Hot Summer Reads: Hazlitt's Essays

It's a shame that William Hazlitt's essays haven't yet shown up on anybody else's list of Hot Summer Reads. Granted, the fellow can be grumpy at times and a mite too sure of himself. On top of that, he hasn't published anything new since 1830.

But in our age of hype, hooey, and balderdash, Hazlitt's plain speaker still provides some of the best table talk in town--caustic, impassioned, and genuinely interesting. In that questionable corner where journalism bumps up against literature, Hazlitt's style is one of the finest and fiercest in the language.

Ronald Blythe has characterized Hazlitt as "the word-juggler who never misses: his almost casual use of ornament, epigram, and fancy is hypnotic." Another notable English essayist, Virginia Woolf, said that Hazlitt's essays are "emphatically himself," and that even the titles of some of those essays betray his distinctive character: "On the Connection between Toad-Eaters and Tyrants," "On Cant and Hypocrisy," "On Disagreeable People," and "On the Pleasure of Hating."

Also worth reading are Hazlitt's observations on the nature of writing. In the essay "On the Difference Between Writing and Speaking," he argues that "few persons can be found who speak and write equally well." An expert speaker is more immediately impressive--and invariably shallow; the writer, by contrast, is "thrown back . . . on the severer researches of thought and study":

The writer must be original, or he is nothing. He is not to take up with ready-made goods; for he has time allowed him to create his own materials, to make novel combinations of thought and fancy, to contend with unforeseen difficulties of style and execution, while we look on, and admire the growing work in secret and at leisure. There is a degree of finishing as well as of solid strength in writing which is not to be got at every day, and we can wait for perfection.

Finally, let me recommend six essays by Hazlitt that appear in our collection of Classic British and American Essays and Speeches:

• On Corporate Bodies
  "Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor good-will."


• On Familiar Style
  "It is not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a familiar for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without affectation is to write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing that requires more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of expression, than the style I am speaking of."


• On the Fear of Death
  "There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern--why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?"


• On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth
  "The world is a witch that puts us off with false shows and appearances. The simplicity of youth, the confiding expectation, the boundless raptures, are gone: we only think of getting out of it as well as we can, and without any great mischance or annoyance."


• On Going a Journey
  This essay "is so good," said Robert Louis Stevenson, "that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it."


• On Gusto
  "In a word, gusto in painting is where the impression made on one sense excites by affinity those of another."

If these essays put you in the mood for some seriously good summer reading, pick up the Oxford World's Classics edition of Hazlitt's Selected Writings, edited by Jon Cook (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Image: William Hazlitt, Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Source: http://grammar.about.com/b/2013/07/08/hot-summer-reads-hazlitts-essays.htm

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