The Fourth Dimension of a Poem
Page 23
In the main line of empiricism, which largely governed Hazlitt’s early philosophical writings, elementary sense perceptions are accompanied by, or become associated with, pleasures and pains, which give rise, respectively, to desire and aversion, and so to our judgments of good and bad. To this pleasure principle as determining our judgments and actions Hazlitt, in a way that looks forward to Nietzsche and Freud, adds a contrary compulsion, the power principle:
We are as prone to make a torment of our fears, as to luxuriate in our hopes of good. If it be asked, Why we do so? the best answer will be, Because we cannot help it. The sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of pleasure.
Hazlitt is writing here about “Poetry in General,” but the complex and equivocal role of the sense of power as motivating his own and others’ actions and achievements, as well as his responses to the actions and achievements of others, is a dominant theme in his writings about morality and politics as well. He tells us in an essay, “On Depth and Superficiality,” that he once startled Coleridge—who as a Christian philosopher affirmed original sin, but interpreted the dogma in a liberal way—by asserting, in answer to Coleridge’s challenge whether he “had ever known a child of a naturally wicked disposition,” that,
yes, there was one in the house with me that cried from morning to night, for spite. . . . It had a positive pleasure in pain from the sense of power accompanying it. . . . I have no other idea of what is commonly understood by wickedness than that perversion of the will or love of mischief for its own sake. . . . It cried only to vent its passion and alarm the house, and I saw in its frantic screams and gestures that great baby, the world, tumbling about in its swaddling-clothes, and tormenting itself and others for the last six thousand years!
Hazlitt attributed the persistence and success of political oppression not only to the innate delight men feel in wielding power over others, but also to their propensity to identify with the power employed to oppress them. “The love of power in ourselves and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.” He rejected the hope that amelioration and reform would someday “complete the triumph of humanity and liberty,” because such a Utopian faith requires “several things necessary which are impossible,” including the condition that “the love of power and of change shall no longer goad man on. . . . Our strength lies in our weakness; our virtues are built on our vices . . . nor can we lift man above his nature more than above the earth he treads.”
To “virtues,” or positive qualities of which the power drive is in diverse ways capable, Hazlitt responded in full though troubled measure. Bromwich acutely reveals the parallels, and the mingling of admiration and ambivalence, in Hazlitt’s commentaries on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Milton’s Satan, and Napoleon Bonaparte (in whose defense, vehement but qualified, Hazlitt published, at the end of his career, a four-volume Life). These are all persons of heroic will and power and of absolute self-reliance, who appeal to us in spite of—or rather, as Hazlitt recognizes, because of—their contempt for others who are less than themselves. There is a similar dividedness in his lifelong fascination with Edmund Burke, who is for Hazlitt the incomparable hero of prose, commanding “the most perfect prose-style, the most powerful, the most dazzling, the most daring.” “The principle which guides his pen is . . . not pleasure, but power.” “He exults in the display of power.”
To Hazlitt, Burke is the unequaled master of eloquence not because he persuades us by rational argument, but because he overwhelms us, leaving us in a state of admiration and acquiescence that is independent of our conviction. Yet by putting the power of language in the service of established political power, as Hazlitt saw it, Burke was more than any other man responsible for the success of counterrevolution and the blasting of the highest human hope. “The consequences of his writings as instruments of political power have been tremendous, fatal, such as no exertion of wit, or knowledge, or genius can ever counteract or atone for.” Nonetheless Hazlitt declares that “it has always been with me a test of the sense and candor of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man.”
We also find this doubleness of assertion and attitude in Hazlitt’s criticism of poetry. His highest praise is for the power of a poetic passage; yet he believed that the great poets (in our time one thinks of Yeats, Pound, Eliot), as well as the proclivities of the imagination that produce sublime poetry, naturally take the side of established hierarchy, glory, and power. “The cause of the people is indeed but little calculated as a subject for poetry. . . . The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty,” and as opposed to the understanding, it is also an “aristocratical” faculty. “The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. . . . It is everything by excess.”
Hazlitt’s insight into the complex ways in which poets and poetry are involved with the social and political realities of power underlies what seems to me one of his most remarkable achievements in literary criticism, his discussion of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in his late and best book, The Spirit of the Age. Hazlitt recognized that a social class structure was built into the traditional hierarchy and decorums of the poetic genres, in which the highest and most serious (epic and tragedy) represented kings and aristocracy in a language appropriate to their rank, and the descending genres were apportioned to a descending social order and idiom. This inherited class consciousness permeated the taste and sensibility of the middle- as well as upper-class readers in Wordsworth’s time. In his early poetry, Wordsworth introduced the common, the lowly, the trivial, and the social outcast as subjects of serious, even tragic poetic concern, and in a language, he says, adopted from “humble and rustic life”; with the result, as Wordsworth complained, that his poems elicited “unremitting hostility,” and “the slight, the aversion, and even the contempt” of its reviewers. Hazlitt interprets Wordsworth’s originality in Lyrical Ballads as his egalitarian subversion of the implicit assumptions about class and power in poetry, and therefore as the equivalent in literature to the French Revolution in politics:
It is one of the innovations of the time. It partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age: the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments. His Muse . . . is a levelling one. It proceeds on a principle of equality. . . . His popular, inartificial style gets rid (at a blow) of all the trappings of verse, of all the high places of poetry. . . . Kings, queens, priests, robes, the altar and the throne . . . are not to be found here.
