New Books: A Great British Essayist and Philosopher

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The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a book that should be useful for students interested in literature, European history, British culture, philosophy, and related fields.

The Spirit of Controversy: and Other Essays is by William Hazlitt, an English essayist and philosopher who lived in the early 1800s.

The TU Library collection also includes other books by and about Hazlitt.

Among the philosophers studied by Hazlitt were John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, Claude Adrien Helvétius, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

One writer praised Hazlitt over a century ago for his psychological revelations:

The cast of his mind, the quality of his temperament, and the nature of his experience combined to make him thoughtful, individual, and earnest; more abstract than social, more intent than discursive, more original than accomplished, he contributed ideas instead of fantasies, and vindicated opinions instead of tastes.

Zest was his inspiration; that intellectual pleasure which comes from idiosyncrasies, moods, convictions, he both felt and imparted in a rare degree; he thirsted for truth ; he was jealous of his independence; he was a devotee of freedom. In him the animal and intellectual were delicately fused.

Few such voluminous writers have been such limited readers. Keenly alive to political abuses, bred in the atmosphere of dissent, prone to follow out his mental instincts with little regard to precedent or prosperity, there was a singular consistency of purpose in his career.

Undisciplined by academic training, his mind was developed by a process of reflection, both patient and comprehensive; and so much was it to him a kingdom, that only the pressure of necessity or the encouragement of opportunity would have won him from vagrant musing to elaborate expression. He looked within for the materials of his essays, — drawing upon reason and consciousness, outward influences being the occasions rather than the source of his discourse.

So far as he was a practical writer he was a reformer, and, as a critic, he wrote from esthetic insight, and not in accordance with any conventional standard. Accordingly, while excelled in fancy, rhetoric, and fullness of knowledge by many of his class, he is one of the most suggestive; he may amuse less, but he makes us think more, and puts us on a track of free and acute speculation or subtle intellectual sympathy.

He makes life interesting by hinting its latent significance; he reveals the mysterious charm of character by analyzing its elemental traits; he revives our sense of truth and defines the peculiarities of genius ; and to him progress, justice, and liberty seem more of personal concern from this very perception of the divine possibilities of free development. His defects and misfortunes confirmed these tendencies.

A more complete education would probably have weakened his power as a writer; more extensive social experience, less privation and persecution, would have bred intellectual ease, and higher birth and fortune modified the emphasis of his opinions. But, thrown so early upon his own resources, left to his wayward impulses, and taught to think for himself, he garnered in solitude the thoughts which circumstances afterwards elicited, and had the time and the freedom to attain certain fixed views and realize his own special endowments by experiment.

His earliest tendency was metaphysical, his most congenial aptitude artistic. The spontaneous exercise of his devouring intelligence was in the sphere of abstract truth ; the fondest desire of his youth was to be a painter; and from these two facts in the history of his mind, we can easily infer all his merits as an essayist […]

The processes and impression of his own mind had such an interest for him, that it was a delight to record and speculate on them. In treating of a work of art or a favorite author, he brought to bear on their interpretation the sympathetic insight born of experience. We know his tastes and antipathies, his prejudices and passions, not only as a whole, but in detail.

Authorship was to him a kind of confessional; incidentally he lets us into many of the secrets of his consciousness. As to the outward man and the habits of his life, carelessness, want of method, and caprice were stamped thereon. […]

When fairly warmed by conversation, his manner was earnest and unconscious; but among strangers he was shy, and his way of shaking hands and taking one’s arm was the reverse of cordial. He admitted that he had little claim to be thought a good-natured man. His landladies were annoyed because he scribbled notes for his essays on the mantel-piece.

He was a wretched correspondent; variable in his moods, partly from ill-health and more from a nervous temperament; he was yet remarkably industrious, as the amount of his writings prove ; but it required the stimulus of necessity or the attraction of a subject to enlist his attention. His mind was naturally clear, fervid, and sensitive. […] Nor should we lose sight of the fact that Hazlitt, while a votary of art and literature, was also an enthusiastic and baffled reformer.

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Here are some thoughts by Hazlitt from books, some of which are in the TU Library collection:

The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.

  • Review of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold in Yellow Dwarf (1818)

Those who aim at faultless regularity will only produce mediocrity, and no one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.

  • “Thoughts on Taste”, Edinburgh Magazine (1819)

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

  • “Thoughts on Taste,” Edinburgh Magazine, (1818)

Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone — but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.

  • “On The Conduct of Life” (1822)

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.

  • “Common Places,” No. 1, The Literary Examiner (1823)

Man is a make-believe animal — he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

  • Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (1824)

The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.

  • Edinburgh Review (1829)

When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.

  • The Atlas (1830)

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

  • The New Monthly Magazine (1830)

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

  • The Times Newspaper (1818)

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(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)