10 - Spirit of the Age; Or, Contemporary Portraits by William Hazlitt

In Spirit of the Age; Or, Contemporary Portraits, William Hazlitt masterfully captures the essence of his era through insightful monographs on a constellation of literary luminaries. Meet the likes of Jeremy Bentham, the architect of utilitarian philosophy, and William Godwin, who elevated morality beyond human reach. Delve into the minds of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edward Irving, and Sir Walter Scott, as Hazlitt reveals their distinct contributions to literature and society. From the eloquence of Thomas Campbell, known for Pleasures of Hope, to the impactful thoughts of William Wordsworth and Thomas Malthus, Hazlitt provides a vivid portrayal of his contemporaries. Engaging comparisons between the works of Charles Lamb and Washington Irving further enrich this collection, making it a fascinating exploration of the literary landscape of his time. Summary by Craig Campbell.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter ten of the Spirit of the Age or Contemporary
Portraits by William Haslett. This is a LibriVox recording. All
LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information
or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by
Garfield The SUSA, Chapter ten, William Wordsworth. Mister Wordsworth's genius

(00:26):
is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age.
Had he lived in any other period of the world,
he would never have been heard of. As it is,
he has some difficulty to contend with the habitude of
his intellect and the meanness of his subject with him.
Lowliness is young ambition's ladder, but he finds it a

(00:47):
toil to climb in this way the steep of fame.
His homely muse can hardly raise her wing from the ground,
nor spread her hidden glories to the sun. He has
no figures, nor no fantasies which busy passion draws in
the brains of men, neither the gorgeous machinery of mythologic

(01:07):
lore nor the splendid colors of poetic diction. His style
is vernacular. He delivers household truths. He sees nothing loftier
than human hopes nothing deeper than the human heart. This
he probes, This he tampers with. This he poises with
all its incalculable weight of thought and feeling in his hands,

(01:32):
and at the same time calms the throbbing pulses of
his own heart by keeping his eye ever fixed on
the face of nature. If he can make the life
blood flow from the wounded breast, this is the living
coloring with which he paints his verse. If he can
assuage the pain or close up the wound with the

(01:53):
balm of solitary musing all the healing power of plants
and herbs and skyey influences, this is the sole triumph
of his art. He takes the simplest elements of nature
and of the human mind, the mere abstract conditions inseparable
from our being, and tries to compound a new system

(02:14):
of poetry from them, and has perhaps succeeded as well
as any one could. Nihil umani hme alianimputo is the
motto of his works. He thinks nothing low or indifferent
of which this can be affirmed. Everything that professes to
be more than this, that is not an absolute sense
of truth, and failing he holds to be vitiated, false

(02:37):
and spurious. In a word, his poetry is founded on
setting up an opposition and pushing it to the utmost length,
between the natural and the artificial, between the spirit of
humanity and the spirit of fashion and of the world.
It is one of the innovations of the time. It

(02:57):
partakes off and is carried along with the revolutionary movement of
our age. The political changes of the day were the
model on which he formed and conducted his political experiments.
His muse it cannot be denied, and without this we
cannot explain its character at all, is a leveling one.

(03:18):
It proceeds on a principle of equality and strives to
reduce all things to the same standard. It is distinguished
by a broad humility. It relies upon its own resources
and disdains external shae and relief. It takes the calmnest
events and objects as a test to prove that nature

(03:39):
is always interested from its inherent truth and beauty, without
any of the ornaments of dress or pomp of circumstances
to set it off. Hence, the unaccountable mixture of seeming
simplicity and real abstruseness. In lyrical ballads fools have laughed
at wise men scarcely understand them. He takes his subject

(04:02):
or a story merely as begs or loops to hang
thought and feeling on. The incidents are trifling in proportion
to his contempt for imposing appearances. The reflections are profound
according to the gravity and the aspiring pretensions of his mind.
His popular in artificial style, gets rid at a blow

(04:24):
of all the trappings or verse of all the high
places of poetry. The cloud captiles the solemn temples, the
gorgeous palaces are swept to the ground, and like the
baseless fabric of her vision, leave not a wreck behind.
All the traditions of learning, all the superstitions of age,

(04:45):
are obliterated and effaced. We begin de novo on a
taboola rasa of poetry. The purple pall, the nodding plume
of tragedy are exploded as mere pantomime and trick, to
return to the simplicity of truth and nature. King's queens, priests, nobles,

(05:07):
the altar and the throne. The distinctions of rank, birth
weld power, the judges, robe, the marshals, truncheon, the ceremony
that the great One's lungs are not to be found here.
The Otto tramples on the bride of art with greater pride,
the old an epode, the strophy and the antistrophy he

(05:30):
loves to scorn. The harp of Homer, the trump of
Pindar and of Alcias are still the decencies of costume.
The decorations of vanity are stripped off without mercy, as barbarous,
idle and gothic. The jewels in the crisp hair, the
diadem on the polished brow are thought meltricious, theatrical vulgar.

