Essay: William Hazlitt's View on Coleridge, Byron and Wordsworth in His The Spirit of the Age

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Essay: William Hazlitt's View on Coleridge, Byron and Wordsworth in Hi…

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저자 : 이풍호 Paul Lee     시집명 : Collected Essays
출판(발표)연도 : 1993     출판사 : Eastwind Press, Los Angeles, California
Paul Lee 이풍호
English 467
Professor Peter Brier
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William Hazlitt's View on Coleridge, Byron and
Wordsworth in His The Spirit of the Age

In his collection of essays, The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt wrote his view on the late eighteenth century's conception of the spirit of the age through his observation of the English writers of the late eighteenth century. His theory of abstract ideas provided a philosophical and psychological rationale for the critical movement towards particularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. On the problem of abstraction between science and science-oriented philosophy which was drawing a growing awareness in the literary criticism of the period, Hazlitt viewed the problem between the imaginative, spiritual or poetic, and the abstract, scientific or philosophical, empirical or idealist. In Hazlitt's criticism of the poets and philosophers of the early nineteenth century, the spirit of the age is seen in terms not for reason and understanding, mechanism and dynamism, empiricism and some form of transcendental idealism, but of reason and feeling, reason and sentiment, abstraction and poetry, the head versus the heart. The gravest danger to the imaginative principle is not mechanism but abstraction.
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Hazlitt's criticism of the poets and critics of the early nineteenth century embodies his awareness that the method of science was built into the non-poetic, non-empirical alternative proposed by his contemporaries. When The Spirit of the Age was published, Utilitarianism was beginning to make an impact on a much wider audience. Jeremy Bentham's growing popularity was paralleled by a significant if modest growth in the popularity of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's philosophical and religious teachings. In this conflict between two rival systems of abstraction, Bentham versus Coleridge, empiricism versus a transcendent theory of metaphysics, isolation of the spirit of the age existed in early nineteenth-century England. The Spirit of the Age is considered as series of perceptive but disparate and impressionistic sketches of famous contemporaries. It is a masterpiece of the kind of indirectness using of conglomerate detail in which descriptions of physical appearance, commentary, and anecdotal reportage. We can realize that no portrait is alike in these essays.
The basic opposition between dramatic poetry and abstraction once established, Hazlitt then proceeds to examine the dramatic pretensions of some contemporary poets and novelists - William Godwin, William
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Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott - in vindication of his view of the spirit of the age. His conception in The Spirit of the Age emerges powerfully but indirectly through the missing of particulars, even the most trivial, are related to his central preoccupation. The individual portraits and the work as a whole are conceived and presented dramatically. We can draw our own conclusions because the dramatic conception of detail that helps to unify the individual sketches also confers unity on the work as a whole.
One of the most distinctive features of Hazlitt's critical method is his employment of what might be termed control models. In his criticism a writer comes to serve as an ideal, or is chosen to exemplify a standard in a particular branch of literature: Shakespeare as a dramatist, Bacon as a philosopher, Montaigne as an essayist, Burke as a prose-writer, and Joseph Fawcett as critic. This critical procedure also represents Wordsworth by virtue of his egotism, Coleridge because of his metaphysical learnings, Byron as a result of his generality for ethical poetry, and Shelley as a poet of impalpable abstractions. In The Spirit of the Age Sir Walter Scott appears as the novelist who is always concrete never abstract and
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satisfies all hazlitt's experiential demands to compare and contrast Hazlitt's contemporary writers. Hazlitt contrasts with striking comments that "Sir Walter Scott is the most dramatic writer now living and Lord Byron is the least so" (Perkins 696)
As a genuine poetic spirit therefore Scott is immeasurably the inferior of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron. Nevertheless, the experiential demand which Scott satisfies, even if only at the historical or narrative level, enabled Hazlitt to invoke his work as a novelist against which he might measure the abstraction of his greater contemporaries. There is no abstraction in Scott's work, but neither is there feeling or imagination. This Scott's works can be thought as a tension. For a writer to be characteristic of the age, there must be something of the genuinely poetic which is in turn circumscribed by a tendency to abstraction because only in this way can the writer be said to defend the poetic against the scientific.
