The Fight and Other Writings
Metadata
Highlights
The tragic Muse does not merely utter muffled sounds: but we see the paleness on the cheek, and the life-blood gushing from the heart! The interest we take in our own lives, in our successes or disappointments, and the home feelings that arise out of these, when well described, are the clearest and truest mirror in which we can see the image of human nature. For in this sense each man is a microcosm. What he is, the rest are — whatever his joys and sorrows are composed of, theirs are the same — no more, no less. — location: 7482
This preference for the physically tangible — for touch and taste — is explained in the seminal essay ‘On Reason and Imagination’, where he argues against writers who adopt ‘dry and husky’ abstractions and ignore individual facts and experiences. — location: 165
Often Hazlitt uses the term ‘transparency’ to praise a work of art, and here he’s both thinking of the illuminated transparencies in magic lantern shows and offering the term as a figure for his own, often highly visual, journalism. Coleridge, he says in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, can make the entire universe become ‘a transparency of fine words’, and Hazlitt nourishes a wish to make his own prose acquire the glossy glow of an illuminated slide. — location: 208
Often Hazlitt uses the term ‘transparency’ to praise a work of art, and here he’s both thinking of the illuminated transparencies in magic lantern shows and offering the term as a figure for his own, often highly visual, journalism. Coleridge, he says in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, can make the entire universe become ‘a transparency of fine words’, and Hazlitt nourishes a wish to make his own prose acquire the glossy glow of an illuminated slide. — location: 208
we look at Hazlitt’s Work the image of a furnace appears significantly often: it is one of his symbols for a particular type of creative imagination shared by certain writers — Milton and Burke primarily. Thus, in his essay on Shakespeare and Milton, he remarks: — location: 213
The fervour of his imagination melts down and renders malleable, as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials. — location: 217
Yeats, too, was fascinated by the way in which art can be thrown together from scraps, from the bits and pieces that litter the floor of the heart’s rag-and-bone shop, or from objects which are recycled into dissonant form: — location: 227
Yeats, too, was fascinated by the way in which art can be thrown together from scraps, from the bits and pieces that litter the floor of the heart’s rag-and-bone shop, or from objects which are recycled into dissonant form: — location: 227
He is offering the lithe, muscular, elastic human body as a symbol for his own active and engaged prose style. — location: 250
This is a central, sudden, critical epiphany, because here a petrified substance — marble — has been made to flow by the sculptor’s art. His chisel, a tool analogous to Hazlitt’s pen, challenges the view that prose is a petrific, plodding, boring medium which is inferior to poetry. — location: 259
As so often in Hazlitt, the physical body and the visible are identified, so that sight and touch are merged, not separate, senses. — location: 275
Again and again, Hazlitt returns to the moving eye as a figure for active, engaged prose. Writing in an age of popular visual entertainment, he anticipates cinema and television, partly because he notices the way people walk, and so gives the effect of a flickering series of images when he describes Bentham’s rapid walk up and down his garden, or Southey walking stiffly through the streets of London, his umbrella tucked under one arm. — location: 278
The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of things not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is a monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good, by justice and proportion. — location: 1183
The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of things not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is a monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good, by justice and proportion. — location: 1183
men whom fame has eternized in her long and lasting scroll, — location: 1262
Their attainments of different kinds bore the same general stamp, and it was sterling: what they did, had the mark of their age and country upon it. — location: 1263
They went out one by one unnoticed, like evening lights; or were swallowed up in the headlong torrent of puritanic zeal which succeeded, and swept away every thing in its unsparing course, throwing up the wrecks of taste and genius at random, — location: 1278
This character is that of a sublime humanity, such as was never seen on earth before, nor since. This shone manifestly both in his words and actions. We see it in his washing the Disciples’ feet the night before his death, that unspeakable instance of humility and love, above all art, all meanness, and all pride, — location: 1436
Their virtues were the virtues of political machines, their vices were the vices of demons, ready to inflict or to endure pain with obdurate and remorseless inflexibility of purpose. But in the Christian religion, ‘we perceive a softness coming over the heart of a nation, and the iron scales that fence and harden it, melt and drop off’.33 It becomes malleable, capable of pity, of forgiveness, of relaxing in its claims, and remitting its power. We strike it, and it does not hurt us: it is not steel or marble, but flesh and blood, clay tempered with tears, and ‘soft as sinews of the new-born babe’. — location: 1462
and, above all, the insatiable desire of the mind to beget its own image, and to construct out of itself, and for the delight and admiration of the world and posterity, that excellence of which the idea exists hitherto only in its own breast, and the impression of which it would make as universal as the eye of heaven, the benefit as common as the air we breathe. — location: 1504
Taste limps after genius, and from copying the artificial models, we lose sight of the living principle of nature. It is the effort we make, and the impulse we acquire, in overcoming the first obstacles, that projects us forward; it is the necessity for exertion that makes us conscious of our strength; but this necessity and this impulse once removed, the tide of fancy and enthusiasm, which is at first a running stream, soon settles and crusts into the standing pool of dulness, criticism, and virtu.37 — location: 1508
Taste limps after genius, and from copying the artificial models, we lose sight of the living principle of nature. It is the effort we make, and the impulse we acquire, in overcoming the first obstacles, that projects us forward; it is the necessity for exertion that makes us conscious of our strength; but this necessity and this impulse once removed, the tide of fancy and enthusiasm, which is at first a running stream, soon settles and crusts into the standing pool of dulness, criticism, and virtu.37 — location: 1508
Green islands and golden sands seemed to arise, as by enchantment, out of the bosom of the watery waste, and invite the cupidity, or wing the imagination of the dreaming speculator. — location: 1514
Our literature, in a word, is Gothic and grotesque; unequal and irregular; not cast in a previous mould, nor of one uniform texture, but of great weight in the whole, and of incomparable value in the best parts. — location: 1622
Our understanding (such as it is, and must remain to be good for any thing) is not a thoroughfare for commonplaces, smooth as the palm of one’s hand, but full of knotty points and jutting excrescences, rough, uneven, overgrown with brambles; and I like this aspect of the mind (as some one said of the country), where nature keeps a good deal of the soil in her own hands. Perhaps the genius of our poetry has more of Pan than of Apollo; ‘but Pan is a God, Apollo is no more!’ — location: 1627