Bollettino



"For many years, the lodging-house where Hazlitt died - his landlady, eager to let his room, hid his body under the bed while she showed it to would-be tenants - has been known as Hazlitt's Hotel."

Run, do not walk, to Tom Paulin's piece on Hazlitt (which was given as a speech for the ceremony marking the erection of a monument to Hazlitt) in the Observer. It came out last week. We missed it. But we read it this morning, and we are still throbbing in the thrall of the thing. Appreciation -- and not the royal osculation of the ass practiced by blurb writers and friends of friends in the book reviews -- is a pretty rare and lonely art. It requires catching the writer both in the gloss of one's own fine perception of him, and standing enough outside that gloss to see him, or at least glimpse him, as alien. You have to tread a fine zigzag. Well, Paulin does. He's magnificent. And Hazlitt deserves every encomium, poor man. Hazlitt is the writer's writer, the one who dies for all of us who are choking to death on the miserable dribbles of freelance work upon which we expend every fine sentence, every formal tact, that we can, and get away with it.

We've been a Hazlitt reader for years. Like Paulin, the puzzle of Hazlitt is how he can be neglected when Coleridge, whose scholarly insusurrations weigh like lead on the heart of his readers, is studied all too multitudinously. Perhaps that is a bit unfair. However, to read Paulin on Hazlitt is to immediately want to read Hazlitt, whereas to read Richard Holmes on Coleridge is to think what a relief it is that we now don't have to read Coleridge.

One of Hazlitt's essays that Paulin mentions which sounds like fun for this War season is On the Connection between Toad-eaters and Tyrants -- especially as we have just experienced an immense hopping of toad-eaters claiming to be against tyrants. The essay begins with a pretty brisk jab:

" ...the progress of knowledge and civilization is in itself favourable to liberty and equality, and that the general stream of thought and opinion constantly sets in this way, till power finds the tide of public feeling becoming too strong for it, ready to sap its rotten foundations, and "bore through its castle-walls;" and then it contrives to turn the tide of knowledge and sentiment clean the contrary way, and either bribes human reason to take part against human nature, or knocks it on the head by a more summary process. Thus, in the year 1792, Mr Burke became a pensioner for writing his book against the French Revolution, and Mr Thomas Paine was outlawed for his Rights of Man. Since that period, the press has been the great enemy of freedom, the whole weight of that immense engine (for the purposes of good or ill) having a fatal bias given to it by the two main springs of fear and favour."

That seems exactly right, even, sad to say, about Burke. In 1792, Burke was in the process of turning his hatred of the French Revolution, a hatred sprung from his detestation of a government by theory, into a war against the principles of the French revolution, which was, clearly, the mirror image of government by theory --a war for the sake of theory. Hazlitt's summation of the "history and mystery of literary patriotism and prostitution for the last twenty years" is masterful: he understands how deadly the convergence between the polemical impulse and the interest of the powerful can become, and what disaster it can cause. We've seen that happen in the last year, with much, much more trifling men than Coleridge or Burke or Wordsworth. The horde of belligerati contain hardly one man who is worth reading twice; and most of them, like Andrew Sullivan, aren't worth reading once. No one would do it if they didn't agree with Andrew S.'s opinions -- and that is the lowest form of writing. Hitchens, Cohen, and Berman are on a higher plane, but --- except for Berman -- they have pretty much lowered themselves to the Sullivan standard.

But the most famous passage in the essay is one of those jets of political fantasia which remind us of Troilus and Cressida for its eloquence, bitterness, and partial truth:

"Man is a toad-eating animal. The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave. It is not he alone, who wears the golden crown, that is proud of it: the wretch who pines in a dungeon, and in chains, is dazzled with it; and if he could but shake off his own fetters, would care little about the wretches whom he left behind him, so that he might have an opportunity, on being set free himself, of gazing at this glittering gew-gaw "on some high holiday of once a year." The slave, who has no other hope or consolation, clings to the apparition of royal magnificence, which insults his misery and his despair; stares through the hollow eyes of famine at the insolence of pride and luxury which has occasioned it, and hugs his chains the closer, because he has nothing else left."

Hazlitt wrote this at a dreadful time, from his perspective. The restoration of the Bourbons, the seeming burial of all the liberal ideals of the French revolution in England, made him feel that his time was being carried backwards into the abyss of brute force that, in Republican mythology, was the actual situation under Charles I, replayed in the worst days of George III. The thing was... Hazlitt was wrong about his time. Wrong in an interesting way.

But this would carry us into the depths of an essay that I am, as always, perpetually working on. We don't want to go there.