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Hazlitt and the Functions of the Imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
William Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination have received widespread critical attention, but that attention has been confined almost entirely to his comments on the sympathetic imagination. There can be no question of the importance of sympathy in Hazlitt's understanding of the imagination; it is a central idea with moral, philosophical, political, and aesthetic ramifications in Hazlitt's thought. But it does not by any means sum up Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination as an aesthetic or creative faculty; and since sympathy alone is clearly incapable of creating a work of art, emphasis on that quality obscures Hazlitt's more nearly complete understanding of artistic creation and appreciation. Furthermore, his application of sympathetic doctrine is rather more limited than is generally understood. I propose here to suggest some of these limits and to investigate the major supplements to sympathy in Hazlitt's criticism—associational aesthetics and the formative imagination.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966
References
1 Martin Kallich, “The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory: Hobbes, Locke, and Addison,” ELH, xii (1945), 290-315.
2 Henry Home, Lord Karnes, Elements of Criticism, 1st American from 7th London ed. (Boston, 1796), i, 159.
3 James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), p. 142.
4 Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, “from the Edinburgh edition of 1811” (Boston, 1812), p. 418.
5 See Beattie, Elements of Moral Science (Baltimore, 1813), i, 104-109; Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2nd ed. (London, 1785), i, 34-40; Kames, ii, 384-392; Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London, 1777), p. 134; and Kallich, p. 314.
6 All references to Hazlitt are to P. P. Howe's Centenary Edition (1930-34).
7 This phrase and the idea behind it are commonplaces of Hazlitt's critical thought; he applied them to Wordsworth (iv, 92, viii, 44), Rembrandt (iv, 92), Sidney (vi, 322), John Ford (vi, 270), Coleridge (xii, IS), Dante (xvi, 41 f.), Rousseau (iv, 92), and J. M. W. Turner (xviii, 14, xviii, 95), among others. The implication is usually derogatory, though sometimes Hazlitt appreciates the creation of significance where nothing existed before.
8 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 12th Edinburgh ed. (Philadelphia, 1817), p. 4.
9 W. J. Bate, “The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Criticism,” ELH, xii (1945), 161.
10 Though sometimes he grows indignant at this propensity for siding with power rather than goodness (e.g., iv, 214 ff.).
11 In his Examiner article “On Gusto,” Hazlitt went so far as to accuse Greek statues of lacking gusto, of being too perfect to be interesting. He modified the accusation in republishing the article, but one suspects that Keats had already absorbed it for use in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Payne Knight had already argued that “a model of human perfection may, indeed, excite our admiration, as a consummate work of art; but will never awaken our sympathies, as a vigorous effusion of nature.” An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, 2nd ed. (London, 1805), p. 328.
12 Edinburgh Review, xvin (1811), 1-46.
13 The Light of Nature Pursued, 6th ed. (London, 1842), i, 91.
14 For an admirable exposition of Hazlitt's associationism see Jean-Claude Sallé, “Hazlitt the Associationist,” Review of English Studies, N. S. xv (February 1964), 38-51.