(05:53):
And nothing contains his fastid distaste beyond a simple garland
of flowers. Neither does he avail himself of the advantages
which nature or accident holds out to him. He chooses
to have his subject of foil to his invention, to
owe nothing but to himself. He gathers manner in the wilderness.

(06:15):
He strikes the barren rock for the gushing moisture he
elevates to mean by the strength of his own aspirations.
He clothes the naked with beauty and grandeur from the
store of his own recollections. No cypress grove loads his
verse with perfumes, but his imagination lends a sense of

(06:35):
joy to the bare trees and mountains, bare and grass
in the green field. No storm, no shipwreck startles us
by its horrors, But the rainbow lifts its head in
the cloud, and the breeze sighs through the withered fern.
No sad vicissitude of fate, No overwhelming catastrophe in nature

(06:56):
deforms his page. But the dewdrop glitter on the bending flower.
The tear collects in the glistening eye beneath the hills
along the flowery vales. The generations are prepared, the pangs,
the internal banks are ready, the dread strife of poor
humanity's afflicted will, struggling in vain with ruthless destiny. As

(07:22):
the lark ascends from its low bed on fluttering wing
and salutes the morning skies, So mister Woodsford's unpretending muse
in Russet guise scales the summits of reflection while it
makes the round earth its footstool and its home. Possibly
a good deal of this may be regarded as the

(07:44):
effect of disappointed views and an inverted ambition, prevented by
native pride and endolence from climbing the ascent of learning
or greatness taught by political opinions. To say, to the
vain pomp and glory of the world, I hate seeing
art of classical and artificial poetry blocked up by the
cumbrous ornaments of style and dirged commonplaces, so that nothing

(08:07):
more could be achieved in that direction, but by the
most ridiculous bombast or the tamous sobility. He has turned back,
partly from the bias of his mind, partly perhaps from
a judicious policy, has struck into the sequestered veil of
humble life, sought out the muse among sheep coats and
hamlets and the peasants mountain horns, has discarded all the

(08:29):
dinsel pageantry of verse, and endeavored not in vain to
aggrandize the trivial and add the charm of novelty to
the familiar. No one has sun the same imagination in
raising trifles into importance. No one has displayed the same
pathos and treating of the simplest feelings of the heart,

(08:49):
reserved yet haughty, having no unruly or violent passions, or
those passions having been early suppressed. Mister Wordsworth has passed
his life in solitary musing or in daily converse with
the face of nature. He exemplifies in an eminent degree
the power of association. For his poetry has not the

(09:11):
source of character. He has dwelt among pastoral scenes till
each object has become connected with a thousand feelings, a
link in the chain of thought, a fiber of his
own heart. Everyone is my habit and familiarity, strongly attached
to the place of his birth, or to objects that

(09:32):
recall the most pleasing and eventful circumstances of his life.
But to the author of the lyrical ballads, nature is
a kind of home, and he may be said to
take a personal interest in the universe. There is no
image so insignificant that it has not, in some mood
or other, found way into his heart. No sound that

(09:55):
does not awaken the memory of other years to him.
The meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do
often lie to deep for tears. The daisy looks up
to him with sparkling eye as an old acquaintance. The
cuckoo haunts him with sounds of earlute not to be expressed.

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A linnet's nest startles him with boyish delight. An old
withered thorn is weighed down with a heap of recollections.
A great cloak seen on some wild moor, downed by
the wind, or drenched in the rain afterwards, becomes an
object of imagination to him. Even the leechens on the
rock have a life and being in his thoughts. He

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has described all these objects in a way and with
an intensity of feeling, that no one else had done
before him, and has given a new view or aspect
of nature. He is, in this sense the most original
poet now living, and the one whose writings could the
least be spared, for they have no substitute elsewhere. The

(11:02):
vulgar do not read them, the learned, who see all
things through books do not understand them. The great despise
the fashionable meridicule them. But the author has created himself
an interest in the heart of the retired and lonely
student of nature, which can never die. Persons of this
class will still continue to feel what he has felt.

