In Our Time - William Hazlitt

Episode Date: April 8, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and works of William Hazlitt. Hazlitt is best known for his essays, which ranged in subject matter from Shakespeare, through his first meeting with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to a boxing match. What is less well-known, however, is that he began his writing life as a philosopher, before deliberately abandoning the field for journalism. Nonetheless, his early reasoning about the power of the imagination to take human beings beyond narrow self-interest, as encapsulated in his 'Essay on the Principles of Human Action', shines through his more popular work.Hazlitt is a figure full of contradictions - a republican who revered Napoleon, and a radical who admired the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke. His reputation suffered terribly from his book 'Liber Amoris', a self-revealing memoir of his infatuation with his landlady's daughter. But in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, his importance was acknowledged by writers like Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Ford Madox Ford. In the 180 years since his death, his stature as perhaps the finest essayist in the language has grown and grown. With:Jonathan BateProfessor of English Literature at the University of Warwick Anthony GraylingProfessor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of LondonUttara NatarajanSenior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of LondonProducer: Phil Tinline.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, on a tomb in the graveyard of St. Anne's Church in London, there's an inscription that reads, The first unanswered metaphysician of the age, a despiser of the merely rich and great, a lover of the people, poor or oppressed, a hater of the pride and power of the few. the unconquered champion of truth, liberty and humanity. The essayist and critic William Hazlitt was buried in 1830. By some he was described as the Shakespeare prose writer of our glorious country.

Yet his rebellious, republican views led him to be demonised and ridiculed by the Regency elite. Haslid's writing was as wide-ranging as his interests. She brought the same energy and focus to essays on boxing and racquetball as he did to those on Shakespeare. What's less well known is that he began his career as a painter and a painter. a philosopher. However, his unrequited infatuation with his landlady's daughter and the memoir in which he revealed this led him into disgrace and he died in poverty. His reputation as an intellectual is still recovering. With me to discuss the turbulent life and works of William Hazlett are Anthony Grayling,

Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London, Oetra Natarajan, Senior Lecture in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmith's College University of London and Jonathan Bait, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick. Jonathan, but can you give us a sense that William Hazard's family, background and the effect it had on his ideas? Yeah, he was born into an Ulster dissenting family, actually born at Maidstone in Kent. And the key fact of his background, his upbringing, was that his father was a dissenting minister. He was a unitarian. So he's involved with the non-established church.

And immediately that has very strong. links with politics in the period. Early in Haslitt's childhood, there was a falling out, really for political reasons, within the congregation of his father, as a result of which his father went to America for a time and became one of the first Unitarian ministers in America. Then back to England and started a ministry on the Welsh borders, There's a little town called Wembe just outside Shrewsbury. But as I say, the key fact is that Haslett's father is a preacher and a political, radical,

and indeed publishes his sermons and so forth. And being in Unitarian, he didn't believe that Christ was the son of God, but Christ was a great moral teacher. And this barred the young Haslett from education at the ancient university. So at 15, he went to Hackney College, a college set up by descendants, in which you've got a far better education. so all three of you here today claim, then you would have got at Oxford or Cambridge.

Yeah, this is one of the really interesting things about the links between radical thinkers in the 18th century and religion. The only established universities were Oxford and Cambridge in England. To go there, you had to sign up to the Articles of Faith of the Church of England. If you were a dissenter, you wouldn't do that. So the dissenters set up their own academies. There was a very famous one at Warrington was one of the first ones

where the great Joseph Priestley was teaching for a time. And then Hackney became the real sort of centre of dissenting education in London. Now, in the 18th century, education at Oxford and Cambridge was very much in the sort of aristotelian logic of the Middle Ages and above all in the classical languages. Whereas at these dissenting academies, you would study contemporary literature, you'd study Shakespeare, history, geography,

a much more rounded curriculum. And contemporary politics, I understand. Indeed, absolutely, yeah. So a much more rounded and contemporary curriculum. And this was crucial in shaping Haslett. After a brief attempt following his brother to be a painter, and I'm sure everybody around this table like some of his portrait paintings. Very much indeed.

