Fire from the FlintWilliam Hazlitt and the Art of the Essay

For six years, from 1813 to 1819, the essayist and critic William Hazlitt lived in a house in York Street, Westminster, that was owned by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, but which was once the home of the poet John Milton. Hazlitt must have appreciated his situation. A child of the English Romantic movement, he revered Milton’s poetry and had whole passages of Paradise Lost by heart. He considered the blind poet to be ‘in originality scarcely inferior to Homer’ and praised the transforming, synthesising power of Milton’s creative intellect: ‘The power of his mind is stamped on every line. The fervour of his imagination melts down and renders malleable, as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials.’

The philosophy of his landlord, however, roused Hazlitt’s deepest antipathy. Bentham’s doctrine of utilitarianism, which approached all ethical questions armed with a simple rationalist formula, jarred with his most fundamental beliefs. Hazlitt never missed an opportunity to argue against it. All of his writings are set against the notion that cold reason, divorced from the natural passions, is sufficient to account for the richness of human experience. Although he was a believer in objective truth, Hazlitt saw truth as an active principle. ‘The mind strikes out truth by collision,’ he wrote, ‘as steel strikes fire from the flint.’ He argued that pure rationality was, in fact, a form of irrationality, because it was lifeless and inhuman. In this he is quintessentially Romantic: he valued energy and spontaneity; he loathed any attempt to deny the importance of the emotions as a vital, defining part of existence. His criticism often expresses a dislike of formality and systematisation. The word ‘mechanical’, which appears frequently in his writings, always has negative connotations. It signifies a process whose outcome is predetermined, shaped by the limitations of its own method. Milton’s verse may be, as Samuel Johnson complained, harsh and unequal, but for Hazlitt this is the source of its greatness: Milton is not a mere technician, but unites form and content so that the ‘sound of his lines is moulded into the expression of the sentiment’.

Bentham, who lived next door, seems to have been unaware of the identity of his tenant, but Hazlitt certainly knew his landlord. The philosopher was in the habit of taking his exercise in the garden outside Hazlitt’s window, and it is tempting to imagine Hazlitt composing one of his scorching anti-utilitarian essays, pencilling notes to himself on the wall above the fireplace (as he was in the habit of doing), as he gazed down from the superior vantage of Milton’s house at Bentham, dressed in his customary open-necked shirt and knee-socks, while the dour old utilitarian performed his daily ‘circumgyrations’.

Several years after Bentham had evicted him for failing to pay the rent, Hazlitt published a playfully mocking portrait of his former landlord that assumes this very perspective. Like so much of Hazlitt’s writing it is a bravura performance. It begins with a suspiciously familiar account of the philosopher’s habits. Without ever mentioning the author’s former proximity to his subject, it offers an intimate glimpse of Bentham strolling in his garden ‘in eager conversation’ with some eminent guest, ‘his walk almost amounting to a run, his tongue keeping pace with it in shrill, cluttering accents.’ Hazlitt chides Bentham for once proposing to cut down the two large trees that shaded his garden in order to build ‘a paltry Chrestomathic School’ – a decision that would have turned the former home of John Milton into ‘a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster to pass backwards and forwards to it with their cloven hoofs.’ He attacks the assumptions of Bentham’s principle of utility, denying that reason alone can be sensibly applied to ethical questions, which are contentious precisely because they relate to matters which rouse the passionate side of human nature. All the while he caricatures Bentham as an absentminded professor, permanently distracted from reality, who ‘regards the people about him no more than the flies of summer.’ Bentham’s ideas, Hazlitt argues, reduce ‘the theory and practice of human life to a caput mortuum [dead principle] of reason, and dull, plodding, technical calculation.’ He ridicules the philosopher’s obscure style (‘His works have been translated into French – they ought to be translated into English’), before summing him up as ‘one of those who prefer the artificial to the natural in most things, and think the mind of man omnipotent.’ To Hazlitt’s mind there could be few more damning criticisms.

Hazlitt placed this prose portrait at the beginning of perhaps his most famous work, The Spirit of the Age, in which he gathered a series of essays on some of the most significant figures of his day, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Godwin, Sir Walter Scott, William Pitt and Thomas Malthus. All of the sketches adopt a similar technique. He attacks his subjects with a robust mixture of analysis, polemic and caricature. His bracingly ad hominem approach, which was forged in the crucible of the popular press, is direct and aggressive, but is nevertheless based on a consistent principle. Hazlitt was an unusually perceptive student of human nature. He was fascinated by the way character informed opinion. When he addresses his subjects he is looking to understand not only their ideas but their psychology. He wants to understand them as individuals, to understand how they think. He was, as one critic has put it, ‘a psychoanalytically minded man’. This informs all his writings. He did not compartmentalise his thinking, did not try to separate his political opinions from his aesthetics or his psychological observations. Each informed the others. He approaches each topic from the decisively subjective perspective of a thinking and feeling man.

