Hazlitt is sometimes rather like Walt Whitman, democratic, containing multitudes, yet happy with solitary self-communion. In a pleasant essay called 'A Sun-Bath - Nakedness', Whitman remarks: 'Here I realise the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom less alone than when alone. Never before did I get so close to Nature ...' Who was the old fellow? It might have been Hazlitt (who died when Whitman was an office-boy), for he once wrote: 'Out of doors nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.' Or it might have been Byron, or Byron's favourite, Samuel Rogers, both of whom put the solitude paradox into verse. It might even have been Cicero, quoting Scipio Africanus: nec minus solus quam cum solus esset. Hazlitt and Whitman did not much care who the 'old fellow' was who first coined the phrase: he had contributed to the 'common sense', just as they did, while enjoying their sunny solitudes, rhapsodising about Nature, Liberty and the People. Their self-love, their very egotism, stimulated their disinterested sympathy with others.

LRB 6 September 1984 | PDF Download