Ed. Note: This one of those wide-ranging essays where I talk about some larger developments in the history of literature. I decided to post it before it turned into a dang book chapter.

How I Found My Guru (It’s Not What You Think)

Of a piece with my general snobbery is my belief that people my age are terrible when it comes to selecting a guru. You know what I’m on about—well, maybe you don’t. By guru I don’t mean a fancy TV dietician or someone who teaches meditative techniques at your local ashram. (Those are legit uses of the word, but not what I’m talking about.) What I mean by a guru is an intellectual guide, a person who helps you make sense of the world. And the reason why most people don’t have a guru in this sense is that for most people—whether you like it or not (and by you, I mean myself)—for most people intellectual matters are either a form of work or a temporary escape from work; in either case, something most normal people naturally run from rather than towards. (This assumes that the truth isn’t much simpler: like, you have a pastor named Dave, and Pastor Dave is your guru; but I’ve never met your pastor so I can’t comment on that.) I don’t think it is at all snobby to point out that most people seem to get along fine without some designated secular guru, as evidenced by the fact that the most subscribed social media channels the world over are a mix of pop stars, people vlogging comedic riffs over videogame footage, and world leaders/presidential candidates. They are not seeking intellectual guidance because, for the most part, they are not intellectually-inclined: just give me football on Sunday and leave me the fuck alone.

No, the non-denominational guru is a intellectual or semi-intellectual person’s phenomenon. Your guru is the person you listen to and quote all the frickin’ time (and the people around you notice this.) Many young people have been horrified to discover that their parents or grandparents have adopted cable television (or one cable television personality) as their guru. My recently deceased grandfather (RIP), for example, made a ritual of watching Rachel Maddow every weeknight (how odd! I thought.) We see the same phenomenon with young people (particularly young men) who, knowing it’s a big world and wanting the guidance of some non-parental, non-in loco parentis adult—because you can’t trust your parents to be nonobjective, nor your teachers, to tell it how it is, to give you a non-invested view of things (which is the sine qua non of the guru)—and so they seek out and find an intellectual guru, and if they are a self-confident, strapping young white man, Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche have long been popular intellectual gurus. I just read an article the other day about some Canadian fellow who “America’s angry young men” (to quote the sub-headline) are now following, a person who, from the sounds of it, espouses fairly standard tropes about personal responsibility and hard work and how the radical SJWs are destroying America. Ah, lemmings.

Here’s a tip (from a snob, for what it’s worth): if your guru’s point of view can be plausibly italicized like that, that means it is what’s called a trope. You have not been drinking from the fountain of original wisdom, but the reused distilment of someone’s bilge water. If you are a truly intellectually curious young man (not just a person who poses as one), then you must ask yourself where these repeated things are being repeated from. Moreover, why are they being repeated? Are they always true? Does your guru address when and why these things aren’t true? Is he intellectually honest? Is his reasoning naturalistic, arising from the uniqueness of each circumstance, or do his opinions come premade from the commedia dell’arte of a thousand other clowns just like him? Also: how did you come to know about this guru? How was he/she introduced to you? Was there a glidepath from you to your guru, a conveyor invariably carrying someone with your biases towards someone who inevitably reinforced rather than challenged those biases? My snobbishness is that I think far more people are conveyored towards their gurus than will typically acknowledge it, and this to me is a terrible way to choose a guru. You can’t trust a guru who comes to you—or rather, who you come to—so easily. Nay, cross a desert starving to find a guru before you swallow that pre-digestion.

Hazlitt

My ideal guru is one no one else in the world cares about, someone who speaks specifically to me; not to my politics—that’s too much of the world, and unreliable; much harder to find one who comports with my experience, with my involuntary soul. A guru is a person who loves the things you love, whose love of your loves is spontaneous and uncontrolled and, in the most ideal scenario, uncontrollable. You cannot help loving what you love, and your guru cannot help loving it too; this is how you know your sympathy with each other is real, because you did not choose each other, but rather the inmost part of you involuntarily chose the inmost part of them. This was what happened when I bought (cheaply) a five-volume set of The Works of William Hazlitt at an antique mall in Ohio, and sat outside in the car while my mom and stepfather leisurely toured the aisles. In a burning hot car, I opened the pages of The Plain Speaker. This is what I read:

I have but an indifferent opinion of the prose-style of poets: not that it is not sometimes good, nay, excellent; but it is never the better, and generally the worse, from the habit of writing verse. Poets are winged animals, and can cleave the air, like birds, with ease to themselves and delight to the beholders; but like those “feathered, two- legged things,” when they light upon the ground of prose and matter-of-fact, they seem not to have the same use of their feet.

