proximoception | (no subject)

Hazlitt's one of those difficult personalities too. I sometimes wonder if that's partly why he's so unread, though it's probably more to the point that he's as relentlessly allusive to contemporary micro-events and figures as Byron is in the Don Juan intro, which I swear single-handedly reduced Byron's readership by at least fifty percent this last century. With Byron you can skip to Canto One though, or if you're patient can get there shortly and not look back. Hazlitt wasn't careful to clearly direct at least a chunk of his work toward universal/personal interest, the way Emerson did, with his often deceptively self-help focus and absurdly general titles, which given the limited appeal of essays for most people means Emerson gets most of the small pile of chips. Once you know enough about his era, though, Hazlitt's use of highly specific contemporary examples to make universal points becomes awesomely fruitful and entertaining. He's more or less a secret pleasure for professors, graduate students, and maybe historians studying the Romantic period at this point. Which makes me sad.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The essay and its related form, the aphorism, are my two favorite literary genres. For some reason fiction, as it is broadly understood, I have a lot more trouble immersing myself in, with certain exceptions. Besides occasionally attempting and idly aspiring to write in these forms (essay and aphorism that is), I have often fantasized about putting together some anthology of them. Because of this interest, I got the 2009 Oxford World's Classics selection of Hazlitt's writings, having become aware of it just when it came out. (To my disappointment it did not contain "On the Pleasure of Hating," though I've since found it in the awesome, nearly 700 page Oxford Book of Essays, from 1991.) I read much of it around that time, and read or reread bits of it since. I was not even aware of the two Penguin selections of it, which I'd very much like to get now. I recall liking his writing style, but as you identified, there's sometimes an impenetrable topicality of content.

Anyway, regarding why Hazlitt is so unread, I think that lack of (at least overt) universal/personal interest in much of the writing explains why, while there are aphorisms if you look for them, he doesn't seem to be particularly known for any one line, or handful of lines. I just did a quick search for "William Hazlitt quotes" and most of what came up was unfamiliar, or only familiar in the sense that I'd heard it somewhere but didn't know the source. So while he may be deserving of quotation, it's an accident of history that such quotes haven't come down to us in the loud, flashy way of a Wilde or an Emerson. Consequently, he's an unknown quantity in the popular imagination (though in England it's probably somewhat different), a mere name, as he was to me just a few years ago. Hazlitt doesn't even fall into that category of dubious desirability, that of being "more quoted than read." For who quotes him nowadays besides scholars and other essayists?

It seems like there could be some revival of interest in him for his political dimension, at least. I don't know enough about him yet to know quite how he'd be characterized that way, though.

He's a pragmatic radical. Pretty much the first pragmatic radical, since he watched the first unpragmatically radical experiments go down in flames as a teenager. My last ever term paper, turned in two weeks ago, was mostly about how his hatred of Shelley combined plausible outrage at the poet's outspokenness at a very delicate political moment with envy that he couldn't say those things openly himself, since he believed all of them.

One thing with Hazlitt is his titles don't always let you know what he'll be talking about - he'll call a piece "On Daydreaming" and spend the middle four pages of it recounting how bad of a partner Charles Lamb was in 1813 at some now forgotten game you're not even sure is cards, what with its utterly esoteric terminology. And then go back to being brilliant about daydreaming. You do find he was ultimately on topic the whole time, often in some jarringly counterintuitive way, but that topic doesn't always turn out to be synonymous with the title.