304
JOHN KINNAIRD
Hazlitt what seems to him the only apology he can. Once again we
meet the story of the man who so loved the French Revolution that
he became its bigot, resorting to personal venom whenever his ideal
was threatened, especially when the challenge came from the poets who
in his youth had shared his faith. Hazlitt felt scorn but not disrespect
for Coleridge'S mind, which even here he can be seen admiring
3!
potentially the greatest of his age. Is there a better way of saying
what went wrong with Coleridge-or, for that matter, with all of
Idealist philosophy after Kant? No, it is not any blindness in Hazlitt–
far from it-that most liberal intellectuals have always found offensive;
it is rather his attack on the idea of an abstract purity: his refusal
throughout his work to regard ideas, any ideas, whatever their political
color, as having their source or end in themselves, as free from personal
bias, will and circumstance.
Of course, if Hazlitt's own mind in these attacks really had
been
filled with the simple liberal ideology that Mr. Baker ascribes to
him,
there would, finally, be no redemption or significance in his criticism.
What an irony it indeed would be if the "main ideas" that inspired
this savage Ishmael, this unforgiving scourge, really turned out to
be,
in Mr. Baker's description, "benevolence," "the sympathetic imagina–
tion," "man's essential goodness"! Nothing betrays the Hazlitt legend
more than its inconsistency with itself; for we are asked to believe that
this man of "personal" consciousness could so blindly defend the
humanitarian ideals of the Revolution as to learn nothing all his life
from the fact of his own irascible self. No, once again it is the liberal
mythology, not Hazlitt's honest individualism, that has turned its eyes
from the truth.
One looks in vain through this book for what is perhaps Hazlitt's
most original idea in literary criticism: that "poetry is right-royal," that
its language "falls in with the language of power"- that poetic imagina–
tion
is
essentially inimical to democracy and democracy to it. All of
these ideas have been generally ignored, have been denied the status
of ideas, because they point to a truth that liberal and non-liberal alike
have preferred not to recognize in Hazlitt: namely, that he, no less
than Wordsworth and Coleridge--and far more clearly than they–
knew that the Revolution and its vision of man had failed, that the
great
U
experimentum crucis"
was irrevocably dead. He refused, indeed,
to recant to the "murderers" of these hopes as he continued
to
defend
his early ideals, but he had learned that a benign humanism could no
longer pretend to define man's nature. And it was, in fact,
this
know–
ledge that made Hazlitt so irascible--furious at others, especially all
