Excusing the messenger
Paul Foot
THE DAY-STAR OF LIBERTY: WILLIAM HAZLITT'S RADICAL STYLE by Tom Paulin Faber, £22.50, pp. 382 Throughout the reading of this thrilling book I was haunted by a memory. In 1991, when I was working on a radio programme about poetry and revolution, Fiona Maclean of the BBC instructed me to interview a reader in poetry at Nottingham University I had never heard of called Tom Paulin. In the recording studio he listened impatiently to our intentions. He had only one question: 'Who is reading the poet- ry?'An actor, we assured him. He was visi- bly irritated. No, he replied, he was going to read it. Seizing his copy of Paradise Lost, eyes sparkling, he was off, his thick Ulster accent a shocking defiance to standard BBC plumminess: Still govern thou my Song, Urania, and fit audience find, though few. But drive far off the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers, the Race Of that wilde rout that tore the Thracian
bard In Rhodope...
He broke off to hail the old poet's indomitability in the moment of his perse- cution. 'What he means there', he exclaimed, 'is all these royalist louts ram- paging drunk through London, beating up surviving republicans, persecuting them and at times executing them.' Tom Paulin's enthusiasm was irresistible and carried all before it. William Hazlitt features even higher in Paulin's pantheon than does John Milton, and that infectious zeal not just for Hazlitt but for all literature and art is the essence of this book. Torn Paulin does not parade his vast knowledge on a shelf, as so many academic writers do. He seeks to fire his readers with his intellectual and politi- cal passions, and there is no telling where he will take you next. Now he is sharing Hazlitt's horror of capital punishment, now analysing his absorption with Poussin, his influence on Dickens, his admiration for Keats (and Milton again — that appeal to Urania is set out here in full). The only consistent theme is the fierce determina- tion of author and subject to hold fast against all comers to the dissent which inspired them in their youth.
The structure of the book is governed by Paulin's fascination with style. He connects the sound of words and their meaning, the rhythm and cadences of prose with the message it conveys. William Pitt's 'devious greyness' is endemic in his writing and speaking style. And poor old Jeremy Ben- tham, who might expect to get a word of praise for his efforts on behalf of reform, is denounced by both Hazlitt and Paulin for his dreary prose. 'How to redeem the lan- guage of reform from this type of racked contortion' is the problem for both. And rightly so.
Yet an obsession with style carries with it obvious dangers. My own awakening to them came early. At Oxford my friend Richard Ingrains and I used to read purple passages into a tape-recorder, mull over them and learn them by heart. Richard found an extract in Hilaire Bel- loc's life of Danton which seemed to me (and still does) as perfect a piece of English prose as it is possible to imagine. In the vacation, I recited it proudly to my grandfather, Isaac Foot, and named Belloc as the greatest. The old man grunted, shuf- fled out of the room and came back with an off-print from the Contemporary Review in November 1934, entitled 'Mr Hilaire Belloc and Oliver Cromwell' by Isaac Foot MP: as fine a Protestant polemic as has ever been admired by Tom Paulin. The message for me was the inscription: 'To Paul Mackintosh Foot, Christmas 1958. In the hope that he will not mistake noble prose for ignoble history.'
Words, however grossly or gloriously put together, have meanings, as Tom Paulin is forced to admit as he returns again and again, like a dog to his vomit, to Edmund Burke. He wastes a whole page quoting the celebrated passage in which Burke throws himself at the feet of Marie Antoinette. Paulin, who hates the message, makes excuses for the messenger, and unconvinc- ingly complains that Burke's style has deteriorated. Whatever the style, however, the words amount to nothing more or less than sycophantic royalist tosh of the kind which drove those louts to persecute Milton, and in which these days the mass media are constantly grovelling. Again, because he wants to put the case for radical prose, Paulin defends Hazlitt's view that `the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power'. How does this square with Paulin's own passion for Mil- ton, or with the electrifying effect on reformers for nearly two centuries of the poems of Byron or Shelley? And how for that matter can Paulin, a champion of lib- erty, claim that 'the cause of liberty triumphed with the election of the Whigs in 1830'? Less than four per cent of British men voted in that 'triumph', and the full brunt of Whiggish liberty was felt at once by the victims of the Poor Law Amend- ment Act and the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
William Hazlitt was a writer of genius, whose intuition and wit provide us with the clearest pictures of the great men and liter- ature of his time. But he suffered also, in Paulin's words, from an 'exclusive or patri- cian idea of leadership. . . which makes him sometimes write like a Whig general or Napoleonic marshal'. Perhaps that helps to explain why Hazlitt was 'chained to Burke as he is to Napoleon', or why he was so helpless a victim of a ridiculous sexual infatuation which he could not resist writ- ing about. Because this book is so loosely constructed round Hazlitt's radical style, Tom Paulin can skate over these contradic- tions without resolving them. The pity is that he did not write the authoritative life of Hazlitt which is so desperately needed. Perhaps he is too closely chained to his hero to expose him to the full blast of dis- senting biography.
`Unfortunately, his six-pack stomach quickly became a beer-barrel belly.'
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