Thursday, February 28, 2013
Hazlitt on Youthful radicalism
Hazlitt on William Godwin deriding the youthful radicalism that disappears with "maturity" " 'Throw aside your books of chemistry,' said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, 'and read Godwin on Necessity.' Sad necessity! Fatal reverse! Is truth then so variable? Is it one thing at twenty and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below zero in 1814? Not so, in the name of manhood and of common sense! Let us pause here a little. Mr. Godwin indulged in extreme opinions, and carried with him all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time. What then? Because those opinions were overcharged, were they therefore altogether groundless? Is the very God of our idolatry all of a sudden to become an abomination and an anathema? Could so many young men of talent, of education, and of principle have been hurried away by what had neither truth nor nature, not one particle of honest feeling nor the least show of reason in it? "
Labels: Hazlitt, Radicalism, William Godwin
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Great to see a Hazlitt quote on your blog. Another good and directly relevant passage from the same Godwin essay comes a little bit later. After describing Godwin as "another Prospero" who "uttered syllables that with their enchanted breath were to change the world, and might almost stop the stars in their courses" he continues:
"Oh! and is all forgot? Is this sun of intellect blotted from the sky? Or has it suffered eclipse? Or is it we who make the fancied gloom, by looking at it through the paltry, broken, stained fragments of our own interests and prejudices? Were we fools then, or are we dishonest now? Or was the impulse of the mind less likely to be true and sound when it arose from high thought and warm feeling, than afterwards, when it was warped and debased by the example, the vices, and follies of the world?"
And Hazlitt's Man Is A Toad-eating Animal has much to say on last year's royal Jubilee. It opens:
"Man is a toad-eating animal. The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave. It is not he alone who wears the golden crown, that is proud of it: the wretch who pines in a dungeon, and in chains, is dazzled with it.."
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"Oh! and is all forgot? Is this sun of intellect blotted from the sky? Or has it suffered eclipse? Or is it we who make the fancied gloom, by looking at it through the paltry, broken, stained fragments of our own interests and prejudices? Were we fools then, or are we dishonest now? Or was the impulse of the mind less likely to be true and sound when it arose from high thought and warm feeling, than afterwards, when it was warped and debased by the example, the vices, and follies of the world?"
And Hazlitt's Man Is A Toad-eating Animal has much to say on last year's royal Jubilee. It opens:
"Man is a toad-eating animal. The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave. It is not he alone who wears the golden crown, that is proud of it: the wretch who pines in a dungeon, and in chains, is dazzled with it.."
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