by M H Abrams
The Romantic variation on life as a journey by no means marked the end of the literary uses of the image. So late as the mid twentieth century, T. S. Eliot, in his Four Quartets (1935–42), composed the most sustained and intricate deployment of the theme of the journey in all of literature. The whole of Eliot’s long poem articulates a figurative quest, by land and sea and underground, for a garden, “our first world,” that has been glimpsed and lost but not forgotten. That the journey is circular is indicated by the persistent and paradoxical interplay, in the course of the poem, between the words “beginning” and “end”; and the second quartet, “East Coker,” itself enacts that circular shape by opening, “In my beginning is my end,” and by closing with the repetition of the opening sentence, with its elements reversed: “In my end is my beginning.” We learn that this movement signifies the poet’s own educational journey, which (as in Wordsworth’s Prelude) constitutes a dual education, both in his life and in his poetic craft; and in the traditional way, the place of origin, the unforgotten garden, is identified as home: “Home is where one starts from.” This origin turns out also to have been the goal of the quest, for “the way forward is the way back”;16 although, as the end of the Quartets reveals, it is not until our circumnavigation has reached its haven that we will achieve the knowledge that it has been, all along, our home:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning.
This is a remarkably inventive poem that, in the way it orders and relates its elements, justifies its reputation as a distinctively modernist work. In those elements themselves, however, we can recognize the Romantic image of the spiral educational journey impelled by a dialectic of contraries; and beyond that, the model of Dante’s Divine Comedy that Eliot’s poem often echoes and emulates; and ultimately, the Augustinian paradigm of the peregrinatio vitae as a quest whose goal is not in this world. Eliot’s poem epitomizes the long and varied history of the trope of the spiritual journey, even as it attests its continuing viability as an imaginative option.
NOTES
1. Hebrews 11:8–16. All biblical quotations are from The New English Bible, edited by Samuel Sandmel (Oxford, 1976).
2. Proclus, The Elements of Theology, translated and edited by E. R. Dodds (Oxford, 1933), propositions 33, 146.
3. Plotinus, The Six Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page (London, 1956), 1.6.8; see also 6.5.7, 6.5.10, 6.9.9.
4. Augustine, The City of God, translated by Marcus Dodds (New York, 1948), 1.9.17.
5. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, translated by F. J. Sheed (London, 1944), 12.16, 13.13.
6. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (London, 1945), pp. 157–58.
7. For a detailed treatment of the motif of the spiral journey in these and other writers of the early nineteenth century, see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971), chapters 4 and 5.
8. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, edited by C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937), pp. 147, 185, 188–89.
9. J. G. Fichte, Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre, in Sämtliche Werke, edited by Fichte (Berlin, 1845), vol. 1, pp. 332–33.
10. J. G. Fichte, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen zeitalters, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7, p. 12.
11. F. W. J. von Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart, 1856–61), vol. 2, pp. 341, 628. For other references to the Iliad and Odyssey as a two-part epic of spiritual departure and return, see Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, pp. 42, 57.
12. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, edited and translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford, 1967), p. 171; Schiller, “Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung,” in Sämtliche Werke, edited by Otto Güntter and George Witkowski (Leipzig, n.d.), vol. 17, pp. 505–6.
13. William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere, edited by Beth Darlington (Ithaca, N. Y., 1977), ms. D, lines 45, 103–7.
14. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, edited by Johannes Hoffmeister, 6th ed. (Hamburg, 1952), pp. 20, 26–27, 67, 563–64, 549; also, The Logic of Hegel, translated by William Wallace, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1892), 379.
15. The Logic of Hegel, 379.
16. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–62 (London, 1963), pp. 187–214.
Point-Blank Prose: The Essays of William Hazlitt*
WILLIAM HAZLITT AT first planned to follow his father into the Unitarian ministry, became instead a painter of portraits, then turned to writing on philosophy, economics, and politics. Not until his mid-thirties did he discover his vocation as a public lecturer and prolific contributor to periodicals. In the twenty years before his death in 1830, he produced enough to fill almost twenty volumes of his collected Works, including superb criticism of English dramatists, poets, and novelists, the best commentaries on painting in the England of his day, remarkable analyses of the English theater and its actors, comments on the contemporary political scene that are of enduring interest, and more than a hundred informal essays which, as David Bromwich says, are “more observing, original, and keen-witted than any others in the language.”
In his best-known essay, “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” Hazlitt nostalgically recalls the turning point of his life, which was Coleridge’s short stay near Hazlitt’s village in Shropshire as a visiting preacher to a Unitarian congregation. “I was at that time,” Hazlitt says, “dumb, inarticulate, helpless.” It was to the example of Coleridge’s ceaseless eloquence, in conversation and from the pulpit, that Hazlitt attributes the fact that “my understanding did not remain dumb and brutish,” but “at last found a language to express itself.” The shy and tongue-tied youth accepted Coleridge’s invitation for a three weeks’ visit to his home at Nether Stowey in the Lake Country, where he met Wordsworth and heard some of the recently written Lyrical Ballads read aloud, at which time, he says, “the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me.”
