The man who made Soho resonate before it was invented
PAUL JOHNSON
To put up a plaque to Hazlitt in Soho was apt — he was the first Bohemian to die there. But the Hazlitt lobby should stop their nonsense about his being one of our most neglected writers. It is true he is less studied in academia than is Coleridge. But then Coleridge was misty and opaque; and mist and opacity generate PhDs. Hazlitt was a wonderfully clear writer — you always know exactly where he stands — and clarity leaves less work for dons to do.
Hazlitt died in obscurity but has never been neglected. His collection of profiles, Spirit of the Age, has always been in print and much imitated. It must be the most widely read prose work of the early 19th century. I was encouraged to read his essays at school and have done so ever since. He is in every anthology. In 1922 he was the subject of a superb biography by P.P. Howe, who also edited his collected works in 21 volumes. Poor Anthony Trollope had to wait for another 80 years. Five years ago Duncan Wu edited, for Pickering, a beautifully produced nine-volume Selected Works. I have on my Hazlitt shelf half-a-dozen works of biography and criticism, all recent. So let's drop the whining about neglect.
Hazlitt was a great writer. I think of him as the first truly modern writer: crisp, concise, direct, personal, punchy, angry and vertiginous. He takes you to the edge of the precipice. But he had serious faults, and the Hazlitt lobby do his cause no good by denying them. Hazlitt prided himself on his staunchness. Of all the writers who early applauded French revolutionary ideas —
Southey, Mackintosh, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Godwin, for instance — Hazlitt was the only one who never qualified his support, even though this meant embracing the monstrous dictatorship of Bonaparte, which cost the lives of four million soldiers and countless civilians, and adumbrated the 20thcentury totalitarian state. This foolish consistenc■,, so contrary to nature and to the development of the mind led him to waste the final period of his life, when he might have produced a great work, writing a long Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, of no value, which not even his warmest admirers can read through.
Worse, it led him to attack savagely his old friends, Coleridge and Wordsworth, who had both been revolted by the Terror and then outraged by Bonaparte's treatment of small nations, like the Swiss Cantons. Hazlitt owed everything except his genius to these two men, and indeed to Southey. His vituperative attacks on Southey are understandable because the Poet Laureate became a fellow extremist at the other end of the spectrum. But H's presentation of Wordsworth as an apostate is unforgivable — it was the basis for Brovvning's monstrous early poem 'The Lost Leader' — for Wordsworth's opinions always followed a humane and compassionate line of progression. H's mean and wounding attacks on Coleridge were still more reprehensible for, as H knew, the poor man was sick and near to despair as a result of his addiction to opium, and had much less confidence in his powers than the sturdy Wordsworth. H helped to silence the voice of a great but fragile poet.
H's rage against these two men was tinctured with guilt about an episode in 1803 when he was staying in the Lake District under their sponsorship. Both H's wives were middle-class women with money, but his sexual tastes (as he admitted) were for servant girls, or whores if need be. In the Lakes, sex-hungry and possibly drunk, he thought the farm girls would be easy meat. Crabb Robinson in his diary says that Wordsworth related how `Hazlitt, when at Keswick, narrowly escaped being ducked by the populace and probably sent to prison'. Benjamin Robert Haydon's diary entry about Wordsworth's story is more explicit: 'He was relating to me with great horror Hazlitt's lecherous conduct to the girls of the Lake [Derwentwater] and that no woman could walk after dark for his Satyr and beastly appetites.' Some girl called him a black-faced rascal, when Hazlitt, enraged, pushed her down, "and because, Sir," said Wordsworth, "she refused to gratify his abominable and devilish propensities he lifted up her petticoats and smote her on the bottom" ' . The local farmers, according to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's testimony, got up a posse to do justice to the dark stranger, and he was obliged to flee, borrowing shoes from Coleridge. Wordsworth 'took him into his house at midnight, gave him clothes and money (from three to five pounds)'. The two poets kept the business quiet at the time and only brought it up years later when driven beyond endurance by H's attacks. Today's Hazlitt lobby simply denies the outrage ever took place.
Who can say? The trouble with Hazlitt was that he was an obsessive in everything,
but not least when sex raised its (to him) lurid head. The story of his violent and tragic love for his landlady's slinky daughter Sarah (it was the way in which she glided 'like a snake' which inflamed him), told in his weird account, the Liber Amoris, and in some still more uninhibited letters he wrote at the time, is one of the most bizarre episodes in English literature. H's obsession was such that he persuaded his first wife, Sarah Staddart, a decent and loyal friend of Mary Lamb, to give him a 'Scotch divorce'. This involved her swearing the 'Calumny Oath' and so exposed her to a charge of perjury, then punished by seven years' transportation to Australia. The moment he got his divorce papers. H left Scotland immediately for London, without a word of thanks to his ex-wife, in order to propose to the girl, who turned him down contemptuously. That H then felt compelled to put it all in print, albeit anonymously, almost defies belief. H's authorship was immediately guessed and trumpeted around by his enemies, and this act of literary suicide virtually finished him as a force in controversial journalism.
As always, Lamb gave the soundest verdict. He said that H did bad things but was not a bad man. H quarrelled with almost everyone he knew, sooner or later, including Lamb, for a time. H was a thinker of acute judgment, who invented art criticism as we know it, and made matchless contributions to literary and theatre analysis. But he was fundamentally antisocial. He refused to accept that other writers had the right to feelings as tender as his own. He lashed out, unthinkingly, with the penetrating weapons that nature gave him, and then screamed in agony when they hit back. Like so many of his intellectual successors, and like his contemporary Shelley, with whom he had a lot in common, he thought ideas were much more important than people. He put humanity on the throne of his love, but kicked individual human beings out of the way in the process. I can see him admiring Stalin and cherishing his memory right to the end. Yet, when politics are not the issue, H is a writer of superlative skill: bold yet sensitive; dashing like a cavalry charge, yet still and deep as a philosopher; always going straight to the heart of the matter, yet capable of the finest verbal embroidery when the mood takes him. Taste and gusto, insight and humour, sheer power and minute delicacy — the man had it all. If only he had left politics alone.
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