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| William Hazlitt (self-portrait, 1802) |
"Rules and models destroy genius and art."
- William Hazlitt, On Originality (1817)
If George Orwell was once memorably described as a man who "can't blow his nose without reflecting on the state of the British handkerchief industry," the same can be said of William Hazlitt (1778-1830), one of the most gifted and controversial authors of his time. Like Orwell, Hazlitt wasn't censorious or a moraliser; his journalism presented complex ideas with acute insight and a fresh, unique style. Today, he is considered a sideline figure in Romanticism, the literary and artistic movement that swept across Europe in the late 18th century. But it should be noted, of course, that Romanticism is largely the invention of 20th century academia. There was no actual movement at the time (at least, not in England), and even if there were Hazlitt would certainly not have considered himself a part of it. As we will see, he stood alone against trends and fashions. Another great irony of Hazlitt's reputation is the relatively minor status he is afforded by modern critics, despite the fact his essays and articles appeared in national magazines before many of his poetic peers had even reached print. The time has surely come for a reckoning: for William Hazlitt to finally be recognised as one of the most important English intellectuals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and for his legacy as a free-thinker to be recognised in an era of fake news, identity politics and cancel culture. In fact, there could hardly be a more apt figure to help us navigate our way through these complicated and polarising times than Hazlitt.
In the late 18th century the word 'romantic' was not a complimentary term. It stood for ideas that were fanciful, impractical or inconsequential. Even Thomas Paine, the great polemicist, and now considered one of the first flowerings of English Romanticism, used the phrase derisively to describe state hierarchy in his influential pamphlet
The Rights of Man (1791). This was the Age of Reason, where cultural and scientific advances imposed rigid structures of order and logic on art, literature and philosophy. The political landscape was particularly repressive. In England, the Tory administration under William Pitt was notorious for its savage economic policies, leading British citizens (mostly comprised of working-class labourers) towards high taxation, high inflation and mass unemployment. But in comparison with France, at least England had the illusion of democracy. The appalling poverty endured by Frence citizens was a direct result of the despotic sovereignty of Louis XVI, whose luxurious lifestyle was such a drain on state funds it practically bankrupted the country. Events in Paris from July 1789, however, were to shake the foundations of European society. This was the beginning of the French Revolution, where the central concepts of
liberté,
egalité and
fraternité were to strike a powerful chord of dissension and expose the hypocrisy of the so-called Age of Enlightenment. It was this idea of individual liberty through both political freedom and that of the imagination which marked the birth of Romanticism. The French Revolution may have been the catalyst which sparked this new thinking, but (to mix metaphors for a moment) the seed of dissent had aleady been planted by the American War of Independence some fourteen years earlier - and it was William Hazlitt's first-hand exposure to the complex emotions surrounding that conflict which spurred him towards radicalism.
Hazlitt was born in Maidstone, Kent, the son of an Unitarian minister. In 1780, Hazlitt's father so outraged his congregation by openly advocating the American Revolutionary War that he was forced to move the family to Bandon in Ireland. It was there, after meeting American prisoners of war, that William Hazlitt Snr. made the decision to move Unitariansism to the United States, establishing the first church there in 1783. Returning to England a year later, the family settled in Wem, Shropshire, where the young Hazlitt was groomed for a life in the ministry. After a brief period studying at the Unitarian College in Hackney, exposed to the radical philosophies of Helévitus and D'Holbach, Hazlitt renounced the prospect of joining the church. His decision to become an author was cemented in January 1798 when he witnessed Samuel Taylor Coleridge preaching in Shrewsbury. It was through his aquaintance with Coleridge that Hazlitt was introduced to William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb. Hazlitt would later immortalise his long conversations with these men in his essay
My First Acquaintance with Poets (1823), one of the most beautifully composed portraits of these writers in the language. Lamb, who was to become alongside Coleridge a lifelong friend, was sufficiently impressed by Hazlitt's articulacy and enthusiasm to offer him a post on
The Morning Chronicle. The parliamentary reports and theatrical reviews he wrote for that paper brought him to the attention of more prestigious magazines such as
The Examiner and
London Magazine; it was through these publications that Hazlitt was to make his name as both a controversial personality and original thinker.