He studied philosophy. And can you tell us a little about that, Jonathan, and then go into this first meeting. with Coleridge? Yeah, his older brother John became quite a successful portrait painter, especially of miniatures. And to begin with, Haslett thought he would follow in his brother's footsteps. And there are some very, very fine paintings by him. There's a wonderful painting in the National Portrait Gallery of his friend Charles Lamb, Charles Lamb looking like a Venetian senator. Haslett, as a painter, was very influenced by Titian in 1802 when he was, you know, when he was a

The war with France came to a temporary cessation. He was able to go to Paris and start copying portraits in the Louvre. And he said that Titian's portrait of a young man with a glove in black absolutely shaped his idea of what a great portrait was like. Then he studied philosophy. Sorry to hurry you along, we've got a lot to do. Then he studied philosophy. He studied philosophy and he thought that he had come up with a really original philosophical idea.

Anthony, I'm sure, will tell us it's not as original. Haslick claimed it was, but in 1808, he published his first work, a work of philosophy called an essay on the principles of human action. And after that essay, which Anthony can tell us a little bit more moment, he set off as a journalist, essayist, and met Coleridge. In fact, he walked 10 miles on a raw morning to hear Coleridge speech, give a sermon, speak a sermon, and that was the sacred year of 1790. 1798, yeah. I mean, the chronology is a bit confusing here because he wrote the essay a lot later. The essay is called My First Acquaintance with Poets. And it's about the year 1798 where Hazlitt is 20, so he's just on the threshold of adulthood. And Coleridge, himself a preacher, comes to preach at Haslitt's father's church.

And Haslett is absolutely enchanted by this figure of Coleridge, the great. thinker, the great poet and Haslett feels that he's in touch with new ideas and a new sense of every aspect of intellectual life coming together.

And Coleridge, preaching on truth and genius, although he turned on him savagely later, that is Haslett on Coleridge, and the other way around. Anthony Grayling, first of all about this philosophy and then Haslitt's take a view of the French Revolution which broke out in 1789. Yes, indeed. Well, in fact,

It is an original idea, and it has it. I'd like to defend him on that one, although it came out of a debate in the 18th century about personal identity and the continuity of personality through time, which had been originated in the preceding in the 17th century by John Locke. So there had been considerable discussion about this, and the discussion focused on the fact that traditionally, of course, people thought we had immaterial souls which persist through all the vicissitudes of ordinary life, and that's what survives death.

But the Unitarians, like William's father and the great Joseph Priestley and Price, who were principal discussers of this problem, were materialists. That is, in the case of British didn't think that we had an immaterial soul, and that posed some difficulties because what is it that survives over time, given all the physical changes we undergo, and what happens at the resurrection? That was the great point. And in the year of Hazlitt's birth, 1788, I think it was, was 78, 178, Priestley and Price published a correspondence they had had with one another on this very question.

And when Hasid went to the new college in Hackney in the 1790s, one of his teachers, a man called Belgium, had been a commentator on this discussion. Hasid must have discussed it with Belgium and heard lectures on the priestly thesis about personal identity. And it was as a result of that and of reading the Baron Dolbach on the nature of man, that he realized that there was a very key implication of the idea that our personality is not a matter of an immaterial soul, but is a matter, as it were, of succession of different stages. And this is that our future selves don't exist. And therefore our relationship to our own future selves is the same as our relationship to anybody else.

And the importance of that insight was that in the 18th century, and even still today, indeed, people think that the reason why we do what we do, the basis of our moral action, is our self-interest, is the fact that we put ourselves before anybody else. And has it recognized that if our future selves are on a par with all other selves, then in fact the way we act with respect to our future self has the same basis as our action for everybody else. And he called this the natural disinterestedness of the human mind. that it is imagination, sympathetic imagination, which connects us with the interests of our future selves

and therefore of everybody else, and it's on a par. It's not self-interest, which is important, but disinterestedness. He pinched a phrase to say that his book of philosophy was still born from the press and hardly anybody read it, but eventually it influenced certainly what he wrote from then onwards and the way he tackled the subjects he took on. It deeply influenced it, yes, he came to say that since metaphysical treatises, and I should just mention, by the way, that the word metaphysics in hazardous day meant what we nowadays call philosophy, because the word philosophy in hazardous day meant what we now call science.

