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COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University
Authors were actuated by the desire of the applause of posterity, only so long as they were debarred of that of their contemporaries, just as we see the map of the goldmines of Peru hanging in the room of Hogarth's Distressed Poet. In the midst of the ignorance and prejudices with which they were surrounded, they had a sort of forlorn hope in the prospect of immortality. The spirit of universal criticism has superseded the anticipation of posthumous fame, and instead of waiting for the award of distant ages, the poet or prose-writer receives his final doom from the next number of the Edinburgh or Quarterly Review. According as the nearness of the applause increases, our impatience increases with it. A writer in a weekly journal engages with reluctance in a monthly publication: and again, a contributor to a daily paper sets about his task with greater spirit than either of them. It is like prompt payment. The effort and the applause go together. (1)
THE MOST INTRIGUING FEATURE OF THE PUBLICATION OF GERMAINE DE Stall's De l'Allemagne, coupled with the presence of the author at the launch in London, and the reissuing of many of her other works, was the quite surprising number of literary and journalistic responses to the Staelian oeuvre. Some of the most intense replies come from William Hazlitt, who continued to engage with de Stall's work directly and obliquely in many articles for newspapers and periodicals, both during and after her stay in England. De l'Allemagne's publication allowed Hazlitt not only to profit from another review, but also benefit his own productivity. Unable as yet to find a publisher for the lectures he had given on metaphysics in 1812, de Stael's work provided the ideal opportunity. As a consequence, after a general review of the work for the Morning Chronicle in November 1813, Hazlitt proceeded to publish four more essays between February and April 1814 in the same paper. Although entitled "Madame de Stael's Account of German Philosophy," Hazlitt published his own work, making only cursory glances at the original text, covering the works of Hobbes, Locke, Hartley, Helvetius and others. As Hazlitt's biographer Stanley Jones notes, the complex philosophical debates must have presented the readers of the paper with quite a surprise: "they stood out from the rest of the matter, war correspondence, political reports, London and provincial news, with an abstruseness that must have made many a reader stare. Only Madame de Stael's popularity can explain Perry's acceptance of these eight closely printed columns." (2)
This is in no way to denigrate Hazlitt's writing. As a journalist he took advantage of every opportunity that came his way, and, most importantly, his canny move provided a neat illustration of the cultural climate in early nineteenth-century British literature. The world of publishing was continuing to expand, newspapers and periodicals held sway over literary taste, and publicity and fame could be achieved from a single article. This necessity to write to the moment and of the moment was a fact of journalistic life and one of which Hazlitt was only too aware. As he would illustrate in an essay on "The Periodical Press" for the Edinburgh Review ten years after de Stael's visit to London: "If we are superficial, let us be brilliant. If we cannot be profound, let us at least be popular" (16: 218). After de Stael's continuing British popularity had prompted the re-release of Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1814), Hazlitt was ready and waiting to respond. If the original text is concerned with the achievement of a celebrated name, Hazlitt too writes about renown, despite his disagreements with parts of de Stael's argument. Suggesting that de Stael's claim that Rousseau lived only in his imagination, from which he consequently derived his theories, is "radically wrong," Hazlitt claims that it was his "extreme sensibility," his profound egotism which actuated his desire for fame (4: 88). Paradoxically, both critics effectively suggested the same thing via different methods, that Rousseau knew exactly how to control an audience:
His interest in his own thoughts and feelings was always wound up to the highest pitch; and hence the enthusiasm which he excited in others. He owed the power which he exercised over the opinions of all Europe, by which he created numberless disciples, and overturned established systems, to the tyranny which his feelings, in the first instance, exercised over himself. The dazzling blaze of his reputation was kindled by the same fire that fed upon his vitals. (89)
In spite of their differences both writers recognized, through the figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the need to take advantage of the moment, to employ their talents to win the applause of their peers, and achieve a contemporary celebrity through the different forms of publicity available to them.
What I will label Hazlitt's contemporaneity, his focus on the present and distrust of the future, his status as a professional journalist and his delight in the "prompt payment" achieved by the proximity of "effort and applause" will entail proposing an argument exactly opposite to that of previous Hazlitt scholars. In The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, Leo Braudy brands Hazlitt "the first great fame theorist of the modern age," but suggests that his ideas embrace "artistic individuals whose social role is to be antisocial or non-social, who look into the past to see only wreckage and into the future to see light." (3) Lucy Newlyn places Hazlitt firmly within "a culture which depended heavily on the possibility of posthumous fame (as recompense for contemporary rejection)," while Hazlitt, "the single most determined and most comprehensive theorist of posterity from the period," is integral to Andrew Bennett's argument about the Romantic culture of posterity. (4) Although Hazlitt did voice concern about the possibilities of instantaneous popularity usurping fame and the often wayward, fickle nature of public opinion, his writings betray a greater fear of the posthumous, the unknown, unknowable future which can offer no guarantees. Remaining suspicious of those who, like Byron or Wordsworth, aristocratically spurn public judgment as a reactionary refuge from the feminizing effects of contemporary celebrity, Hazlitt placed a value upon the present moment as death to the "Monarchism of literature," birth to the accessibility of knowledge and the spontaneous reward of literary endeavor. One of the foremost cultural critics of the Romantic period, Hazlitt embodies the spirit of that time as one, in the words of his greatest admirer, the writer Mary Russell Mitford, "so light and brilliant, and sparkling! So original! [...] [H]e's a master spirit, depend on it." (5)
1. Writing to/for the Moment
William Hazlitt flourished as a journalist in the 1810s and 1820s, decades that witnessed the meteoric rise of the periodical and prose writing in the wake of the perceived decline of poetry. There was a three-fold reason for the popularity of the essay form over that of the poetic. Firstly, as Lee Erickson puts it in The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, poetry had become a less marketable, more expensive commodity: "Poetry had already retreated to Annuals and small presses, which could afford to indulge the vanity of gentlemanly and academic ambitions." (6) Literary Annuals were luxurious, high-quality productions with a corresponding notoriety for fashionably saccharine, low-quality content. Although so popular that they earned regular contributors such as Letitia Elizabeth Landon a small fortune, annuals and gift books were savaged by critics. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72), set just before the 1832 Reform Bill, questions the value of "gorgeous watered-silk publication[s]" which display "ladies and gentlemen with shiny copperplate cheeks and copper-plate smiles," prompting the amused Dr Lydgate to wonder which is "the silliest--the engravings or the writing here." (7) Financially exorbitant and of dubious literary standard, poetry became fashionably unfashionable during the 1820s.
The exception, of course, was the insatiable demand for the critically acclaimed (if, occasionally, critically bemused) and massively popular poetry of Lord Byron. Byron's concentration upon the contemporary, the issues of the day as well as a knowledge of the literary market, fascinated the public and ensured sales of his poetry into the tens, even hundreds of thousands, helped along by unscrupulous pirates who cut prices and aided distribution. Sales like Byron's were the exception though and even he began to lose favor with the reading public after personal scandals and over-satiation of the market with his poetry. As the pious but astute writer of Cato to Lord Byron on the Immorality of His Writings (1824) put it succinctly: "The commodity is becoming sickening." (8) The Monthly Review had had enough by 1817, requesting that "we are [...] sincere in now expressing a wish that he would for a time withdraw from public view, and curb, if not his facility of composition, at least his inclination to print," while the Literary Review suggested that it would be advantageous to Byron if the "interminable visitor" Don Juan "came less frequently and in better condition."...
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