By: Bernard Richards / The Daily Telegraph (title: In the Trump era, there's one classic English writer you must read)
Translation: Telegrafi.com
The year 1825 was not very interesting from a literary point of view. Byron, Shelley, and Keats were dead; Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge were alive but past their prime, and hardly anyone of importance had been born. There was one bright spot, however: the publication of the book The spirit of the times by William Hazlitt, on January 11. The book was originally published anonymously – a circumstance that may have allowed more scope for candor. Hazlitt’s book, with its “contemporary portraits”, offers an accurate assessment of the literary and political character of the time and, 200 years later, remains a work worth rereading. It covers 25 figures – 26 if you include the brief eulogy for James Sheridan Knowles, added at the end – including names such as Bentham, Godwin, Malthus and Canning, as well as Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth and Scott.
Hazlitt is both an admirer and a critic of his time. One of Bentham’s hobbies was woodworking; “he fancies,” Hazlitt observes, “that he could carve people in the same way.” The writer presents us not only with what his characters wrote, but often with their physical presence. Bentham’s gait is said to have been “almost like a run.” Wordsworth is described thus: “He reminds one of some of Holbein’s portraits: serious, sullen, with a slight touch of humor, oppressed by the customs of the time or the pretensions of the person.” William Cobbett is presented in a charming sketch: the only time Hazlitt saw him, he “was wearing a red cloth waistcoat, with the pockets hanging down, as was the custom of gentleman farmers in the last century.”
Hazlitt occasionally resorts to harsh language. He admires Walter Scott, seeing him as a personality suited to the realism of a Scotsman. However, Hazlitt criticizes Scott, noting that he “expressed the pettiness, the anger, the resentment, the bigotry, and the lack of tolerance of his contemporaries.” Byron is described as a “sublime poet.” Hazlitt shows great sympathy for Wordsworth’s poetry, and his assessment could not be higher. However, he describes excursion like "consecutive meals of apple pancakes."
Above all, as it is reread The spirit of the times and Hazlitt’s warnings about media outlets that can abandon the truth and manipulate “public opinion by closing their eyes,” one reflects on the relevance of these observations to current conditions, especially in the age of Trump. A word that is often repeated and scorned throughout the work is “legitimacy.” In his 1818 essay, What is the people?, Hazlitt wrote: “Such is the old doctrine of Divine Right, revived under a new style and title: Legitimacy. 'Beautiful word, Legitimacy'”! This is a reference to Edmund the Martyr, Shakespeare's character in King Lear, who revolts because he feels his rights have been denied. The word carries a kind of force similar to the dreaded term “earned right” in our time.
Readers interested in what Hazlitt means should take a look at the section on the politician William Wilberforce. Hazlitt has great reservations about him, seeing him as implicated in supporting “legitimacy.” In 1799, Wilberforce spoke in favor of the Combinations Act, which banned trade union activity. In 1819, he opposed an inquiry into the Peterloo Massacre and passed the Six Government Acts, which restricted public gatherings and seditious writing. Hazlitt criticized him as a man “who preaches Christianity to the uneducated and tolerates the worst abuses in civilized states.” Legitimacy, at first glance, may seem like a term to be accepted, but for Hazlitt it conceals arbitrary and ruthless actions by those in power, including the way in which concepts of “divine right” have been smuggled into political discourse.
Hazlitt's style is engaging and interesting, still easily readable today. It can also be humorous: “[Bentham's works] have been translated into French—they should have been translated into English.” At times, Hazlitt uses interesting imagery, as when he observes that “[Byron's poetry] stands like a tower of defence over its subject.” Hazlitt is fond of metaphors, although they are perhaps more attractive than modern editors would prefer: it may be said that [Francis Jeffrey] weaves words into whatever shape he pleases, for use or for ornament, as the glassmaker shapes the vitreous liquid with his breath; and his sentences shine like glass because of their perfect smoothness, and are equally transparent. Jeffrey is "very combative, full of electric shocks, very similar to a volt battery."
Another example: Irish oratory … is like a kind of aeronaut: always going up in a balloon and then breaking its neck or coming down in a parachute. It is full of gaseous matter, of fiction and fantasy, of alliteration and antithesis, of fiery passion and swelling metaphors that burst the thin silken veil of meaning. The aerial spectacle, which before shone in empty space and rose in all the delight of ignorance, at last staggers and descends back into its original swamps!
Modern writers may be more careful than Hazlitt in his broad characterizations of the Scots and Irish. However, at least he does not make the linguistic errors that are common among many modern journalists.
Some of Hazlitt's quotes may be incomprehensible, but they are nevertheless enjoyable for today's readers. In his essay on Jeffrey, he quotes the poet Sneyd Davies (1709–1769), a name that no one today has heard of.
Since there are no fairy lights, no fast rays,
Neither pulse vibration, nor object to tempt
Outside the souls; but the heart locked in the monastery
Lie at home, like an idol in a niche
Dark!
It's a pleasure to identify one of these references and feel more informed than Howard Ringbaum, the late David Lodge character [from Change of scenery], who admits, while playing Shame, that he has not read Hamlet. This admission prevents him from securing a permanent position at the university. In fact, Hazlitt quotes constantly. For what purpose? It is not a question of boasting. He does so because literature has helped to shape his thoughts and serves as a natural reservoir: the past supports the present, while the present confirms that the past remains valid and relevant. Much of Shakespeare [William Shakespeare] continues to be part of Hazlitt's and our everyday language. For example, Hazlitt puts the phrase "the learned conclusion" in quotation marks, to remind us that it comes from Othello. Many of us would not remember this, or perhaps would never have known it.
To read The spirit of the times today makes you think: what would a book with this title look like in 2025? And who would write it? Who would be the modern-day Hazlitt? (Readers may have their own suggestions.) Such authors will have to take into account the world of film and the deceptive lights of fatuous fire-it, blazing in the swamp of the internet. In the 19th century, there was at least one attempt at a sequel: The new spirit of the times (1844) by Richard Hengist Horne, which was neither as sharp nor as successful as the original. There are interesting parallels to our own time. In the 20th century, brilliant minds like Thomas Malthus were pitted against the worthless Thomas Moore or the charismatic but dangerous preachers Edward Irving. (Think of the American “prosperity” “gospel,” preached by Lamborghini-driving evangelists like Billy Graham, Kenneth Copeland, and Jesse Duplantis.) Hazlitt was highly critical of the political disunity that had gripped Britain, a state of affairs that continues today. In our own time, we also have realist challengers in the arts; the XNUMXs had the poet Crabbe and the grim figure of Peter Grimm, whose milieu, in the Hall, Hazlitt describes it in vivid detail: Where everything presented itself to the eye or ear / oppressed the soul with misery, pain and fear.
Hazlitt offers, like Orwell, the perspective of a very honest writer who writes without fear of persecution and is able to present us with vivid and complete images of the characters – not just what they write, but their full identities. His mastery of language is one of the features that allows him to occupy a high moral position. This is evident on every page of The spirit of the times. /Telegraph/
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