Not only in The Spirit of the Age, but throughout his writings, Hazlitt uses physical details as a novelist might use them, as a kind of shorthand, as metonymies of character. The Prime Minister William Pitt, for example, has ‘a nose expressing pride and aspiring self-opinion.’ As ‘the rudder of the face, the index of the will,’ the nose of the dithering, underachieving Samuel Taylor Coleridge is ‘small, feeble, nothing – like what he has done.’ Percy Shelley is ‘sanguine and shrill voiced,’ reflecting his flighty opinions: ‘His bending, flexible form,’ observed Hazlitt, ‘appears to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple with the world around him, but slides from it like a river.’ The poet laureate Robert Southey – the most strident of the political apostates Hazlitt pursued so tirelessly in his writings – is recalled as having a ‘hectic flush upon his cheek, a roving fire in his eye.’ Even the passing description of William Wordsworth as ‘gaunt and Don Quixote-like’ conveys more than the poet’s physical presence by alluding to his notoriously impenetrable egotism, which Hazlitt wrote was ‘in some respects like a madness; for he scorns even the admiration of himself, thinking it a presumption in any one to suppose he has taste or sense enough to understand him.’ 

Hazlitt is a central figure in the English Romantic movement. As a young man he was an acquaintance of the Lake Poets. He was deeply embroiled in the political and aesthetic debates of the day. He was admired by, and profoundly influenced, John Keats; and he also influenced the French novelist Stendhal, a writer to whom he is often compared. But he is, at the same time, a marginal, incorrigible figure: the most irascible of the Romantics. His life was one of hardship and disappointment. His last words, uttered in a Soho rooming house in 1830 – ‘Well, I’ve had a happy life’ – have generally been regarded with incredulity. Born the son of a dissenting Unitarian minister in 1778, he was raised in the small Shropshire village of Wem. For a time he considered entering the ministry, but at some point during his adolescence he seems to have quietly abandoned his religious faith. He chose instead to pursue a career as a painter, but set himself such high standards that he gave up this ambition while still in his twenties, frustrated at his inability to paint as well as Titian. It was then that he turned to journalism. For the remainder of his life he lived the precarious existence of a jobbing writer. He was prolific: his collected works extend to twenty-one volumes. He was also brilliant, capable of turning his hand to any topic. He wrote extensively on the visual arts, theatre, literature and philosophy; he produced biographical and autobiographical works; he was a formidable political writer; but most famously he was a superb practitioner of the familiar essay. 

Hazlitt’s personal life was mostly unhappy. When it came to women he was goatish, a tendency that got him into trouble on more than one occasion. He was twice married, but both marriages failed and were probably ill-advised in the first place. His friend and fellow essayist, Charles Lamb, giggled uncontrollably during Hazlitt’s wedding to his first wife Sarah Stoddart, later explaining that this was because ‘any awful thing makes me laugh.’ The breakdown of this relationship was hastened by a dramatic mid-life crisis, which took the form of an infatuation with the much younger daughter of his landlady. She, it seems, was openly flirtatious but rejected him when he raised the prospect of marriage. This drove Hazlitt to an anguished fit of jealousy that he documented, in a manner unflattering to himself, in Liber Amoris. The book quickly became notorious, thanks largely to Hazlitt’s political enemies, who seized upon the work as evidence of his depraved nature. It is, however, an unsparing account of the psychology of obsession, the way a mind in the grip of an all-consuming passion can distort reality to its own detriment.

But the defining disappointment of Hazlitt’s life was political. Like so many of his generation, he was inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. He never wavered from his commitment to republicanism. But he lived through a period of grinding reaction as the monarchies of Europe banded together to crush the egalitarian spirit of the Revolution, confronting and defeating republican France in the Napoleonic wars.

Typically, Hazlitt’s attitude to the politically oppressive climate had a deeply personal resonance. He forever associated his initial flush of optimism, along with its subsequent betrayal, with the formative experience he describes in one of his best known essays, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’. One morning in 1798 he rose early and walked ten miles to hear a sermon by Coleridge, who was at that time considering a career as a Unitarian minister. The young Hazlitt was introduced to Coleridge and was dazzled by his intellectual brilliance. Through Coleridge he was admitted into the circle of the Lake Poets, all of them still in the grip of their youthful revolutionary idealism. He was awestruck.

In the years that followed, Hazlitt looked on with dismay as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey abandoned their republican principles to become monarchists and men of the establishment. He never forgave them their political apostasy. He attacked them repeatedly in print, taking every opportunity to remind them of what they once were and of the democratic principles they once believed in. The three disgraced poets appear so ritually in Hazlitt’s writings that they become almost talismanic figures, symbols of the wider political betrayal that so deeply affected him. They become examples of the fatal weakness of human nature.

