Table-Talk

William Hazlitt

Hazlitt is the presiding intelligence of Table-Talk, a man who watches the audience as closely as the stage and finds in their seating habits a whole moral philosophy. He confesses to a prejudice against prologue-speakers and managers while admitting he would not know what to make of John Kemble in the boxes—whether he was playing the great man or the great actor. His gift is to make a passing irritation about where an actor sits feel like a revelation about vanity, modesty, and the strange commerce between performer and spectator.

William Cobbett

Cobbett is the writer Hazlitt cannot help admiring even as he diagnoses the flaw: a man whose descriptions of America and Botley turnips are so vivid they 'look green in prose,' yet who lays about him with his pen like Giant Despair, knocking down friends and enemies alike. Hazlitt sees in him a noble writer undone by a bad propensity—the flail that levels his antagonists also lays his own party low. He matters because he embodies the book's recurring question: what is the cost of a genius that refuses to stand its ground?

Sir Joshua Reynolds

Reynolds hovers in the background of Hazlitt's reflections on intellectual superiority—the man who knew more and saw farther, and paid for it by being misunderstood. Hazlitt's essay on the disadvantages of such superiority reads like a meditation on Reynolds's fate: to stride so far ahead that you dwindle in the distance, to be treated as a foreign species by the common herd. He matters because he gives a face to the loneliness of the original mind, the very condition Hazlitt fears and defends.

John Cavanagh

Cavanagh belongs to Hazlitt's gallery of figures who are great without the trappings of greatness—like Mrs. Siddons, who needs no robes to be tragedy personified. He is the athlete as artist, a man whose mastery is so complete that it annihilates rules and makes theories irrelevant. He matters because he extends Hazlitt's argument beyond the theatre: true excellence is self-evident, whether in a fives court or on a stage, and the pit is where we go to see it plain.

William Wordsworth

Wordsworth is the living example of Hazlitt's paradox: a man who strides so far before his readers that he dwindles in the distance, speaking a language they cannot follow. Hazlitt's essay on intellectual superiority reads as a defense of Wordsworth's strangeness—the 'far-fetched ideas' that make him the butt of slander rather than the mark of admiration. He matters because he forces the question at the heart of Table-Talk: is the original mind doomed to isolation, or can the pit still recognize greatness when it sees it?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge appears in Hazlitt's reflections as a man whose words 'might create a soul under the ribs of death' while his face remains a blank—lips moving mechanically, pain and languor the only visible inmates. Hazlitt uses him to explore the second sight of morals, the way we discern a person's truth not in their phrases but in their whole deportment. He matters because he is the book's most intimate case of the divided self, the genius whose outward coldness may conceal an inflammable spirit, or may not.