It's all very confusing, but metaphysics. No, he recognised that a dry, detailed analytical treatise was going to reach very, very few readers. It's still true, maybe even more true today than it was in Hazard's its own day. And so he wanted to purvey his philosophical insights in popular essays. and came therefore to do that and to say that almost all his essays had underneath them some application of one or other of the principles that he had worked out very painfully and over a very long period of time from the 1790s into the first and second decades of the 19th century. He was 11 when the French Revolution broke out.

He became a passionate supporter of the French Revolution and more surprisingly he continued to be a supporter after the terror, which a lot of his then idols, younger idols, Kohler region words were being the prime example, ceased to be. He followed Napoleon. Napoleon, to him, had carried through the revolution. The Napoleonic code was the personification of the best of the, exemplification of the best of the revolution. Can you talk to that for a while?

Yes, indeed. Well, firstly, of course, the revolution caused the most immense excitement all around the civilised world. We have reports of people in Moscow and St. Petersburg saying how, you know, people of all nationalities that come out on the streets and hugged one another when they heard about the fall of the Bastille. And Hazlitz's sister, Peggy, in her memoir,

talks about how exhilarated her father, William Hazett Senior was when he heard about the news. So you can imagine this very precocious, very, very bright boy, 11-year-old boy, very close to his father and shared with his father a lot of those social and political principles that he had acquired from him would have been over the moon at the thought.

He said, in fact, that that was the day of his own birth that the birth of his consciousness and the birth of liberty took place on the same day. And he was true to that, as some other people were too, not everybody was disabused by the terror that happened later on. The principles of the French Revolution were very deeply rooted in the whole radical dissenting tradition, which of course was quashed by very repressive laws against...

In the 1790s. And he remained faithful to that, and he believed that Napoleon had taken the best of those principles. And, you know, when you look at the way Napoleon put down a rabble of kings in Europe, a nice joke that has itself, but somebody said to him that he admired Napoleon of putting down the rabble in the streets of Paris with Canaan, you know, Grapeshot, and has it said, no, I admire the way he put down a rabble of kings in Europe and brought the Holy Roman Empire to an end, opened the ghettos and enfranchised the Jews.

And he was a great admirer of Napoleon's. when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo Must later on, he was drunk for two weeks and then gave up alcohol altogether. So it just shows you how deeply and passionately attached he was to Napoleon. And indeed we should mention that his last great work at the very end of his life was a rather curate's egg of a three-volume biography of Napoleon.

But he also admired the code because it gave the rights to citizens. There was no preferment outside merit and people could come, as it were, from where Napoleon had come from to take over the state. Puter Natarajan, what were the other important philosophical influences at work on Haslett? Are we just laying the basis for it before we move on? Well, as Anthony said,

Haslitt's reaction was against these philosophers who grounded all human action in self-interest. And that was in turn underpinned by a notion that we're all propelled by our senses. We feel ourselves. and the world around us through our senses.

So in a way we're trapped by our senses because our senses cannot give us any real feeling of anyone else. This is why we naturally act self-interestedly. Hazlitt was therefore naturally drawn to philosophers who could counter

I think these notions of being completely ruled by the senses. Russo's Emil, he says, was very much a model for him. Russo criticising the modern philosophy in Emil, the material philosophy, as Anthony said. He is particularly dismissive of the notion that all our thoughts and feelings

can be boiled down to physical impressions. Bishop Barclay, I think, is an important influence too. Haslett several times expresses great admiration for Barclay. And although he isn't, in many ways, he discounts the ultimate emphasis. of Barclay's philosophy, he's very attracted to the idea that the mind can control what it perceives. But we're not controlled by what the external world impacts on the senses, but we in fact can control what we perceive. And a very key influence also, especially on that early essay, is Bishop Butler in the Rose Chapel summons. And what's crucial for Haslett about Butler

is that Butler insists that we can decouple sensory response, sense impressions, from self-interest. Can you un-rubble that a bit more? I can. Butler says that there are all kinds of ways in which, when we gratify our senses,

