The nineteenth century idea of literary talent

Hazlitt, genius, juggling, and David Copperfield

In The Dandy School, a review of Disraeli’s 1826 novel Vivian Grey, William Hazlitt complained that modern fiction no longer used imagination to take readers to times and places they were unfamiliar with—“to place us in the situations of others and enable us to feel an interest in all that strikes them”—but preferred to depict fashionable society on Bond Street. The fashionable novel means, “You have no new inlet to thought or feeling opened to you; but the passing object, the topic of the day (however insipid or repulsive) is served up to you with a self-sufficient air.”

Hazlitt was angry about the clanging way novelists added information that was “new to him” but old to his characters. The problem when a novelist “informs you that the quality eat fish with silver forks” is not just that it’s clunky technique, but that it prioritises the surface. The quality don’t spend their time thinking I am eating fish with a silver fork. What then are they thinking? What about the use of art to help us understand the situations of others? Forget it, says Hazlitt:

a young linen-draper or attorney’s-clerk from the country, who had gained a thirty-thousand pound prize in the lottery and wished to set up for a fine gentleman, might learn from these Novels what hotel to put up at, what watering place to go to, what hatter, hosier, tailor, shoemaker, friseur to employ, what part of the town he should be seen in, what theatre he might frequent; but how to behave, speak, look, feel, and think in his new and more aspiring character he would not find the most distant hint in the gross caricatures or flimsy sketches of the most mechanical and shallow of all schools. It is really as if, in lieu of our royal and fashionable “Society of Authors,” a deputation of tailors, cooks, lacqueys, had taken possession of Parnassus, and had appointed some Abigail out of place perpetual Secretary.

The novel, says Hazlitt, has been co-opted into the circus of fashion. “Authors at present would be thought gentlemen, as gentlemen have a fancy to turn authors.” What counted was not hard work and ability, but being clever in a shallow sense. “The smart improvisatori turns out the most wearisome of interminable writers... At a moment’s warning he can supply something that is worth nothing, and in ten times the space he can spin out ten times the quantity of the same poor trash.”

These fashionable novels are what Jane Eyre refers to when she describes her cousin Georgina, who has told her everything about being in London, as talking a whole volume of a fashionable novel. It’s also the image of novelists that Dickens was working against in David Copperfield, which is why he makes David work so hard. Rather than being fashionable fops, writers had to become bourgeois artists.

Hazlitt contrasts this sorry trend with Restoration theatre, who presented upper-class people in a real way, not just by describing their silverware.

It would seem that the race of these is over, or that our modern scribes have not had access to them on a proper footing — that is, not for their talents or conversation, but as mountebanks or political drudges.

The word that caught my eye here is talent. We know from his essay The Indian Jugglers, that Hazlitt thinks of talent as “the capacity of doing any thing that depends on application and industry, such as writing a criticism, making a speech, studying the law.” That is, a talent is an ability that can be worked at to produce something valuable. It is not genius, but it is not commonplace. Talent requires practice; genius, inspiration. “Talent differs from genius, as voluntary differs from involuntary power.”

But greatness is not dependent on talent or genius. Doing work that changes the world and lasts into history is what makes greatness. “A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.” Hazlitt believes that greatness is difficult to find in the professions, in the navy, or in chemistry—but, he acknowledges that “it is in the nature of greatness to propagate an idea of itself, as wave impels wave, circle without circle. It is a contradiction in terms for a coxcomb to be a great man. A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.”

The word talent occurs frequently in Copperfield, mostly in connection with Mr. Micawber, whose wife is convinced has talent that is unrecognised by the world. What Mr. and Mrs. Micawber don’t realise is that talent, per Hazlitt, requires “application and industry.” David Copperfield stands in contrast to Mr. Micawber as being industrious. What is missing from this new image of talent is Hazlitt’s notion of inspired genius. That Romantic ideal is represented in Steerforth—who comes to a sorry moral ending, a warning to the industrious nineteenth century not to rely on native ability alone.

Copperfield is not a romantic genius—he is a man of talent and application, based on Carlyle’s idea of the hero and a man-of-letters. Dickens reacted to Hazlitt’s complaint about dandyish novelists, but he took Carlyle as his inspiration for what should replace them. The romantic ideal of individual genius and talent was giving way to a more Victorian idea of hard work and hero worship: the inspired genius was becoming the self-made man. Hazlitt wrote about dandy novelists in 1827; Carlyle set out his hero theory in 1840; in 1849 Copperfield embodied Carlyle’s ideal; in 1859, Samuel Smiles popularised the concept of self help.

The notion of greatness and genius, whether an individual inspiration or something to worship, had faded into a prescription for achievement. From lofty ideals to practical advice. From poetry that sets its face against the world to respectable self-betterment.