written. There is not so much alloy of waywardness, or of splendid trifling, and full as much sense and feeling in it as in the best of his former essays. We will just pass over its leading titles; but it is manifestly impossible thus to convey any adequate idea of a work which is in itself only an index to a world of thoughts. We shall say but little of the first article "On the Pleasure of Painting," because it has already appeared in our Magazine,* and is, we are assured, well remembered by our readers. Nothing of the kind, we think, can be more exquisite than the author's own early aspirations and toils after eminence in his beloved art which he here gathers up and embalms. The spirit of long-crush ed hope breathes tenderly through every line, and gives a nicer accus racy to every fine distinction, and a deeper beauty to every image. Though we do not agree with those who regard Mr. Hazlitt as usually a defender of paradox, we think he has appeared in this charac ter in his second essay "On the Past and the Future." He has, in this most eloquent disquisition, attempted to prove that the past is, at any given moment, of as much consequence to an individual as the future that he has no more interest in what is to come than in what is gone by, except so far as he may think himself able to avert the former by action-that it is as well to have lived and enjoyed, as to have life and enjoyment yet in store. Now we may, without presumption, affirm that this is untrue, even though we should not be able to detect its fallacy. The error seems to us to consist in excluding from the argument all that properly appertains to individual being. The past and future, taken abstractedly, are quite different from the past and future, as they refer to the conscious life of each man ;-and Mr. Hazlitt's reasoning appears to us to exist only in confounding these two senses of the terms. He, one moment, takes a stand apart from humanity, and the next speaks from an individual heart. Thus he says, and says most truly "a Treatise on the Millennium is dull; but who was ever weary of reading the fables of the golden age?"-But then we have no more personal concern in one than in the other, and where this is the case, we prefer that which human hearts have long been wont to yearn over, which the nurses of our own childhood have talked of, and over which antiquity has spread its mighty wings. Perhaps both the golden age and the Millennium are better as objects of distant contemplation, than of personal interest-for we do not heartily wish to realize either-but, were it otherwise, and the one were just over, and the other just beginning, should we hesitate which to choose, the past or the future? Or, to take a less refined and questionable example-would it be the same to us whether we had just spent a fortune, or were just adopted as a miser's heir? Then, again, Mr. Hazlitt differs from a person who would not like to have been Claude, because then all would be over with him, on the ground that it cannot signify when we live, save the present minute, because the value of human life is not altered in the course of centuries. But that present minute and the feeling that its consciousness will last-is every thing. Our author forgets that the very desire to have been Claude is part of our present being. The vivid feeling which thus grasps past and future, and throws itself into other existences, refutes his own theory. The past itself has no real being to us except in the present. When it actually was, it had none of those attributes which it assumes now that it is gone. Like a young sapling, we have, at first, as slender roots as stem ;-we strike deeper as we advance; and have a mightier hold within the soil as we spread out above it. The recollection of the past not only gives value to the present, but to the future;-because we feel that we cannot lose it till our heart and flesh shall fail us. For this, if for nothing else, we would live on. When it is "all over with us," the past is nothing. Mr. Hazlitt's own examples seem to us to be decisive against him. Hẻ * In an advertisement prefixed to the work, Mr. Hazlitt informs us that this Essay, and that on the Ignorance of the Learned, have appeared in periodical works. The others are now first published. " instances the agitation of criminals before their trial, and their composure after they are convicted, as proofs that when a future event is certain," it gives us little more disturbance or emotion than if it had already taken place, or were something to happen in another state of being, or to another person." But is this the secret of their stillness? Is there no distinction between indifference and despair? Because menareless agitated when hope has fled, are they, therefore, at peace? Can it be gravely asserted, that if a man were called on to decide between the recollection of the rack a year ago, or the certain prospect of enduring its agonies in a year to come, he would have no preference! The question may surely be left on this practical issue. It is not, however, fairly stated by our author. The past and the future have both an existence in the present moment, the first in recollection, the last in hope-and taking the mere value to the imagination of the two, the past is incomparably the richest; that is, the definite abstractedly considered as mere matter of contemplation, is better than the visionary; but the latter is of more value to us, because another kind of existence is reserved for it-that which the past once had —and which it will one day lose, to take its place in the majestic background of our being. Though we thus differ from the author on the main doctrine of this essay, we admit that it is full of the deepest sentiments, and of the stateliest truths. How pregnant is the following refutation of the usual complaints of the brevity and worth lessness of life! Though I by no means think that our habitual attachment to life is in exact pro portion to the value of the gift, yet I am not one of those splenetic persons who affect to think it of no value at all. Que peu de chose est la vio humaine-is an exelamation in the mouths of moralists and philosophers, to which I cannot agree. It is little, it is short, it is not worth having, if we take the last hour, and leave out all that has gone before, which has been one way of looking at the subject. Such calculators seem to say that life is