William Hazlitt

“ I am now near three hundred miles from London, in a company that must, in all human probability, soon be dispersed; my wife lying-in at an inn, and in circumstances that I cannot describe. I do not wish to eat the bread of idleness; I neither know, nor wish to know any thing of luxury; and a trifling salary would make me affluent. I have played in the country with applause, and my friends, I am afraid, have flattered me: some of them have ranked me among the sons of genius, and I have, at times, been silly enough to believe them. I have succeeded best in low comedy and old men. ”

“ Indeed, Sir, I do not find myself so much flattered by the very favourable opinion which, as far as I am able to come at the truth, the town entertains of me, as I am by your friendship and kindness. It is true I have had great difficulties to encounter, and the unhappy effects of a narrow education to surmount: but to be thus distinguished is more than a compensation for the labour I have taken, and the conflicts I have had with poverty, obscurity, and their dismal attendants. I am successful—I am happy—I shall acquire the means of making my father, my family, and some of my friends happy. ”

“ When the tragedy of Cato was first played, at a time when party zeal ran high, the Whigs applauded all the strong passages in the play, as a satire on the Tories; and the Tories were as loud in their applause as the Whigs, to shew that the satire was unfelt. But the ‘horrors’ of the French Revolution were, it seems, to become a Medusa’s shield to screen every species of existing vice or folly from the glance even of ridicule, and to render them invulnerable and incorrigible. To stickle obstinately for the abuses to which any system is liable is tacitly to identify the system with the abuse. ”

“ LIX. Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue; and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves.
LX. There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please—that is, as they please or displease us. As long as we are in good humour with them, we see nothing but their good qualities ”

“ The pleasure or torment of our lives is in the pursuit of some favourite passion or perverse humour.
‘Within our bosoms reigns another lord,
Passion, sole judge and umpire of itself.’ CCLXXIX. There are few things more contemptible than the conversation of men of the town. It is made up of the technicalities and cant of all professions, without the spirit or knowledge of any. It is flashy and vapid, and is like the rinsings of different liquors at a night-cellar, instead of a bottle of fine old port. It is without clearness or body, and a heap of affectation. ”

“ While all goes well, they are like fish out of water. They have no confidence or sympathy with their good fortune, and look upon it as a momentary delusion. Let a doubt be thrown on the question, and they begin to be full of lively apprehensions again; let all their hopes vanish, and they feel themselves on firm ground once more. From want of spirit or of habit, their imaginations cannot rise from the low ground of humility, cannot reflect the gay, flaunting colours of the rainbow, flag and droop into despondency, and can neither indulge the expectation, nor employ the means of success. ”

“ The sense I have of beauty raises me for a moment above myself, but depresses me the more afterwards, when I recollect how it is thrown away in vain admiration, and that it only makes me more susceptible of pain from the mortifications I meet with. Would I had never seen her! I might then not indeed have been happy, but at least I might have passed my life in peace, and have sunk into forgetfulness without a pang.—The noble scenery in this country mixes with my passion, and refines, but does not relieve it. I was at Stirling Castle not long ago. ”

“ Women are not spoiled by education and an affectation of superior wisdom. They take their chance for wit and shrewdness, and pick up their advantages, according to their opportunities and turn of mind. Their faculties (such as they are) shoot out freely and gracefully, like the slender trees in a forest; and are not clipped and cut down, as the understandings of men are, into uncouth shapes and distorted fancies, like yew-trees in an old-fashioned garden. Women in short resemble self-taught men, with more pliancy and delicacy of feeling. ”

“ There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
LIV. The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test; for it is that on which our success in life depends. Yet how often do our talents and pursuits lie in different directions! The best painters are not always the cleverest men; and an author who makes an unfavourable or doubtful impression on the public, may in himself be a person of rare and agreeable qualifications. One cause of this is affectation. ”

“ CXLIV. Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.
CXLV. Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.
CXLVI. A mere sanguine temperament often passes for genius and patriotism.
CXLVII. Animal spirits are continually taken for wit and fancy; and the want of them, for sense and judgment.
CXLVIII. In public speaking, we must appeal either to the prejudices of others, or to the love of truth and justice. If we think merely of displaying our own ability, we shall ruin every cause we undertake. ”

“ She never once betrays herself by any momentary forgetfulness, by any appearance of triumph or superiority to the person who is her dupe, by any levity of manner in the plenitude of her success; it is one faultless, undeviating, consistent, consummate piece of acting. Were she a saint on earth, she could not seem more like one. Her hypocritical high-flown pretensions, indeed, make her the worse: but still the ascendancy of her will, her determined perseverance in what she undertakes to do, has something admirable in it, approaching to the heroic. ”

“ The actions in Raphael are like a branch of a tree swept by the surging blast; those in Hogarth like straws whirled and twitched about in the gusts and eddies of passion. I do not mean to say that goodness alone constitutes greatness, but mental power does. Hogarth’s Good Apprentice is insipid: Raphael has clothed Elymas the Sorcerer with all the dignity and grandeur of vice. Selfish characters and passions borrow greatness from the range of imagination, and strength of purpose; and besides, have an advantage in natural force and interest. ”

“ Let any one be ever so much enamoured of a woman who does not requite his passion, and let him consider what he feels when he finds her scorn or indifference turning to mutual regard, the thrill, the glow of rapture, the melting of two hearts into one, the creation of another self in her—and he will own that he was before only half in love! ”

