Chapter 23

HAZLITT

There are few more desolate and cheerless places in England than the spot where this old coaching inn stands beside the open road, with the unenclosed downs stretching away to the far horizon, fold after fold. Somewhere amid these hills and hollows, but quite hidden, is the village of West Winterslow, from which the ‘Hut’ obtains its name. The place, save for the periodical passing of the coaches, was as solitary in old times as it is now,{157} and its quiet as profound. The very name is chilling, and as excellently descriptive as it is possible for a name to be.

When, coming within sight of its isolated roof-tree from the summit of the hills on either side, the coach-guards used to blow fanfares on their bugles as a reminder for the ostler to have his fresh teams ready, the inn and its surrounding stables woke into life, and when they were gone their several ways, it dozed again. Save that it doubtless looked more prosperous then, the present appearance of ‘Winterslow Hut’ is identical with its aspect of sixty years ago. The same horse-pond by the roadside, the same trees, only older and more decrepit, the same prehistoric dykes and tumuli on the unchanging downs; it must have been capable of absorbing the fun and jollity of a fair, and still presenting its characteristically dour and dreary aspect; but now that, sitting in the bay window of the parlour that commands the road in either direction, you may watch the highway by the half-hour and see no traveller, the emptiness is appalling.

To this solitary outpost of civilisation came William Hazlitt, critic and essayist, during several years, for quietude. For four years, from 1808 to 1812, he and his wife lived in a cottage at West Winterslow, on the small income derived from her other cottage property there, supplemented by the sums the wayward Hazlitt earned fitfully by the practice of literature. Then they removed to London, where they disagreed, Hazlitt retiring to the ‘Hut’ in 1819, and leaving his wife in town. Nervous and{158} irritable, he wanted quiet, nor can it be doubted that in this spot he found what he sought. He was cursed, according to the widely different beliefs of his friends, with ‘an ingrained selfishness,’ or ‘a morbid self-consciousness,’ and oil the downs he would walk, for the pleasure of having the neighbourhood all to himself, from forty to fifty miles a day. He wrote his Winterslow essays here, and his Napoleon, for whom he had an almost insane reverence. The ‘diabolical scowl’ of Hazlitt when Napoleon or any other of his pet susceptibilities were abused must have been worth seeing.

‘Now,’ says a literary hero-hunter, who has visited ‘Winterslow Hut,’ as a place of pilgrimage,—‘now it is a desolate place, fallen into decay, and tenanted by a labouring man and his family, cultivating a small farm of some thirty acres, and barely able to make a living out of it. In winter two or three weeks will sometimes elapse without even a beggar or tramp or cart passing the door. On the ground floor, looking out upon a horse-pond, flanked by two old lime-trees, is a little parlour, which was the one probably used by Hazlitt as his sitting-room. At the other end of the house is a large empty room, formerly devoted to cock-fighting matches and singlestick combats. It was with a strange and eerie feeling that I contemplated this little parlour, and pictured to myself the many solitary evenings during which Hazlitt sat in it enjoying copious libations of his favourite tea (for during the last fifteen years of his life he never tasted alcoholic drinks of any kind) perhaps reading Tom Jones for the tenth time, or enjoying{159}
A LITERARY RECLUSE
Image unavailable: ‘WINTERSLOW HUT.’
‘WINTERSLOW HUT.’

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one of Congreve’s comedies, or Rousseau’s Confessions, or writing, in his large flowing hand, a dozen pages of the essay on Persons one would Wish to have Seen, or On Living to One’s Self. One cannot imagine any retreat more consonant with the feelings of this lonely thinker, during one of his periods of seclusion, than the out-of-the-world place in which I stood. In winter time it must have been desolate beyond description—on wild nights especially—“heaven’s chancel-vault” blind with sleet—the fierce wind sweeping down from the bare wolds around, and beating furiously against the doors and windows of the unsheltered hostelry.’

It is not to be supposed that Hazlitt was insensible to the dreariness of the spot. ‘Here, even here,’ he says, as though the dolour of the place had come home to him, ‘with a few old authors I can manage to get through the summer or winter months without ever knowing what it is to feel ennui. They sit with me at breakfast; they walk out with me before dinner. After a long walk through unfrequented tracts, after starting the hare from the fern, or hearing the wing of the raven rustling above my head, or being greeted by the woodman’s “stern good-night,” as he strikes into his narrow homeward path, I can “take mine ease at mine inn,” beside the blazing hearth, and shake hands with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo, as the oldest acquaintance I have.’

His Farewell to Essay Writing was written here 20th February 1828. He had long given up the intemperance of former years, and cultivated literature on copious tea-drinking. ‘As I quaff my{162} libations of tea in a morning,’ he says, ‘I love to watch the clouds sailing from the west, and fancy that “the spring comes slowly up this way.” In this hope, while “fields are dank, and ways are mire,” I follow the same direction to a neighbouring wood, where, having gained the dry, level greensward, I can see my way for a mile before me, closed in on each side by copse-wood, and ending in a point of light more or less brilliant, as the day is bright or cloudy.’ And so this harbinger of our own literary neurotics continues, dropping into a morbid introspective strain, pulling up his soul, like a plant, by the roots, to see how it is growing, and babbling to the world, between the jewel-work of his literature, of his follies and his unrest. Strange, that this wiry pedestrian, this apostle of fresh air, should be of the same dough of which the degenerates of our time are compounded.