William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt: The Continuing Dialogue (review)

This is the second book edited by Eleanor Gates to emerge in as many years, both of which draw on her father Payson G. Gates's mid-century Romantic scholarship and—more importantly—on his excellent collection of holograph letters and other primary materials. The first of these two books, Leigh Hunt: A Life in Letters (1998), greatly enlarged the Hunt canon by making available a selection of 422 of his letters (along with fourteen Hazlitt letters), many previously unpublished and all complete with well-researched headnotes. Such a book has therefore already found an indispensable place on the shelves of most university libraries. Whether the present book will be found equally important, however, is much less certain. It does have strengths that make it worthwhile to consult as a supplement to currently available biographies of Hunt and Hazlitt, offering adjustments to our perspective on certain events made possible by reference to previously unpublished letters. As its editor also points out, "there is still no study specifically devoted to the Hunt-Hazlitt relationship [and] [Payson] Gates's is in fact the first work to explore this in any systematic fashion" (xiv). However, her subsequent claim that the book "as such fills a large gap" is somewhat overstated (xiv). To match such a claim, one might imagine a study of the mutual influence of Hunt and Hazlitt that attempts to situate this relationship along some of the more intriguing fault-lines of early nineteenth-century struggles for political and ideological authority mapped out by the mass of recent scholarship in this area. Instead, we have here a more traditional biographical narrative—albeit a dual one—that employs a strikingly unself-conscious Romantic style, a style that at its most pronounced (in the opening and closing chapters of the book) presents something of a period piece, of more interest to a history of literary biography than to the current study of these two writers. However, if this strong flavor of anachronism can be accommodated, there does remain a core of interest to be gleaned in the details of a story that pairs these two writers in a "Continuing Dialogue," and in the way Eleanor Gates's more than 800 endnotes double the trope of dialogue by working hard to modernize her father's text, often along the way providing useful checklists of primary sources (both old and new) for key biographical details.

If nothing else, Payson Gates's narrative registers the shock of difference created by the utter transformation of critical discourse over the last half-century, in particular by throwing into vivid negative relief the prevailing convention of avoiding at all costs what McGann has famously called an "uncritical absorption in romanticism's own self-representations" (The Romantic Ideology 1). Consider the following passage from Gates's first chapter, entitled "When the World Was New":

Whatever the subject, Hunt is well-nigh perfect in the dual role of genial companion and guide par excellence in matters literary—at once the friendly essayist who comes to the reader's fireside and chats with him in the most entertaining fashion, and the discerning and sympathetic critic whose exquisite taste and wealth of knowledge admirably qualify him to select and interpret the works of others. It is no wonder that Charles Lamb called him "matchless as a fire-side companion." (9)

The echo of Roosevelt's "fireside chats" situates this discourse in the postwar "politics of vision" that did so much to produce the "Romantic Ideology" in America. At what other period, one might ask, would Hazlitt be described as "healthily liberal" in an "unregenerate age" (6), or could one risk the unfettered Keatsian hyperbole of the assertion "At his best, Hazlitt is unsurpassed in the whole realm of English literature" (6)? One other example of this style will suffice, in which we observe the construction of Romanticism as a secular faith amidst the new set of postwar...