we in fact go against our self-interest. For instance, we indulge too much. We might get a bit too drunk. You might eat too many sweets. And actually, you know that it's bad for you, but you do it anyway. So sensual gratification is clearly not the same thing as self-interested behaviour. We can separate self-interest, which is a more abstract thing,

from sensual gratification. And that abstract thing, self-interest, is driven by wanting some sort of benefit, a good. And this is Hazl's key point in the essay. he says that whether we act on our own behalf, whether we act on behalf of somebody else, what we want is a benefit or a good. What drives us is a love of good and not a love of self. Out of all his influences, because he did take contradictory influences. There was a great supporter of French Revolution,

and yet he was a great admirer of Edmund Burke, the conservative, magnificent orator and writer who was very much strongly against the French Revolution. So it went on. Did the melting pot of his mind never start? melting on. Did he come to some kind of resolution? Haslitt prided himself, I would say, on his own consistency. He

very much in later life declared that his ideas hadn't changed very much from when he was 16. So I think what he's doing is engaging with different philosophers

and adapting from them ideas which conduce to his own thesis, which is that everything is imaginative. And yes, I think it does all come together. Anthony Greiling, he wrote another book after the essay on the Principles of Human Action. He wrote a book, Free Thoughts on Public Affairs,

but I want to get towards his essays, and we've been announced this as the greatest essays in English language, and soon as we get on to that, the better. But as a final point, from what Honour has said then, are we talking about someone whose essays, whose ideas that he worked out, as you say, painfully over a long term, about the place of the imagination, as well as the place of reason, these are the two, as if we, pick out two, two guiding lights.

Yes, first let me just mention that, of course, in addition to the essay and the principles of human action, he published a number of other things and did a number of other things that were specifically philosophical. Right up until 1812, just before he became a parliamentary reporter for the, the Chronicle newspaper. One was a redaction and addition of the great seven-volume work by a man called

Abraham Tucker called The Light of Nature revealed. Another was a set of lectures that he gave, his very first lectures in 1812, on the history of English philosophy, which is fascinating from the point of view of the fact that what we now think of when we look back across the landscape

of 17th and 18th century British philosophy, we think you know, Locke, Great, Barclay, slightly less important, Hume, great and so on. With the exception of Hume, what has to did was to reverse those judgments. He had a very poor opinion of Locke, who he thought had plagiarized Hobbes,

and he was a great admirer of Barclay, who is a wonderful thinker. So he devoted a very, very great deal of time to the study, the deep study of philosophy, and close attention to the texts of contemporary and recent philosophers, as in the case of Abraham Tucker.

And so one has to grant that everything that he wrote after that time, all these essays float on a deep ocean of good, profound philosophical understanding. And as you read those essays and go through them, and of course, they're so magical and wonderful, as we'll come on to later, that you are swept along by them. But if you pause over them, you notice that these philosophical ideas, these impulses, philosophical impulses are there and inform everything that he writes. Well, let's get to the essays, Jonathan Bates.

he's taken on by the Morning Chronicle. He starts writing the essays. Can you give the listeners, the listeners who are about to rush out and buy a house that we all have, a taste, if they haven't got it already, a taste of what began to, what it struck people about him because he... And where you go.

Well, he began, as Anthony said, actually as a parliamentary reporter. That didn't last too long. Because what happened was early in 1814, the theatre critic of the newspaper, left and Haslett was propelled into the job of being the theatre reviewer. And it was really with his theatre reviews that his essay writing style began to take off. So over the following year, sort of 1814 through the rest of the Regency years, he starts writing essays from many different

magazines and newspapers on all sorts of different themes. And I think the great thing to have a sense of with Haslett is that he had this wonderfully capacious, hungry imagination. He would write about anything. Well, let's give us some... Can you give us a scattergun resume of what he'd write about? He would write about... I mean, the post office.

