Hazlitt on education, professionalism and freedom
“Hmmmm.” At the door he turns and fixes you with a serious look. “Read Hazlitt,” he says. “That’s my advice. Read Hazlitt and write before breakfast every day.” –Bright Lights, Big City
Sounding much like a precursor to Dave Hickey, a portrait of William Hazlitt, from the Introduction by Jon Cook to William Hazlitt, Selected Writings:
Hazlitt’s argument about the arts can be understood . . . as a metaphor for freedom. As polemic, the argument fueled his assault on the British art establishment of the day. Hazlitt was deeply suspicious of Joshua Reynolds’s attempts to improve the education of artists and their public through the institution of the Royal Academy. Where Reynolds thought to dignify the artist by turning art into a profession, Hazlitt regarded professionalism and genius as antithetical. The Royal Academy provided a dignified cover story for turning art into a species of commodity production. It was ‘a mercantile body … consisting chiefly of manufacturers of portraits who pander to the personal vanity and ignorance of their sitters’.
Far from improving art and educating its public, the Royal Academy hastened a process of decline which Hazlitt thought was already inevitable. Hazlitt’s polemic against Reynolds and the Academy is suffused by a melancholy resistance to the idea that art can be improved by becoming subject to an educational regime. Hazlitt makes the history of art speak against this meliorism. One radical implication of this view of history, and one which Hazlitt occasionally voices, is that there can be no such thing as a beneficial tradition in the arts. The arts are strongest at an early stage of their history because their expressiveness is not constrained by the accumulation of precedent. Artists were not obliged to be always looking over their shoulders to see what others had done. They could be ‘original’ in one of Hazlitt’s primary senses, by representing in their art some particular aspect of nature which had been uniquely disclosed to them. By contrast, the opportunities for originality in modern conditions are limited not only by the accumulation of preceding work which stands between the artist and an original representation of nature, but also by the need to assert the distinction of any work against the claims of contemporary rivals; hence, the restrictive egotism which Hazlitt discerned in a number of his contemporaries, an egotism necessary for their survival in a crowded market.
He attempts to return our experience of art to a moment which Susan Sontag has described as ‘before all theory, when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.” The attempt is essentially ironic, and self-defeating because in writing about art the critic returns it to the very realm of discourse from which he wants to defend it. Running alongside this is another kind of fantasy: art, in Hazlitt’s writing, both in its creation and its reception, stands for the possibility of an unprecedented and unpredictable event. The career of Napoleon is the political correlative for Hazlitt’s sense of this kind of freedom and power in art, and stands as a reminder of how much artistic genius meant to him as a form of ambition realized without the privilege of noble birth or professional status.
Hazlitt’s beliefs about art illustrate his ambivalence towards the legacy of the eighteenth-century enlightenment, which, in his Life of Napoleon, had figured as the cause of the French Revolution. If reason, and the circulation of ideas through the printing press, promoted new kinds of freedom, they also were in the service of new forms of centralization and standardization which seemed to diminish the possibilities of dramatic expression and debate.
Hazlitt’s value as a writer may well be in the thoroughness with which he registers such ambivalences and his corresponding refusal of the protection of intellectual systems or political establishments. As a dramatic thinker he can be volatile and unpredictable, a writer who resists critical framing. But this is at one with Hazlitt’s sustained commitment to the values of freedom and dissent, something which sets him apart from a subsequent English tradition of critical thought devoted to dreams of social stability and obedience. His writing is open to the reader’s agreement or dissent; it is not in pursuit of disciples. His tone is democratic and secular; even now, this can make him seem a moving, and even exemplary, figure.
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