WILLIAM HAZLITT STEVENSON'S saying that none of us can write like Hazlitt, good fellows as we are, seems to many readers, no doubt, a polite exaggeration. Wherein is Hazlitt's simple straightforward style remarkable? The virtuosity of De Quincey in passages of the Opium Eater and elsewhere is apparent. In Hazlitt there is no ostentation; there are no tricks. The sentences are for the most part short; the words are in no way unusual, though precise, and are neither too many nor too few. It is a style remarkable for the ease with which it conceals its art. The author's mind is revealed in the printed page as though seen through an unflawed crystal; it is neither dimmed nor distorted. Hazlitt talks to his auditors in a conversational and friendly tone, and the sentences rise and fall as with the modulations of the voice. No one who has not himself written much can know how difficult and how rare is a mastery of language such as this. The root of the matter lies in Hazlitt's concern with his thoughts, which are copious, closely packed, and arresting. He wishes not to startle the reader with some fine phrase or purple passage but to convey with exactness his ideas. It is not a style to be emulated unless one has much to impart. Pose, affectation, thinness of utterance, can have no commerce with such plain speaking, which is not "literary" in the less happy meaning of that unfortunate word. No doubt it is Hazlitt's very freedom from the more obvious graces which accounts for the tardy recognition of his greatness. Keats held that the depth of Hazlitt's literary criticism was one |