Byron's passion. His
egotism--be it said without offence--is dashed with something of the
feeling common amongst his dissenting friends. He feels the awkwardness
which prevails amongst a clique branded by a certain social stigma, and
despises himself for his awkwardness. He resents neglect and scorns to
ask for patronage. His egotism is a touchy and wayward feeling which
takes the mask of misanthropy. He is always meditating upon his own
qualities, but not in the spirit of the conceited man who plumes himself
upon his virtues, nor of the ascetic who broods over his vices. He
prefers the apparently self-contradictory attitude (but human nature is
illogical) of meditating with remorse upon his own virtues. What in
others is complacency, becomes with him, ostensibly at least,
self-reproach. He affects--but it is hard to say where the affectation
begins--to be annoyed by the contemplation of his own merits. He is
angry with the world for preferring commonplace to genius, and rewarding
stupidity by success; but in form at least, he mocks at his own folly
for expecting better things. If he is vain at bottom, his vanity shows
itself indirectly by depreciating his neighbours. He is too proud to
dwell upon his own virtues, but he has been convinced by impartial
observation that the world at large is in a conspiracy against merit.
Thus he manages to transform his self-consciousness into the semblance
of proud humility, and extracts a bitter and rather morbid pleasure from
dwelling upon his disappointments and failures. Half-a-dozen of his best
Essays give expression to this mood, which is rather bitter than
querulous. He enlarges cordially on the 'disadvantages of intellectual
superiority.' An author--Hazlitt, to wit--is not allowed to relax into
dulness; if he is brilliant he is not understood, and if he professes an
interest in common things it is assumed that then he must be a fool. And
yet in the midst of these grumblings he is forced to admit a touch of
weakness, and tells us how it pleases him to hear a man ask in the Fives
Court, 'Which is Mr. Hazlitt?' He, the most idiosyncratic of men, and
most proud of it at bottom, declares how 'he hates his style to be
known, as he hates all idiosyncrasy.' At the next moment he purrs with
complacency at the recollection of having been forced into an avowal of
his authorship of an article in the 'Edinburgh Review.' Most generally
he eschews these naive lapses into vanity. He dilates on t