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| Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1804) by James Northcote |
Hazlitt's style was honed through the deployment of non-ornamental language, coupled with the use of aphorism, as a means to intellectual enquiry, often lending his writing a direct, almost theatrical flavour. One piece begins with the title '
What is the People?', only to be followed in the first line of the essay by " -AND who are you to ask the question?", revealing a somewhat eccentric personality at play. He described himself as a "Radical liberal" but held great sympathy for the high-Toryism of Samuel Johnson. He preferred the rustic serenity of Constable to the frenetic seascapes of Turner. In 1825, when asked to write a review of the recently deciphered diaries of Samuel Pepys, he chose to write about Shakespeare instead. The extrordinary range of Hazlitt's writing, from his account of the "
fine gentleman at the play [
sic]" who "enters the boxes with a menacing air, as if prepared to force his way through some obstacle he resents beforehand" to his critique of Thomas Malthus and mandatory depopulation presents an insight into an enquiring mind trying to make sense of his time. But it is not contentious to argue that a number of Hazlitt's preoccupations seem highly advanced for the 19th century and strongly anticipate many of the concerns we find ourselves grappling with today.
Hazlitt was particularly suspicious of the popular press with its "flimsy circulating medium of magazines," which he claimed had reduced modern authorship to "a species of stenography." This appears a paradoxical argument when we consider Hazlitt made his name and earned a living through journalism. His supposition that "we read by proxy, we skim the cream of prose without any trouble; we get at the quintessence of poetry without loss of time" appears damning, as does his contention that "literature and civilisation have abstracted man from himself so far; and the press has been the ruin of the state." This is not a Swiftean discharge of bile, but serves to remind us of the complex relationship between author and reader, creating a direct - if imaginary - discourse between the two. By reminding us of the press' power to corrupt, and the consequences for the people who become corrupted as a result, Hazlitt asserts our personal sovereignty and freedom of thought as individual human beings. In his essay
On Characteristics (1823), Hazlitt observes "Truth is not one, but many" and that "an observation may be true in itself that contradicts another equally true, according to the point-of-view from which we contemplate the subject." This is a clear reference to Relativism, a school of thought largely ignored by Enlightenment thinkers, and one which would not gain currency until the 20th century. The self-reflexity Hazlitt demonstrates throughout his writing is not just a sign of his modernity but his remarkable prescience as an author.
On the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), one of Hazlitt's most celebrated essays, effectively constitutes the first series of case studies in English literature. The process of psychological examination Hazlitt employs to explain character motivation is exemplary in that he was writing at a time when no practical model of psychological analysis existed. In a similar vein, Hazlitt described his own work in the essay
On the Causes of Popular Opinion (1821) as "the thoughts of a metaphysician expressed by a painter [...] subtle and difficult problems translated into hieroglyphics": an aphorism that casually pre-empts both Charles Dodgson's influential studies of symbolic logic and the Structuralist philosophy of Roland Barthes.
Hazlit's work, and, on occasion, Hazlitt himself, was often the subject of scrutiny. In
Blackwood's Magazine, John Lockhart denigrated Hazlitt as a member of the "Cockney School of Poetry" - effectively describing him as illiterate and uneducated. In his day Hazlitt was the first journalist to make a living solely through his writing, so it was inevitable his detractors took great delight in his imprisonment for debt in 1822. But it was his affair with Sarah Walker, a young maid in his service, which left him all but ostracised by the literary community. The fact that she was still a minor, some 29 years younger than Hazlitt, served to confirm his image as a seditious radical dangerously loose in polite society. In an attempt to justify his obsession with Walker, Hazlitt wrote an epistolary novella purporting to represent the correspondence between the two - not so much to explain the situation to others, he stressed, but in order to understand it for himself.
Liber Amoris, or the New Pygmalion was published in 1823 and was instantly vilified by the press. The critical backlash was so intense it even dwarfed Thomas De Quincey's
Confessions of an English Opium Eater published a year earlier. Hazlitt's reaction was to set about writing his life's work: a four-volume history of Napoleon.
