William hazlitt's prose is like exceedingly fine whisky. Fiery and rebarbative to the virgin palate, it becomes, once the taste is acquired, wonderful: indeed, one of the most wonderful things in all English writing. Demanding, assertive, full of energetically varied movement, it counts among the most truly poetical prose-and the most truly philosophical poetry-in English literature. To open Hazlitt's pages is to be plucked from one's chair and swooped into an adventure of ideas and feelings which stream from Hazlitt's mind with raw energy and excoriating honesty. Some say that Hazlitt is the great lost genius of English letters, and should be rescued from obscurity. Even Tom Paulin says so, in this important new study of Hazlitt's style. But in fact Hazlitt has never been lost to view: he has always been read by those who appreciate excellent writing and strong thought. What writer would not be content to have, in every generation which followed his time, a discerning and undiminishing readership, even if its numbers are small?
However, it is true that Hazlitt merits a wider audience; Paulin's aim is to secure it for him. He does so by examining Hazlitt's "radical style"-on the premise that the style is the man-in the process introducing us to Hazlitt's life and the tumultuous times he lived through, which saw the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, their reactionary consequences in England, the flowering of English Romantic poetry, and the vigour of the periodical press, in whose more radical pages Hazlitt was a star. Paulin insists, rightly, on making much of Hazlitt's Dissenting background. The Dissenters of the 18th century, especially the Unitarians, were the intellectual aristocracy of their day, numbering among them Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, and owing much to the thought of Francis Hutcheson. Not only was this tradition scientifically-minded and Perfectibilist in tendency, it also took the democratic, republican, even revolutionary side of the argument; and was hot in its opposition to church hegemony, the Divine Right of Kings and aristocratic principles. Hazlitt was a soldier in this cause, sometimes directly but more often in the distinctive new dimension he brought to the work of criticism and philosophical debate.
Hazlitt's father was a Unitarian minister whose strong principles did nothing to help him achieve success in life. After wandering from one congregation to another for some years, including several in America, the elder Hazlitt settled his family at Wem in Shropshire. Hazlitt was educated partly at home and partly at the New College in Hackney, founded by Priestley as an academy to produce Dissenting ministers. So scientifically-minded and free-thinking was this institution that in Hazlitt's year all the students became agnostic and the academy closed. At that early age Hazlitt was already engaged in the great passion of his life: his interest in "metaphysics" (what we now call philosophy). He laboured for a decade to finish his first treatise, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action, the writing of which, he tells us, became a little easier after he met Coleridge, whose eloquence helped to unlock his powers of expression. (It was, however, many years before his writing attained its full fluency and power.) The Essay received scarcely any notice; Hazlitt later said this taught him that one should always advance philosophical views in popular guise. Thereafter he repeated the Essay's thesis on the natural disinterestedness of man, and adumbrated his other philosophical ideas in the periodical essays he wrote for a much wider public.
Hazlitt wrote about politics, art, drama, literature and life. In his most famous book, The Spirit of the Age, he anatomised those whom he regarded as the principal figures of his day-with unerring judgement: almost all those he chose to examine have survived into history, among them Bentham, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Cobbett, Horne Tooke and Godwin. In all these critical and ethical writings Hazlitt celebrated what was vigorous, whole, full of life and movement-what he called "gusto": a term he coined to denote a sensibility that engages the physical senses as well as the intellect. With Hutcheson, he regarded the child as the imago of man: inquisitive and hungry for knowledge, grasping at things with its whole being; "disinterested" (Hazlitt's key philosophical term, signifies desiring knowledge) and responding to kindness and affection open-heartedly, without thought for what profit might be gained thereby. Earlier philosophers, chief among them Hartley, had premised their ethics on what they saw as the natural self-interestedness of man; Hazlitt, following Hutcheson, repudiated their moral psychology.
