xt7qjq0stw34_1572 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dipstest/xt7qjq0stw34/data/mets.xml https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dipstest/xt7qjq0stw34/data/1997ms474.dao.xml unknown archival material 1997ms474 English University of Kentucky The physical rights to the materials in this collection are held by the University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center.  Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. W. Hugh Peal manuscript collection William Hazlitt clippings text 43.94 Cubic Feet 86 boxes, 4 oversize boxes, 22 items Poor-Good Peal accession no. 11453. William Hazlitt clippings 2017 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dipstest/xt7qjq0stw34/data/1997ms474/Box_15/Folder_18/Multipage4989.pdf 1943 November 5-6 1943 1943 November 5-6 section false xt7qjq0stw34_1572 xt7qjq0stw34  

AZLITT has proved his own best
Hanalyst. We can argue round and
round his character, admire it or get
furious with it, till doomsday without coming

nearer to a diagnosis than this:—
I am not. in the ordinary acceptation of the word,
_ a good—natured man—that is, many things annoy
me besides what interferes With my own ease and
interest. I hate a lie. A piece of injustice wounds
me to the quick, though nothing but the report of
it reach me. Therefore I have many enemies and
few friends.
He scored many other bulls with himself as
the target, while his enemies’ arrows all went
wide of the mark. "‘1 should be an excellent
man on a jury. I might say little, but I should
starve the other eleven obstinate fellows out.’
An angular man, a body withrazor edges.
Again, “ I have brooded over an idea till it has
become a substance .in my brain." One idea,
a dominating idea, in the brain of this
Jacobinical son of the French Revolution was
Napoleon, and it became so thickened and
hardened by years of brooding that it could
not be prized out, even if a well-meaning
friend had used for the operation the surgical
instrument of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s
imagination—the earth‘s equator straightened
out for a crowbar. He could only cure it by
writing it out—and he died in the act. Napo-
leon became the touchstone for any test in
politics. It created other symbols: Napoleon
—liberty, Pitt—tyranny, Southey—~renegade,
Giffordmtoadyism, Cobbett—staunchness.

TWO OBSESSIONS

The wonder and the pity of it is that high
political principles, keen sympathy with
oppressed peoples everywhere, should have
been so twisted an a erpowered by such a
callous spirit as Na .,which he would
have hated in any _0
few better reasoners in our literature than
Hazlitt, and none clearer, until he drops his
incomparable rapier and begins to lay about
him with Napoleon as a bludgeon. The stream
of his mind ran with sparkling clarity; there
were but two obstructions in its flow, and
round them the water swirled in a whirl'of

 

 

aggressor. There are ,

darkness—Napoleon and the “ snake-like ”

charmer Sarah Walker. Hazlitt was not the
only English author whose views were sent

. awry by Napoleon, only on the others he had
the reverse effect: they were forgiven because
they turned the respectable corner from revo-
lution to reaction. As for the enchantment of
the tailor’s daughter, Hazlitt is not the only
man of genius to become temporarily
deranged by a pretty face. He worked out the
Sarah obsession also by writing a book—«
“ Liber Am'oris," a pre-Freudian essay in
liberation and one of the strangest love stories
in the annals of frenzy.

LIFE OF NAPOLEON

It is sad that the cathartic process of
writing the “Life of Napoleon” was
delayed till he was wasted by illness
and the end was near. And it is time a
word was said even for the work on his hero:
it is not surprising that it angered Hazlitt’s
contemporaries (most of them spluttered with
bad temper and slander whatever he wrote);
it is not surprising that its blindness to the
continental misery in the wake of Napoleon’s
ambition should fret our patience in these
overburdened days. which have had more
than enough of dictatorship ; but it is surpris-
ing that a work of such literary power should
remain a closed book. It is good reading
indeed. The momentum of Hazlitt’s words,

his pertinacity, hurries our sympathies over—-
it may be better to say cheats them over—the
boundaries of reason and renders the transi-
tion mere common sense.

There is magic in the style that can
do that; and it ‘is the same magic that can
give a gay touch to a grammar book:
make us spectators at the fives-court when
Jack Cavanagh beat four capital players
together ; see the Indian jugglei‘s making brass
balls chase one another like sparkles of fire;
re—visit with him, as if ourselves renewing our
youth, the table, the chair, the window where
he learned to construe Livy, the chapel where
his father preached; re-tread the “ribbed
sea-sands " near Porlock with Coleridge when
the poet’s flame was brightest. And, with
Napoleon out of the scene, he dealt with
politics too like an artist. “ The Spirit of the
Age ” 'is packed with hard thinking—wit and
prejudice, also, in good measure. But as
portraiture of famous figures, and some illus-
trious obscure, of the time it gives us more
than the National Portrait-Gallery can, for
Hazlitt, trained as a painter, also carried an
X-ray apparatus in his head. _ William Gifford
has acquired immortality as a victim: there
he is for ever, preserved in Hazlitt‘s scorn like '
a fly in amber. These things make Hazlitt,
they are his mark, his symbol, what he lives
and will live by.

1943

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