He'd write about... Yeah, he... Exactly. Well, you're doing it for us, Melvin. No, no. Yeah, I mean... For me, the brilliance of Hazard is that whether he is writing an essay about a Shakespearean tragedy or about some Indian jugglers

performing on the street, whether he's writing about John Kavanaugh the fives player, or Malthus' his essay on population. He approaches it with the same energy. One of his great words is gusto. Gusto, he says, is power or passion defining an object? He looks at his experience, the world around him, the politics around him, his memories of the past, and he animates everything with extraordinary gusto. Can I come back to you, Otero for a moment? Running through his criticism is his notion of genius. Can you tell us what he meant by genius? Absolutely.

What seems to me very interesting about Hasl's idea of genius is that there emerge quite distinctly two kinds of genius in Hasl's writing. One is Shakespeare. Shakespeare to Haslett is the kind of genius which can become

anything at all. I must remember that. Sorry to interrupt. It's not rude, look. I hope it's helpful. But at that time, Shakespeare was not thought of as the great national barred. He was well thought of but he'd been plagiarised, he'd been amended and so on. He wasn't the supreme figure

and Hazlitt was very instrumental with Coleridge of pushing him forward in that way. Absolutely. I think Haslett was key to the reception of Shakespeare in his time. His Shakespeare criticism is also developing in response to Keene's performances

which he's going to look at. And his notion of Shakespeare is a genius which can become any character that it represents. It's a protein genius, he calls it. That's without ego as well. It's contrasting with Wordsworth who is ego. Exactly right. It is about Wordsworth.

Exactly right. He has a notion of Shakespeare and genius which has no self. But side by side with that, he has examples of genius. You mentioned Wordsworth, who he admires, but is also quite antipathetic to in some respects. A better example is Milton. Milton, he says, is what he calls an ordinary genius. But it's a kind of genius which functions through asserting a very, very strong ego. Now, it's curious, but it actually says a great deal for English culture,

and I'm using word English here, that he makes his big reputation by being a theatre critic. And in a time of bankruptcy, awful winter, terrible times, Drew Réin is going to close. This young boy, or young man, Edmund Keane is playing Shylock. in the mention of Venice, of course, has the ghost to see it, and is entrancified, infatuated, and writes as such. And he saves the theatre, Jane Austen writes, saying, I must get in after reading this, I can't get any tickets.

So can you just give us his reaction to that, and why you think it struck that nerve? Yeah, I mean, it really was the case that there was a wonderful piece of good fortune that Keene arrived as actor at exactly the moment Hazlitt arrived as critic, and they sort of made each other's reputations and transformed the theatre. What Haslett loved about Keene was the energy, the sense of throwing himself into the role. But he also liked the fact that Keene, he was provincial working class and illegitimate child. He had come from nowhere and yet he could take on these great parts for kings like Richard III.

And also, Shylock, the fact that Shylock was one of the first roles with which Keene made his reputation. Shylock, the Jew, the outsider, yet the character who appeals to universal human sympathy, hath not a Jew eyes and so on. It's Keen's performance and then Hazlitt's mediation of that performance to the public through his review is the first moment where people begin to see that Shylock is a deeply humane character, that Shakespeare has not written an anti-Semitic play, that Shylock is in many ways the most sympathetic character in the play. And note that word sympathy. That's the idea. going back to the essay on the principles of human action, the idea of sympathising, empathising with the point of view of another.

That's what an actor can do. An actor can become another person. Can we know it? It's just the connection there, Melbourne, with this idea of negative capability or the idea of being able to occupy almost any viewpoint as Shakespeare could. That universal genius.

Explain negative capability a little bit more. It's just a term, I think, Keats came up with because Keith was a huge admirer of Hazard. And he latched onto this idea that Hazard, was so keen on, the idea of being able to occupy multiple points of view sympathetically and to represent them. And this, of course, is what a really fine actor can do. This is what the theatre does. This is why it's out of, has this theatre criticism, that you get perhaps the best example of the application of this idea of the universalising genius. I noticed to my horror

that there isn't a copy of Hazel's essays on this table, but can you give this some idea of what he was saying about Keene, that infatuated, that caught the imaginations of people like Jane Austen, the London theatre going public, and saved an entire theatre from bankruptcy. Anybody, and I feel like bidding, yeah, well, I think it's because in the review, in that crucial review, which, by the way, he was accused of having been paid by the theatre to write, because he did save the theatre from bankruptcy and the rest, but in it, you get a match between the gusto, Jonathan's quite right. This is the key aesthetic term of criticism

