The cover of Duncan Wu's William Hazlitt: the First Modern Man features a portrait of Hazlitt—a self-portrait. It is clearly the work of a significant talent, executed with subtle skill. We see in it a young man in a nondescript coat, a white stock wreathing his neck, who looks directly at the viewer. Light from an unseen window illuminates the right side of his face, but the other side is still discernible. His face is tilted ever so slightly downward so that he seems to be looking from under his brows. His eyes are quite large, his closed lips full; but his chin is short and, one might say, rather weak. The overall impression is of immense intelligence, immense sensitivity, immense vulnerability. These impressions are correct, though they do not tell us all we need to know of the man's character.

Hazlitt has not come down to us as a painter, and barely even as an essayist, though that was the role he filled for generations: one of the two great English essayists of the Romantic era, the other being Charles Lamb. When Hazlitt is remembered today it is usually as the beleaguered protagonist of a doomed love affair with a serving girl more than twenty years his junior, a story he faithfully recorded in a book called Liber Amoris. Duncan Wu wants to restore Hazlitt to a far higher place in the public estimation, and anyone who has spent much time reading Hazlitt is likely to wish him success in that endeavor. But Wu's approach—driven by an almost comical determination to justify Hazlitt's behavior in the countless quarrels that dominated much of his adult life—works against his declared aims. A reader of this biography who was not already well acquainted with Hazlitt's prose would have little sense of why Wu thinks Hazlitt deserves the highest possible praise for an essayist, "the title of the British Montaigne." And this is sad, because even so high a claim is plausible. William Hazlitt is a great but largely forgotten genius of English literature.

In July of 1791 in the English city of Birmingham, a mob acting in the name of King and Church sacked and burned the home and laboratory of Joseph Priestley—known to us as a great scientist but to them as an anti-monarchist, Unitarian, and Francophile. (Priestley had aroused their anger by openly celebrating what would later be called Bastille Day.) This treatment of a great man outraged William Hazlitt, who wrote this impassioned defense of Priestley in his local newspaper:

Religious persecution is the bane of all religion; and the friends of persecution are the worst enemies religion has; and of all persecutions, that of calumny is the most intolerable. Any other kind of persecution can affect our outward circumstances only, our properties, our lives; but this may affect our characters for ever. And this great man has not only had his goods spoiled, his habitation burned, and his life endangered, but is also calumniated, aspersed with the most malicious reflections, and charged with every thing bad, for which a misrepresentation of the truth and prejudice can give the least pretence.

Hazlitt was thirteen years old at the time.

No wonder his father had high hopes for him. But those hopes focused on the idea that William would like his father become a Unitarian minister, and this was not to be. Two years after the sad affair in Birmingham, Priestley had moved on to the Unitarian New College at Hackney, just outside London, and young Hazlitt followed to study with the great man. But within two further years Hazlitt had become, as he himself put it, an "avowed infidel." The news broke his father's heart. Hazlitt loved his father deeply, so much so that this moment was in Wu's view "the most catastrophic event of his life," but he never returned to any kind of religious faith.

Instead he turned to philosophy—he developed a theory of what he called moral "disinterestedness" that occupied much of his intellectual energy in his youth—and then to painting, and ultimately to the potent combination of literary ambition and revolutionary politics that he saw exemplified in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Hazlitt met those two poets when he was nineteen and they just a few years older. He was electrified and transfixed, especially by Coleridge's already near-legendary eloquence, and recorded those early meetings many years later in what would become one of his most famous essays, "My First Acquaintance with Poets."

But it did not take Hazlitt long to fall out with Wordsworth and Coleridge alike; nor, for that matter, did it take him long to fall out with most of the other literary and artistic figures he met as he was drawn deeper and deeper into London's intellectual world. Of Coleridge—universally considered one of the very greatest critics of Shakespeare—Hazlitt airily declared that he "isn't competent to the task of lecturing on Shakespeare, for he is not well-read in him." Indeed, much of what Coleridge knew he learned from Hazlitt, says Hazlitt. Of Wordsworth he wrote, "He hates all greatness, and all pretensions to it but his own. His egotism is in this respect a madness … . He hates all science and all art; he hates chemistry; … he hates Sir Isaac Newton; … he hates prose, he hates all poetry but his own; he hates Shakespeare; … he hates music, dancing, and painting … . He hates all that others love and admire but himself."