Hazlitt is a complex, paradoxical character. His biographer Stanley Jones describes him as a ‘realistic romantic idealist’. In person he was dark and brooding, intense and philosophical. His hair was thick and lustrous black. His enemies in the Tory press described him as ‘pimpled’, but his complexion was in fact pale and clear. He had a reputation, fuelled by his pugnacious journalism, for being quarrelsome, but he was, oddly enough for such a combative writer, rather shy. According to Jones he was ‘withdrawn and agonisingly sincere’. Few writers have written as well on the pleasures of solitude and quiet contemplation. He tended to be ‘nervous and self-effacing’ in social situations, only becoming animated when the conversation turned to serious questions of politics or philosophy. ‘I know a person,’ Hazlitt wrote, ‘to whom it has been objected as a disqualification for friendship, that he never shakes you cordially by the hand.’ That same person, however, ‘is the last to quit his seat in your company, grapples with a subject in conversation right earnestly, and is, I take it, backward to give up a cause or a friend. Cold and distant in appearance, he piques himself on being the king of good haters, and a no less zealous partisan. The most phlegmatic constitutions often contain the most inflammable spirits – as fire is struck from the hardest flints.’ Hazlitt knew this type well, of course: he is describing himself. 

Coleridge found the young Hazlitt to be ‘brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange’: ‘he delivers himself of almost all his conceptions by forceps, yet he says more than any man I ever knew.’ To the poet John Clare, who encountered the essayist many years later at a London party, Hazlitt was ‘a silent picture of severity’. Clare detected a nervousness in Hazlitt’s mannerisms, which he took as a sign of a suspicious nature, but reported evidence of a fiery intelligence that accords with Coleridge’s impression of a young man who ‘sends well-headed and well-feathered thoughts straight forwards to the mark with a twang of the bow string.’ Hazlitt could evidently be engaging company. Thomas Noon Talfourd met him at the home of Charles Lamb and recorded that, once the essayist had been drawn from his sombre mood by Charles’s sister Mary, he spoke with ease and fluency: ‘he did not talk for effect, to dazzle, or surprise, or annoy, but with the most simple and honest desire to make his view of the subject at hand entirely apprehended by his hearer.’ 

When roused he would dispute with great passion and persistence. During a stay at Keswick in 1803, he sided with Wordsworth to argue against the existence of a benevolent God, much to the dismay of the believer Coleridge; and on another occasion he came to blows with John Lamb, the elder brother of Charles, after Lamb asserted that Holbein’s colouring was the equal of Vandyke’s. The art-lover Hazlitt was incensed at such a boorish suggestion and made his feelings known. Lamb responded by punching him. When the scuffling pair were separated, Hazlitt retorted: ‘By God, Sir, you need not trouble yourself. I do not mind a blow, Sir! Nothing affects me but an abstract idea!’

‘Imagination’ is a key term for understanding Hazlitt’s thought. The frequent references to imagination in his writings describe something more complex than is conveyed by everyday usage – not merely the ability to conjure ‘figurative or fanciful’ notions disconnected from reality, but the active ethical dimension of human consciousness. For Hazlitt, the imagination is that part of the mind which mediates between our inner selves and the external world. It is an innate faculty, a product of the human capacity for abstract thought. Imagination allows us to think beyond the present moment, to conceive of ourselves as beings with a past and a future. This bestows upon us the potential to become masters of our own fate.

The imagination makes us ethical beings because it permits us to reach outside of ourselves and therefore to comprehend the suffering of others. This is the basis of Hazlitt’s strong objection to utilitarianism. In his essay ‘On Reason and Imagination’, he points out that slavery was defended on the utilitarian grounds that the suffering of a certain number of people contributed to the prosperity and thus the happiness of a greater number. But, he argues, the moment you understand what it would be like to be one of the slaves – ‘stowed together in the hold of a slave ship, without air, without light, without food, without hope, so that what they suffered in reality was brought home to you in imagination, till you felt in sickness of heart as one of them’ – at that moment, the entire enterprise becomes morally untenable. Any attempt to weigh up possible benefits or reason away the suffering becomes abhorrent. ‘Those evils that inflame the imagination and make the heart sick, ought not to leave the head cold. This is the very test and measure of the degree of the enormity, that it involuntarily staggers and appals the mind…it very properly carries away the feelings, and (if you will) overpowers the judgement, because it is a mass of evil so monstrous and unwarranted as not to be endured, even in thought.’ 

