Word: hazlitt
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...thought his watercolors were "crude blotches" and his oils a "gross outrage." They also routinely called him insane (which hurt--his mother had died in Bedlam, the London asylum). Their complaints boiled down to the same thing. Turner made light tangible but things illegible. Or, as the essayist William Hazlitt put it in a still famous wisecrack, he made "pictures of nothing, and very like...
...eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable." --WILLIAM HAZLITT...
...will never have the latter. The choice is between a society of hypocrisy or cynicism. The cynic does not admit to doing wrong. The hypocrite has the saving grace of paying homage to virtue by at least publicly acknowledging its sovereignty. "Any one may yield to temptation," wrote William Hazlitt, "and yet feel a sincere love and aspiration after virtue: but he who maintains vice in theory, has not even the conception or capacity for virtue in his mind. Men err: fiends only make a mock at goodness...
...John Leonard easily heads the lists. I do not want to be of his company. Indeed, at the very mention of the name John Leonard it seemed that Montaigne threw his mantel across his shoulders and left the room, followed by Pascal delicately lifting the skirt of his vestments; Hazlitt said he had a previous engagement at the five courts, Lamb muttered something about his sister not being well. Orwell stubbed out his cigarette. Camus buckled the belt of his trenchcoat, and they were all gone...
...field hands, toiling like ants in the distance. "The poor people are dirty," Constable explained, "and to approach one of the cottages is almost insufferable." Blythe groups Wordsworth with Constable in regarding the English countryside as Eden, polluted by the presence of inferior Eves and Adams. Even William Hazlitt, an essayist with a political conscience, thought rural England was full of louts. Pinched by poverty, exhausted by labor, "all country people hate each other," he maintained...