Byron? "A king is hardly good enough for him to touch: a man of genius is no better than a worm." Shelley? A "philosophic fanatic"; "though a man in knowledge, he is a child in feeling." The great political philosopher William Godwin, an early and long-term supporter and encourager of Hazlitt? "He says little, and that little were better left alone, being both dull and nonsensical; his talk is as flat as a pancake, there is no leaven in it, he has not dough enough to make a loaf and a cake." And what about ordinary people, say, the rural folk of whom Wordsworth wrote so eloquently? "All country-people hate each other."

The most surprising aspect of Duncan Wu's biography is his nearly unwavering determination to justify Hazlitt in such denunciations, to declare repeatedly that Hazlitt is morally blameless in these quarrels, and, in some cases, to carry the denunciations a bit further even than Hazlitt did. Wu calls Hazlitt's dismissal of Coleridge's critical abilities "a characteristically incisive analysis," and in another passage adds that "Coleridge was a hopelessly deluded man" who suffered from the "knowledge that Hazlitt would surpass him." (Note the word "knowledge," rather than "suspicion" or "fear." Wu seems to take it for granted that Hazlitt did suspass Coleridge, a judgment which to few others will seem obvious.) After quoting the attack on Wordsworth at greater length than I have done here, Wu simply writes, "All of this was true"—but then adds, as though making a slight qualification, "at least, it was based on Hazlitt's encounters with Wordsworth." (There's a world of wiggle-room in the phrase "based on.") Wu also informs us that Hazlitt "did know something about country people," adding that in any case the essay in which he makes his categorical judgment is a "tour de force of invective"—a phrase Wu repeats verbatim when describing a later attack on Coleridge, as though rhetorical flair compensates for all else. Regarding the condemnation on Shelley, Wu writes "Hazlitt was doubtless at fault"—but not for writing what he did, only for failing to realize that others would not treat such matters with the serene intellectual "disinterestedness" with which, Wu assures us, Hazlitt himself always accepted attacks. (He repeats this judgment at least three times in the course of the biography.)

Only the mockery of Godwin—which was followed by a period of several years in which Hazlitt continued to meet Godwin socially, often in Godwin's own home, without ever telling the old man what he had been saying and writing about him—causes Wu to hesitate for a moment. "Hazlitt should have understood" that Godwin would be unhappy with being pilloried, he acknowledges, which if course is a long way from saying that Hazlitt shouldn't have written what he wrote. But, as though even that point counts too heavily against Hazlitt, Wu rushes on to say, "these were extreme times"—after all, Hazitt "felt himself to be on the fringes of society," which surely explains why he would attack a man in whose society he was always welcome as an old and beloved friend. The worst Wu can bring himself to say is that Hazlitt's smearing of Godwin was a "miscalculation." And again and again he returns to his summation of Hazlitt's constant verbal warfare: "No writer was more reviled, and none were less deserving of it."

There is no question that Hazlitt did receive far more than his share of public criticism. Wu quotes a germane comment made thirty-five years after Hazlitt's death: "William Hazlitt … was in his day the best abused man in Great Britain; it was dangerous to be his companion, so many stones were always flying about his ears." Like Kierkegaard in Denmark thirty years later, he became a figure whom many others delighted in mocking—he even brought a libel suit against Blackwood's Magazine, which was settled out of court but in his favor—and like the attacks on Kierkegaard, the attacks on Hazlitt seem strangely out of proportion to the provocation he afforded. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard quite literally asked for mockery, and Hazlitt didn't do much less than that: his relentless critiques of public figures, so many of which focus on eccentricities of appearance, speech, and gesture, surely invited responses in kind. He could therefore scarcely have been surprised at a reference to "pimpled Hazlitt's coxcomb lectures," and if others had responded as he responded to Blackwood's, he would have been the object of a few lawsuits himself.

