William Hazlitt

“ Reynolds and Morton, how will you rejoice, could you lift up your heads a hundred years hence, and see a five-act play of yours cut down to a one-act farce! It is not that there are not plenty of rogues and pick pockets at present; but the Muse is averse to look that way; the imagination has taken a higher flight; wit and humour do not flow in that dirty channel, picking the grains of gold out of it. Instead of descending, we aspire; and the age has a sublime front given to it to contemplate the heaven of drawing-rooms and the milky-way of fashion. ”

“ These persons are raised so high above the rest of the species, that the more violent and agitating pursuits of mankind appear to them like the turmoil of ants on a molehill. Nothing interests them but their own pride and self-importance. Our passions are to them an impertinence; an expression of high sentiment they rather shrink from as a ludicrous and upstart assumption of equality. They, therefore, like what glitters to the eye, what is smooth to the touch; but they shun, by an instinct of sovereign taste, whatever has a soul in it, and implies a reciprocity of feeling. ”

“ There is a calibre, a weight of metal in Miss Kelly’s pathos, which the French actress is without. Our lively neighbours are doubtless ‘born to converse, to live, and act with ease’—all is set in motion like a feather, stopped like a feather. Smiles play upon the lips, tears start into their eyes and are dried up for nothing; an exclamation and a sigh settle the account between life and death; all is a game at make-believe, thoughtless and innocent as childhood, in the baby-house of their imagination—but if you wish to see the heart-strings crack, go and see Miss Kelly in the Maid of Palisseau ”

“ The air is adust, the grass burned up and withered: and it seems as if some figures, reposing on the level, smooth shaven lawn on the river’s side, would be annoyed by the parching heat of the ground. We consider this landscape, which is an old favourite, as one of the most striking proofs of Wilson’s genius, as it conveys not only the image, but the feeling of nature, and excites a new interest unborrowed from the eye, like the fine glow of a summer’s day. There is a sketch of the same subject, called A View on the Thames. ”

“ Every idea of an object is, therefore, in a strict sense an imperfect and general notion of an aggregate: of a house, or tree, as well as of a city, or forest: of a grain of sand as well as of the universe. Every idea of a sensible quality, as of the whiteness of the sheet of paper before me, or the hardness of the table on which I lean, implies the same power of generalization, of connecting several impressions into one sort, as the most refined and abstract idea of virtue and justice, of motion, or extension, or space of time, or being itself. ”

“ We do not talk to the deaf: we do not shew pictures to the blind; we do not reason with a wild beast; we do not quarrel with a stone. Because it would be useless. But we do talk to those who can hear; we shew pictures to those who can see; we reason with prejudice; we quarrel with ill-nature. The human mind differs from an inanimate substance or an automaton, inasmuch as it is actuated by sympathy as well as by necessity. We indeed praise a flower, a statue, or a beautiful face, because they give us pleasure: we praise a virtuous action, as an additional incentive to virtue. ”

“ Canning dangerous. Clever men are the tools with which bad men work. The march of sophistry is devious: the march of power is one. Its means, its tools, its pretexts are various, and borrowed like the hues of the camelion from any object that happens to be at hand: its object is ever the same, and deadly as the serpent’s fang. It moves on to its end with crested majesty, erect, silent, with eyes sunk and fixed, undiverted by fear, unabashed by shame, and puny orators and patriot mountebanks play tricks before it to amuse the crowd, till it crushes the world in its monstrous folds. ”

“ Every object is there collected, and displayed in ostentatious profusion, that can strike the senses or dazzle the imagination; music, dancing, painting, poetry, architecture, the blaze of beauty, ‘the glass of fashion, and the mould of form;’ and yet we are not satisfied—because the multitude and variety of objects distracts the attention, and by flattering us with a vain shew of the highest gratification of every faculty and wish, leaves us at last in a state of listlessness, disappointment, and ennui. ”

“ That which is true or beautiful in itself, is not the less so for standing alone. That which is good for any thing, is the better for being more widely diffused. But fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean, and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath—tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute. ‘The fashion of an hour old mocks the wearer.’ It is a sublimated essence of levity, caprice, vanity, extravagance, idleness, and selfishness. ”