that Hazard used about painting as well as about theatre and about writing in general, even about ideas. But the gusto exemplified by Keene's performance as Shylock and the gusto of Hazard's own response to it. A very interesting point here is this, that the great Victorian critic, George Sainsbury,

many, many years later, said Haslett is the critic's critic, which is a surprising thing in a way for Stensby to have said. A wonderful man who writes about Has it a great deal, Bromwich, has pointed out that there is a connection

between the kind of criticism that Haslett did, which runs today into the review pages of the newspapers, the kind of criticism that Coleridge did, which runs today into the academy. What Stain's meant was that Haslitt was approaching the task of criticism and therefore the task of reviewing Keen

as a sensitive, responsive, of thinking, feeling human individual who was being thrilled by the moment of performance. It wasn't bringing any kind of academic theory to it, but he was responding to it as a thinking sensitive person.

And it was the power of the review, the guster that came through the review that really captured the imagination of people who read it and had that transformative effect. Jonathan Baden then, I'll go to a time. I just think we do need to give listeners a sense of his wonderful style. He begins his review of a performance,

of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Shakespeare has in this play shown himself very well versed in politics and human affairs. The person who reads Coriolanus or sees Coriolanus may as well save himself the trouble of reading Burke attacking the French Revolution or pain defending the French Revolution because Shakespeare gives you both sides of the argument. Then he says the language of poetry, however, falls in with the language of power. A lion is a much more poetical object than the herd of wild asses that it is hunting. And then he goes on from there to talk about the fact that although Shakespeare in Coriolanus gives you both what he calls the aristocratic and the democratic point of view, gives you both Coriolanus and the people, in the end,

the passion of poetry is more on the side of Coriolanus of the aristocracy of power, which in terms of Haslitt's politics is a difficult position to be in. So what happens in that essay is you have a brilliant reading of Shakespeare's play. You have an account of the actor. On this occasion it was actually an actor called Kemble, rather than Keen, who was playing the part. And you have Hazlitt grappling with great questions about aesthetics and politics.

You get an awful lot for the price of one five-page essay. But, Tara, can I ask you, we're talking about essays. Are we talking about a time when poetry and essays were considered to be the two finest ways to express yourself, and the novel was not as highly regarded as these two forms, nothing like Asaard regarded and in the essay, Hazlitt could not only find a place

in which he could put his vast, massive range of interests, as Jonathan indicated a few minutes before, but reach the highest level of literary excellence of which he was capable. I think that's true. I think it was very much his genre,

as the genre which he brought to fruition. And I think it's absolutely right that we see it as a particular romantic development, I think, in the essay. Haslett is inheriting the tradition of Montaigne, who's writing, unlike as classical predecessors, much more informally, addressing his audiences much more intimately.

And then we have the 18th century essays, especially of Addison and Steel, which Haslitt admired. And Haslet has that kind of easy, familiar style. But he's also, running through it all is a kind of, is a weight, is this philosophical way of thinking. It's talking about familiar subjects everyday life, often with great humour, with great energy, but also with a certain kind of seriousness.

And I think we should connect what Hazlitt is saying about familiar style with what Wordsworth is saying in the preface lyrical ballads about poetry, where poetry says take subjects from common life. It uses a language really used by men. These things, common life, the language really used by men, are in fact idealized by poetry. And there is a similar process of idealization, I think, which goes on in Hazlitt's essays.