It's clear, then, that Wu's summary judgment—that no writer was less deserving than Hazlitt of being reviled—is simply untenable. Wu's determination to stand by his man in every conceivable circumstance not only calls his own reliability as a biographer into question, it also—and this is far more important—obscures what Wu most wants to celebrate: Hazlitt's greatness as a writer. So entangled does Wu become in his tendentious retellings of these quarrels that he never seriously develops his strange claim that Hazlitt is "the first modern man," and almost completely neglects to support his views of Hazlitt's literary stature. I will therefore take up that task myself, if only through hints and implications.

Like many essayists—the greater and the lesser alike—Hazlitt took a long time to discover his métier, and indeed could be said to have created that métier out of spare parts he picked up along the way to getting his bills paid. Paying the pills was always a problem for Hazlitt, especially after his marriage in 1808 to Sarah Stoddart, and the subsequent arrival of their children (only one of whom survived infancy). He had not been able to make his way as a painter, and turned increasingly to odd jobs of writing. He had already published his philosophical treatise, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind, in 1805, and then turned to political pamphlets and miscellaneous tasks of editing and compilation, few of which made as much money as he had hoped for. In 1809 he published A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue; a couple of years after that, in imitation of his former friend Coleridge, he advertised a series of philosophical lectures in London: these drew enough of an audience to keep him afloat, so he repeated the practice a few times.

But gradually he began to build a reputation as a writer for the London weekly newspapers, and then for the most famous periodical of the day, The Edinburgh Review. What did he write about? A better question would be, What didn't he write about? Consider just a few titles, from the essays only: "On the Love of the Country," "On Reading Old Books," "Disappointment," "Public Opinion," "On Depth and Superficiality," and, especially noteworthy in light of the life story we have been exploring, "On the Want of Money" and "On Disagreeable People."

At this point I begin to have more sympathy for Wu's difficulties in making a case for Hazlitt's genius, because it is impossible to convey the distinctive quality of these essays through selective quotation. Hazlitt produces the occasional aphoristic sentence: "He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others." "The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves." "Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room." But his mastery does not lie in the snippet, rather in the gradual and nearly imperceptible development of profound ideas from disparate experiences. Consider his late essay "On a Sun-Dial," which begins by noting the motto engraved on a sundial he saw while traveling in Italy, and then, in a few apparently unhurried paragraphs, augments the scope of its concerns to embrace the differences between sundials and clocks, the too-frequent ringing of church chimes in Holland, the purpose of funeral bells, Hazlitt's own disdain for time-pieces and the curious vocation which allows him such disdain, and—looming over it all—the author's sense that Time itself is "the most independent of all things. All the sublimity, all the superstition that hang upon this palpable mode of announcing its flight, are chiefly attached to this circumstance. Time would lose its abstracted character, if we kept it like a curiosity or a jack-in-a-box: its prophetic warnings would have no effect, if it obviously spoke only at our prompting like a paltry ventriloquism."

Reading Hazlitt's essays I am rarely conscious of anything much happening to me. His prose moves in irregular rhythms, but without calling overmuch attention to itself, and in his best work he does not seem even to try to convince me that his subject is important or his treatment distinctive. And yet when I reach the end of any of his finest pieces, I find myself setting the book on my lap and raising my head from the page a while: I feel vibrations in my mind, echoes of ideas that have just been suggested to me, echoes that resonate with one another variously and strangely. No one makes me think quite the way that Hazlitt does.