“ He was to be considered, perhaps, rather as a man of taste, and of an elegant and feeling mind, than as a man of genius; as a lover of the art, rather than an artist. He pursued it, with a view to amuse and sooth his mind, with the ease of a gentleman, not with the severity of a professional student. He wished to make his pictures, like himself, amiable; but a too constant desire to please almost necessarily leads to affectation and effeminacy. He wanted that vigour of intellect, which perceives the beauty of truth ”

“ Thus, in a picture of still life, as a shell or a marble chimney-piece, the stains or the gradations of colour may be delicate, and subjects for a new and careful imitation, though the tout ensemble has not, like a living face, the highest beauty of intelligence and expression. Here lie and here return the true effects and triumphs of art. It is not in making the eye a microscope, but in making it the interpreter and organ of all that can touch the soul and the affections, that the perfection of fine art is shown. ”

“ Curiosity is the source of superstition; for we must have objects to occupy the attention, and fill up the craving void of knowledge; and in the absence of truth, falsehood is called in to supply its place, and with the gross and ignorant, supplies it much better. To ask why the untutored savage believes every marvellous story that is told him, in the dearth of all real knowledge, is to ask why he slakes his thirst at the first fountain that he meets, or devours the prey he has just taken. With all their tendency to bigotry and superstition, country people have scarcely any idea of religion. ”

“ The idea of fame is too pure and sacred to be mingled with our own. Our admiration of others is stronger than our vanity. Poor indeed is that mind which has no other idol but self. It is the want of all real imagination and enthusiasm, or that little glittering halo of personal conceit which surrounds every Frenchman, and does not suffer him to see or feel any thing beyond it, that makes the French perhaps the most contemptible people in the world. ”

“ Indeed, the future is, if possible, more imaginary than the past; for the past may in some sense be said to exist in its consequences; it acts still; it is present to us in its effects; the mouldering ruins and broken fragments still remain; but of the future there is no trace. What a blank does the history of the world for the next six thousand years, present to the mind, compared with that of the last! All that strikes the imagination, or excites any interest in the mighty scene, is what has been. ”

“ Folly is there seen at the height—the moon is at the full—it is ‘the very error of the time.’ There is a perpetual collision of eccentricities—a tilt and tournament of absurdities—the prejudices and caprices of mankind are let loose, and set together by the ears, as in a bear-garden. Hogarth paints nothing but comedy, or tragicomedy. Wilkie paints neither one nor the other. Hogarth never looks at any object but to find out a moral or a ludicrous effect. Wilkie never looks at any object but to see that it is there. ”

“ Our poet is not the same monster of genius that his brother was of power. In the career of fame, he does not risk the success of his reputation by the unlimited extravagance of his pretensions. His muse does not disdain to borrow the conceptions of others, or to submit to the rules of art; and the boldest flights of his imagination seldom pass the bounds of a well-regulated enthusiasm. Charlemagne is the work of a very clever man, rather than a great poet; it displays more talent than genius, more ingenuity than invention. It is more artificial than original. ”

“ It is the same want of a centripetal force, of a ruling passion, of a moral instinct of union and co-operation for a general purpose, that makes men fly off into knots and factions, and each set up for the leader of a party himself. Where there is a strong feeling of interest at work, it reconciles and combines the most discordant materials, and fits them to their place in the social machine. But in the conduct and support of the public good, we see ‘nothing but vanity, chaotic vanity.’ There is no forbearance, no self-denial, no magnanimity of proceeding. ”

“ It is images, such as these, that the polished mirror of the poet’s mind ought chiefly to convey; that cast their soothing, startling reflection over the length of human life, and grace with their amiable innocence its closing scenes; while its less alluring and more sombre tints sink in, and are lost in an absorbent ground of unrelieved prose. Poetry should be the handmaid of the imagination, and the foster-nurse of pleasure and beauty: Mr. Crabbe’s Muse is a determined enemy to the imagination, and a spy on nature. ”

“ If, as a lord, he holds in contempt and abhorrence the willing, delighted homage, which the public pay to the poet, let him retire and feed the pride of birth in stately solitude, or take his place among his equals: but if he does not find this enough, and wants our wondering tribute of applause to satisfy his craving vanity, and make him something more than a mere vulgar lord among hundreds of other lords, why dash the cup of delicious poison, which, at his uneasy request, we tender him, to the ground, with indignant reckless hands, and tell us he scorns equally our censure or our praise? ”