In this achievement, and in giving us “a new view of nature” by elevating the “mean,” the “trivial,” and the “insignificant” in the natural scene to the highest level of interest, Hazlitt asserts, Wordsworth is “the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared, for they have no substitute elsewhere.”
Hazlitt, Keats remarked with admiration, “is your only good damner and if ever I am damn’d—damn me if I shouldn’t like him to damn me.” In a mood of pessimism Hazlitt wrote an essay, “On the Pleasure of Hating,” in which he represents hatred, the “perverse . . . delight in mischief,” as “the very spring of thought and action,” which corrupts, and will continue to corrupt, society, religion, international relations, and one’s relations to oneself. “We throw aside the trammels of civilization. . . . The wild beast resumes its sway within us,” and “the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being restored once more to freedom and lawless, unrestrained impulses.” But to hate, as to power, Hazlitt gives a double interpretation and value; venting indignant hatred upon a subject that deserves it yields a proper and salutary pleasure at our verbal power both over our own feelings and over the subject that occasions them. The victim, as Hazlitt put it, “is no longer, in this case,
the dupe.” Toward those who had “maliciously and willfully blasted” the hopes vested by mankind in the French Revolution Hazlitt, consciously echoing Milton’s Satan, had vowed “what we owe—hatred and scorn everlasting,” and in expressing this hatred and scorn, Hazlitt achieved his most vehement, sustained, and comprehensive eloquence.
Bromwich quotes some splendid examples. Here is an additional instance of such rhetoric—a single, involved, and evolving sentence in which Hazlitt equals Burke in the power of his eloquence, but directs it against the entrenched political powers in whose defense Burke had misdirected his:
But there are persons of that low and inordinate appetite for servility, that they cannot be satisfied with any thing short of that sort of tyranny that has lasted for ever, and is likely to last for ever; that is strengthened and made desperate by the superstitions and prejudices of ages; that is enshrined in traditions, in laws, in usages, in the outward symbols of power, in the very idioms of language; that has struck its roots into the human heart, and clung round the human understanding like a nightshade; that overawes the imagination, and disarms the will to resist it, by the very enormity of the evil; that is cemented with gold and blood; guarded by reverence, guarded by power; linked in endless successions to the principle by which life is transmitted to the generations of tyrants and slaves, and destroying liberty with the first breath of life; that is absolute, unceasing, unerring, fatal, unutterable, abominable, monstrous.
Hazlitt, who liked to think of himself as a member of a party of one, then goes on, in this “Preface” to his Political Essays, evenhandedly to demolish all the political parties of his time, the liberal Reformers and the Whigs no less than the Tories.
It is, however, Hazlitt’s familiar essays that have always been the most widely read and will doubtless continue to be the most widely read. The form of most of these essays is distinctive, “Hazlittean.” Bromwich notes, discerningly, that in his criticism Hazlitt differs from other major critics in that he does not use artistic unity as a prime criterion of literary value. In an essay on Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, who was a highly conscious prose artist, depreciated Hazlitt because his thoughts are “discontinuous,” lacking in “evolution” according to “the law of succession.” Bromwich counters that the coherence of Hazlitt’s thought is “associationist,” which is true; although it should also be observed that Hazlitt’s are often very free associations. He himself tells us that in writing his essays “I seldom see my way a page or even a sentence beforehand.” His compositional unit is the single sentence; he piles sentence upon sentence, frequently according to no apparent principle of rhetorical order, into paragraphs three pages long; he is apt to change his topic abruptly and radically from one paragraph to the next; and when he reaches the end, he simply stops.