All human beings, Hazlitt argued, have the capacity to both reason and imagine, and these abilities should not be regarded as separate. Nor should one be favoured over the other. They are complementary; the passions must bow to the moderating influence of reason, just as reason must not overlook the truth that is revealed by the passions. Thus, in A Letter to William Gifford, Esq., Hazlitt conflates the two terms into the paradoxical phrase ‘reasoning imagination’, which he defines as the faculty that ‘carries us out of ourselves as well as beyond the present moment, that pictures the thoughts, passions and feelings of others to us, and interests us in them, that clothes the whole possible world with a borrowed reality, that breathes into all other forms the breath of life, and endows our sympathies with vital warmth, and diffuses the soul of morality through all the relations and sentiments of our social being.’

This is linked to Hazlitt’s belief in what he calls ‘the natural disinterestedness of the human mind’. He set out this principle in his first published work, a philosophical treatise entitled Essay Concerning the Principles of Human Action, and he returns to it again and again in his writings. The essence of his argument, in the words of the philosopher A.C. Grayling, is ‘that people are interested in the welfare of others in the same way and for the same reasons as they are interested in their own welfare.’ His starting point is the fact that the future does not yet exist. When we picture ourselves minutes or days or years hence, we are projecting our sense of self, which is formed from our memories of the past and our perception of the present, into an imaginary future. ‘Everything before us exists in an ideal world,’ Hazlitt wrote. ‘The future is a blank and dreary void, like sleep or death, till the imagination brooding over it with wings outspread, impregnates it with life and motion.’ A concern with our own future welfare might impress itself upon us with greater immediacy than the claims of others, but, importantly for Hazlitt, the act of sympathetic identification with our non-existent future self is performed by means of the same imaginative leap that allows us to sympathise with other people – our future self being, in effect, another person. If we act purely from self-interest, without acknowledging this natural interest in the welfare of others, we adopt the self-defeating strategy of narrowing the potential of the will in the service of something that has no real substance. ‘Our interest in the future, our identity with it, cannot be substantial; that self which we project before us into it is like a shadow in the water, a bubble in the brain. In becoming the blind and servile drudges of self-interest, we bow down before an idol of our own making.’

Now, Hazlitt was not a naive man. He knew very well that many people, if they did own this instinctive empathetic ability, were somehow able to suppress it. The slave trade was still a thriving concern in his lifetime. The world provides ample evidence of humankind’s selfishness and cruelty. Hazlitt is idealistic in many ways, but there is a profound strain of pessimism running through his work. There could hardly be a more darkly ironic formula than the one he expressed near the end of his life when he claimed that he believed in the ‘theoretical benevolence and practical malignity of man.’ For Hazlitt it was a cruel paradox of human nature that the imagination, the very faculty that allows us to empathise with other people, was readily corruptible. The same faculty that granted a man his moral sense inclined him toward subservience. ‘Man is a toad-eating animal,’ he wrote. ‘The admiration of power in others is as common as the love of it in himself: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.’ Power, he said, is a ‘grim idol’ that ‘dazzles the senses, haunts the imagination, confounds the understanding, and tames the will.’ In his famous essay on Coriolanus he wrote of ‘the logic of the imagination and the passions; which seek to aggrandise what excites admiration and to heap contempt upon misery, to raise power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down that which is low still lower, and to make wretches desperate: to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods; to degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves to the condition of brutes.’

Hazlitt is constantly battling with this paradox of the imagination. He is fundamentally a dialectical writer. He remained remarkably true to his youthful principles and hopes, but time and again in his writings he pitches these principles against the disappointments of his adult life. His expressions of outrage at the political defection of Wordsworth, Southey and, particularly, Coleridge are in part an act of self-excoriation, a testing of his own beliefs. In his greatest essays he sets out to dramatise a vigorous interaction between his inner self and the external world. The critic, as Hazlitt conceives him, is not simply a passive interpreter or peddler of definitions, but someone engaged in a battle for the imagination itself. His job is to impress upon his readers the gulf between the potential and the actual that is revealed by the workings of the disinterested mind. This is an ongoing intellectual struggle, a never-ending process which Hazlitt consistently describes in terms that are active and dynamic – ‘grappling’, ‘forging’, ‘colliding’. 

For Hazlitt the essay is a way of acting out this process. It is a form capable of bridging the gap between the formality of written expression and the free-association of the active mind. Inspired by Montaigne – whom he celebrates as ‘the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man’ – and the intimate prose style developed by Rousseau in the Confessions and Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Hazlitt conceives of the essay as a kind of ideal performance, a direct statement of belief that is addressed, without condescension or affectation, to the reader as an equal. It draws its vitality from the language as it is spoken. He aims ‘to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.’ Each essay opens up a dialogue in a form supple enough to move from the simplest observations and reflections to the most complicated philosophical problems. 