“ Sensibility, not imagination, is his forte. Natural expression, human feeling, seems to woo him like a bride; but the ideal and preternatural beckon him only at a distance and mock his embraces. He sees no dim, portentous visions in his mind’s eye; his acting has no shadowy landscape back-ground to surround it; he is not waited on by spirits of the deep or of the air; neither fate nor metaphysical aid are in league with him; he is prompter to himself, and treads within the circle of the human heart. ”

“ That stream of joy comes pure and fresh to the longing sense, free from art and affectation, the same that rises over vernal groves, mingled with the breath of morning, and the perfumes of the wild hyacinth; that waits for no audience, that wants no rehearsing, that exhausts its raptures, and still—
‘Hymns its good God, and carols sweet of love.’ There is this great difference between nature and art, that the one is what the other seems, and gives all the pleasure it expresses, because it feels it itself. ”

“ No, they think persons of more consequence than principles, and themselves most of all. They injure the principle, through the person most able to protect it. They betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse. When every thing is at stake, dear and valuable to man, as man; when there is but the one dreadful alternative of entire loss, or final recovery of truth and freedom, it is no time to stand upon trifles and moot-points; that great object is to be secured first, and at all hazards. ”

“ Nothing could be too retired, too voluptuous, too sacred from day’s garish eye: instead of which, you have a gaudy panoramic view, a glittering barren waste, a triple row of clouds, of rocks, and mountains piled one upon the other, as if the imagination already bent its idle gaze over that wide world, which was so soon to be their place of exile, and the aching restless spirit of the artist was occupied in building a stately prison for our first parents, instead of decking their bridal bed, and wrapping them in a short-lived dream of bliss! ”

“ If our pride is stung, if we have received a blow or the lie in our own persons, we know well enough what to do: our blood is up, we have an actual feeling and object to satisfy; and we are not to be diverted from our purpose by sophistry or mere words. The quarrel is personal to ourselves; and we feel the whole stress of it, rousing every faculty and straining every nerve. But if the quarrel is general to mankind; if it is one in which the rights, freedom, hopes, and happiness of the whole world are embarked ”

“ Kean’s Othello is, we suppose, the finest piece of acting in the world. It is impossible either to describe or praise it adequately. We have never seen any actor so wrought upon—so “perplexed in the extreme.” The energy of passion, as it expresses itself in action, is not the most terrific part: it is the agony of his soul, shewing itself in looks and tones of voice. In one part, where he listens in dumb despair to the fiend-like insinuations of Iago, he presented the very face, the marble aspect of Dante’s Count Ugolino. ”

“ Canning soothes the House of Commons with the soft accents of liberty and peace! In fine, Mr. Canning’s success as an orator, and the space he occupies in the public mind, are strong indications of the Genius of the Age, in which words have obtained a mastery over things, ‘and to call evil good and good evil,’ is thought the mark of a superior and happy spirit. An accomplished statesman in our day is one who extols the Constitution and violates it—who talks about religion and social order, and means slavery and superstition. ”

“ Those mighty geniuses, who have left their works behind them an inheritance to mankind, live but once to do honour to themselves and their nature. ‘But once put out their light, and there is no Promethean heat that can their light relumine.’ Nor ought it ever to be re-kindled, to be extinguished a second time by the harpies of the human race. What have ‘the worshippers of cats and onions’ to do with those triumphs of human genius, which give the eternal lie to their creed? ”

“ Just so much of human misery is given as to lull those who are exempted from it into a deeper sense of their own security: just enough of the picture of human life is shewn to relieve their languor, without disturbing their indifference;—not to excite their sympathy, but ‘with some sweet, oblivious antidote,’ to pamper their sleek and sordid apathy. In a word, the whole business of the Opera is to stifle emotion in its birth, and to intercept every feeling in its progress to the heart. ”

“ These speculators had no thought but they saw as much of a landscape as Poussin, and knew as much about a face that was before them as Titian or Vandyke would have done. This is a great mistake; the having particular and absolute ideas of things is not only difficult, but impossible. The ablest painters have never been able to give more than one part of nature, in abstracted views of things. The most laborious artists never finished to perfection any one part of an object, or had ever any more than a confused, vague, uncertain notion of the shape of the mouth or nose, or the colour of an eye. ”