IN THE COMPANY OF WILLIAM HAZLITT
THOUGHTS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
by Maurice Whelan
Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 2003. pp.207
When I was studying English literature in high school I remember one time we worked our way through a selection of the great British essayists of the 19th century – Addison, Steele, Lamb, Hazlitt and company. The Hazlitt essay was “On a Sun Dial”, with its meditation on the Latin motto “horas non numero nisi serenas’ – I count only the hours that are sunny. I’ve never reread the essay but, even after so many years, I remember being enchanted by the music and elegance of the prose. Perhaps it was an age of elegant prose, but Hazlitt stood out, even in such company.
It was a pleasant surprise, then, when my colleague Maurice Whelan recently gave a series of public talks on Hazlitt and later collected them in this book. Hazlitt, as one of the supreme prose writers in the history of the English language, has had many biographies and studies. But no-one has previously written of him from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. And not to bring analytic concepts to bear on the man’s life, but rather to listen to what he has to say to psychoanalysts. Maurice argues persuasively that Hazlitt had an intuitively psychoanalytic turn of mind and grappled with the same issues that later preoccupied Freud and, especially, object relations theorists like Ronald Fairbairn.
Hazlitt was painfully aware, like Fairbairn, of the inwardly split (“schizoid”) state of the human mind. Maurice quotes from the essay “On Cant and Hypocrisy”:
Such reasoning would be true, if man were a simple animal or a logical machine, and all his faculties and impulses were in strict unison, instead of which they are eternally at variance, and no-one hates or takes part against himself more heartily or heroically than does the same individual. Does he not pass sentence on his own conduct? Is not his conscience both judge and accuser? What else is the meaning of all our resolutions against ourselves, as well as of our exhortations to others?
Moreover, Fairbairn set himself against the classic instinct theory of Freud and maintained that we do not seek the objects of our need as targets upon which to discharge instinctual tension but rather as human creatures with whom to establish deep connections. “Libido,” he wrote, “is not pleasure-seeking, libido is object-seeking.” Likewise, Hazlitt took issue with Hobbes, Locke and Hartley who reduced all “thought to sensation, all morality into the love of pleasure, and all action into mechanistic impulse.”
On the contrary, Hazlitt maintained, “I could not love myself, if I were not capable of loving others. Self-love, used in this sense, is in its fundamental principle the same with disinterested benevolence.” Man, Maurice writes, in sympathy with Hazlitt, “is not a part of a closed system characterised by entropy, but is a social organism interacting with his environment and being altered by it.”
Similarly, in a manner which speaks for modern psychoanalysis, Hazlitt laid emphasis on “living for oneself”, the title of one of his most important essays, not in the sense of narcissistic isolation but rather as a profound dedication to personal integrity and independence of mind. He used the term “vanity” much as we might nowadays speak of pathological narcissism and asserted that the person preoccupied with personal aggrandisement is not “living for himself” but is indeed profoundly estranged from his true self.
In this context it is interesting to read Maurice’s comment on Hazlitt’s most notorious publication, “Liber Amoris”. Robert Louis Stevenson, who once famously remarked, “Though we be fine fellows nowadays we cannot write like Hazlitt”, refused to write a biography of Hazlitt because he found Liber Amoris so distasteful.
Hazlitt was born in 1778. He died in 1830 at the age of 52, almost the same age as his great idol Shakespeare, possibly of stomach cancer. His first marriage broke up around 1820 and he remarried in 1823, though this marriage too broke up after three years. But in 1822 he had become madly infatuated with Sarah Walker, the daughter of the owner of the house where he was then taking lodgings. In 1823 he published Liber Amoris anonymously.
Much of the book consists of a series of dialogues between “H” and “S” – Hazlitt and Sarah. H’s outpourings are extravagant:
Cruel girl! You look at this moment heavenly soft, or resembling some graceful marble statue, in the moon’s ray! Sadness only heightens the elegance of your features. How can I escape from you, when every new occasion, even your cruelty and scorn, brings out some new charm. Nay, your rejection of me, by the way in which you do it, is only a new link added to my chain.
Eventually it becomes clear to him that Sarah has simultaneously been carrying on a flirtation with another lodger.
My head reeled, my heart recoiled within me. I was stung with scorpions, my flesh crawled with rage, her scorn scorched me like flames; her air (her heavenly air) withdrawn from me, stifled me, and left me gasping for breath and being. It was a fable. She started up in her own likeness, a serpent in place of a woman . . . Seed of the serpent or of the woman, she was divine!
Eventually he recovers from this regressed state. He sees Sarah in the street, away from the environment where he has been used to meeting with her and reflects on her ordinariness and vulnerability, that “if she in fact did not have such an exalted opinion of herself, she could have perceived his idealisation of her as ironic or insulting.”
Although Liber Amoris was published anonymously, Hazlitt’s identity was easily uncovered. He was a trenchant critic of the corrupt Tory Establishment. And the Tory critics had a field day, one describing the book as “the tale of a cockney’s stupidity and folly … filled with degraded practical sensuality, inveterate ignorance and depraved principle.” This same school of critics, it must be remembered, had also sneered at John Keats as a “cockney”. Only the upper classes should have sensitivity.
So why would Hazlitt have published the book at all, and exposed himself to such calumny? Maurice quotes Cyril Connolly who wrote that many people found Liber Amoris repellant because “they see a brilliant mind made helpless by adolescent lust.” But the text of Liber Amoris shows Hazlitt’e awareness of his own primitive projections, that he was indeed locating valued parts of himself in Sarah and thereby depleting himself, and that his infatuation had little to do with Sarah’s actual character. He could become aware of this even as he was swept away by his passion. Maurice suggests Hazlitt published the book as an expression of his own integrity, his willingness to explore the primitive reaches of his own character, and indeed human nature as a whole.
Maurice then addresses the question of why a man as sophisticated as Hazlitt should have fallen into such a regressed infatuation in his mid-40s. Other critics had noted that Hazlitt’s father had died exactly a month before he met and fell in love with Sarah Walker, but few had attached real significance to this. But Maurice notes that, although the father was 84 and feeble, Hazlitt as a child had been deeply attached to him. Moreover, he did not hear news of his father’s death until a week after the event, and missed the funeral. Liber Amoris, then, is
... a book about grief … Within the internal economy of a person’s mind when grief too great to bear has presented itself, an internal ‘about turn’ takes place, an ideal, everlasting loving object is called up. The eyes of the soul must be fixed, even transfixed. He can’t take his eyes off her. He needs such a love to save his life.
I find this account moving and truthful, and I believe Maurice has brought a new clarity to Liber Amoris, a book which has troubled Hazlitt critics ever since it appeared 180 years ago, and it is in keeping with Maurice’s deep empathy for Hazlitt’s intellect and humanity.
It is worth adding that Maurice’s own prose style is compact and graceful and flows easily beside the Hazlitt quotations that appear throughout this book. Maurice is an Irishman, and I’ve often thought the Irish took the perfect revenge for the suppression of their own language by writing the conquerors’ language better than the English themselves. One only has to think of Swift, Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Heaney. Maurice would not wish to insinuate himself into such company, but he does belong to a tradition of Irish eloquence. It’s a conversational eloquence and this is above all a companionable book.
