Lectures on the English Comic Writers with Miscellaneous Essays [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION^ BY W. E. HENLEY When Stevenson was pleased to declare that " we are mighty-fine fellows, but we cannot write like William Hazlitt," he said no more than tho truth. Whether or not we are mighty fine fellows is a great Perhaps; but that none of us, from Stevenson down, can as writers come near to Hazlitt—this, to me, is merely indubitable. To note that he now and then writes blank verse is to note that he sometimes writes impassioned prose; 2 he misquoted habitually; he was a good hater, and could be monstrous unfair; he was given to thinking twice, and his second thoughts were not always better than his first; he repeated himself as seemed good to him. But in the criticism of politics, the criticism of letters, the criticism of acting, the criticism and expression of life,® there 1 From the Introduction to "The Collected Works of William Hazlitt." —J. M. Dent & Co., 1902-1906. " It filled the valley like a mist, And still poured out its endless chant, And still it swells upon the ear. And wraps me in a golden trance. Drowning the noisy tumult of the world. Like sweetest warblings from a sacred grove . . . Contending with the wild winds as they roar . . . And the proud places of the insolent And the oppressor fell . . . Such and so little is the mind of man! » His summary of the fight between Hickman and Bill Neate is alone in literature, as also in the annals of the Ring. Jon Bee was an intelligent creature of his kind, and knew a very great deal more about pugilism than Hazlitt knew; but to contrast the two is to learn much. Badcock (which is Jon Bee) had seen (and worshipped) Jem Belcher, and had reported fights with an extreme contempt for Pierce Egcin, the illiterate ass who gave us Boxiana. Hazlitt, however, looked on at the proceedings of Neate and the Gaslight Man exactly as he had looked on at divers creations of Edmund Kean. He saw the essentials in both expressions of human activity, and his treatment of both is fundamentally the same. In both he ignores the trivial: here the acting (in its lowest sense), there the hits that did not count. And thus, as he gives you only the vital vii