Observing Wordsworth's poetry between the genuinely 'poetic nature of his early poetry and the abstract quality of the later work, Hazlitt introduces Wordsworth that his poetry is "a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age." (Hazlitt 117) With his popular and inartificial style, Wordsworth "chooses to have his
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subject a foil to his invention , to owe nothing but to himself. He gathers manna in the wilderness; he strikes the barren rock for the gushing moisture. He elevates the mean by the strength of his own aspirations; he clothes the naked with beauty and grandeur from the stores of his own recollections. No cypress grove loads his verse with funeral pomp: but his imagination lends 'a sense of joy....' (Hazlitt 119)
In his criticism, The Spirit of the Age, Wordsworth appears as the greatest and most original of his contemporaries. He attributes this pre-eminence to the poet's powers of sentiment and association. Hazlitt praises Wordsworth's essays, like his poetry, that they consist in "seeing nature through the medium of sentiment and passion, as an object is a symbol of the affections." Nature in the Lyrical Ballads "is a kind of home; and he may be said to take a personal interest in the universe." (Hazlitt 121)
By stressing association and sentiment, Wordsworth drew attention to the crucial importance of memory and symbolic significance of objects and events in the poet's past life.
Coleridge in Hazlitt's view was that he was "the man of perhaps the greatest ability now living." While
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Hazlitt could criticize the abstraction of the other poets, he was unable to regard Coleridge as an exception of the spirit of the age for Coleridge's self-authenticating nature of poetry. The abstraction in the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge is still eminently a religious abstraction. In Byron and Shelley, on the other hand, it is humanistic. The pattern which Hazlitt's criticism of these two poets is somewhat similar. The Passion in Byron's poetry, like the feeling in Wordsworth's is severely circumscribed by the poet's egotism. Shelley, his shorter lyrics excepted, occupies the metaphysical extreme which on the religious level is assigned to Coleridge.
In his criticism, introducing Lord Byron, Hazlitt says that Lord Byron with Sir Walter Scott are writers "who would carry away a majority of suffrages as the greatest geniuses of the age." (Perkins 694) According to Hazlitt, Byron himself "stands alone, without mate or fellow - 'as if a man were author himself, and owned no other kin'." (Perkins 695) Byron "exists not by sympathy, but by antipathy" unlike Wordsworth. Nature is no longer his object in his mind as a major concern, but his object to write is to restore us to truth and nature. His "nature must come to him to sit for her picture" instead he goes to nature. One of the great
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and prominent distinction of his writings is 'Intensity'. Hazlitt tells us that Byron "composes... whether he is in the bath, in his study, or on horseback - he writes as habitually as others talk or think - and whether we have the inspiration of the Muse or not, we always find the spirit of the man of genius breathing from his verse." (Perkins 697)
By comparing between Scott and Byron, Hazlitt declares that "we do not like Sir Walter's gratuitous servility: we like Lord Byron's preposterous 'liberalism' little better." (Perkins 699)
Abstraction, in the form of a life lived according to blind custom and convention, mechanized into a form of automatic non-living, is representative for the Romantics of the fall of man. A world of pure imagination, a non-abstract world is the lost paradise of Romantic poetry. According to Coleridge's view of the imagination, a paradise must be recreated out of the destruction of the abstract world of sense perception and everyday living. The Spirit of the Age's appearance in 1825 coincided with a marked change in the philosophical fortunes of Bentham and Coleridge. hazlitt enabled to draw the attention of his readers by showing his analysis in the interest of some more general pattern or theme on his successful contemporary
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writers like Coleridge, Byron and Wordsworth of the age of the Romantic period.



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Works Cited

Perkins, David, et. English Romantic Writers. Florida:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers,
1967.

Hazlitt, William. The Spirit of the Age. London:
Humphrey Milford, Oxford U.P., 1935.
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