Virginia Woolf, though she admired Hazlitt’s essays, felt compelled to criticise them for their lack of ‘perfection’ and ‘unity’ compared with those of Montaigne or Lamb. This seems to me to misunderstand them on a fundamental level – although there may be something wilful about Woolf’s criticism. The Modernists were, as a rule, anxious to distance themselves from Romanticism, which to their urbane, avant-garde sensibilities was tainted by irrationality and sentimentalism. They preferred to look to the safely distant eighteenth century for their acknowledged antecedents. But it is revealing that Woolf’s criticism touches on the very aspect of Hazlitt’s work which anticipates some of the preoccupations of Modernism – that is, his fascination with inwardness; the close attention his essays pay to the subtle movements of the author’s mind and his attempt to reflect that movement as closely as possible in the rhythms of his prose. He is interested in setting out, as clearly as he can, not only what he thinks, but how he thinks. The act of thinking itself, the way in which one thought calls up another, interests him. The metaphor of a ‘train of thought’ appears so frequently in his writings that one critic has suggested Hazlitt naturalised its usage in English. He believed that the natural flow of a man’s thoughts found their own form. A certain open-endedness is thus essential to his conception of the essay. His essays are, as Woolf observed, ‘inconclusive’. They are free-flowing discourses that move from one example to another, drawing their evidence from the author’s entire store of knowledge and experience. They often begin with a conclusion in the form of a specific definition or observation or image, before moving outward, into the world, inscribing ever larger circles around their subject. They meander, lead the reader where they will, calling forth whatever arguments or reveries suggest themselves along the way. They digress, break off, turn in on themselves (‘What abortions are these essays!’), sideswipe the apostates Wordsworth and Coleridge, and resolve themselves however they see fit. Hazlitt’s extraordinarily energetic prose, which he unleashes in long flowing paragraphs that run unbroken for pages at a time, takes on a prismatic quality as he regards his subject first from one angle, and then another. He works his way into his argument, works it over, assessing strengths, probing for weaknesses. At each step he takes his own temperature, considers his attitude, his mood. His mind is always acutely aware of its own processes. The result is a kind of internal dialogue, a dramatisation of the argument the author has been having with himself about the issue to hand.

‘On the Pleasure of Hating’, for example, begins with the author observing the movements of a spider crawling across the floor of his room. He imagines the terror the tiny animal must feel at being confronted with such a huge creature as himself. He takes note of his own feelings of revulsion and fear. For a moment he considers that it is within his power to crush the spider, but he allows it to live and even lifts the matting on the floor to permit its escape. 

This small episode becomes a demonstration of Hazlitt’s principle of disinterestedness. ‘I bear the creature no ill-will,’ he observes, ‘but still I hate the very sight of it.’ He is able both to experience his own fear and simultaneously reflect upon its meaning. He recognises his loathing as something instinctive, but his mind is self-aware and so he does not feel the need to act on the strength of his emotional response. ‘The spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it,’ he reasons. ‘We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.’ This leads him to consider the ambivalent nature of hatred. It is, in the first instance, an energising and potentially progressive force. Without it ‘we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions of men.’ But there is also a perversity, ‘a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind,’ which leads it to ‘delight in mischief.’ 

He begins to develop the idea. Hatred is an expression of the innate intellectual restlessness that is part of human nature. It causes us to become dissatisfied with those things which once gave us pleasure. It is a distorting and destructive principle that corrupts the sentiments. ‘The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it into rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others.’ These thoughts lead Hazlitt inexorably toward the contemplation of his own pessimism and disappointment. In a long concluding paragraph he announces that he is ‘heartily sick’ of his old opinions. Those concepts he believed in – genius, virtue, liberty, love – now appear to him as empty words. They are ‘a mockery and a dream’. ‘If mankind had wished for what is right,’ he argues, ‘they might have had it long ago.’ But this potential remains unrealised largely due to our ‘innate perversity’ and the ‘dastard spirit’ of our own nature, which creates a world in which ‘hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from encounter, and merit is trodden underfoot.’ 

The conclusion is astonishing in part for its furious energy and the stinging slap of its denunciatory rhetoric, but also for the way its misanthropy is made to rebound upon its author. Hazlitt’s caustic pessimism, which might have tended toward exhaustion, is instead fuel to his furnace. He works it into an expression of passionate contempt for the world that threatens to become an all-consuming sense of self-loathing. The passage presents itself as an acting out of the author’s internal struggle to overcome this pessimism. In this, it is not unlike a Shakespearean soliloquy; we might also hear, in the way Hazlitt catches the ebb and flow of his thoughts and feelings, intimations of William James’s ‘stream of consciousness’. In the essay’s final lines, Hazlitt eventually does overcome his feelings of disgust, triumphantly. The very intensity of the passage resists the idea of ennui and belies his initial claim that he is disillusioned with his beliefs. To hate passionately one must also care deeply. This becomes the final and most telling ambivalence. ‘Have I not reason to hate and to despise myself?’ he asks. The answer is a decisive yes: ‘Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.’ 

