The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [73]
The second example I’d offer from Woolf on the question of literature and love is her intriguing set of observations on the English romantic essayist William Hazlitt. A hundred years after Hazlitt wrote, he was for her an important figure, and from her account of him, his work was, at least among her contemporaries, a familiar voice: “The famous passages about reading Love for Love and drinking coffee from a silver pot and reading La Nouvelle Héloise and eating a cold chicken, are known to all.”37 She admires his energy, his intelligence, his vivacity, and his prose style. “Hazlitt strode through the greater part of English literature and delivered his opinion of the majority of famous books.” Never mind that he had decided, for one reason or another, not to read some of them:
Hazlitt is one of those rare critics who have thought so much that they can dispense with reading. It matters very little that Hazlitt had read only one poem by Donne; that he found Shakespeare’s sonnets unintelligible; that he never read a book through after he was thirty; that he came indeed to dislike reading altogether. What he had read he had read with fervour.38
Woolf quotes a long passage from a Hazlitt essay on old English writers that begins, “It is delightful to repose on the wisdom of the ancients; to have some great name at hand, besides one’s own initials always staring one in the face; to travel out of one’s self into the Chaldee, Hebrew, and Egyptian characters, to have the palm-trees waving mystically in the margin of the page,” and offers this response:
Needless to say that is not criticism. It is sitting in an armchair and gazing into the fire, and building up image after image of what one has seen in a book. It is loving and taking the liberties of a lover. It is being Hazlitt.39
What is “not criticism” to Virginia Woolf? In this specific case, it is what we might call free association—or rather, because nothing is really free (of context, of motivation, of effect), associative thinking. From “Egyptian” and “Hebrew,” presumably, Hazlitt’s mind moves not only to palm trees in the margins but also to “camels moving slowly on in the distance of three thousand years,” to “the dry desert of learning,” the “insatiable thirst of knowledge,” the “ruined monuments of antiquity,” “the fragments of buried cities (under which the adder lurks),” and so on. No piece of poetry, no historic fact, no detail from the text of an old author is cited—what the reader gets instead is the mind of the essayist, dreaming, or, as Woolf says, “taking the liberties of a lover.” In Hazlitt, we may say, if we like, that this is delightful or, if we like, that it is romantic or, if we like, that the essayist has earned the right to be fanciful—or, if we prefer, that this is indeed “not criticism” and that we wish he would return to the critical task at hand. For Hazlitt, presumably, all such attitudes are plausible. But what if a critic today undertook such a set of associations, “taking the liberty of a lover”? With a published critic, readers are likely to find it of some interest—if, for example, such a reverie were to appear as a back-page essay in The New York Times Rook Review. But would we allow such liberties to a sophomore English major? What is the relationship of this kind of love, that permits itself to wander far from the textual starting point and the study of literature?
Woolf’s piece on Hazlitt was itself a piece of criticism: she was reviewing his collected works, first for the New York Herald Tribune, and then, in a slightly revised form, for The Times Literary Supplement.40 But what is also striking, and typically witty, is Woolf’s iteration of the idea of love in connection with Hazlitt, an author celebrated for having written an essay “On the Pleasure of Hating”41—an essay Woolf never mentions in her review, but that seems to inform it nonetheless. Hazlitt contended that love and hate were closely allied in literature and in life. He suggested that the popularity of the Scottish novel in his time was related to its harking