Hazlitt had been present when Napoleon was brought to England aboard HMS
Bellerophon in July 1815, and was surprised to find that the vanquished emperor was not the "unclassifiable being, half-African, half-Mediterranean mulatto" the
Morning Post had described but well-proportioned and handsome. His admiration for Napoleon was not unusual (many Englifh people felt he had proven himself a worthy foe), but sometimes it would veer into the realm of out-and-out idolatry. J. B. Priestly described Hazlitt as a 'proto-socialist,' so his sense of awe that Napoleon could achieve so much by "sheer effort of will [...] a modern
Tamburlaine" is puzzling, but then Hazlitt was aware that the question was much more interesting than the answer - representing, in the words of his literary idol Sir Francis Bacon, "a knowledge broken." That
The Life of Naploeon (1828-30) fails to honour this intellectual process is unfortunate. In poor health and facing insolvency, Hazlitt rushed to complete the work by quarrying much of the information from other sources. He only lived to see the first volume published, and even that aroused fierce controversy. His account of the French Revolution provoked particular outrage. Some contemporaries were disgusted by his veneration of an act directly opposing the established social order, while others were embarrassed by his inability to engage with the facts of the Revolution: that it had overthrown a despotic monarchy only to allow an autocratic emperor to usurp executive power.
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| Napoleon on Board the Bellerophon (c. 1880) by Sir William Quiller Orchardson |
To be fair, many of these criticisms were the by-product of a fashionable cynicism now sweeping literary society. In his early adulthood, Coleridge had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution, even wrting an ode inspired by the storming of the Bastille. By 1798, he publicly declared, "I have snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition and the fragments lie in the lumber-room of penitence." In Europe, this wave of disillusionment had reached its peak. "The age treats us harshly!" Franz Schubert wrote to Caspar David Friedrich in 1810. "The young people so seemingly full of promise and energy, who some six years ago wanted to storm the intellectual skies, to bring a new blossoming of poetry and science - where have they gone?" Friedrich's response was to "find solitude in order to communicate with nature." This was the route that Wordsworth and Coleridge decided to take. Even William Blake muted the references to radical politics in his poetry. The noose had started to tighten in 1793 when William Pitt called for the ban of "wicked and seditious literature." Thomas Paine had been forced to flee after a warrant was issued for his arrest. Art and literature were now a dangerous medium to effect social change. In remaining true to his ideals, Hazlitt had set himself out of step with the literary establishment. By the time he completed the final volume of
Napoleon he was a disillusioned and broken man.
When Hazlitt died in 1830 at the age of 52, a result of the years of poverty he endured, the Sarah Walker scandal had completely overshadowed his reputation as an author. Thomas Love Peacock, a former supporter turned rival, coldly declared
Liber Amoris and
The Life of Napoleon to be "the incoherent last musings of a sometime polemicist turned full-time libertine and whore-master." John Lockhart, meanwhile, referred back to his earlier dismissal of Hazlitt as one of the Cockney School and stated his "spent discourse was, at best,
romantic" (the irony of which is that Lockhart himself has now been incorporated into the canon of English Romantic thinkers). It was not until the latter part of the 19th century that Hazlitt's reputation would undergo reassessment. Even W. C. Hazlitt, his grandson, was the victim of the long-standing grudge against him by the literary establishment. By 1889, modern literature had become a respectable field of study and many forgotten figures were reappraised. In his seminal work
A History of 18th Century Literature (1890), Sir Edmund Gosse ranked Hazlitt alongside Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke and Leigh Hunt as one of the most influential and forward-thinking authors of his era.
In many ways, Hazlitt's work had not been completely ignored. It's hard to imagine William Morris' lectures on socialism or John Ruskin's art criticism without Hazlitt's influence. Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, Hazlitt's name has been evoked numerous times in relation to a wide range of authors. George Orwell has been classed as a direct lineal descendant of Hazlitt (his likening of Hitler on the cover of a 1946 reprint of
Mein Kampf to "an image of the dying Christ" brings to mind Hazlitt's reference to Napoleon as "a modern
Tamburlaine"), while Dennis Potter's television plays contain many allusions to Hazlitt's work - most notably
The Confidence Course (1965), where Potter evokes the ghost of Hazlitt as a disruptive outsider at a Dale Carnegie Institute meeting. But then, Hazlitt has always been an outsider: not just within Romanticism or the literary establishment, but.within his own time With the complex arguments and issues thrown at us by the popular media today, perhaps Hazlitt has finally found his place as a true visionary.
