“It is hard to be without money. To get on without it is like travelling in a foreign country without a passport—you are stopped, suspected, and made ridiculous at every turn, besides being subjected to the most serious inconveniences.”
The opening lines of this essay put the concept of being without money within the framework of a rather elitist metaphor, but that is merely disguise. The meat of the matter is made clear a little further on when Hazlitt drops the imagery and make the situation plain. Without money, one literally is incapable of living a good life; the life that is lived is without credit or pleasure. At this point, he drops the boom and make clear the entire point of what being in want of money is all about: “it is to live out of this world, or to be despised if you come into it.”
“More home truths are to be learnt from listening to a noisy debate in an ale house than from attending to a formal one in the House of Commons.”
Considering that he was obviously an educated man well versed in the academic arts of being a gentlemen, Hazlitt’s scorn for other educated British gentlemen runs deep. A number of his essays contain the names of famous men in their titles and it may come as a surprise at how must many of those famous men are the object of that scorn. It would be a mistake to assume such scorn was personal, however. At heart, Hazlitt’s essays are exercises in rhetoric. His approach to a subject is not to go from the personal to the universal, nor from the concrete to the abstract. The defining characteristic of any Hazlitt essay is that he stays on topic and he argues from a position of personality rather than broad, ambiguous conceptual points like ideology. That is why he aligns with ale house drinkers over politicians or—in the clause just preceding this quote, those riding the stagecoach to Oxford rather than the students there or the professors who instruct them.
“The way to secure success, is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it; the surest hindrance to it is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the discernment of the public. He who is determined not to be satisfied with anything short of perfection, will never do anything at all, either to please himself or others.”
According to Hazlitt, if one wants to be successful, ditch the false modesty; it won’t even do you as much good as being a braggart. Which makes a great deal of sense when one understands that Hazlitt is also aware that if one wishes to be considered wise, the only real requirement is that one is thought to be wise; wisdom itself if ultimately beside the point. Recognizing the ugly truth that merit and the awarding of success do not go hand-in-hand—and it is much better to be lucky than talented—the whole point of this essay is that success is inexorably linked to the human tendency to misapprehend perception for reality. Put another way: success is not dependent on how talented you actually are, but on what other people consider to be talent.
“Prejudice, in its ordinary and literal sense, is prejudging any question without having sufficiently examined it, and adhering to our opinion upon it through ignorance, malice, or perversity, in spite of every evidence to the contrary.”
Even after more than a century—and a century in which the recognition of prejudice and the affirmation of its sinister qualities came to the forefront of society, at that—it remains a difficult task to come up with a more perfect description of its definition. The rest of the essay is a precise and well-argued delineation of the various ways in which prejudice arrives and is carried out, both for negative and positive intentions and consequences.
"If we look about us, and ask who are the agreeable and disagreeable people in the world, we shall see that it does not so much depend on their virtues or vices—their understanding or stupidity—as on the degree of pleasure or pain they seem to feel in ordinary social intercourse.”
Written in the 1830’s when it can be assumed that people were not nearly as disagreeable as a whole as they are today, this characterizing of what makes them so somehow yet seems even more relevant in the early decades of the 21st century. Applied to the modern zeitgeist of tribal acceptance of that deemed abominable just a few years earlier when committed by ideological opposites, Hazlitt’s penetration of psychology gets right to the point. In some ways, this may be his most visionary assertion.
