William Hazlitt, on Being Brilliant

Abstract

Authors were actuated by the desire of the applause of posterity, only so long as were debarred of that of their contemporaries, just as we see the map of the goldmines of Peru hanging in the room of Hogarth's Distressed Poet. In the midst of the ignorance and prejudices with which were surrounded, had a sort of forlorn hope in the prospect of immortality. spirit of universal criticism has superseded the anticipation of posthumous fame, and instead of waiting for the award of distant ages, the poet or prose-writer receives his final doom from the next number of the Edinburgh or Quarterly Review. According as the nearness of the applause increases, our impatience increases with it. A writer in a weekly journal engages with reluctance in a monthly publication: and again, a contributor to a daily paper sets about his task with greater spirit than either of them. It is like prompt payment. effort and the applause go together. (1) THE MOST INTRIGUING FEATURE OF THE PUBLICATION OF GERMAINE DE Stall's De l'Allemagne, coupled with the presence of the author at the launch in London, and the reissuing of many of her other works, was the quite surprising number of literary and journalistic responses to the Staelian oeuvre. Some of the most intense replies come from William Hazlitt, who continued to engage with de Stall's work directly and obliquely in many articles for newspapers and periodicals, both during and after her stay in England. De l'Allemagne's publication allowed Hazlitt not only to profit from another review, but also benefit his own productivity. Unable as yet to find a publisher for the lectures he had given on metaphysics in 1812, de Stael's work provided the ideal opportunity. As a consequence, after a general review of the work for the Morning Chronicle in November 1813, Hazlitt proceeded to publish four more essays between February and April 1814 in the same paper. Although entitled de Stael's Account of German Philosophy, Hazlitt published his own work, making only cursory glances at the original text, covering the works of Hobbes, Locke, Hartley, Helvetius and others. As Hazlitt's biographer Stanley Jones notes, the complex philosophical debates must have presented the readers of the paper with quite a surprise: they stood out from the rest of the matter, war correspondence, political reports, London and provincial news, with an abstruseness that must have made many a reader stare. Only Madame de Stael's popularity can explain Perry's acceptance of these eight closely printed columns. (2) This is in no way to denigrate Hazlitt's writing. As a journalist he took advantage of every opportunity that came his way, and, most importantly, his canny move provided a neat illustration of the cultural climate in early nineteenth-century British literature. world of publishing was continuing to expand, newspapers and periodicals held sway over literary taste, and publicity and fame could be achieved from a single article. This necessity to write to the moment and of the moment was a fact of journalistic life and one of which Hazlitt was only too aware. As he would illustrate in an essay on The Periodical Press for the Edinburgh Review ten years after de Stael's visit to London: we are superficial, let us be brilliant. If we cannot be profound, let us at least be popular (16: 218). After de Stael's continuing British popularity had prompted the re-release of Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1814), Hazlitt was ready and waiting to respond. If the original text is concerned with the achievement of a celebrated name, Hazlitt too writes about renown, despite his disagreements with parts of de Stael's argument. Suggesting that de Stael's claim that Rousseau lived only in his imagination, from which he consequently derived his theories, is radically wrong, Hazlitt claims that it was his extreme sensibility, his profound egotism which actuated his desire for fame (4: 88). …