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THE ROMANTIC ESSAYISTS

ROMANTICISM stands alone among literary movements in having exercised an equal and similar, though not identical, transforming power upon verse and prose. The heightened imagination and finer sensibility to beauty could not but react profoundly upon a language so rich in unused faculty and neglected tradition as the English prose of the later decades of the eighteenth century. One must go back to the prose of the seventeenth century of Sir Thomas Browne, Fuller, Taylor, and Donne to find anything resembling it, and little of that age equals the humor and pathos, the quaint and visionary fancy of Lamb or De Quincey.

At the beginning of the new century certain elements of Romantic feeling were vigorous, for example the criticisms of Wordsworth and Coleridge. About 1820, Romantic criticism asserted itself more boldly in the essays of Hazlitt and Lamb, the lectures of Hazlitt and Coleridge, and the new London Magazine and Blackwood's.

But English Romanticism achieved greater things on its creative than on its critical side. All the writers showed the conviction of the supreme worth of imagination, and all were agreed on the high place of poetry, which, as Hazlitt declared, exists in the soul of every man, "the stuff of which our life is made." All aspired to write in a manner more personal, more intimate, more self-revealing, to use a diction more picturesque, more beautiful, to bring into their prose a spirit that English literature had not hitherto known.

Only a few months before his death, Lamb said, "I can read no prose now, though Hazlitt sometimes to be sure, but then Hazlitt's worth all prose writers put together." For fifty years (1778-1830) William Hazlitt lived a varied life, first a painter, then a critic of painting, of the drama, of books, of men, a writer on philosophical subjects, never quite certain of his vocation, unhappy in his domestic relations, of bad temper to his contemporaries, and yet at the end in the presence of his life-long friend, Charles Lamb, he could say with his last breath, "Well, I've had a happy life."

As a critic of the drama, he had a high conception of his duty. He liked the stage, he read widely and wisely in the drama of the Elizabethan Era, the Restoration, and the eighteenth century. His criticisms even to-day are interesting reading. In his relation to the art of painting, Hazlitt stood alone among his contemporaries. At a time when little attention was paid to art criticism he "claimed for it the dignity of a branch of literature and expended on it the wealth of his ever fervid and impassioned imagination."

Of his service as a critic of books and men Professor Saintsbury has written, "He was in literature a great man; I am myself disposed to think that for all his excess of hopelessly uncritical prejudice he was the greatest critic that England has yet produced.'

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To many readers Hazlitt is most interesting as a writer of miscellaneous essays and more especially as the personal and autobiographical essayist. As a bit of advice to writers Stevenson once said, "I should like them to read Hazlitt; there's a lot of style in Hazlitt." And that advice holds to-day.

The model of Hazlitt's style was Burke, the herald of nineteenth-century prose. The fervor of Burke was transferred in Hazlitt into personal enthusiasm; the clear, intellectual prose of the best eighteenth-century writers developed in Hazlitt a style simple, pointed, and epigrammatic. Since Swift, Burke's was the best prose style, Hazlitt's the best essay style. The possibilities of prose Burke never foresaw

the wit of

Sydney Smith, the elegance of De Quincey, the whimsicality of Lamb, the spiritual vigor of Carlyle, the splendid, architectural symmetry of Macaulay.

In the first half of the nineteenth century Macaulay was directly indebted to Hazlitt. Between these two men there is a kinship which the casual reader may not at first distinguish. In both we observe the prominence of the parallel construction — the same tendency toward epigrammatic expression, the same underlying determination to write with unmistakable clearness. In the second half of the century Newman's writing bore ample testimony to the romantic mood of which it was so evident Hazlitt was a contemporary exponent. However, if to any one the mantle of the prophet was handed down, it was to Stevenson. In spirit they were alike, in enthusiasm, in the joy of writing and the joy of living, and Stevenson was ever ready to acknowledge his allegiance to the master sentimentalist.

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If the first half of the nineteenth century had produced only Charles Lamb (17751834), we should be deeply in its debt, for in the thousand years of English literary history there is no one so beloved, no one who has so endeared himself to lovers of books and people. He was a valued critic, a discoverer as well as an interpreter. He first revealed the poetic wealth of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His was perhaps the purest spirit among the critics of his time. He wrote a play, not much above a mediocre one; he wrote sonnets, some worthy to be remembered. His letters, in the opinion of many people whose judgment is to be respected, are the best letters ever written. But the lasting glory not only of his work but also of the century is Elia, the essays which he contributed to the London Magazine.

He does not attempt to show us how many fine things he can say on a hackneyed subject. He does not speculate upon abstruse problems. He writes of memories of simple things and simple people, the sights of common London, the chimney sweepers and the beggars, the Jews, the Quakers, the actors, the street cries, the bells, the old china shops, and book-stalls. We are with the hungry scholars in Christ's Hospital, "in the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire," in Islington, by the New River, on the Bath Road, or watching "those old blind Tobits" lining the walls of Lincoln's Inn. Here are humor and pathos, wit and fancy, just glimpses out across the infinities of space and time, and through it all a boyish delight in play, a sympathy with all kinds of people, a cheering buoyancy that have made him a friend not only of his contemporaries but of all who have come after him.

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) lived a long life, when we bring into comparison the span of years of most of his contemporaries or the physical stress of his own existence. His reputation as a writer rests almost entirely on contributions to the magazines and reviews of his day. He himself classified his writings under three heads, autobiographical, critical, and imaginative. In all three the matter is of less worth than the style. He was one of the great talkers of his time. "What wouldn't one give," said Mrs. Carlyle, when first she saw him in an evening company, "What wouldn't one give to have that little man in a box and take him out now and then to talk?" Everybody who met him testified to the marvelous stream of talk, but no one could remember a dozen words of what he said.

His literary work is just this talk put into print. It is musical, beautiful, full of learning and personal speculation, reminiscent and suggestive of a world of dreams. What he might have accomplished if the subtle spirit of opium that colored his dreams had not robbed him of the power of systematic and fruitful thinking, it is difficult to say. He was not a direct thinker, he fails to give to his subject an ordered and unified treatment. And yet in his autobiography, in the English Mail Coach, in Suspiria de Profundis are passages written with incomparable vividness and charm, examples of an art that seizes the most visionary suggestions of fancy and makes them seem real or that selects from the everyday realities a theme which connects them with

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