The Quarrel Of The Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt

Introduction

John Keats and his friend John Hamilton Reynolds were ardent admirers of Hazlitt. They attended his lectures, read aloud to each other from his essays, and formulated their theories of poetry in response to his views. Through their eyes Hazlitt appears at his best, because when he was with friends like them – ambitious young men of talent – he was relaxed and expansive, ready to talk endlessly about art and philosophy – not in monologue, as Coleridge did, but as a conversationalist in the same mould as his friend Charles Lamb.
      In a letter of April 1817 Reynolds describes entertaining Hazlitt to dinner:

On Thursday last Hazlitt was with me at home, and remained with us till 3 o'clock in the morning! – full of eloquence, – warm, lofty , and communicative on everything imaginative and intelligent, – breathing out with us the peculiar and favourite beauties of our best bards, – passing from grand and commanding argument to gaieties and graces of wit and humour, – and the elegant and higher beauties of Poetry. He is indeed great company, and leaves a weight on the mind, which 'it can hardly bear'. He is full of what Dr Johnson terms 'good talk.' His countenance also is extremely fine: – a sunken and melancholy face, – a forehead lined with thought and bearing a full and strange pulsation on exciting subjects, – an eye, dashed in its light with sorrow, but kindling and living at intellectual moments, – and a stream of coal–black hair dropping all around. Such a face, so silent and sol sensitive, is indeed the banner of the mind. 'It is a book, in which one may read strange things.' He would have become the pencil of Titian, and have done justice to the soul–fed colours of that bold and matchless Italian. I fear you will be tired of this long personality, but I remember having read a few papers of this to you, and therefore imagine you are not wholly uninterested in him.

Reynold's portrait has an air of hyperbole, but it exactly chimes with accounts given by others who enjoyed Hazlitt's friendship. Brilliant, earnest, and always well–judging, he forgot his own existence and its torments when absorbed in discussion. On those occasions he revealed the pure disinterested genius his contemporaries valued in him.
     A very different picture is given by Thomas De Quincey, never a friend to Hazlitt, and still less so after being detected in unacknowledged burrowings from Hazlitt's writings (from which he was uncomfortably obliged to apologize). 'His inveterate misanthropy was constitutional,' De Quincey wrote. 'Exasperated it certainly had been by accidents of life, by disappointments, by mortifications, by insults, and still more by having wilfully placed himself in collision from the first with all the interests that were in the sunshine of the world, and of all the persons that were then powerful in England...A friend of his it was ­ a friend wishing to love him, and admiring him almost to extravagance ­ who told me, in illustration of the dark sinister gloom which sate for ever upon his countenance and gestures, that involuntarily, when Hazlitt put his hand within his waistcoat (as a mere unconscious trick of habit), he himself felt a sudden recoil of fear, as from one who was searching for a hidden dagger.'
      These two portraits ­ drawn from a number of either kind ­ could scarcely be more at variance. They mark the contradictory views taken of Hazlitt in his own day and afterwards. For two generations following his death it was the latter depiction that prevailed. Some thought him the greatest thinker and critical writer of his age: others, even those who acknowledged his genius, saw him as a gloomy pessimistic Jacobin motivated by party spleen and personal antipathies. Leaving aside the melodramatic reference to a dagger, chose to allegorise Hazlitt's fearsome powers as a polemicist and debater in print, there is some truth in De Quincey's picture, for Hazlitt was indeed at loggerheads with the vested interests of his time, he indeed never courted favour with those 'in the sunshine of the world' because he suspected that most of them had got there by dishonest or despicable means, and he indeed suffered much from disappointments in his personal life and insults were connected, for this was an age of violent polemic and party strife, of which Hazlitt was the subject of constant attack by the Tory press, of a kind we could not now tolerate and therefore do not now see. He returned their attacks with interest, but his enemies made ammunition out of his private sufferings, thereby doubling them.
      Understanding this shows how to reconcile the two foregoing portraits. The painter James Smetham, commenting on De Qunicey's pen–sketch, wrote: 'It is said in books we have read since then, that Hazlitt was a gloomy and rather dangerous–looking man, who seemed as if he were feeling for a dagger. We won't believe it. We will allow him to have been dark and solemn and quiet and Dantesque: but what was taken for sinister and malignant was only a knitting the sober brow of Il Penseroso frowning away ³the brood of folly without father bred².'3 Most who knew Hazlitt knew that this was so. Coleridge said he could be 'brow–hanging, shoe contemplative, strange' others that he was 'lean, slouching, splenetic'; but Charles Lamb, Hazlitt's life–long friend, wrote in defending him against an attack by Southey: 'I should belie my own conscience, if I said less than that I think William Hazlitt to be, in his natural state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So far from being ashamed of that intimacy which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for so many years to have preserved it entire; and I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.'
      A man who could inspire such different responses, and who could think and write as Hazlitt did – 'we think we are very fine fellows nowadays,' Robert Louis Stevenson told his contemporaries, 'but none of us can write like Hazlitt' – deserves explanation. The explanation is his life, from which all that he felt and thought sprang, so to explain him is to tell his story.