This point prompts Paulin to make a valuable claim: that Matthew Arnold perverted Hazlitt's conception of "disinterestedness" in a way which adversely affected the whole subsequent critical tradition. One example explains the point. Hazlitt was politically opposed to Burke, but regarded him as a great thinker none the less. He made such "disinterestedness" a test of intellectual integrity. Arnold chose to treat disinterestedness as something else: neutrality. On Arnold's view, the critic is free of attachments and adopts a wholly noncommittal viewpoint. But Paulin argues that Hazlitt was right to demand of criticism that it should be engaged and polemical, shaped by a definite perspective yet still able to applaud whatever merit exists in what it criticises.
Hazlitt was a great admirer of Napoleon. He was devastated by his hero's defeat at Waterloo because it represented the collapse of the dream of liberation-that dawn in 1789 when it was bliss to be alive. The man who wrote those words had reneged on his early idealism, and so had Coleridge and Southey; Hazlitt did not forgive them. Someone once told him, "I admire Napoleon for putting down the rabble in Paris," to which Hazlitt replied: "I admire him for putting down a rabble of kings in Europe." Hazlitt's own brother-in-law, as editor of The Times, was one of those responsible for raising the cry of "Legitimacy" that restored the Bourbons. Hazlitt was drunk for two weeks after Waterloo; he then forswore liquor, wrote his political essays, published them in volume form in 1819, and later wrote his The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte to vindicate his hero against Sir Walter Scott's Tory biography of him. Paulin points out that Hazlitt risked imprisonment for his attacks on the Tory administration of the day.
These aspects of Hazlitt's work, and the tragic love affair which wrecked his reputation when he published his account of it, are illuminated by Paulin's analyses. Much contemporary literary criticism suffers from reliance on the suggestive allusion and the associations in the critic's own mind rather than the real links in what he studies. Paulin is guilty now and then of similar manoeuvres, and he makes implausibly much turn on prosody-the way Hazlitt's prose sometimes scans like poetry. But in general Paulin's account reveals the elaborate structure of Hazlitt's artistry and the background to his thought. Paulin's discussion will probably be most useful to those who already know their Hazlitt, because his account of the life and work are very much supplementary to the rhetorical themes, the philosophy, the prose style, and their sources in Hazlitt's experience. But anyone who reads Paulin will come away knowing that he has been well-conducted into a stimulating encounter with a great writer.
One matter on which Paulin insists overmuch, and offers as a point of novelty in his treatment, is the question of Hazlitt's race. Paulin is keen that we should regard Hazlitt as an Irishman, despite the facts that he was born in Kent and educated in Shropshire and London, that his mother came from a long established Norfolk family, and that his father came from a north of England tribe, branches of which went to Scotland and thence, in the wake of the Protestant conquerors, to Ireland. These last produced the Rev. William Hazlitt Senior, who might well have said, with the Duke of Wellington when someone told the peer that he must be Irish because he was born in Ireland, "if I had been born in a stable it would not make me a horse."
Why, then, does Paulin insist on Hazlitt's Irishness? The only discernible reason seems to be wish-fulfilment. Leeds-born Paulin makes much of his Belfast roots and even more of his Belfast accent, whose cadences, when on television, he milks with considerable artistry to express his critical reactions. Anyone in love with Ireland and its wonderful literary traditions might wish to be Irish and, further, might wish that his literary heroes were Irish, too. I therefore surmise that when Paulin learned that the Rev. William Hazlitt Senior had the good fortune to be born in Shronell, Co. Tipperary, he saw Irishness bursting like a glorious light over the Reverend's descendants, no matter what their place of birth and education and no matter where their mothers came from. It seems not to matter that there is nothing in Hazlitt's mind, or style, or interests, which even remotely depends on the geography of his forebears' movements-except in one respect, which is that the Hazlitts' friendship with the Godwins is the result of both families' Norfolk roots.
All this, ultimately, is a distraction. The real merit of Paulin's study of Hazlitt lies in its success in showing that this marvellous writer belongs in the first rank of English letters, and therefore deserves, as he is now sure to get, many more readers.
The Day-Star of liberty: William Hazlitt's radical style
Tom Paulin
Faber and Faber 1998, ?22.50
