BOO KS
305
idealists, for reminding
him
of this truth, even more furious with
himself for having to face it and confess it. Yet far from perverting,
his bitterness gave him his intellectual strength, for it forced him to the
working-out of what is really his most distinctive idea as a critic: his
dialectical sense of the self.
It is this constant theme that still makes Hazlitt freshly readable
today, even while his understanding of his theme divides him from us.
Like Mr. Baker, we are alI prone to overlook in Hazlitt a sense of reality
at bottom much like our own, for we never encounter his dialectic in the
forms and language now familiar to us. Here, instead, we find an anti–
rationalism without method of its own, a psychology without conceptual
jargon, historical insight without formulation. But all the empirical
waywardness of his "familiar style" proceeds from a consistent critical
awareness, for Hazlitt differs from all his contemporaries- or at least
from Coleridge-in seeing the human dialectic not as primarily a
dynamic of transcendence and intellectual progress, but as the binding
force of all individuality. Even when his subject is not himself but, as
it actually
i~
most of the time, something general or objective, it none–
theless takes the form of a self: it may be then a national self, or
the self of an attitude or a class or a type, or the self ("the soul and
body") of a work of art. Whatever he does in criticism thus becomes,
sooner or later, a "character." Hence he could publicly damn Words–
worth, for instance, as an insufferable egotist because he knew he
was also able to praise that same self, for much the same reasons,
as an original and great poet. On the same principle, he just as
ruthlessly disparaged as poets his fellow-liberals Byron and Shelley.
Needless to say, this is no longer our sense of either literature
OF
criticism. When we speak of "the self" in literature, we are likely
to
mean nothing that recalls our individuality; we mean something
so inaccessibly deep within or so elusively beyond any man's conscious
ego as to be known only through those mysteries of creation that
constitute "art" and divide it from our normal lives: "the Unconscious,"
"tradition," "symbolic form," "culture," "myth"-"etc. etc.," as George
Orwell used to say in concluding his lists of modem abstractions. In
Orwell; we see the faith that sustained him in his independence: his
faith in "the love of truth," in an indestructible "human heart," in a
self more important than all its ideas because greater as a "nature"
than its conditioning in time. But this awesome reminder of how far
we have come, along with all our shrewder knowledge of the sources
and resources of literature, would still not explain our neglect or
dismissal of Hazlitt's criticism today. He still stands unrivalled as the