It's interesting when Hazlitt met Coleridge, and Coleridge took him to meet Wordsworth. They read to him the lyrical ballads. He discussed the lyrical ballads with them then and said that he'd learned a great deal from Coleridge in particular about how to clarify his ideas. Indeed, he saw them in manuscript and immediately recognised, and this says something about Hazlitt's powers as a perceptive critic,

saw their value and their significance. But he is never, it goes back to your point about Coleridge going into the academy and Haslett going into journalism, he's never as sort of ponderous and serious as Coleridge. I mean, I don't think we want listeners to get the sense that because there are these philosophical ideas behind the essays, the essays are somehow heavy because they're supremely light. I mean, his great essay, the fight, where Bill Neat fights against the gasman down at Hungerford. I mean, this is the greatest sporting essay in the English language. And indeed was recognised as such by, there was a great heavyweight champion of the 1920s,

who, after having had his head bashed a lot, did a collection of essays on boxing and said in the preface to it, Hazlitt's essay on boxing is the greatest ever written. But nonetheless, he moves from the fight, doesn't he, to images from Dante's Inferno. That's exactly a very good example of how it is wonderfully light, but it is never just light. And there's always that kind of anchoring of that everyday experience in something larger, I think. It should be mentioned that Hazlisset's never begin with throat clearing. A hand comes out of the page, grabs you by the throat and rushes you off immediately. It's not so much throat clearing is.

So it's strangling. Because his personal life infringed so much on not only his reputation, but work he did. Let's turn to that. He married, Sarah Stoddart, and about 18, 20, that had cooled, and he was living in that marriage was cool. He was living in lodgings without her, in Hoban, and then he was besotted, infatuated, fell in love. What are we going to call it, Jonathan?

This is a painful but fascinating story. His infatuation with his landlady's daughter, Sarah Walker. He was 18. Yeah, she was 18 and a little bit of a flirt, and it seems that the most of the most of. mother sent this girl in to flirt with all the young gentlemen who lodged in this place in Southampton buildings in order to persuade them to stay there. And Hazlitt, a great romantic, a great idealist. He absolutely fell crazily in love with this girl. And he sort of projected onto her

an awful lot of feelings that in a sense weren't provoked by her. But it led him to go off to Scotland where it was easy to get a divorce in order to divorce his wife so that he could marry Sarah. But then he came back and of course he discovered that she was doing just the same things with some of the other young gentlemen that she had done with him. And he then

foolishly from the point of view of his reputation. Now just one second before we go to Liberal Morris. The effect on him as I've read was drastic. I mean Mary Shelley came back and said I did not recognise him. His hair had fallen out. He was a... We're talking serious effect.

It was terrible, yes. And that quote from Mary Shelley, I was very speaking. She said, if he hadn't smiled at me, I wouldn't have recognized him. He'd lost weight, he'd lost his hair. He was absolutely devastated by this experience. It's quite important to put us into the context of Hazlitz's thinking about these matters and also his emotional makeup, because he was one of those men who can't match the Virgin and the Mordland, you know, the Madonna and the Mordland.

There was a huge gap between them. Oh yes, of course, yes. So my college at Oxford is right, I keep calling it that. The problem for him was that he was perfectly at home with working girls and prostitutes, and he was never shy as people weren't in the Regency period about the fact that he frequented prostitutes and so on. But at the same time, girls and women who were of the middle class or upper class, they terrified him. When he was a young man, he was very, very shy about them, he idealised them. He was always in love with somebody or other, usually with a...

a persona of a played by an actress on the stage. And so when he met Sarah Walker, he was over-prepared in a way to project, as Jonathan says, all his idealizations and fantasies. And he'd written about this some years before. In a review of Sigismundi on European literature, he had said things that later on, Stendall, his friend, picked up on this idea of idealizing somebody

and being prepared to fall in love with somebody because of your own fantasies about it. And perhaps as a way to get through it, as Jonathan was saying, we have to move on a bit quicker now. He wrote a memoir, stroke, novel called Liber Amoris, the Book of Love. This came out, and honestly, everybody knew it was Hazard, and he was slated, and can you go on from there? Pimpled Hazlitt, people started calling him,

and the idea that he had fallen in love with this tailor's daughter, the landlady's husband was a tailor. It ruined his reputation. It's a book some people still find. quite painful to read because it is so raw, so honest about the way that falling in love can lead you into a kind of self-abasement. Although I actually think it's a more artful book than that makes out. It copies, it transcribes some of his conversations with Sarah. It copies letters he wrote to his friends about his feelings.