“ Many persons saw no defect in Mr Kemble till Mr Kean came, and then finding themselves mistaken in the abstract idea of perfection they had indulged in, were ready to give up their opinion altogether. When a man is a great favourite with the public, they incline by a natural spirit of exaggeration and love of the marvellous, to heap all sorts of perfections upon him, and when they find by another’s excelling him in some one thing that this is not the case, they are disposed to strip their former idol, and leave him ‘bare to weather.’ Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion. ”

“ Could I have thought I should ever live to believe them an inhuman mockery of one who had the sincerest regard for you? Do you think they will not now turn to rank poison in my veins, and kill me, soul and body? You say it is friendship—but if this is friendship, I’ll forswear love. Ah! Sarah! it must be something more or less than friendship. If your caresses are sincere, they shew fondness—if they are not, I must be more than indifferent to you. ”

“ He has not indeed been sparing of the most pointed raillery upon the philosophic pretensions of Frank Henley, in the letters of his rival, Coke Clifton. And the best proof of the strength with which he has conceived, and pourtrayed his favourite character is, that notwithstanding all the other’s wit and eloquence, Frank is never once degraded in our esteem. He stands his ground firmly, and, upon the whole, has the preference, though it is not exactly such a preference as virtue ought to have over vice, wisdom over folly, or pure mind over sensuality and selfishness. ”

“ CCCXLIV. The affectation of gentility by people without birth or fortune is a very idle species of vanity. For those who are in middle or humble life to aspire to be always seen in the company of the great is like the ambition of a dwarf who should hire himself as an attendant to wait upon a giant. But we find great numbers of this class—whose pride or vanity seems to be sufficiently gratified by the admiration of the finery or superiority of others, without any farther object. ”

“ Woe be to the false delicacy which is unable to endure a recital honourable to humanity, when made with an appeal to the feelings powerful enough to command tears! However, Sir, be persuaded that I entertain a lively sense of the very great attention you have otherwise shewn me, as well as of the handsome, and by far too flattering encomiums you have passed on my feeble productions. My motives are pure, and I have courage enough to tell truths likely to prove beneficial:—my writings will corrupt no one;—this is the only merit I am anxious to claim for myself ”

“ In like manner, we plume ourselves most on excelling in what we are not bound to do, and are most flattered by the admission of our most questionable pretensions. We nurse the ricketty child, and want to have our faults and weak sides pampered into virtues. We feel little obliged to any one for owning the merit we are known to have—it is an old story—but we are mightily pleased to be complimented on some fancy we set up for—it is a feather in our cap, a new conquest, an extension of our sense of power. A man of talent aspires to a reputation for personal address or advantages. ”

“ My state is this, that I shall never lie down again at night nor rise up in the morning in peace, nor ever behold my little boy’s face with pleasure while I live—unless I am restored to her favour. Instead of that delicious feeling I had when she was heavenly-kind to me, and my heart softened and melted in its own tenderness and her sweetness, I am now inclosed in a dungeon of despair. The sky is marble to my thoughts; nature is dead around me, as hope is within me ”

“ XLVII. Personal pretensions alone ensure female regard. It is not the eye that sees whatever is sublime or beautiful in nature that the fair delight to see gazing in silent rapture on themselves, but that which is itself a pleasing object to the sense. I may look at a Claude or a Raphael by turns, but this does not alter my own appearance; and it is that which women attend to.
XLVIII. There are persons that we like, though they do not like us. This happens very rarely; and, indeed it argues a strong presumption of merit both in them and in ourselves. ”

“ Perfect virtue, the pure disinterested love of justice, an unshaken zeal for truth, regardless of all petty consequences, a superiority to false modesty, a contempt for the opinion of the world, when reason and conscience are on our side, all these are fine things, and easily conceived, while they remain, what they are, the pure creatures of the understanding, mere abstract essences, which cannot kindle too warm a glow of enthusiasm in the breast. ”

“ In political economy, Adam Smith is laid on the shelf, and Davenant and De Witt have given place to the Says, the Ricardos, the Malthuses, and the Macullochs. These persons are happy in one respect—they have a sovereign contempt for all who have gone before them, and never dream of those who are to come after them and usurp their place. When any set of men think theirs the only science worth studying, and themselves the only infallible persons in it, it is a sign how frail the traces are of past excellence in it, and how little connection it has with the general affairs of human life. ”

“ I thought of the time when I was a little happy careless child, of my father’s house, of my early lessons, of my brother’s picture of me when a boy, of all that had since happened to me, and of the waste of years to come—I stopped, faultered, and was going to turn back once more to make a longer truce with wretchedness and patch up a hollow league with love, when the recollection of her words—‘I always told you I had no affection for you’—steeled my resolution, and I determined to proceed. ”

“ The mind of a Frenchman is, in general, more easily moved, and by slighter causes; an Englishman’s feelings are, for the very reason that they require a greater momentum to bring them out, more steady and more strong. I do not here inquire into the superiority of the French or English character. I only state what I conceive to be the difference with a view to those among the French, who, setting up an exclusive claim to certain qualities, will not allow others the superiority in things which are totally distinct, and who are ready to grasp all excellence, however incompatible, to themselves. ”