William Hazlitt: An Empiricist Radical

Extract

Hazlitt has had a fair amount of modern critical attention, but not enough of it has been concerned with rescuing him from the drab category of ‘minor Regency prose’ and establishing him where he belongs, as one of the most extraordinarily intelligent writers of his period. Perhaps the difficulty has been in part one of genre. One dominant definition of the English essay form, as a belletristic set- piece concerned to charm, composed of the casual meanderings of a liberal, off-beat, impressionist mind, fits a little of Hazlitt’s work accurately enough; but there seem good reasons why critics who feel comfortably at home with Lamb, Stevenson and Belloc might feel less at ease with Hazlitt’s writings as a whole. His liberalism is allied with a trenchancy which has been attacked as intemperate and bellicose; and this is perhaps one reason why a book like Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, to my mind an inferior product containing hardly a single disturbing judgment, has assumed predominance over works with a sharper edge—Political Essays, Table Talk, The Plain Speaker.

Hazlitt’s trenchancy springs from his radicalism; and it is worth calling the abrasive force of that radicalism to mind, with its controlled combination of moral indictment and caustic irony. There are his comments on the Quarterly Review, for instance:

The intention is to poison the sources of public opinion and of individual fame—to pervert literature, from being the natural ally of freedom and humanity, into an engine of priestcraft and despotism, and to undermine the spirit of the English constitution and the independence of the English character.