But it does manage to construct them into a narrative. I mean, there's a narrative running through it where he gives some. this little statue of Napoleon, his heroes. So it is an artful work. In a way, it's in a tradition of confessional literature. It is experience reshaped as literature, but there's no doubt how much it damaged his reputation. One thing that happened,

it gave the people who hated him in the conservative press at the time, it gave him a chance to get him, and they took it. Can you explain what that meant to his reputation and how they went about it? Well, the conservative press had been getting at him for some time, But they never got him. They got him this time.

Well, Haslett claimed that they did. For instance, he said his first major bestseller was characters of Shakespeare's plays. And he said it was selling rapidly till the Tory reviewers got at it and then it then sold another copy, he says. So Haslett is attacked by the conservative press. And it had taken its toll on him well before, I would say, the publication. of Liberal Morris. But Libra Morris, the problem was his friends couldn't defend it. I think it was a book that was deeply embarrassing to his friends.

It was seized on with delight by the Tory press. And I think it was almost, but not quite, the nail in the coffin, I think. And the press was vicious at this time. This is the era where, you know, rival newspaper editors can get shot in duels and so on. As Oetura says earlier, Hazlitt's characters of Shakespeare's play,

had been attacked by a Tory reviewer, and Haslitt responds by describing him as the invisible link that connects literature with the police. Exactly right. And it's not at all paradoxical, I don't think, to say that some of the very, very best things that Hazlid wrote, he wrote after this debunk, including, for example, some of the essays in the spirit of the age.

He lived only another seven years after the... sort of end of this thing because it was in, I think it was in 1823 when he saw his paramour walking down Southampton Row with another man by whom she was made pregnant out of Redlock as it happens, but it was

the sort of final chapter of that very, very sad event. I had to say, by the way, that when I was writing a biography about Hazith, I went to America to have a look at what remains of the archive has its letters and the originals of some of the letters that are reproduces.

in the Livermorese are slightly different from, much boredier than in some respects the material that appeared in the book. But they are so devastating, so moving, that one couldn't but weep over them. I mean, here was a man of so rich in feeling and so destroyed by this experience that the illness that killed him. I think he died probably of stomach cancer in 1830

very probably began as a result of all the stern and drang that happened at that time. But yet in those sort of twilight years in a way, of his reputation anyway, when he traveled extensively on the continent to spend a lot of time outside Europe, became very poor, it was in that time that some of his very, very best things were written.

Nevertheless, just returned to Moyduro, and if it's wrong or not, do say so. His reputation did suffer badly from that, and although Antonus pointed out he wrote some of the fine survive for it, in terms of that, he became a disregarded figure and remained disregarded for quite a long time. His reputation has

taken a long time to sort of to bring back up, isn't it? There's no doubt his reputation took a hit. I mean, some of the late Victorian early 20th century writers like Robert Louis Stevenson thought very highly of his style. Until he read Liban Memorial, and he threw it over the room, and said he won't meet Hazlitt again. Exactly. And then I think the other thing that Haslitt suffered from was that the essay as a form fell rather into disrepute in the early 20th century.

Haslitt's close friend Charles Lamb became regarded as a rather whimsical, sentimental figure. So the academic critics of much of the 20th century really took against Haslitt. David Lodge wrote a novel 1984 called Small World, in which there's a sort of risible scholar who works on Haslett, and this is thought to be, you know, only the kind of smallest mind could possibly be interested in Haslet. And yet, in the 20 years since then, David Lodge has been proved comprehensively wrong

because some of our great minds, Tom Paulin has written a wonderful book on Haslet, and Michael Foote was a great Haslet fan, there's been a great revival in the last 20 years. And how would you say, Otterer, finally, his reputation stands now? I think it's higher than it has been in a very, very long time. I think especially as an essayist, but also as a political writer. And I think finally at last, the worth of the Shakespeare criticism as well

is really starting to emerge fully into view. So, died in poverty. Happy ending. Well, I suppose... But he was a materialist, he won't know this. Yes, he won't know this. Happily we do. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Utterra John, Jonathan Bate and Anthony Grayling. Next week we're going to talk about the rise and fall of the Zulu Nation. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.