nothing when it is over, and that may in their sense be true. If the old rule-Respice finem were to be made absolute, and no one could be pronounced fortunate till the day of his death, there are few among us whose existence would, upon those conditions, be much to be envied. But this is not a fair view of the case. A man's life is his whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of the candle; and this, I say, is considerable, and not a little matter, whe ther we regard its pleasures or its pains. trary, from our own superannuated desires or To draw a peevish conclusion to the conforgetful indifference, is about as reasonable he is grown old, or never lived because he as to say, a man never was young because is now dead. The length or agreeableness of a journey does not depend on the few last steps of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged of from the last stone that is added to it. It is neither the first nor last hour of our existence, but the space that parts these two-not our exit nor our feel, and think while there-that we are to entrance upon the stage, but what we do, attend to in pronouncing sentence upon it. Indeed it would be easy to show that it is the very extent of human life, the infinite number of things contained in it, its contradictory and fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another, the hours, months, years spent in one fond pursuit after another; that it is, in a word, the length of our common journey and the quantity of events crowded tual perception, make it slide from our into it, that, baffling the grasp of our ac◄ memory, and dwindle into nothing in its and we say it is nothing! It is a speck in own perspective. It is too mighty for us, big enough to hold its striking groups, its our fancy, and yet what canvas would be endless subjects! It is light as vanity, and yet if all its weary moments, if all its head and heart aches were compressed into one, what fortitude would not be overwhelmed with the blow! What a huge heap, a "huge, dumb heap," of wishes, thoughts, feelings, anxious cares, soothing hopes, loves, joys, friendships, it is of sentiment, long, and deep, and intense, composed of! How many ideas and trains often pass through the mind in only one day's thinking or reading, for instance! how many years in a long life, still ocHow many such days are there in a year, cupied with something interesting, still recalling some old impression, still recurring to some difficult question, and making progress in it, every step accompanied with a sense of power, and every moment conscious of "the high endeavour or the glad which keeps it employed, and is wound up success; " for the mind seizes only on that to a certain pitch of pleasurable excitement or lively solicitude, by the necessity of its own nature. The following apostrophe of the author to the scenes of his early raptures," warm from the heart, and faithful to its fires," is not, to, our feeling, inferior to the finest passages in Rousseau's Confessions. Ye woods that crown the clear lone brow of Norman Court, why do I revisit ye so oft, and feel a soothing consciousness of your presence, but that your high tops waving in the wind recal to me the hours and years that are for ever fled, that ye renew in ceaseless murmurs the story of long-cherished hopes and bitter disappointment, that in your solitudes and tangled wilds I can wander and lose myself as I wander on and am lost in the solitude of my own heart; and that as your rustling branches give the loud blast to the waste below-borne on the thoughts of other years, I can look down with patient anguish at the cheerless desolation which I feel within! Without that face pale as the primrose with hyacinthine locks, for ever shunning and for ever haunting me, mocking my waking thoughts as in a dream, without that smile which my heart could never turn to scorn, without those eyes dark with their own lustre, still bent on mine, and drawing the soul into their liquid mazes like a sea of love, without that name trembling in fancy's ear, without that form gliding before me like Oread or Dryad in fabled groves, what should I do, how pass away the listless leaden-footed hours? Then wave, wave on, ye woods of Tuderley, and lift your high tops in the air; my sighs and vows uttered by your mystic voice breathe into me my former being, and enable me to bear the thing I am! The two Essays "On Genius and Common Sense,' are distinguished by an extraordinary power of observation and analysis, of which we cannot here give examples. But we must lay before our readers the following character of the poet Wordsworth,-chiefly for that noble bursting out of the old love, in the midst of political enmity, with which it does the heart good to sympathize. I am afraid I shall hardly write so satisfactory a character of Mr. Wordsworth, though he, too, like Rembrandt, has a faculty of making something out of nothing, that is, out of himself, by the medium through which he sees, and with which he clothes the barrenest subject. Mr. Wordsworth is the last man to "look abroad into universality," if that alone constituted genius: he looks at home into himself, and is "content with riches fineless." He would in the other case be not dark." He sits in the centre of his own being, and there "enjoys bright day.” He does not waste a thought on others. Whatever does not relate exclusively and wholly to himself, is foreign to his views. He contemplates a whole-length figure of himself, he looks along the unbroken line of his personal identity. He thrusts aside all other objects, all other interest, with scorn and impatience, that he may repose on his own being, that he may dig out that he may unfold the precious stores of the treasures of thought contained in it, a mind, for ever brooding over itself. His genius is the effect of his individual character. He stamps that character, that deep individual interest, on whatever he meets. The object is nothing but as it furnishes food for internal meditation, for old associations. If there had been no other being in the universe, Mr. Wordsworth's poetry would have been just what it is. If there had been neither love nor friendship, neither ambition, nor pleasure, nor business in the world, the author of the Lyrical Ballads need not have been greatly changed from what he is-might still have "kept the noiseless tenour of his way," retired in the sanctuary