What is a little extraordinary, there is a want of rhythmus and cadence in what they write without the help of metrical rules. Like persons who have been accustomed to sing to music, they are at a loss in the absence of the habitual accompaniment and guide to their judgment. Their style halts, totters, is loose, disjointed, and without expressive pauses or rapid movements. The measured cadence and regular sing-song of rhyme or blank verse have destroyed, as it were, their natural ear for the mere characteristic harmony which ought to subsist between the sound and the sense.

I was entranced, captivated. This apparently effortless writing has required many years of further study of the varieties and extremities of English prose style through the ages to for me to understand the labor involved in its working-up. William Hazlitt’s prose style immediately struck me, and even after studying the styles of many great English writers across the centuries, I still come back to Hazlitt’s, and regard it as probably the greatest prose style in the English language (though not without close competitors.)

Let’s look at this paragraph sentence by sentence, clause by clause, and give names to some of the rhetorical riches buried inside it. Opinion of the prose-style of poets is a phrase combining suspended assonance and consonance, the Os and the Ps. Not that it is not sometimes good, nay, excellent uses a treble of not not nay (followed by a never in the next clause) while amplifying good to excellent. Never the better and generally the worse are isocolonic in structure, and worse happily rhymes with verse.

The next sentence is an example of something Hazlitt lauds later in his essay in the writing of Edmund Burke, namely a sustained metaphor. He carries his bird metaphor forward, never faltering, never mixing—but one long, picturesque metaphor, like a Terence Malick tracking shot—beautiful. The next paragraph carries an equally sustained (though less tightly written) metaphor about “persons who have been accustomed to sing to music,” and while the image is less coherent here, it shows that Hazlitt’s imagery is consistently strong, sustained, the opposite of the flightiness he criticizes; Hazlitt’s style hypostasizes the counterfactual of his criticisms of prose-writing poets, showing us a better way.

(Ed. Note: A skeptical reader might wonder how I was not “conveyored,” a tendentious neologism, to Hazlitt, given that we both agree so much on matters of style and, apparently, taste. Yet at the time I was enamored of the prose style of Cormac McCarthy! In fact, it is Hazlitt’s salutatory synthesis of Ciceronian and anti-Ciceronian influences that served as a needful corrective to my prose-like-a-poet ways. If we seem alike, it is because the master has not only mended the student but pointed to numerous other avenues for growth.)

Ciceronianism in Early Modern Italy and France
William Hazlitt’s style is the culmination of multiple threads of English (and we should probably say European) prose. It is not so uncommon now to talk about the history of prose style as following cycles of Ciceronian and Anti-Ciceronian movements, as Morris W. Kroll helped define them in the 1920s with his collection of essays, Attic and Baroque Style: The Anti-Ciceronian Movement. These two traditions reappear under various guises—Attic vs. Oriental, Ciceronian vs. Baroque—but the general patterns remain relatively consistent over time. Ciceronian movements in literature emphasize order, clarity, and balanced phrasing. Ciceronian movements are also pan-European, and emphasize diction and syntax that easily translated from one language to another without the knottiness of local particularities. They have a classical beauty, a purity of form that seems timeless, immortal, and replicable in any language. The first apogee of Ciceronianism took place from around the turn of the 16^th century in Italy and continued up until the end of that century, when it was superceded by a new mood in the literature of the Spanish Golden Age and Elizabethan England, though France took an opposite path, and with the Academie Francaise, with the classicism of Boileau, Corneille, Racine, and Descartes, Catholic France became the nexus of Ciceronianism.

Anti-Ciceronianism in Elizabethan/Jacobean England
Ciceronianism was also the dominant note in England for a brief time with the rise of Euphuism associated with John Lyly—a writer whose influence is notable in the early prose romances of Greene and Heywood, the early writing of Thomas Nashe, and even early Shakespeare; over the course of the 1590s, however, English literature did not so much dissipate the influence of Lyly as moderate it, and incorporate other elements; instead of rank purple prose, Nashe developed a more graceful phraseology that relied on suspended alliteration. Shakespeare and fellow playwrights limited their couplets and naturalized their speeches. Finally, hearty native divines like Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes imbued English prose with a more grave, serious aspect—divorced from extravagance, aimed at dealing with the pressing political issues of the day.

The greatest Anti-Ciceronian in English—and someone whose reception in English and other languages tracks with the history of Ciceronian and anti-Ciceronian movements—was William Shakespeare, who tells Polonius to use “more matter with less art,” whose definition of great art is “to hold a mirror up to nature.” Anti-Ciceronianism is the rebellion of nature against art, naturalism against artificiality; it declares that form must be made beholden to function, that it is more important that the words pass “trippingly on the tongue” than that they conform to exact metrical parameters, and Shakespeare was among the first to experiment with meter, to make his characters’ conversations more conversational, self-hearing, and dialogical (in a way Bakhtin would admire) more like the pitter-patter of actual speech than the “good, set terms” which had been common before. In France, Michel de Montaigne was perhaps the first great anti-Ciceronian, “the first to say as a writer what he felt as a man,” as Hazlitt describes him, though his influence (and that of Rabelais) on the naturalism of French prose was curiously limited. Anti-Ciceronian writers can be more challenging than Ciceronian writers to translate, because they emphasize particular things and use language that is earthy and moored to a particular time and place; they emphasize sincerity at the expense of form, texture at the expense of clarity, and emotion and passion over the sereneness of classical Ciceronian prose.

