William Hazlitt was England's supreme essayist, and one of the greatest writers of prose in the English language. He was also the best and most important critic of the Romantic period, making original contributions to appreciation of art, theatre, literature and philosophy. And as if that were not enough, he was also a hard-hitting political polemicist who, at the expense of his own chances for worldly advancement, defended a radical stance which was not just unpopular but actively persecuted in the Regency period of the early 19th century - as shown by the fact that some of his friends found themselves in prison for views that he and they shared.
Hazlitt is sometimes labelled a "Romantic" like Coleridge and Wordsworth, who were first his friends and later his enemies. If the label has any value, it is because he was an intensely personal writer, vividly present in everything he wrote. He argued for his opinions without appealing to the authority, or needing the protection, of orthodox ideas or established ideologies.
A good example is afforded by his innovative style of criticism. The critics who came before him attacked Shakespeare for failing to observe the theatrical "unities" of time and place, as prescribed two thousand years before by Aristotle. Hazlitt was not interested in rules and formalities; he reacted to theatre - and to art, literature and ideas - as a man of deep feeling and independent mind, asking only whether he was being presented with truth, and in a manner that was well done of its kind. He demanded honesty in art, not orthodoxy; and he listened to his own responses, which were keen and searching, for the basis of his judgments.
As a result he changed the way people thought and wrote about the arts, and indirectly helped to liberate them from the rule of the past. Hazlitt wrote incessantly, not just because he made his living that way, but because he was impelled to write; it was his way of thinking, and of making sense of things. He thereby transmuted his life and thought into literature, leaving a body of work - 20 volumes' worth, in the standard edition - which continues to delight and instruct. Many of his essays are classics of the English tongue.
He has always had admirers, and his reputation, great and controversial in his own day, has never ceased to grow, though for a time it was clouded by Victorian delicacy, which was offended by his confessional style and most of all by his Liber Amoris, the searingly painful account of his notorious middle-aged passion for the young daughter of his landlady. Hazlitt attracted sharply different responses from his contemporaries. One view is well represented by John Keats and his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, who ardently admired him. They attended his lectures, read aloud to each other from his essays, and formulated their theories of poetry in response to his views. Through their eyes Hazlitt appears at his best, because when he was with such ambitious young men of talent, he was relaxed and expansive, ready to talk endlessly about art and philosophy - not in monologue, as Coleridge did, but as a conversationalist in the same mould as his friend Charles Lamb.
In a letter of April 1817, Reynolds describes entertaining Hazlitt to dinner: "On Thursday last Hazlitt was with me at home, and remained with us till three o'clock in the morning! - full of eloquence, - warm, lofty, and communicative on everything imaginative and intelligent - He is indeed great company, and leaves a weight on the mind, which 'it can hardly bear'. He is full of what Dr Johnson terms 'good talk'. His countenance also is extremely fine: - a sunken and melancholy face, - a forehead lined with thought and bearing a full and strange pulsation on exciting subjects, - an eye, dashed in its light with sorrow, but kindling and living at intellectual moments, - and a stream of coal-black hair dropping around all. Such a face, so silent and so sensitive, is indeed the banner of the mind. I fear you will be tired of this long 'personality', but I remember having read a few papers of his to you, and therefore imagine you are not wholly uninterested in him."
Reynolds' portrait has an air of hyperbole, but it chimes exactly with accounts given by others who enjoyed Hazlitt's friendship. A very different picture is given by Thomas De Quincey, never a friend to Hazlitt, still less so after the detection of his unacknowledged borrowings from Hazlitt's writings (for which he was uncomfortably obliged to apologise).
"His inveterate misanthropy was constitutional," De Quincey wrote. "Exasperated it certainly had been by accidents of life, by disappointments, by mortifications, by insults, and still more by having wilfully placed himself in collision from the first with all the interests that were in the sunshine of the world, and of all the persons that were then powerful in England... A friend of his it was who told me that involuntarily, when Hazlitt put his hand within his waistcoat (as a mere unconscious trick of habit), he himself felt a sudden recoil of fear, as from one who was searching for a hidden dagger."
These two portraits - drawn from a number of either kind - could scarcely be more at variance. For two generations after Hazlitt's death it was De Quincey's portrait which prevailed, for although some thought him the greatest thinker and critical writer of his age, others saw him as a gloomy pessimistic Jacobin motivated by party spleen and personal antipathies. Leaving aside the melodramatic reference to a dagger, chosen to allegorise Hazlitt's fearsome powers as a polemicist, there is some truth in De Quincey's picture, for Hazlitt was indeed at loggerheads with the vested interests of his time, he indeed never courted favour with those "in the sunshine of the world" because he suspected that most of them had got there by dishonest or despicable means, and he indeed suffered much from disappointments in his personal life and insults in his public life.
The disappointments and insults were connected, for this was an age of violent polemic and party strife, in which Hazlitt was the subject of constant attacks by the Tory press, of a kind we could not now tolerate. They called him depraved, blasphemous, malign, a fiend who endangered traditions and proprieties, a blackguard, a quack, a "pimpled coxcomb".