It is characteristic that Hazlitt’s ideas should depend so much upon the manner in which they are expressed. His celebrated prose style, which he crafted in opposition to the pompous formalities that passed for fine writing in his day, is itself an expression of his philosophical convictions. Tom Paulin has drawn attention to the extended meditation on the art of prose writing running throughout Hazlitt’s work. This is more than a question of aesthetics; it extends to the function of prose writing as a critical tool. Good prose, Hazlitt believed, should embody the kinetic principle – ‘gusto’ – that he valued in art; it should have energy and forward momentum, but be flexible enough to do justice to the infinite variety of life. In contrast to the poet, whose first allegiance is to the ‘exaggerating and exclusive’ aspect of the imagination which disconnects the mind from reality, the prose writer must ‘impart conviction’: ‘The principle which guides his pen is truth, not beauty – not pleasure, but power.’ Prose is, above all, a combative medium in which ‘every word should be a blow: every thought should instantly grapple with its fellow.’ 

It is fitting that one of Hazlitt’s most famous pieces of writing should be an account of a boxing match. ‘The Fight’ describes a bout between Bill Neate and Tom ‘the Gas-man’ Hickman, which took place at Hungerford on 11 December 1821. On the surface it is a brisk and engaging slice of reportage, but Hazlitt’s restless intellectual energy turns the essay into something more evocative. His report develops into an expression of his vigorously dialectical understanding of the power of the imagination.

Though he makes no explicit reference to the fact, it would not have been lost upon Hazlitt that the colloquial term for boxing he adopts throughout the essay – ‘The Fancy’ – is also a philosophical category devised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his Biographia Literaria Coleridge draws a distinction between the Fancy, which he defines as the part of the mind preoccupied with facts and calculations, and the synthesising, creative aspects of consciousness, which he calls (like Hazlitt) Imagination. Hazlitt and Coleridge do share some basic philosophical assumptions. Both men, for example, strongly reject Locke’s empiricism, which proposes that the human mind is a tabula rasa. But Hazlitt was scathing about Coleridge’s weakness for obscurantism and mystical abstraction. In his slashing notice of Biographia Literaria, published in the Edinburgh Review in August 1817, he seizes upon Coleridge’s admission that ‘even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysicks, and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me. History, and particular facts, lost all interest in my mind.’ Here, Hazlitt goes on to argue, is the fatal flaw that derailed his brilliant but dilatory former friend. In a sense, ‘The Fight’ is yet another of Hazlitt’s retorts to Coleridge. The essay’s demonstration of Hazlitt’s ideal of the engaged mind, one that is flexible, pragmatic and always alert to the inexhaustible variety of the world around it, contrasts with the wayward poet’s detachment from reality. In Coleridge’s system Fancy is of a lesser order than Imagination; but Hazlitt wants to show how the active mind always retains a firm grip on those ‘particular facts’ which left Coleridge uninterested.

So much of Hazlitt’s writing is a direct reflection of his mood, and in ‘The Fight’ he is buoyant and cheerful. The essay is alive with detail: the bright moon that appears to grace his overnight journey from London; the warm sun on his back and the field’s dewy grass on the morning of the fight. Swept up by the fraternal, democratic spirit of the occasion Hazlitt writes warmly of the desire to communicate that flows from his good humour: ‘Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.’ This upbeat mood colours his perceptions, giving a welcome hue to his surroundings. Even as he sits atop a mail coach, travelling though the ‘drizzling rain’ – a situation that would normally have him feeling ‘cold, comfortless, impatient’ – his sense of anticipation makes him content: ‘Such is the force of the imagination!’

But if a fight provides Hazlitt with the definitive metaphor for his prose style and his ideal of intellectual engagement, it is also a symbol of the reality of power. In a dispute over opinion, he reflects, it is possible to triumph through sheer impudence, but the fancy (Hazlitt capitalises the word throughout) is ‘the most practical of all things’. Confidence is ‘half the battle, but only half’; once the fight has begun the only thing that matters is how well each man wields his fists. Tom Hickman, it transpires, is loud and boastful. He tries to intimidate his opponent verbally before the bout. This rouses Hazlitt’s disapproval. Magnanimity and bravery, he cautions the arrogant fighter, ‘should be inseparable’. Hazlitt is surprised to learn that Hickman is the favourite, despite being smaller and lighter than Neate. Hickman comes into the fight on the back of several wins, but Hazlitt thinks the punters are being influenced by his bluster, foolishly taking the boxer’s own assessment as an accurate measure of his ability: ‘The amateurs were frightened at his big words, and thought that they would make up for the difference between six feet and five feet nine. Truly, the fancy are not men of imagination. They judge of what has been, and cannot conceive of any thing that is to be.’

