SINCLAIRE ON HAZLITT

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22769, 22 July 1939, Page 18

SINCLAIRE ON HAZLITT

*0 TBS EDITOR OF THE PRESS. Sir, —Wordsworth said Voltaire was dull; Mr F. H. Tucker said Hazlitt was dull; Mr T. S. Eliot said—now what was that line? Something about “damp souls of housemaids sprouting from the area railings.” And ’im a poit! “Shakung ah song goo,” as my housemaid, whose cousin’s nephew goes to secondary school, said to me when I refused the whitebait fritters. Hazlitt said, “Authors should converse chiefly with authors, and their talk should be of books.” Conversing with authors is what Hazlitt does best. They were. his “familiars,” friends and foes alike, as the denizens of the London alleys were the “familiars” of Dickens, and as the transfigured ghosts of knights-at-arms were those of Scott. Indeed most of Hazlitt’s waking hours were spent* in the company of authors, either in reading s their thoughts or in writing of them. While he was not substantially skirmishing with them at Lamb’s Thursday evenings, he was drawing them on, pressing them, and finally “pinking” them in the spirit, in his lonely eyrie at Winterslow. “In writing,” said Hazlitt, “you have to contend with the world.” (Did he mean authors?) “In painting you have only to carry on a friendly strife with Nature. No angry passions rise to disturb the silent progress of the work, to shake the hand or dim the brow, no irritable humours are set afloat: you have no absurd opinions to combat, no point to strain, no adversary to crush, no fool to annoy—you are actuated by fear or favour to no man. There is, ‘no juggling here,’ no sophistry, no intrigue, no tampering with the evidence, no evidence to make black white, or white black; but you resign your hands into a greater power, that of Nature, with the simplicity of a child. ...” Because one suspects he was thinking of authors as he wrote these lines, one comprehends then why Hazlitt has no affinity for either Mr Tucker or Mr Eliot, and therefore, in the words, but not in the accents, of my housemaid’s cousin’s nephew, “Tout savoir e’est tout pardonner.”— Yours, etc., GODWIN ELSE. Prebbleton, July 15, 1939.