Friday 29 May 2020

Borges Reading Hazlitt Reading Borges


Each and every day without fail I receive hits on my note on Hazlitt’s essay On the Feeling of Immortality in Early Youth.
immortality
They emanate from India only where Hazlitt is on an English Honours course and where relevance and relatability bow before a traditional curriculum. Unless it is a cozening feature of Google I am top of their hit parade or near it. Should Hazlitt be such an obscure figure that my marginal gloss persists for years? Jorge Luis Borges would have been surprised for Hazlitt, Stevenson and De Quincey that he read as a child were central to his imagination.

Consider this incitement to Pierre Menard:

‘What a pity’, said some one, ‘that Milton had not the pleasure of reading Paradise Lost! He could not read it, as we do, with the weight of impression that a hundred years of admiration have added to it — ‘a phoenix gazed by all’ — with the sense of the number of editions it has passed through with still increasing reputation, with the tone of solidity, time-proof, which it has received from the breath of cold, envious maligners, with the sound which the voice of Fame has lent to every line of it!

(from Is Genius Conscious of its Powers)

Borges gives that lateral nod of respect to Hazlitt in The Cult of the Phoenix:

That the members of the cult should, in a Jewish milieu, resemble Jews proves nothing, what cannot be denied is that they, like Hazlitt’s infinite Shakespeare, resemble every man in the world.

He further dedicates an essay to this myriad minded man:

Haunted, hounded, he began imagining other heroes, other tragic fables. Thus while his body, in whorehouses and taverns around London, lived its life as body, the soul that lived inside it would be Caesar, who ignores the admonition of the sibyl, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters. No one was as many men as that man—that man whose repertoire, like that of the Egyptian Proteus, was all the appearances of being. From time to time he would leave a confession in one corner or another of the work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard says that inside himself, he plays the part of many, and Iago says, with curious words, I am not what I am. The fundamental identity of living, dreaming, and performing inspired him to famous passages.
(from Everything and Nothing)

Hazlitt on Milton and Shakespeare:

The striking peculiarity of Shakspeare's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds—so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had "a mind reflecting ages past," and present:—all the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: "All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave," are hardly hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives—as well those that they knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves. 


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