(11:24):
He has expressed what they might, in vain wish to express,
except with glistening eye and faltering tongue. There is a
lofty philosophic tone, a thoughtful humanity infused into his pastoral vein,
remote from the passions and events of the great world,
he has communicated interest and dignity to the primal movements

(11:47):
of the heart of man, and engrafted his own conscious
reflections on the casual thoughts of hinds and shepherds. Nursed
amidst the grandeur of mountain scenery, he has stooped to
have a nearer view of the daisy under his feet,
or plucked a branch of white thorn from the spray,

(12:07):
But in describing it, his mind seems imbued with the
majesty and solemnity of the objects around him. The dull
rock lifts its head in the directness of the spirit,
the cataract rose in the sound of his verse, and
in its dim and mysterious meaning. The mists seem to
gather in the hollows of Helvelen, and the folkeds guitar

(12:30):
hoggles in the distance. There is little mention of mountainous
scenery in mister Wordsworth's poetry, but by internal evidence one
might be almost sure that it was written in a
mountainous country, from its baareness, its simplicity, its loftiness, and
its depth. His later philosophic productions have a somewhat different character.

(12:54):
They are a departure from a dereliction of his first principles.
They are classical and courtly, the abolished in style without
being gaudy, dignified in subject without affectation. They seem to
have been composed not in a cottage at Grassmere, but
among the half inspired grows and stately recollections of Colorton.

(13:16):
We might allude, in particular for examples of what we mean,
to the lines on a picture by Claude Lorraine, and
to the exquisite poem entitled Laudamia. The last of these
breathes the pure spirit of the finest fragments of antiquity,
the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty, and the

(13:38):
languor of death, calm, contemplation and majestic pains. Its glossy
brilliancy arises from the perfection of the finishing, like that
of careful sculpture, not from goudy coloring. The texture of
the thoughts has the smoothness and solidity of marble. It
is a poem that might be read aloud in elysium,

(13:59):
and a sprots of departed heroes and sages would gather
round to listen to it. Mister Wordsworth's philosophic poetry, with
a less glowing aspect and less tumored in the veins
than Lord Byron's, on similar occasions, bends a calmer and
keener eye on mortality. The impression, if less vivid, is

(14:20):
more pleasing and permanent, and we confess it. Perhaps it
is a want of taste and proper feeling that there
are lines in poems of our authors that we think
of ten times for once, that we refer to any
of Lord Byron's, or if there are any of the
latter's writings that we can dwell upon in the same
way that is as lasting in heartfelt sentiments. It is

(14:42):
when laying aside his usual pomp and pretension, he descends
with wordsword to the common ground of a disinterested humanity.
It may be considered as characteristic of her poet's writings
that they either make no impression of the mind at all,
seem mere nonsense verses, or or that they leave a
mark behind them that never wears out. They either fall

(15:06):
blunted from the indurated breast without any perceptible result, or
they absorbit like passion to one class of readers. He
appears sublime to another, and we fear the largest ridiculous.
He has probably realized Milton's wish and fit audience found
though few, but we suspect he is not reconciled to

(15:29):
the alternative. There are delightful passages in The Excursion, both
of natural description and of inspired reflection, passages of the
latter kind that, in the sound of the thoughts and
of the swelling language, resemble heavily symphonies mournful requiems over
the grave of human hopes. But we must add, in

(15:51):
justice and insincerity, that we think it is impossible that
this work should ever become popular, even in the same
degree as a lyrical balance. It affects a system without
having any intelligible clue to one, and instead of unfolding
a principle in various and striking lights, repeats the same
conclusions till they become flat and insipid. Mister Wadsworth's mind

(16:17):
is obtuse, except as it is the organ and the
receptacle of accumulated feelings. It is not analytic but synthetic.
It is reflecting rather than theoretical. The Excursion, we believe
fell stillborn from the breasts. There was something abortive and
clumsy and ill judged in the attempt. It was long

(16:38):
and labored. The personages, for the most part, were low,
the fair rustic. The plan raised expectations which were not fulfilled,
and the effect was like being ushered into a stately
hall and invited to sit down to a splendid banquet
in the company of clowns, and with nothing but successive
courses of apple dumplings sewed up. It was not even