of his own heart, hallowing the Sabbath of his own thoughts. With the passions, the pursuits, and imaginations of other men he does not profess to sympathise, but "finds tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing." With a mind averse from outward objects, but ever intent upon its own workings, he hangs a weight of thought and feeling upon every trifling circumstance connected with his past history. The note of the cuckoo sounds in his ear like the voice of other years; the daisy spreads its leaves in the rays of boyish delight, that stream from his thoughtful eyes; the rainbow lifts its proud arch in heaven but to mark his progress from infancy to manhood; an old thorn is buried, bowed down under the mass of associations he has wound about it, and to him, as he himself beautifully says, "The meanest flow'r that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." It is this power of habitual sentiment, or of transferring the interest of our conscious existence to whatever gently solicits attention, and is a link in the chain of associa tion, without rousing our passions or hurting our pride, that is the striking feature in Mr. Wordsworth's mind and poetry. Others have felt and shown this power before, as Withers, Burns, &c. but none have felt it so intensely and absolutely as to lend to it the voice of inspiration, as to make it the foundation of a new style and school in poetry. His strength, as it so often happens, arises from the excess of his weakness. But he has opened a new avenue to the human heart, has explored another secret haunt and nook of nature, "sacred to verse, and sure of everlasting fame." Compared with his lines, Lord Byron's stanzas are but exaggerated common-place, and Walter Scott's poetry (not his prose) old wives' fables. There is no one in whom I have been more disappointed than in the writer here spoken of, nor with whom I am more disposed on certain points to quarrel: but the love of truth and justice, which obliges me to do this, will not suffer me to blench his merits. Do what he can, he cannot help being an original-minded man. His poetry is not servile. While the cuckoo returns in the spring, while the daisy looks bright in the sun, while the rainbow lifts it head above the storm "Yet I'll remember thee, Glencairn, And all that thou hast done for me!" 66 We must, we find, make short work with the rest of the volume. The "Character of Cobbett," is worthy of the subject, and will probably be the most popular of these essays; though, for our own part, we prefer those in which the author takes a wider range of majestic contemplations. His article on "People with one Idea,” is a piece of admirable sarcasm, and contains, among many palpable hits, a sketch of Mr. Qwen to the life: The next, "On the Ignorance of the Learned," is a masterly dissection of the mere scholastic character; but we admire Mr. Hazlitt more when he vindicates the majesties of the heart, or the grandeurs of antiquity, than when he exposes the emptiness of pretension. In the paper entitled, the Indian Jugglers," he has written very finely on bodily and mental accomplishments, and has finally left the question of their relative value nearly where he found it. In that on "Thought and Action," he has, in the same way, given full weight to the claims of poets and heroes-and has eloquently rebuked those who would institute impertinent comparisons be tween them. He has, in another paper, given an amusing and instructive exposure of " Paradox and Common Place," detecting the inward weakness of Mr. Shelley's vagaries, and crushing Mr. Canning's taudry nets for the understanding, into atoms, We will not follow him through his proofs of the identity of vulgarity with affectation-or his elaborate exposures of the inconsis tencies of Sir Joshua Reynolds's discourses-but will conclude with a picture of a dreaming, contemplative existence, from the article "On Living to One's-self," which, we think, is in Mr. Hazlitt's finest style, and which is steeped in intense recollection of his own being. What I mean by living to one's-self is living in the world, as in it, not of it: it is as if no one knew there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it: it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it; to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclina. tion to make or meddle with it. It is such a life as a pure spirit might be supposed to lead, and such an interest as it might take in the affairs of men, calm, contem plative, passive, distant, touched with pity for their sorrows, smiling at their follies without bitterness, sharing their affections, but not troubled by their passions, not seeking their notice, nor once dreamt of by them. He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart, looks at the busy world through the loop-holes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray. "He hears the tumult, and is still." He is not able to mend it, nor willing to mar it. He sees enough in the universe to interest him, without putting himself forward to try what he can do to fix the eyes of the universe upon him. Vain the attempt! He reads the clouds, he looks at the stars, he watches the return of the seasons, the falling leaves of autumn, the perfumed breath of spring; starts with delight at the note of a thrush in a copse near him, sits by the fire, listens to the moaning of the wind, pores upon a book, or discourses the freezing hours away, or melts down hours to minutes in pleasing thought. All this while he is taken up with other things, forgetting himself. He relishes an author's style, without thinking of turning author. He is fond of looking at a print from an old picture in the room, without teasing himself to copy it. He does not fret himself to death with trying to be what he is not, or to do what he cannot. He hardly knows what he is capable of, and is not in the least concerned whether he shall ever make a figure in the world. He feels the truth of the beyond his narrow pretensions in general "To see the children sporting on the shore, more." I cared for nothing, I wanted nothing. I A was no printer's devil waiting for me. I LORD BYRON'S MARINO FALIERO, &c.* fancying himself on enchanted ground, Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice. An Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts. With the Prophecy of Dante. A Poem, by Lord Byron.Murray, London. |