William Hazlitt: Radical Voice from High Romanticism

139 REVIEWS WILLIAM HAZLITT: RADICAL VOICE FROM HIGH ROMANTICISM TAe Letters of William Hazlitt, ed. Herschel M. Sikes, W. H. Bonner, and Gerald Lahey. NYU Press, 1978. 399pp. $8.50 paper. John Kinnaird. William Hazlitt: Critic ofPower. Columbia University Press, 1978. 429pp. $22.50. In the Everyman's Library, this biographical summary prefaces works by the radical polemicist, critic, and essayist William Hazlitt: Born in 1788 and educated for the Unitarian ministry. Studied painting, wrote dramatic criticisms. Continental tour, 1824-5. Died in 1830. Thumbnail sketches are useful, but this one is inaccurate and misleading. Born in 1778 (eight years after his onetime friend, Wordsworth), in adolescence Hazlitt withdrew from the piety of his father, a converted Presbyterian minister credited with founding Unitarianism in the U.S. during an attempt to settle here in the 1780's. In the apocalyptic 1790's, Hazlitt was educated at a religious dissenter's academy so radical that it was condemned as "the slaughterhouse of Christianity." He left it without a degree in order to write philosophy and study painting. During the Peace of Amiens in 1802 he went to Paris, commissioned to copy masterpieces concentrated in Napoleon's Louvre, and (as Kinnaird expertly shows) experienced an epiphany that disclosed his life's work: "Where the triumph of human liberty had been, there were the triumphs of human genius." Back in London he eventually turned for a livelihood to the disreputable new profession ofjournalistic reviewing in the partisan press that had sprung up to mold mass opinion after the French Revolution. For the rest of his life he struggled ideologically against the Times, the Quarterly Review, Blackwood's, etc., reactionary guardians of a threatened ruling class culture. In the year of Byron's death, 1824, which is now widely recognized as closing the period of British High Romanticism, Hazlitt completed his most important critical work. The Spirit oftheAge: or Contemporary Portraits, depicting the "war" between advanced and reactionary tendencies within the political and cultural leaders of his generation. Only then did he find an opportunity to make the traditional Grand Tour of Europe featured in the sketch. Ironically, as Kinnaird shows, the Tour initiated a twilight existence for Hazlitt of growing alienation from the newer cultural hypocrisies that were ushering in the Victorian era. Still publishing but penniless, emaciated by an undiagnosable stomach ailment which Kinnaird identifies metaphorically as "internal bleeding," Hazlitt died at age fifty-two in 1830, having rejoiced at the news of the July Revolution in France. Hazlitt was admired after his death by such writers as Thackeray, Stevenson, and (in France) Sainte-Beuve, but he was never mentioned by his most obvious successor as a popularizing critic of the British literary tradition, Matthew Arnold. We can speculate upon the reasons: not only were Hazlitt's politics too radical, as Victorian commentators seldom failed to note; his personal life was also 140 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW an affront. Unaffectedly bohemien even after marriage and children, he was, for example, not only open with friends about his recourse to prostitutes, but he also greeted them respectfully on the street. His friend P. G. Patmore also recalled an apartment in which Hazlitt had casually covered the mantlepiece and wall with names and addresses (like a modern phone booth) and with key words for essays. After separating from his wife, he fell in love with the unresponsive (and therefore idealized) teenage daughter of his landlord, and went through a degrading, seldomused Scottish divorce. Even all that might have been overlooked if he had not published his letters detailing the affair under the titleLiberAmorís—the fool of love—a realistic confession that privately titillated readers for the next century. Nevertheless, on the centenary of Hazlitt's death in 1930, P. P. Howe, a devoted British amateur (in the best sense) scholar brought out the "monument" called for by Bulwer-Lytton in 1836, a comprehensive edition of Hazlitt's estimated three million published words, in twenty-one volumes. Howe excluded correspondence from the edition, having excerpted what was available for his sympathetic Life of Hazlitt in 1922. As we might guess of a prolific periodical essayist, Hazlitt wasted few words in his private letters, which reflect...