(17:02):
tiger pattery. Mister Wordsworth, in his person is about the
middle size, with marked features and an air somewhat stately
and quixotic. He reminds one of some of Holbyn's heads,
grave saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humor, kept

(17:22):
under by the manners of the age or by the
pretensions of the person. He has a peculiar sweetness in
his smile, and great depth and manliness, and a rugged
harmony in the tones of his voice. His manner of
reading his own poetry is particularly imposing, and in his
favorite passages his eye beams with brittle, natural luster, and

(17:44):
the meaning labors slowly up from his swelling breast. No
one who has seen him at these moments could go
away with an impression that he was a man of
no mark on likelihood. Perhaps the comment of his face
and voice is necessary to convey a full idea of
his poetry. His language may not be intelligible, but his

(18:07):
manner is not to be mistaken. It is clear that
he is either mad or inspired in company, even in
a tete a tete, Mister wordsword is often silent, indolent,
and reserved. If he has become verbose and oracular of
late years, he was not so in his better days.
He threw out a bold or an indifferent remark without

(18:30):
either effort or pretension, and relapsed into musing again. He
shone most because he seemed most roused and animated in
reciting his own poetry or in talking about it. He
sometimes gave striking views of his feelings and trains of
association in composing certain passages. Or if one did not

(18:50):
always understand his distinctions, still there was no want of interest.
There was a latent meaning worth inquiring into, like a
vein of owe that one cannot exactly hit upon at
the moment, but of which there are sure indications. His
standard of poetry is high and severe, almost too exclusiveness.

(19:10):
He admits of nothing below scarcely of anything about himself.
It is fine to hear him talk of the way
in which certain subjects should have been treated by eminent poets,
according to his notions of the art. Thus he finds
fault with Dryden's description of Bacchus in The Alexander's Feast,
as if he were a mere, good looking youth or
boon companion, flushed with a purple grace. He shews his

(19:34):
honest face instead of representing the god returning from the
conquest of India, ground with mine leaves and drawn by panthers,
and followed by troops or satyrs of wild men and
animals that he had tamed. You would think, on hearing
him speak on this subject, that you saw Titian's picture

(19:54):
of the meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne. So classic were
his conceptions, so black his style. Milton is his great idol,
and he sometimes dares to compare himself with him. His
sonnets indeed have something of the same, high raised stone
and prophetic spirit. Chaucer is another prime favorite of his,

(20:16):
and he has been at the pains to modernize some
of the Canterbury tales. Those persons who look upon mister
Wordsworth as a merely puerile writer must be rather at
a loss to account for his strong predilection for such
geniuses as Dante and Michelangelo. We do not think our
author has any very cordial sympathy with Shakespeare. How should he.

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Shakespeare was the least of an egotist of anybody in
the world. He does not much relish the variety of
scope and dramatic composition. He hailes those interlocutions between Lucius
and Caius. Yet mister Wordsworth himself wrote a tragedy when
he was young, and we have heard the falling energy
de lines quoted from it, as put into the mouth

(21:00):
of a person smit with remorse for some rash crime.
Action is momentary, the motion of a muscle this way
or that. Suffering is long, obscure and infinite. Perhaps, for
want of light and shade and the unshackled spirit of
the drama, this performance was never brought forward. Arcritic has

(21:23):
a great dislike to Gray and a fondness for Thompson
and Collins. It is modifying to hear him speak of
Pope and Dryden, whom because they have been supposed to
have all the possible excellences of poetry, he even allowed
to have none. Nothing, however, can be fairer or more
amusing than the way in which he sometimes exposes the

(21:44):
unmeaning verbiage of modern poetry. Thus, in the beginning of
Doctor Johnson's Vanity of Human Fishes led Observation with Extensive
Views serving mankind from China to Peru, he says there
is a total want of imagination accompanying the words. The
same idea is repeated three times under the disguise of

(22:07):
a different phraseology. It comes to this, Let observation with
extensive observation observe mankind or take away the first line,
and the second surveying mankind from China to Peru literally
conveys the whole. Mister Wordsworth is, we must say, a
perfect dro cancer. As to prose writers, he complains of

(22:30):
the drier reasoners and matter of fact people for their
want of passion, and he is jealous of the rhetorical
declaimers and rhapsodists as drenching on the province of poetry.
He condemns all French writers as well of poetry as prose.
In the lump his list in this way is indeed small.

