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[proximoception]

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.

Comments

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Good questions. The most recent Penguin edition's well-annotated, and was designed to tie in to the editor Tom Paulin's biography of Hazlitt.

But yeah, a laptop's fine. All this info can be found, I just worry a person would stop bothering - see it as a chore.

You're enough of a history buff that you might not though. The same things that make Hazlitt annoying for the uninitiated make him a pretty great (if gloriously biased) trove of info on his time and place. And I'm probably overstating difficulties. Hazlitt's unread for the same reasons everyone else from his time who didn't write about bonnet-y courtship, wars or monsters is - it's not like a ton of people are reading Thomas De Quincey these days.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the thing about Hazlitt is that the assumed microhistory provides the transitions from sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph. He thinks you're just as immersed in current and recent events as he is. Luckily Shakespeare is another emulsion his sentences develop in, bringing their microhistory along with it.

I think reading Romantic prose, De Quincey (and Byron, and Keats's letters) are the easiest to read cold, then you should go to Lamb, and then Hazlitt. Hazlitt is the clearest sighted and most subtle stylist of the three. And I love the way you characterize him when you post on him.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I think the style's what makes his historical embeddedness particularly tragic: the exactness and modulations he manages to get into an essentially conversational baseline are incredible. Best of the enlightenment and romantic styles in one. Nearly everything he says is the best way to say that thing, this side of verse. Which he basically drops into where that's an improvement. Something amazingly selfless about how freely he steps into and out of Wordsworth, Milton, and yeah especially Shakespeare. There'd probably even be something to say for printing his verse quotations as prose, and continuous with his, which I guarantee they were in MS.

Lamb's the last major Romantic I still know little of - he's one of the strangest minds I've encountered. Didn't finish Redgauntlet, but I read enough to feel I understood the very unstrange Scott.