Throughout his career, Hazlitt's work was continually disrupted not just by his incessant public spats, but still more by a continually roiling private life. From his teenage years on he was attracted to prostitutes, and even had a tendency to fall in love with them. And once, on something like the whim of a moment, he proposed marriage to Wordsworth's sister Dorothy. (She told him that she was married to Poetry.) In the early years of his first marriage, when he and his wife Sarah were living in the countryside and not long after she had suffered a miscarriage, he fell so hopelessly in love with a young peasant girl named Sally Baugh that Sarah ordered him to go to London to escape his infatuation. A decade later, when he was forty-one and his marriage had all but collapsed, he became so obsessed with nineteen-year-old Sarah Walker that he could barely eat—his friends were shocked by his appearance—and was utterly incapable of writing. Sarah would tease him so skillfully, arousing him to the point of madness but allowing no near approach to sexual intercourse, that Hazlitt turned once more to prostitutes for relief. (Hazlitt was staying in the inn run by Sarah's father, and Wu reports that Sarah would escort them to her suitor's room.) Though he was rapidly falling back into his old poverty, he focused his energies on getting a divorce—in Scotland, where the laws were laxer than in England—so that he could propose to the young woman. But when he finally became "a free man" he discovered that she had attached herself to someone else, a man whom she had previously declared herself to have no interest in.

At this Hazlitt collapsed utterly. He told Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, "I feel much like a man who has been thrown from the top of a house." He was only able to recover by writing a full account of the experience: the Liber Amoris, published anonymously in 1823—though the authorship was an open secret, and Hazlitt was fully aware that he would be recognized. He was, as he himself commented, merely saying in print what he had been telling everyone who had come within earshot of him for the previous three years. And besides, he desperately needed the money. (A year after publishing it he would marry a widow named Isabella Bridgwater, but that marriage would end just six years later with his death.)

Wu thinks the Liber Amoris a great book because of its "brutal honesty," its refusal to "pander to vanity or self-regard." I would say that these may be personal virtues but they are not literary ones; for me the Liber is continually thrown onto the rocks by the sweep of its author's emotional tides. "My heart is torn out of me, with every feeling for which I wished to live. The whole is like a dream, an effect of enchantment; it torments me, and it drives me mad." Hazlitt deals out this kind of prose by the bucketful; I think most readers prefer it in teaspoon doses.

And in any case, this interminable outpouring of feeling is not the way of the essay—not the way of Hazlitt at his extraordinary best. Consider "On the Pleasure of Hating," which derives much of its strength from the slightly detached manner in which it approaches its subject, its initial contentment with philosophical generalization:

Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, 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. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction.

But this strength is multipled many times over as Hazlitt gradually allows a more passionate impetus to drive him forward, a more personal encounter with the experience of hatred. It's impossible here to capture the subtle transformation of the meditation's tone, but these are its last words:

What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves,—seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy—mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love;—have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

This is compelling stuff, and its power is generated by the sinuous path Hazlitt follows to reach that agonized conclusion. In the Liber Amoris, though it's a much longer work, Hazlitt can't manage to build up the reader's trust and sympathy. He seems just to want to throw us from the top of a house.

And it must also be said that even in the masterful "On the Pleasure of Hating" we hear the discordant notes of self-justification and self-pity—especially if we have read Duncan Wu's biography. One would never guess from this account that its author could have betrayed friendships as well as being duped by them; nor is the suspicion entertained that "fools of love" can someimes be deficient in their own powers of loving. That concluding sentence is Hazlitt's way of saying to Coleridge and Wordsworth and others whom he classed with "the world" that he only regrets having let them off so easily.

Brilliant as "On the Pleasure of Hating" is, then, I retreat a step or two from it. For all Hazlitt's evident genius, the character of his essays—which, in the nature of the essayistic case, is largely his own nature—can drift far from the ironic, gently self-questioning spirit of Montaigne. Montaigne chose as his motto Que s&ccedit;ay-je?—What do I know?—and one cannot imagine a motto less congenial to the ever-confident Hazlitt.

Do I really want to suggest that we evaluate writers on the basis of their character? Treat every writer thus, and who should 'scape whipping? And in general I would say that such a scheme is indeed bad policy. But Hemingway's shortcomings do not touch the Nick Adams stories, nor Byron's Don Juan, in the way that an essayist's flaws of character soak into the essays themselves. Montaigne wrote that his book was "consubstantial with its author," that it was impossible to encounter or judge the one without simultaneously responding to the other. To some extent this is true of all essays, sobering though that truth might be to those of us who write them; and so it is hard for me not to think that Hazlitt, great as he is, would have been still greater had he been a better man.

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Original Sin: A Cultural History (HarperOne) and Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.