But as often occurred in Hazlitt’s stormy life, this idyll had a sequel in the form of farce. When five years later he revisited Coleridge and Wordsworth to paint their portraits, his stay created increasing friction and ended abruptly in a scandal. Hazlitt, it seems, was aggressively but awkwardly amatory toward the country girls. As Wordsworth “with great horror” told the story to the painter Benjamin Haydon twenty-one years after the event, when one young woman rebuffed his advances Hazlitt “enraged pushed her down, and because, Sir, she refused to gratify his abominable and devilish propensities, he lifted up her petticoats and smote her on the bottom.” To escape a ducking by the enraged populace, Hazlitt ignominiously fled, assisted by gifts of money and clothes from Wordsworth.
This episode caused an estrangement of both Wordsworth and Coleridge from Hazlitt, which was exacerbated by their increasing political differences and by Hazlitt’s outspoken reviews of their opinions and writings. Bromwich treats harshly their rejection of Hazlitt. Undoubtedly, both Wordsworth and Coleridge were intolerant and behaved sanctimoniously toward the younger writer. But in extenuation one should point out that Hazlitt never managed to stay on good terms with anyone for very long. In demeanor he was often gauche, graceless, suspicious—in Coleridge’s memorable sketch, he was “brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange.” He also exhibited what Leigh Hunt called “great impartiality of assault,” in that he expressed his mind and variable moods fully, not only about his foes but his friends, and not only in conversation but in print. In the course of his combative life Hazlitt alienated everyone who was most intimate with him, including Leigh Hunt and the tolerant Charles Lam
b, who nonetheless continued to praise Hazlitt’s qualities when he was at his genial best: “I think W.H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. . . . I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.”
In a cogent opening chapter, David Bromwich tells us that his book is about another Hazlitt than the one we commonly admire as a zestful, hearty, worldly essayist; he will reveal a Hazlitt who is “fiercer and less reconciled,” the “most restless of the English romantics . . . and in one sense the most shocking.” Bromwich claims that as a literary critic Hazlitt is grossly undervalued in our time because of the vogue for theoretical criticism; this, he writes, shows a “love of method and yearning for system” of which “the true father is Coleridge.” His complaint is a valid one. To oppose the current academic neglect of Hazlitt as a critic, however, Bromwich takes an unnecessary tack. In his account of Hazlitt’s criticism, as he puts it, his own “argument with Coleridge is audible as a persistent undertone.” In this argument Bromwich himself succumbs to the modern preference for theory over practice by claiming that, even as a theorist of poetry, Hazlitt is more rewarding than Coleridge; and he employs a seesaw method of evaluation, whereby in elevating Hazlitt he depresses Coleridge and at times comes close to caricaturing his views about poetry.
Both Coleridge and Hazlitt are great critics, but their excellence is different in kind. Coleridge is a systematic critic for whom theory precedes application, and whose theory of poetry is a part of a general philosophy of man and nature. He persistently views the works he criticizes through the perspective provided by his theory, though mediated by his sensibility and subtle awareness of his own procedures as a practicing poet. Historically, Coleridge has proved to be the most seminal and influential writer in our language, both on criticism and on poetry. Hazlitt’s special virtues, on the other hand, depend not on a systematic prior theory, but on the immediacy of his response to a specific literary work or passage. If I had to make a choice between them as practical critics, I would, like Bromwich, take Hazlitt’s literary commentary over Coleridge’s; it is wider-ranging, less moralistic, often more interesting, even startling, in its insights, and more open to the special excellences of such unfashionable poets as Alexander Pope. Fortunately we do not have to make a choice. We can apply to criticism the pluralism that Hazlitt finely asserts for literature: “To know the best in each class infers a higher degree of taste; to reject the class is only a negation of taste; for different classes do not interfere with one another.”
Hazlitt decries what he calls the “modern or metaphysical school of criticism,” and to identify his own distinctive procedure, introduces the term “impression”: “I cannot help receiving certain impressions from things; and I have sufficient courage to declare (somewhat abruptly) what they are.” It is difficult to call Hazlitt a critical impressionist without seeming to derogate his achievement, because we tend to apply the term to critics who substitute their own reveries for qualities of the work they ostensibly discuss. Hazlitt means by “impression,” however, his direct response to a work’s particularities, as adapted, he says, to “the effect which the author has aimed at producing.” He praised Edmund Burke in a way that defines his own aim and achievement as a critic. “He loses no particle of the exact, characteristic, extreme impression of the thing he writes about . . . and communicates this to the reader.” Hazlitt’s firsthand responses to his subjects are of enduring value because they are directed and informed throughout by the play of a well-read, acute, opinionated, and unsystematic but remarkably interesting intelligence and temperament.