The fight is an epic, lasting into ‘the seventeenth or eighteenth round’, but Hazlitt captures it in a single giddying paragraph. After the lengthy description of his journey from London, with its affectionately ironic musings upon the virtues of the English character and the capriciousness of fate, the pent up anticipation is released in one breathless rush of excitement. Hazlitt, strictly a pugilist of letters, had never before witnessed a fight and his account reels at the raw physicality of the contest, at seeing ‘two men smashed to the ground, smeared with gore, stunned, senseless, the breath beaten out of their bodies; and then, before you recover from the shock, to see them rise up with new strength and courage.’ His account climaxes in a fearsome description of Hickman’s face the moment after he is stunned by a blow from Neate in the twelfth round: ‘I never saw anything more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death’s head, spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or like one of the figures in Dante’s Inferno.’

‘The Fight’, which came close to being rejected for publication because Hazlitt’s editors thought it might be too coarse for general consumption, is framed as a simple morality tale. The triumph of the stolid Bill Neate is depicted as a victory for the virtues Hazlitt has been celebrating throughout the essay: decency, humility, frankness and courage – with both fighters given full credit for the latter. Tom Hickman, Hazlitt writes, ‘has lost nothing by the late fight but his presumption; and that every man may do as well without.’ But the essay’s subtext, its insistence that facts are ‘stubborn things’, is an expression both of Hazlitt’s sense of realism and his preoccupation with the relationship between the intellectual and the physical. The fight is analogous to a frank and fearless exchange of opinions conducted in good faith, but unlike an argument it is capable of being resolved decisively. 

Hazlitt takes up this question in another of his most frequently anthologised essays, ‘The Indian Jugglers’. It begins with Hazlitt being amazed by the skill of a troupe of performers. He observes how their fluent movements have become second nature to them, ‘as if the difficulty once mastered naturally resolved itself into ease and grace’. The jugglers’ ability, he argues, is like a ‘mathematical truth’; the line between success and failure is clear. This precise mechanical skill is in contrast to the untidy and inconclusive nature of intellectual dispute. In a debate ‘there is no such power or superiority’. Compared to the jugglers, Hazlitt feels his writing to be a poor thing. He describes his occupation as ‘pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts.’ He denounces his own essays for their ‘errors’, ‘ill-pieced transitions’, ‘crooked reasons’ and ‘lame conclusions’. 

At first glance ‘The Indian Jugglers’, which proceeds through a long sequence of digressions (Hazlitt admired Laurence Sterne), seems, in spite of its wonderfully fluent prose, to be casually, almost lazily, put together. But, as David Bromwich has pointed out, its underlying structure is a straightforward dialectic. It first praises the virtues of mechanical ability, which achieves perfection within specified limits. It then works its way around to consider the superiority of artistic genius, which in striving always to reach beyond itself reveals its imperfections but also expresses a deeper sense of truth and beauty. Finally, Hazlitt moves beyond these opposed perspectives, subsuming them both under the category of ‘greatness’. This, he argues, is possessed by those with the ability to ‘impress the idea of power on others’, to seize the imagination, to change the world by altering the way it is perceived, making it appear in a new light or demonstrating some new and profound truth.

The essay then breaks off its discussion to append an obituary for a man named John Cavanagh, which Hazlitt introduces as if he had merely stumbled upon it in the Examiner, even though it is his own work. Cavanagh, we learn, was a champion at fives, a form of handball played on a three-sided court. Hazlitt was himself an enthusiastic and competitive fives player and he is lyrical in his praise of Cavanagh’s prowess, describing him as indisputably the greatest player the game had ever seen: ‘His eye was certain, his hand fatal, his presence of mind complete.’ This seemingly incongruous panegyric, an essay within an essay, becomes another of Hazlitt’s extended analogies between the physical and the intellectual. He does not only rank Cavanagh against other fives players but compares him to various writers and politicians; and, like the description of the fight between Neate and Hickman – ‘little cautious sparring – no half-hits – no tapping and trifling, none of the petit-maîtreship of the art’ – the celebration of Cavanagh’s technique evokes Hazlitt’s prescription for effective prose writing: ‘His style of play was as remarkable as his power of execution. He had no affectation, no trifling…His blows were not undecided and ineffectual – lumbering like Mr Wordsworth’s epic poetry, nor wavering like Mr Coleridge’s lyric prose, nor short of the mark like Mr Brougham’s speeches, nor wide of it like Mr Canning’s wit, nor foul like the Quarterly, nor let balls like the Edinburgh Review.’

