On the Pleasures of Hating

We have long looked across the Atlantic for permission to be cranky. For all our fierce frontier spirit and John Wayne flicks, Americans are perennially—compulsively—sunny.¹ But sunny is such dull emotional weather, blank as blue sky, empty as the mind of God. Which is why one is relieved to have at hand English essayist William Hazlitt’s brief tonic piece “On the Pleasures of Hating.”² Penned almost two centuries ago in 1826, the essay remains today as fresh and invigorating as a slap in the face, as familiar as the stench of rot.

Among the many pleasures of Hazlitt’s piece is the permission he grants us to lay claim to our baser, not our better, natures. And to befriend them thereby. It’s hard not to be charmed by brave admission of base instinct, as when Gore Vidal confessed to a reporter that “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” It’s not simply the marvelous frisson of truth that delights, but that such truth is tonic—liberating us from shame about our own too-human natures. “Nothing that is human is foreign to me,” wrote Terence, the second-century Roman playwright, and we’re still quoting him today, because it’s true.³ Schadenfreude—malicious delight in another’s misfortune—is so commonplace as to merit its own term (in German, of course). By contrast the popular American adage “If you can’t say something nice . . . don’t say anything at all” comes to us from that august literary source Thumper, the rabbit from the 1942 script of Walt Disney’s Bambi, and has always struck me—even as a child—as a sure-fire recipe for conversational disaster. What, after all, could be duller than saying something nice? Niceness blunts the writer’s greatest gift—clear sight.

To hate—it seems—is human; to write well of it, sublime. And Hazlitt does. His is an almost textbook example of the essay’s charms, a veritable handbook on how to write one well.

Hazlitt opens with that classic essayistic move—contemplation of the ordinary and overlooked; specifically, he begins by observing a bug, of which he writes: “There is a spider crawling along the matted floor of the room where I sit . . . ; he runs with heedless, hurried haste, he hobbles awkwardly towards me, he stops—he sees the giant shadow before him, and, at a loss whether to retreat or proceed, meditates his huge foe—but as I do not start up . . . he takes heart and ventures on with mingled cunning, impudence and fear. As he passes me, I lift up the matting to assist his escape . . . a child, a woman, a clown, or a moralist a century ago, would have crushed the little reptile to death—my philosophy has got beyond that . . . but still I hate the very sight of it. The spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it.”

Hate, Hazlitt makes clear, outlives our best intentions to weed it from our natures, and so begins his artful dissection of sentiment, society, and self.

His piece from there can be read as a sort of sentimental striptease, peeling back the layers of his subject to reveal the mysteries of malevolence: first he considers hate in abstract terms (as when he writes that “Nature seems [the more we look into it] made up of antipathies: . . . Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests”); then he considers hate as it manifests in society, where he critiques hate’s place in religion, politics, and pop culture; finally he scrutinizes private life, where he dissects the pleasure of hating his friends, admits to hating books, and finally tells us that he hates himself. And it is here that Hazlitt demonstrates the essayist’s greatest strength: unrelenting self-examination—the courage to lay oneself bare.

I could describe for you the myriad charms of his charming piece by telling you about his high-low diction play (as when he calls the spider one of an “edifying breed”). I could point out...