Heartache

THE QUARREL OF THE AGE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WILLIAM HAZLITT.

By A.C. Grayling.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 412 pages; £25

ACCORDING to this new biography, William Hazlitt was the greatest essayist in English letters. He inherited an anti-establishment outlook from the dissenting tradition into which he was born in 1778, but it is Hazlitt's humanity—both as a person and in his philosophy—which really stands out.

As a young man, he was excited by the French revolution, and he retained an idealised view of Napoleon to the end of his life. But his generous imagination was equally capable of appreciating the prose of a conservative thinker like Edmund Burke. This inclusiveness of thought sits well with what Anthony Grayling cites as Hazlitt's most important contribution to philosophy: his belief not merely in the possibility of altruism but that human beings are essentially “naturally disinterested”, not the selfish brutes that Thomas Hobbes perceived them to be.

Philosophy and politics took up much of Hazlitt's mental landscape, but his love of the theatre, expressed in his work as a drama critic, is where he is at his most appealing. “My God...Who is this Schiller, this convulser of the heart?” he wrote as a student. His mature writings on Shakespeare pay testimony to his continued ability to be deeply moved: over-intellectual modern-day critics should take a lesson from his capacity to write intelligently about emotion.

Yet for all the wisdom of his criticism, Hazlitt was not in control of his own emotional life. At the age of 42, having separated from his wife, he became infatuated with his landlord's daughter to an extent which can only be described as pathological. Unremarkable in herself, and apparently uninterested in him, the girl had a blankness about her on to which Hazlitt projected his own hell of lust and jealousy, passion and paranoia: at one point he even used a decoy to tempt her into sexual indiscretion and was rewarded with the agony of detailed descriptions of another man's hand up her skirt. The psychological toll on Hazlitt was great. When Mary Shelley saw him after a gap of three years, she could not believe how emaciated he had become.

Yet while this mad love affair, which Hazlitt chronicled and published as the embarrassing “Liber Amoris”, reveals the flaws of the man, it also provides the part of the biography in which he comes most to life. That a man of such prolific mental powers should be in thrall to such an adolescent obsession only serves to highlight his humanity.