The wider significance of Cavanagh’s obituary is the way it collapses the distinction between mind and body, and in doing so makes an implicit claim for Hazlitt’s own art – the art of the essay. Cavanagh played with a perfect fusion of instinct and cunning. ‘He had equal power of skill, quickness, and judgement. He could either outwit his antagonist by finesse, or beat him by main strength.’ To play fives, Hazlitt observes, is to be totally within the moment, to have complete ‘presence of mind’. For Hazlitt this is an ideal state. Elsewhere he argues that the pleasure of painting springs from the way it simultaneously exercises the body and the intellect; similarly, the fives player, through a combination of physical exertion and mental agility, achieves a unity in which his entire being is directed toward a single goal. The essayist, no less than the artist or sportsman, is always striving to enter into this ideal state. He should possess both power and subtlety. Experience taught Hazlitt that sound logical reasoning on its own is not enough to convince; to argue a case successfully, your interlocutor must somehow be made to feel the validity of your argument. He was also conscious of the fact that language is as capable of moving one away from a truthful perception of reality as toward it. When he sets out to criticise William Pitt, for example, he notes the way the politician’s ‘artful use of words’ and ‘dexterity of logical arrangement’ allow him to remain uncommitted to any specific idea or principle. His critique of Samuel Johnson takes a similar line, arguing that the regularity of Johnson’s prose and its consistently lofty tone (regardless of the topic, wrote Hazlitt, Johnson is ‘always upon stilts’) takes no account of the variety of his subject matter and so strips away the nuances of his thought. The language of Hazlitt’s essays, by contrast, always strives to embody the imagination, to inhabit the physical reality it describes, to convey the truth of his perceptions through its jostling ideas, its vivid descriptiveness, and the way it adapts its form to its subject: the percussive alliteration of his account of the fight, the ease and fluency of his praise for the Indian jugglers, the swiftness and accuracy of his celebration of Cavanagh’s unsurpassed skill. Hazlitt came to essay writing partly as a matter of convenience, but the flexibility of the form suited him. In his hands the essay is, as its etymology instructs, an attempt, a concentrated burst of intellectual energy that seeks to transmit the spark of understanding from one mind to another.

When Hazlitt observes that Wordsworth liked to compose as he walked up and down a straight garden path, while Coleridge preferred to compose as he clambered over uneven ground, he means to tell us something about the two writers both as poets and as men. The image is carefully chosen to suggest that each man’s verse is an expression of his whole being, drawn from his physical self as well as his character. It is one of the manifestations of Hazlitt’s Romanticism that he regarded his own essays no less as an extension of his personality. Hazlitt the essayist is as intense and forthright as he was in person, as athletic and competitive as he was on the fives court. He is one of those writers who, regardless of the subject to hand, always writes about himself. Tom Paulin has described his extensive and diverse body of work as a ‘disjointed, epic autobiography – a kind of prose Prelude’, which sets out to ‘dramatise consciousness as a form of combative self-exposure.’ Yet Hazlitt never seems solipsistic. The true author, he wrote, ‘plucks up an argument by the roots’ and ‘tears out the heart of his subject.’ His willingness to do this while confronting the paradoxes of his own character gives his work a toughness and a directness that many other Romantic writers lack – a toughness that can make his writing seem startlingly modern. His prose style, though it was seen by many of his contemporaries as wilfully perverse, produced some of the sharpest, most energetic writing in the English language, and gave the world some of its greatest examples of the art of the essay.

William Hazlitt’s extensive writings are collected in the 21 volume Complete Works (1930–34), edited by P.P. Howe, but a representative selection is available in The Fight and Other Writings (2000), edited by Tom Paulin and David Chandler and published by Penguin Classics. 

The brief biographical sketch in the first section of this essay draws principally upon the two most recent biographies of Hazlitt: Stanley Jones’s Hazlitt: A Life (1989) and A.C. Grayling’s The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt (2000). Charles Lamb’s reaction to Hazlitt’s wedding and Hazlitt’s argument with John Lamb are both recounted in A Double Life: A Biography of Charles & Mary Lamb (2003) by Sarah Burton. For a fuller account of John Clare’s impressions of Hazlitt, see Jonathan Bate’s John Clare: A Biography (2003). The metaphysical argument between Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Coleridge is discussed in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (1977) by Molly Lefebure.

There are many critical studies of Hazlitt’s work, but recommended are David Bromwich’s Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (1983) and Tom Paulin’s The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (1998). An interesting discussion of the parallels between Hazlitt’s ideas and twentieth-century psychoanalytical thought can be found in Maurice Whelan’s In the Company of William Hazlitt (2003). Virginia Woolf’s appreciation of Hazlitt is collected in The Common Reader (1932).