The Restoration of Ciceronianism in England
Elizabethan and Jacobean England marked an incredible flowering of verse and prose in the anti-Ciceronian manner, but that mostly ended in 1642, when Parliament banned the operation of the English theaters, and it took an even sharper turn after 1660, when the Restoration of Charles II instilled a certain lightness and frippery (and, it may be said, corruption of manners) into English literary culture; this was a time most memorable in English literature for comedies of manners from the likes of Congreve and Wycherley and (in the next century) Sheridan. Only one English tragedy of the Restoration period has been regarded as a masterpiece, Venice Preserv’d by Thomas Otway, a marginal figure who was hardly appreciated in his own time. Milton produced Paradise Lost, but Milton was regarded as a curiosity and a relic. In poetry, the fashion was set by John Dryden and then, supreme above all others, Alexander Pope. In prose, the models were Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, founders of The Tatler and The Spectator, and Addison in particular was revered in 18^th century England as the epitome of classical eloquence, of what we are presently describing as Ciceronian prose. Such, so the mythos of English literary history goes, was the tyrannizing fashion for over a century—until Rousseau, revolution, Bonaparte, and Romanticism blew it all away.

Romantic English Prose
Students of English literature are familiar with the basic outlines of this story. A revolutionary spirit overtook European civilization at the end of the 18^th century. The French overthrew a monarch and ultimately installed an uncouth emperor. Their native-born captiousness—the spirit of Rousseau—influenced a whole generation of English writers who travelled to France and early on identified with the revolutionaries—among them William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. These poets, although they may have eventually soured on what the French revolution became, nevertheless took away a sense that the literature that had prevailed in the entire century before the revolution was in many ways fake, inane, superficial, unable to cope with the new realities of the world. In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth released the famous Lyrical Ballads, which is credited with introducing a more earthy, naturalistic note in English poetry, and being a landmark text in the English Romantic movement.

Concurrent with the anti-Ciceronian move in English poetry however, there was an equally significant anti-Ciceronian movement in English prose; it is a vast and tangled subject. As Theodor-Watts-Dunton comments near the end of “The Renascence of Wonder in English Poetry,” which serves as the introduction to volume III of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature, “To discuss the Renascence of Wonder as seen in prose fiction would require the space of a large book, or rather of a library.” The principal figures we can identify with this movement in the Romantic period in English prose include Francis Jeffrey, Sidney Smith, Robert Southey, Walter Savage Landor, James and Horace Smith, Thomas de Quincey, Sir Walter Scott (in his guise as “the author of Waverley”), Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt—and as we gather these names together, it is difficult not to think that a crop of great English prose stylists was born from 1770 to 1790 (coming of age from 1800 – 1820) with whom only that of Shakespeare’s time may be fitly compared. Few students of English literature are aware this great period of our poetry was also one of the greatest periods of our prose.

Smith, Jeffrey, and The Edinburgh Review
The Edinburgh Review, which was founded in 1802 by Sydney Smith and a group of his friends, really marked the invention of the literary review as we today know it. Francis Jeffrey, who took over editing the journal from the second issue onwards, explains the significance of this venture in the introduction to the compilation of his Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (1844):

The Edinburgh Review, it is well known, aimed high from the beginning: —and refusing to confine itself to the humble task of pronouncing on the mere literary merits of the works that came before it, professed to go deeply into the Principles on which its judgments were to be rested; as well as to take large and original views of all the important questions to which those works might relate. … Many errors there were, of course—and some considerable blunders … But with all these drawbacks, I think it must be allowed to have substantially succeeded—in familiarizing the public mind (that is, the minds of very many individuals) with higher speculations, and sounder and larger views of the great objects of human pursuit, that had ever before been brought as effectually home to their apprehensions; and also, in permanently raising the standard, and increasing the influence of all such Occasional writings; not only in this country, but over the greater part of Europe, and the free States of America; while it proportionally enlarge the capacity, and improved the relish of the growing multitudes to whom such writings were address, for “the stronger meats” which were then first provided for their digestion.

