f his own
correctness. Such explanation of his conduct as, it is easier to follow
the desires of others than to give expression to the desires of one's
self, would have been, to Hazlitt, spiritual and legal sacrilege.

In dreamers, the rising young attorney sensed a poorly concealed effort
to evade this primal responsibility toward him and the society of which
he was an inseparable part. Men who walked with their heads in the
clouds were certain to step on one's feet. Dreamers were scoundrels or
lunatics who sought to justify their unfitness for society by ridiculing
it as unworthy and by phantasizing over new values and standards which
would be more amiable to their weaknesses. There were political dreamers
and dreamers in morals and art. Hazlitt bunched them together, branded
them with an identical rage, and spat them out in one word, "nuts."

Dreamers challenged his sense of superiority by hinting at soul states
and social states superior to those he already occupied. Dreamers
disturbed him. For this he perhaps hated them most. Their phantasies
sometimes lifted him into moments of disorder, moments of doubt as
revolting to his spirit as were sores revolting to his skin. Then also,
dreamers had their champions--men and women who applauded their lunatic
writings and cheered their lunatic theories.

The punishment of lawbreakers vindicated his own virtue. But his rage
against dreamers was such that their punishing offered him no sense of
satisfactory vindication. His railing and ridicule against creatures who
yearned, grimaced--neurasthenics, in short--left him with no fine
feeling of the victorious sufficiency of himself. Thus to conceal
himself from doubts always threatening an appearance, it was necessary
for him to assume a viciousness of attitude not entirely sincere. So he
read with unction political speeches and art reviews denouncing the
phantasts of his day, and from them he borrowed elaborate invective. Yet
his invective seemed like a vague defense of himself who should need no
defense and thus again doubt raised a dim triumph in his heart.

"Yes, I'm a reactionary," he would say. "I'm for the good old things of
life. Things that mean something." And even this definition of faith
would leave him unsatisfied.

The paradox of George Hazlitt lay in the fact that he was himself a
dreamer. Champions of order and champions of disorder share somewhat in
a similarity of imaginative impulses.

Six months had pass