(22:51):
He approves of Walton's, Angler, Bailey, and some other writers
of an inoffensive modesty of pretension. He also likes books
of voyagers and travels, and Robinson Crusoe. In art, he
greatly esteems Bewick's wood cuts and Waterloo's Sylvan etchings, but
he sometimes takes a higher tone and gives his mind

(23:13):
fair play. We have known him enlarge with a noble
intelligence and enthusiasm on Nicolas Poussan's fine landscape compositions, pointing
out the unity of design that pervades them, the superintending mind,
the imaginative principle that brings all to bear on the
same end, and declaring he would not give a rush

(23:35):
for any landscape that did not express the time of day,
the climate, the beer of the world it was meant
to illustrate, or had not this character of holeness in it.
His eye also does justice to Rembrand's fine and masterly
effects in the way in which that artist works something

(23:55):
out of nothing and transforms the stump of a tree
a common figure to an ideal object by the gorgeous
light and shade drawn upon it. He perceives an analogy
to his own mode of investing the mining details of
nature with an atmosphere of sentiment, and in pronouncing Rembrandt

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to be a man of genius, feels that he strengthens
his own claim to the title. It has been said
of mister Wordsworth that he hates gonchology, that he hates
the weenus of medesis. But these, we hope are mere
epigrams and due desprey, as far from truth as they
are free from malice, a sort of running satire or

(24:37):
critical clenches, where one for sense and one for rhyme
is quite sufficient. At one time we think, however, that
if mister Wordsword had been a more liberal and cantacritic,
he would have been a most sterning writer. If a
greater number of sources of pleasure had been open to him,
he would have communicated pleasure to the world more frequently.

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Had he been less fastidious in pronouncing sentence on the
works of others, his own would have been received more
favorably and treated more leniently. The current of his feelings
is deep but narrow. The range of his understanding is
lofty and aspiring, rather than discursive. The force, the originality,

(25:21):
the absolute truth, and identity with which he feels some
things makes him indifferent to so many others. The simplicity
and enthusiasm of his feelings with respect to nature renders
him bigoted and intolerant in his judgments of men and things.
But it happens to him, as to others, that his

(25:41):
strength lies in his weakness. And perhaps we have no
right to complain. We might get rid of the cynic
and the egotist, and bind in his stead a commonplace man.
We should take the good the gods provide us. A
fine and original vein of poetry is not one of
their most contemptible gifts, and the rest is scarcely worth

(26:05):
thinking of, except as it may be a modification to
those who expect perfection from human nature, or who have
been idle enough at some peer of their lives to
deify men of genius as possessing claims about it. But
this is a god that jars, and we shall not
dwell upon it. Lord Byron, we have called, according to

(26:28):
the old proverb, the spoiled child of fortune. Mister Wordsworth
might plead, in mitigation of some peculiarities, that he is
a spoiled child of disappointment. We are convinced if he
had been earlier popular poet, he would have borne his
honors meekly, and would have been a person of great
bonomy and frankness of disposition, with a sense of injustice

(26:51):
and of undeserved ridicules, sars or temper and narrows the views.
To have produced works of genius, and to find him
neglected or treated with scorn is one of the heaviest
trials of human patience. We exaggerate our own merits when
they are denied by others, and are apt to grudge
and caravel at every particle of praise bestowed on those

(27:14):
to whom we feel a conscious superiority. In mere self defense,
we turn against a world when it turns against us,
brood over the undeserved slights we receive, and thus the
genial current of the soul is stopped or vents itself
in effusions of petuleance and self conceit. Mister Wurdsworld has

(27:35):
thought too much of contemporary critics and criticism, and less
than he ought of the award of posterity and of
the opinion. We do not say our private friends, but
of those who were made so by their admiration of
his genius. He did not court popularity by conformity to
establish models, and he ought not to have been surprised

(27:57):
that his originality was not under stood. As a matter
of course, he has not too much on the bridle,
and has often thrown out cross to the critics in
mere defiance, or as a point of honor when he
was challenged, which otherwise his own good sense would have withheld.
We suspect that mister Wordsworth's feelings are a little morbid

(28:19):
in this respect, or that he resents censure more than
he is gratified by praise. Otherwise, the tide has turned
much in his favor of Latiers. He has a large
body of determined partisans, and is at present sufficiently in
request with the public to save or relieve him from
the last necessity to which a man of genius can

(28:40):
be reduced, that of becoming the god of his own
Idolatry end of Chapter ten