It may be allowed that there had been literary criticism before, and occasional comments. But The Edinburgh Review (followed in 1809 by the rival Tory Quarterly Review) marked the beginning of a more sophisticated appreciation of literature, along with a growing middle class audience that was hungry to absorb it. (It is arguably the progenitor of this website and all literary websites like it.) What we see in a perusal of the numbers of the Edinburgh Review are the modern “reviews” of single books—much in the same manner as those you see on this website and in numerous publications. Surprisingly, this manner of review of a single book (almost as soon as it is released to the buying public) was not at all before Francis Jeffrey and Sydney Smith made it a thing with The Edinburgh Review. As G. Gregory Smith puts it in his entry on Jeffrey in Chambers’ Cyclopaedia of English Literature,

In the Edinburgh, he set the fashion of the ‘review,’ a medley of extract and reflection, in which author and critic, in more or less amiable dialogue, explain themselves to the intelligent reader. It demanded less originality and less completeness in theory; and it was to a great extent, as in the later Causeries du Lundi and other analogous examples, the outcome of journalistic necessity. In Jeffrey’s case this manner was probably helped by a habit, qcquired in youth, of making extentive notes and precis of books and lectures, and of interpolating paragraphs of approval or dissent. The method made ‘criticism’ easy to those who were in a hurry to write, or in a hurry to read, and it undoubtedly did much, in the earlier stages at least, to stimulate literary taste.

The review is, if we are being honest, an easier piece of writing to bring off because it is primarily reactive rather than creative; the author furnishes the materials, and the reviewer supplies reaction and analysis of those materials. This is why the review is the bread-and-butter (though not exclusive) form of entertainment writing on the internet. I would also add that the review, by being more granularly focused on the style and execution of a single work rather than broadly characterizing a large group of works, is more in line with an anti-Ciceronian manner of textured writing; it concerns itself with the fine details, rather than the overall form. It allows one to praise some parts of a work and not others, to give partial credit; in short, it concerns itself not primarily with the forest, but with the trees.

The “Cockney” School
But as I sample Jefferies’ and Smith’s writing, I find it tastes a bit too much like the 18^th century. There is excessive comma usage, too much circling around the edges of a point rather than making it. This is not the purest, noblest English prose; that would come from the next group of writers, who used the infrastructure created by Smith and Jefferies to become not so much hack writers as writers under pressure; theirs is urgent, not leisurely writing. It must succeed, it must entertain. This is the milieu in which Hazlitt became quite possibly the greatest essayist in the English language; he was (as he says of Shakespeare in his Lectures on the Drama in the Age of Elizabeth) a giant among giants, the greatest of a group of greats in the art of essay writing.

They were derisively known (by their political opponents) as the “Cockney School,” called so on account of their progressive politics and (with one or two exceptions) low birth. Writers like Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Thomas de Quincey came not from places of privilege, but from relatively impoverished circumstances. They had not time to write fiction, but needed to ally themselves to a publishing industry that was already in place and work themselves up by building a reputation as critics and writers of “Occasional Prose”—that is, getting paid to write essays. Both Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb matriculated from Christ Hospital, a charity school for the indigent. Thomas de Quincey made bad investments with his parents’ patrimony, and by the first decade of the 19^th century found himself deeply in debt, while William Hazlitt began his career barely eking out a living as an itinerant painter. These lowly review writers and essay-mongers all knew each other; they were a circle of friends arguing about literature over a pint.

“A proper sympathy with the infirmities of our species” set the group apart, as Leigh Hunt puts it in the introduction to The Round Table, an 1817 collection of essays by him and William Hazlitt.

But for sickness, for ordinary worldly trouble, and in one or two respects, for troubles not very ordinary, few persons, perhaps, at our time of life, can make a handsomer shew of infirmities. Of some we shall only say, that they have been common to most men, as well as ourselves, who were not born to estates of their own: but these and others have enabled us to buy, what money have still kept us poor in,—some good real knowledge, and at bottom of all our egotism, some warm-wishing unaffected humility.

These writers were highly class-conscious because poverty the life of this sort of writer. They were political radicals, in most cases, because one could not be an intellectually aware person of their means and not be a radical. They were profoundly dissatisfied with the status quo not merely of politics, but also of literature. They collectively viewed the 18th century as a time of artificiality and insipidity, and want to reach back—way back, to times ancient and remote to them–to the Age of Elizabeth, to discover the writers (and anti-Ciceronian ones at that) whom time had forgot. In both poetry and prose, the Cockney School writers learned to imitate and eventually rival these early modern models, the riches stored in the vaults of their old literature. In a way, we who write about them are repeating that same process of re-discovery that seems to cycle from time to time, changing traditions, changing tastes. This continual shifting never stops, but rather continues today.

I want to explore in a series of essays how different writers of the romantic school reworked the anti-Ciceronian influence s of the distant past into their writing.

Next time: A review of some works by Hazlitt, Lamb, de Quincey, and Hunt