Hazlitt most approximates the norm of artistic unity in essays such as “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” which have narrative sequence, but even that work ends in a conclusion in which nothing is concluded: “Enough of this for the present.” Another narrative essay, “The Fight,” however, is thoroughly ordered, and worth noting also as a reminder that, in addition to his merits as a critic of literature, oratory, painting, the theater, and politics, Hazlitt was both the originator and nonpareil of sports reporting. The essay describes the mounting excitement of the fans as they make their way to the appointed arena by stagecoach, with an overnight stop at an inn, then on foot; its central episode, the fight between the gas man and Bill Neate, is rendered in a tone that moves easily between the true heroic and the mock-heroic, and evolves through suspense, false expectation, and reversal to the denouement; it is followed by Hazlitt’s sharing delighted reminiscences of the fight with others during the return home. It ends: “Toms called upon me the next day, to ask me if I did not think the fight was a complete thing? I said I thought it was. I hope he will relish my account of it.” The essay is itself a complete thing, and reveals the kind of formal values that Hazlitt ordinarily gives up in order to achieve his own kind of essayistic brilliance, by his mastery of what he called “plain, point-blank speaking.”
Hazlitt, himself an athlete, describes the elements and relations in his ideal of prose by a trope taken from athletic contests: “Every word should be a blow, every thought should instantly grapple with its fellow.” When he is at his best in expressing the supple energy of his mind in the power of his prose, Hazlitt makes De Quincey’s craftsmanship in the essay seem ponderous, Leigh Hunt’s lightweight, and even Lamb’s, in many instances, sequestered and quaint. There are moods of reading, in fact, in which no other essayist can give us the satisfaction that Hazlitt does. R. L. Stevenson said in one of his essays that “though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt.” David Bromwich, in the opening paragraph of his book about the other Hazlitt, cites this comment as appropriate to the standard Hazlitt, about whom he remarks that “I never cared for him much.” I have a hunch, though, that even the other Hazlitt would have liked Stevenson’s compliment very much.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is grateful to his colleague Jonathan Culler for his suggestion that he collect and publish these essays, and for his acts of kindness and generosity over the years. Dianne Ferriss was, as always, an indispensable assistant in preparing the text for publication. Julia Reidhead, vice president at W. W. Norton & Company, was an enthusiastic supporter of the book, and Carly Fraser Doria, associate editor at Norton, was unfailingly expert and tactful as its editor. The author wishes also to thank the copyright holders for their generous permission to reprint the essays in this volume.
INDEX
Abraham, 196
Absolute, 167–69, 183
absolute knowledge, 209–10
Addison, Joseph, 157–58, 159, 164, 184
Aesthetica (Baumgarten), 158
aesthetic attitude, 153–54, 184
Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism (Stolnitz), 153–54
aesthetic standards, x
see also art-as-such; beauty
Age of Sensibility, 477
agon, 64
Aids to Reflection (Coleridge), 134
Albion, 204
alienation:
in Apocalypse, 148
in “The force that through the green fuse,” 148–49
in Hegel’s philosophy, 135, 141, 144
in Hyperion, 145–46
as poem, 206
in “Reflective,” 149–50
in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 141–43
alterity, 75
ambiguity, 127–28
Ammons, A. R., 22–29, 149–50
analytic philosophers, 70
“Another New Poem by Wordsworth” (Davies), 108–24, 129
antihumanism, 54–56, 93–94
Anton Reiser (Moritz), 175
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 127–28
Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom), xi
apartheid, 83
Apocalypse, 203
Apocalypse (Lawrence), 148
aporia, 65, 80
appearance, reality vs., 70
architecture, 151, 156, 161, 162, 189n
Aristotelians, 152
Aristotle, x, 67, 69, 87, 96, 155–56, 167, 190n
Arnold, Matthew, 14
ars, 155
Ars Poetica (Horace), 67–69, 155, 156
art, religion of, 183, 185
art-as-such, 151–52, 153, 157, 160, 170
contemplation of, 151–52, 159, 160
limitations of theory of, 187–89
quick adoption of, 163
art for art’s sake, 157, 180, 182, 183, 193n
associationist, 225
Athanasius, 168
Auden, W. H., 4–10
Augu
stine, Saint, xi, 169–71, 174
life journey and, 199–200, 211
Austin, John, 75
autarkeia, 176
see also self-sufficiency
author:
current theorists’ views of, 58
death of, 65–69, 82
functional principle of, 66
Horace on, 67–69
misreading by, 91n
author-effect, 60
author function, 65–67
development of, 67
authorial intentions, 102
autonomy, 152
autotelic, 152
axial proposition, 61
Bahn (road), 203
Bailey, Benjamin, 51n
Barthes, Roland, 55
author pronounced dead by, 65–67
on reference of narratives, 59, 79
on scriptor, 58, 65, 88n
texts personified by, 63, 65
Bateson, F. W., 108
Baudelaire, Charles, 180, 183
Baumgarten, Alexander, 158
beauty:
in art for art’s sake, 182
as God, 168–70, 182
Poe on, 180
religion of, 183
beauty (continued)
right taste for, 165
secularization of term, 173
self-sufficiency and, 192n
Shaftesbury on, 172–73
as truth and goodness, 165, 166–67
unity of, 192n