According to Virginia Woolf, the aim of biography should be to connect hidden areas of its subject's personality – what she called the 'soul' – with external forces of society and history. A mere list of someone's doings would miss the point of our principal reason for reading biography, which is to gain insight into the motivations and meanings of a human life. In writing Hazlitt's biography the task of connecting inner and outer in this way is made easy by the fact that he is a completely autobiographical author, utterly himself in his writings. With Hazlitt, inner and outer are one. He lived a confessional existence, transposing his experience into literature, writing with stark honesty. He is among the very few who lived and wrote without a mask. This is not to say that he wrote without artistry and even artifice, but his material was his own thought and feeling, his own dealings with lifes' intractabilities, and he used that material unsparingly.
      The autobiographical richness of Hazlitt's writings might itself seem a problem. Autobiography tends to be apologia, a self–serving exercise at best creative with truth and at worst – and too often – evasive, distorting, or dishonest. But Hazlitt was not a self–server, and he was incapable of lying. He did not care to conceal what he thought or felt about matters that stirred him. When he desired privacy for himself or others, he remained silent. To the mortification of his friends it was a desire he rarely felt.
      In one good sense, then, to meet Hazlitt almost in the flesh, one need only open his works and read'. 'Hazlitt was not one of those non–committal writers who shuffle off in a mist and die of their own insignificance,' Virginia Woolf wrote. 'His essays are emphatically himself ... So thin is the veil of the essay as Hazlitt wore it, his very look comes before us.'
      Because Hazlitt is so autobiographical an author, his work has, for all its diversity and range, an intensely personal character, as if it constitutes a single long anecdote about a man responding to his world – to art, literature and drama, to politics and ideas – with nerves naked to their pressure. Some of the usual resources of biographers are in Hazlitt's case lacking: few letters to or from him survive, and he kept no diary. There are may contemporary records of him in the form of others' diaries and letters, and also in the great quarrel of the press, which involved him as a principal combatant; but the fact that he was a controversial figure, defended and attacked with equal violence by his peers, obliges a biographer to treat contemporary claims about him with caution.
      Hazlitt was born in 1778, just two years after the American declaration of independence, and died in 1830, lingering long enough in his last illness to hear with pleasure that the Bourbons had again been driven from Paris. His life therefore spans a vivid epoch. Its core event is the French Revolution, which was Hazlitt's inspiration and guiding star. He witnessed the rise of Napoleon, whom he admired and whose biography he later wrote. He witnessed – literally so, reading the manuscript of the Lyrical Ballads before publication – the birth of a new world in poetry at the hands of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who were first his friends and later his enemies because they betrayed the cause of liberty – and in Coleridge's case, in Hazlitt's view, because he betrayed his talent too. He was an inspiration to Keats, whom he befriended. He influenced Stendhal long before the two of them met in person. Throughout his life Hazlitt opposed the repressive conservative politics of England, prompted by its fear of France's revolutionary example into quashing the reform movement that had been growing during the eighteenth century, and which briefly seemed about to catch fire from the conflagration in Paris.
      Hazlitt thought and wrote always as an independent. He was trebly an alien in his own land and time: because of his inexorable personality, because he was of Dissenting stock, and because he was a radical in politics. It gives one pause to reflect that he was a contemporary of Jane Austen, whose delicately nuanced social world, with its pointillistic graduations of snobbery and rank in country house and vicarage settings, seems a world away from the middle–class intellectual community of London to which Hazlitt belonged, where professional writers chose their allegiances for themselves. But both their worlds are real parts of the history of their time, and Hazlitt's writings were read in both.