Indian Jugglers by Hazlitt

                    The Indian Jugglers

                                   - William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered as one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell.

William Hazlitt  was eager to inquire into human life with all its variety. He was keenly interested in a vast variety of things-books of all kinds, politics, sports, stage etc. He conveyed his enjoyment and observation to the readers through his essays.

William Hazlitt in his essay the Indian Jugglers talks about the stunning performance of an Indian Juggler. In this essay he praises the Juggler’s mechanical mastery, his “skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill,”. Hazlitt is perplexed to see an odd and inexplicable mixture of simple and miraculous power. In the course of his act, the Juggler tosses two brass balls in the air, but then keeps four balls up, “which is what none of us could do to save our lives, nor if we were to take our whole lives to do it in.”

Jugglers are the ones who provide us with amusement with their exceptional art of handling different things simultaneously. Juggling in India is found in streets and small towns. Ramo Samee was an Indian Juggler & Magician in the 19th Century.

Man, thou art a wonderful animal, and thy ways past finding out! Thou canst do strange things; but thou turnest them to little account!

In short, "hot damn!" In fact, seeing the Indian juggler do his thing pushes Hazlitt the rhetorical equivalent of a life-crisis:

he hearing a speech in Parliament, . . . stirs me not a jot, shakes not my good opinion of myself: but the seeing the Indian Jugglers does. It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this! Nothing. What have I been doing all my life! 

Juggling is a difficult art, which even mathematicians have spent a lot of time attempting to understand. They have created a general formula that can be used by jugglers, but it still takes a lot of practice to master juggling.

Hazlitt’s powerful argument for the superiority of intellectual endeavour to mechanical skill takes off from his awed response to a juggling act, performed by Indian entertainers at the Olympic Theatre on the Strand. The jugglers’ skill exposes, to Hazlitt, the inadequacy of lesser performances, including his own essays.