William Hazlitt's collected writings fill 22 volumes. He was a literary
critic, an art critic, a theatre critic, a philosopher and a polemicist, and
his works The Plain Speaker (a collection of essays) and The Spirit of the
Age (a survey of the writers of the Romantic period, most of them known to
him personally) used to be revered as classics. Nowadays he is scarcely
known, and Duncan Wu's vigorous biography, the fruit of 10 years' labour in
the archives, is an attempt to put that right. The Hazlitt he brings to
light, however, is unlikely to win a place in his readers' affections. He
was a tormented, bitter man, who excelled at resentment.
His father, an Irish dissenting minister of heretical views, had taught him to
hate all institutions, whether of church or state, and since human society
is based on institutions this was an important first step towards his son's
unhappiness. Born in 1778, young Hazlitt greeted the French revolution with
frenzied enthusiasm. He idolised Napoleon, and was filled with hope that the
victorious French would put an end to Britain and its constitution, an event
that, Wu tells us, both Hazlitt and his father had long wished for.
The defeat of his hero at Waterloo was a devastating blow. He did not wash or
shave for weeks and got drunk every night. As a teenager he had much admired
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, and sought their friendship, joyful that
they shared his revolutionary ardour. However, the reign of terror, followed
by the imminent threat of a French invasion, drastically modified the three
poets' political views. They supported the British government's repressive
measures against suspected revolutionaries, and Wordsworth even enlisted in
the Grasmere volunteers, a unit that was fortunately not cast in a combat
role.
Hazlitt never forgave them. He denounced them as turncoats and pursued them
with derision and vituperation. Reviewing Coleridge's poems in 1816 he
dismissed Kubla Khan as “nonsense verses” and Christabel as “utterly
destitute of value”. Wu says that he knew perfectly well they were works of
genius, but lied about them to get his own back on Coleridge - behaviour
that Wu is inclined to condone. It seems questionable, though, whether
changing one's political allegiance is necessarily as heinous as Wu seems to
feel. In the last resort, the poets' sin was merely that they were less keen
to see the end of Britain and its constitution than Hazlitt was.
However, Hazlitt's rancour was implacable, and its source was not only
political. In 1803 a strange episode took place that permanently poisoned
relations between him and his former friends. He was staying in Coleridge's
house at Keswick, and went out one evening to the local tavern, where a girl
he tried to chat up made an impudent remark. His response was, Wu says,
“characteristic”: “He threw her over his knee, lifted her petticoats, and
spanked her on the bottom.” He then fled to Coleridge's house, where news
arrived that a gang of locals was on its way to wreak vengeance. Coleridge
and Southey rapidly smuggled him out of Keswick to Dove Cottage, where
Wordsworth took him in, supplying him next morning with money and clothes so
that he could get away.
Since the three poets quite possibly saved his life, it might be expected that
he would repay them with thanks. On the contrary, he began to feel that he
had been unnecessarily humiliated, and came to see himself as the victim,
and his rescuers as malicious persecutors. As usual, Wu takes his side.
“Hazlitt was not an embittered or grudgeful man,” he maintains, “but the
treatment he suffered at the hands of Wordsworth and Coleridge was to rankle
for the rest of his life.” Hazlitt's extraordinary capacity for feeling hard
done-by was also apparent in the matter of his first marriage. His wife was
the sister of a successful barrister, John Stoddart, and since Hazlitt was a
penniless journalist, and often in debt, Stoddart generously set up a trust
to make the newlyweds an annual allowance. Far from being grateful, Hazlitt
saw this as a “mammoth humiliation”. It “filled him with disgust for years
to come”, Wu testifies, and was one of the “corrosive forces” that destroyed
the marriage. Hazlitt repaid his benefactor by describing him, in a
newspaper article, as a “stupid, senseless, vulgar person”, and likened The
Times, of which Stoddart was editor, to a “water closet”.
Another corrosive force that destabilised the marriage was Hazlitt's fondness
for the company of prostitutes. He gave them free run of his lodgings, which
inevitably fuelled scandal and also distressed his young son, who was so
appalled on one occasion by the noises coming from his father's bedroom that
he intervened physically. Pathologically shy and tongue-tied in company,
Hazlitt seems to have found sexual satisfaction only with women he felt
superior to socially. He fell madly in love with his landlady's daughter,
Sarah Walker, who was, apparently, willing to engage in lengthy petting
sessions, but refused to have sex. He persuaded his wife to divorce him, in
the hope that this would win Sarah over, but she still resisted, and he
vented his thwarted lust and rage in a detailed account of the affair
published in 1823 as Liber Amoris, which mingles feelings of contempt based
on social class with sexual loathing and hysterical denunciation. He
describes himself as “glued to a bitch, a little damned incubus”, and Sarah
as “a common lodging-house drab” with “an itch for being slabbered and
felt”. Wu endorses Hazlitt's judgments. Sarah was, he assures us, “exactly
what he feared: a snake, a succubus”, and feminist critics show their
“stupidity” by accusing Hazlitt of sexual harassment. All the same, they
seem to have a point. When Sarah finally rejected him he persuaded a friend
to move into the Walkers' lodging house with the express intention of
seducing her. The friend reported back to Hazlitt, who noted his
accomplice's progress in a diary. He appeared naked before Sarah, and kissed
her on several occasions, but apparently got no further.
Publishing Liber Amoris was an act of self-destruction. The Tory press seized
on it with delight, execrating its author as a libertine and whoremaster,
and Hazlitt's reputation was in ruins. He died in poverty. Wu's biography
is, like its subject, passionately partisan, and throws objectivity to the
winds. He gleefully applauds Hazlitt's “rabble-rousing” tirades, and
lambasts his enemies as blackguards and liars. At times he verges on fiction
by inventing conversations that he feels must have taken place, but which do
not occur in the historical record. This may attract scholarly frowns, but
it undoubtedly livens up his writing.
For all that, the claims he makes are wildly extravagant. The reader blinks to
learn that Hazlitt possessed “laser-like intelligence” and “an almost
godlike perspective”. Such estimates cut no ice unless backed by the kind of
analysis that Tom Paulin attempted in The Day-Star of Liberty, and Wu never
gets near that critical terrain. The samples of Hazlitt's essays, art
criticism and lectures that he offers seem verbose, far from incisive, and
not always notable for intelligence. What sort of intelligence concludes (in
Characteristics) that “Women have as little imagination as they have reason;
they are pure egoists”? Nor is it clear why Wu considers Hazlitt the first
modern man. All it seems to amount to is that Hazlitt was a journalist, so
foreshadowed the power of the mass media. But, to qualify as modern men,
competitors must have had ideas we still use in our thinking. Among
Hazlitt's predecessors Montaigne, Newton and Rousseau all did that. Among
his contemporaries, Wordsworth and the protosocialist Robert Owen, whom he
dismissed as insignificant, did so, too. Hazlitt did not.
William Hazlitt by Duncan Wu
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