William Hazlitt
By Jacob A. Stein
Recently The New Yorker carried an article about William Hazlitt
(1778–1830), the critic and essayist.
In that article Arthur Krystal wrote that, until recently, it was
unlikely students of literature would bother to crack open P. P. Howe’s
1930–34 edition of The Complete Works of William Hazlitt,
consisting of 21 volumes. It so happens that I have a set in blue boards
sitting on the shelf in my office.
Here is how I came to buy the books. One fine day, circa 1953, I was
out for a stroll along New York’s Fifth Avenue. The avenue was
crowded with shoppers confident they were in the presence of the most
expensive things money can buy—Tiffany here, Cartier there, and
so on.
As I walked along with an independent air, my posture improved. I
stepped with authority. I wanted to be accepted as an authentic member
of the acquisitive elite. I thought that I was about to grasp the reality
hidden behind the materialism, the continuity behind the transitory,
and the laws that control who wins and who loses, and what is known
as accidental sagacity.
My general destination was J. N. Bartfield Fine & Rare Books,
the antiquarian book store on West 57th Street. In those days when in
New York, I looked in on Bartfield to check the stock. On prior visits,
I had spied the blue Hazlitt. Each time I saw it, I thought of
Hazlitt’s essay, “The Indian Jugglers,” and how well
Hazlitt described juggling. I myself had tossed around a few clubs in
the air, but nothing like the Indian jugglers Hazlitt described. The
essay itself was, in its own way, a demonstration of the juggler’s
art.
Hazlitt opens by saying that the Indian juggler tosses two balls into
the air and catches them, which is what anyone can do. He then takes
four in hand. But let me give you Hazlitt’s words:
[He keeps up] four at the same time, which…none
of us could do to save our lives, nor if we were to take our whole lives
to do it in. Is it then a trifling power we see at work, or is it not
something next to miraculous? It is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity,
which nothing but the bending [of] the faculties of body and mind to
it from the tenderest infancy, with incessant, ever-anxious application
up to manhood, can accomplish or make even a slight approach to.
[Any miscalculation is fatal because] the precision
of the movements must be like a mathematical truth, their rapidity is
like lightning. To catch four balls in succession in less than a second
of time, and deliver them back so as to return with seeming consciousness
to the hand again, to make them revolve round him at certain intervals,
like the planets in the spheres, to make them chase one another like
sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers or meteors, to throw them
behind his back and twine them round his neck like ribbons or like serpents,
to do what appears an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease,
the grace, the carelessness imaginable.
A juggler friend of mine who works on political campaigns said that
anyone running for president must have the same talent as Hazlitt’s
Indian juggler. He must keep four balls in the air. But once elected,
the president is handed 20 balls that he must keep in the air. He will
drop most of them.
The person I dealt with at Bartfield, Barney Ruder, knew I had my
eye on Hazlitt. He said that when the set came out, a client
of his, a prominent Washington lawyer, bought it. That prominent lawyer
said that reading Hazlitt’s essays was the way to learn to write.
Hazlitt was the master of a biting, direct, and concise sentence—most
lawyers cannot write like that.
Mr. Ruder asked if I had heard of Frank Hogan. Of course I heard of
Frank Hogan—he founded Hogan & Hartson LLP. He said Hogan
represented the defendants in the Teapot Dome Scandal, and the papers
reported he received a million-dollar fee. He spent some of that money
on books. Hogan has been quoted as saying that there is something sacred
in the spiritual and intimate companionship of a book, and he felt “a
profound happiness and satisfaction in possession of these precious
monuments of human thought and progress.” Mr. Ruder said Hogan
was an avid book collector who, when he wanted something, he bought
it. That was enough for me. If Frank Hogan had to have Hazlitt,
I must have Hazlitt.
When you are in my neighborhood, drop by and we will read, in volume
XIX, Hazlitt’s arguments against capital punishment. In his time,
anyone caught stealing five shillings could be put to death.
Hazlitt’s opening comments in his essay on wit and humor have
been repeated many times:
Hazlitt commented on “The Fear of Death,” “The Shyness
of Scholars,” “Religious Hypocrisy,” “On Living
to Oneself,” and “On the Ignorance of the Learned.”
Hazlitt would have been a good person to have sitting at your side
at counsel table when picking a jury. He knew people, inside and out.
He even wrote a piece titled “On the Look of a Gentleman.”
But in his own case, he got caught up in a disastrous love affair, which
he called his fatal attachment. He never got over it. His friends could
not discourage him from writing a book about it. It is in volume IX.
Jacob A. Stein, a partner at Stein, Mitchell & Muse LLP, can
be reached by e-mail at jstein@steinmitchell.com.