The qualities of mind and temperament that distinguish Hazlitt’s criticism are revealed in the terms he repeatedly uses to define the highest literary or artistic values: especially “imagination,” “genius,” “expression,” “passion,” “character,” “gusto,” “energy,” and above all “power.” Hazlitt nowhere pins down the meaning of these words, and all attempts by his commentators to define them are baffled by the variability of Hazlitt’s own texts. As Hazlitt used them, they are interrelated and often interchangeable; they refer to qualities of the author’s mind, to the work itself, to the objects represented by the work, or to the response to the work by a reader. Sometimes Hazlitt uses them to refer to all these at once. This elusiveness and variability are not defects, but are requisite to the kind of criticism that Hazlitt inaugurated. Because these terms do not designate fixed categories, but are flexible and fluid, they are adaptable to the distinctive quality of whatever Hazlitt is talking about. “A thing,” Hazlitt wrote, “is not more perfect by becoming something else, but by being more itself.” The meanings of his descriptive words are realized only in the reader’s own experience of those features of a work to which Hazlitt has directed his attention.
Hazlitt’s most systematic enterprise was his first published work, On the Principles of Human Action (1805). A late example of the many replies to Hobbes’ view that the sole human motive is egoistic self-interest, Hazlitt’s closely reasoned argument, as his subtitle puts it, aims to prove “the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind.” Bromwich and other commentators are doubtless right in asserting that Hazlitt later applied the moral concept of disinterestedness to art: it underlies his claim that Shakespeare, “the least of an egotist that it was possible to be,” identified himself in imagination with each of his characters. It also underlies his distinction between the outward-looking older poets, from Homer on, and the “modern school of poetry” (by which he meant the contemporary Romantics, especially Wordsworth), who “reduce poetry to a mere effusion of natural sensibility.” These claims were widely influential and shaped the opinions of the young Keats. But here Hazlitt was largely refining views current in Germany and England, particularly after Schiller’s “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” that Shakespeare was both an objective and an imaginatively self-projective poet, and that, like the ancient poets, he was naïve, impersonal, and objective, while the modern poets were predominantly sentimental, self-interested, and subjective.
Much more original in Hazlitt’s essays is his emphasis on what he calls “the mixed motives” that compel all human action, including the composition of poetry, and the way that these motives involve “all the intricate folds and delicate involutions of our self-love.” The most startling aspect of Hazlitt’s criticism is his demolition of the romantic idealism of his contemporaries about the motives for writing poetry, epitomized in Shelley’s assertion that “poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” In “On Poetry in General,” Hazlitt asserted that fear, hatred, contempt, no less than hope, love, and wonder, “are all poetry.”
It is as natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or contempt, as our love and admiration. . . . The imagination, by . . . embodying them and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief to the indistinct and importunate cravings of the will. We do not wish the thing to be so, but we wish it to appear such as it is. For knowledge is conscious power; and the mind is no longer, in this case, the dupe, though it may be the victim of vice or folly.
As Bromwich says, Hazlitt’s criticism is especially interesting for its awareness that “literature and politics belong to one world.” He cites Hazlitt’s statement “that poetry is an interesting study, for this reason, that it relates to whatever is most interesting in human life,” and the most enlightening chapters in his book are those on Hazlitt’s political thought and writings, which as he shows belong in the same intellectual and emotional world as his critical thought and his writings on literature.
“I started in life,” Hazlitt said, “with the French Revolution, and I have lived, alas! to see the end of it. . . . Since then, I confess, I have no longer felt myself young, for with that my hopes fell.” The thinking and imagination of his major literary contemporaries, including Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and S
outhey, were also shaped by the inordinate hopes they had invested in the Revolution and by their despair at its failure; but what for them was a preoccupation was for Hazlitt an obsession.
I will never cease, nor be prevented from returning on the wings of imagination to that bright dream of our youth. . . . To those hopes eternal regrets are due; to those who maliciously blasted them, in the fear that they might be accomplished, we feel no less what we owe—hatred and scorn as lasting.
Within this proscenium Hazlitt viewed his own experience, as well as the political events and personages, and the writers and works of literature, of his era.
The persistent term in Hazlitt’s writings, which connects, and greatly complicates, his treatment of these matters, is “power.” There is in his works, Bromwich notes, “a moral ambiguity implicit in every exertion of power to which the imagination moves us,” and the same word links “the power of poetry which Hazlitt loved, and the power of tyranny which he hated.” It should also be remarked that the moral ambiguity of power, and Hazlitt’s ambivalence toward its manifestation and effects, are evident within, as well as in the interplay between, the realms of poetry, life, and politics. Perhaps the closest we can come to establishing the range of applications in Hazlitt’s use of this term is by a negative definition: “power” encompasses essential aspects of human motivation and responsiveness that are left out of account in the moral philosophy of English empiricism, and especially of Benthamite Utilitarianism and its calculus of pleasure.
