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

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.