Table-Talk

William Hazlitt

5 ideas

1. The Indian Jugglers Humble the Essayist

   Hazlitt watches an Indian juggler keep four brass balls circling in the air with flawless precision and feels ashamed, because nothing he has ever written approaches such complete mastery. He concludes that mechanical skill can be perfected because its task is bounded and its success visible, while intellectual work has no fixed limit and so is never finished or faultless. He closes by eulogizing John Cavanagh, a fives player, as a man whose excellence was total within its narrow field.

2. Common Sense Is Unconscious Accumulated Reasoning

   Common sense and genius both work by drawing on a mass of past impressions too numerous and too faint to be spelled out as rules. A person can judge a face, a situation, or a picture correctly without being able to give reasons, because the judgment compresses thousands of forgotten observations. Demanding explicit justification therefore often degrades the judgment rather than testing it.

3. Book Learning Crowds Out Direct Observation

   The scholar who knows only what books say swaps his own seeing for other people's secondhand ideas and loses touch with how things actually behave. So the learned are often more ignorant of real life, people, and practical matters than uneducated people who must watch the world directly to get by. Accumulated reading can stand in for understanding while blocking the experience that produces it.

4. Familiar Style: The Precise Common Word

   Familiar style is not loose or vulgar writing. It is writing as an educated person talks in lively conversation, using the exact word in common use rather than ornate diction or slang. It is harder than florid writing because every word must carry the thought directly, with no gaudy phrasing to hide a lack of meaning.

5. Distance Lets Imagination Supply Perfection

   Objects that are distant in space or time please us because their blur removes the particular flaws that close sight would reveal. Imagination then fills the vague outline with our own hopes and feelings. The charm of a far hill, a childhood memory, or an unvisited place comes from what we project onto it, not from what is actually there.

Save and mark ideas in the app