In its most vicious style one of the chief Tory magazines, Blackwood's, was capable of ranting, "Let execrations gurgle in your gullet, distended with the rising gorge of your blackest bile; belch out your bitter blackguardism lest you burst; clench your fists till your fretted palms are pierced with the jagged edge of nails bitten in impotent desperation, stamp with cloven feet on the fetid flags of your sty till the mire mounts to your mouth" - and so on.
More sober journals, recognising Hazlitt's genius, applauded "the spirit and energy of this extraordinary writer, whose work abounds with striking beauties, and with the enlightened spirit of truth and critical discrimination", but they did not wholly cancel the harm done. Hazlitt returned the Tory attacks with interest, but his enemies made ammunition out of his private sufferings, thereby doubling them.
A man who could inspire such different responses, and who could think and write as Hazlitt did - "We think we are very fine fellows nowadays," Robert Louis Stevenson told his contemporaries, "but none of us can write like Hazlitt" - deserves explanation. The explanation is his life, from which all that he felt and thought sprang; so to explain him is to tell his story - and not least one of the most famous (or perhaps infamous) episodes in it, his unrequited love for a woman less than half his age. His account of the affair, the Liber Amoris, is so frank and painful that it destroyed his reputation among his contemporaries and the Victorians who came immediately afterwards.
Hazlitt's disastrous passion began in the summer of 1820. He was 42, and at the height of his fame and powers. He had been separated from his first wife for three years, and was living a bachelor's life in lodgings. The young woman, Sarah Walker, was the 19-year-old daughter of a boarding-house landlady.
The unhappy tale began when, on August 16 - Hazlitt's third day in his new lodgings at Southampton Buildings near Chancery Lane in London - he saw Sarah Walker for the first time. She brought breakfast to his rooms, and he was immediately struck by her manner. He watched as she went away, mesmerised by her walk, for she had a waving, gliding step which he found graceful beyond description. At the door she turned and looked him full in the eye, her strange, dark gaze burning him to the depths of his soul. He was stunned, amazed - and in love in an instant.
It might seem that, for one who suffered frequently from infatuations (his friend Patmore said "he was always in love with somebody or other") and who therefore understood their nature, Hazlitt should have been well armed against his vulnerability to them. But his own views explain why he allowed himself to become besotted in this case. Love and desire, he said, are blessings when mutual (which he thought they rarely were, except in novels), but like the Furies when unrequited. Either way one cannot escape them. They are non-rational, and the will cannot oppose them. They take hold and run their course, and their victim can do nothing but survive as best he - usually, in Hazlitt's view, he - can. Hazlitt accordingly never attempted to resist. He gave in to his feelings at their first impulse, and invariably suffered the consequences. In the case of Sarah Walker, "suffered" is a wholly inadequate word. His obsession with her almost drove him mad.
Hazlitt also therefore believed in love at first sight. More accurately, he believed that what goes by that name is only a recognition of an antecedently cherished ideal; that in a sense it is not "first sight" at all. "I do not think that what is called Love at first sight is so great an absurdity as it is sometimes imagined to be," he wrote soon after meeting Sarah Walker. "We generally make up our minds beforehand to the sort of person we should like, grave or gay, black, brown or fair; with golden tresses or with raven locks; - and when we meet with a complete example of the qualities we admire, the bargain is soon struck. We have never seen any thing to come up to our newly discovered goddess before, but she is what we have been all our lives looking for. The idol we fall down and worship is an image familiar to our minds. It has been present to our waking thoughts, it has haunted us in our dreams."
A few years before, in a review of a book on European literature, Hazlitt had pointedly disagreed with its author's regret that Petrarch and his Laura had not been able to enjoy a longer intimacy. "The whole is in better keeping as it is," Hazlitt wrote. "The love of a man like Petrarch would have been less in character, if it had been less ideal. For the purposes of inspiration, a single interview was quite sufficient. The smile which sank into his heart the first time he ever beheld her, played round her lips ever after, the look with which her eyes first met his, never passed away. The image of his mistress still haunted his mind, and was recalled by every object in nature. Even death could not dissolve the fine illusion: for that which exists in the imagination is alone imperishable." These words struck home to a reader in Paris who felt that they described his own experience exactly. The reader was Stendhal, who, in making a note of this passage, was not for the first time copying out Hazlitt's words. The two met in Paris some years later, and became friends.
Those words - "The smile which sank into his heart the first time he ever beheld her" - could scarcely have been more prophetic, given the beginning and the manner of Hazlitt's passion for Sarah Walker. But she did not impress everyone. Hazlitt's friend Procter described her thus: "Her face was round and small, and her eyes were motionless, glassy, and without any speculation (apparently) in them. Her movements in walking were remarkable, for I never observed her to make a step. She went onwards in a wavy, sinuous manner, like the movement of a snake. She was silent, or uttered monosyllables only, and very demure. Her steady, unmoving gaze upon the person she was addressing was exceedingly unpleasant. The Germans would have extracted a romance from her, endowing her perhaps with some diabolic attribute."
Although this description was written after the event, in pity for Hazlitt and dislike of Sarah Walker - though it is not as unfriendly as the description offered by Hazlitt's first wife: "thin and bony as the scrag end of a neck of mutton" - it tallies exactly with Hazlitt's own descriptions, except that he gave them a different cast. Her walk, her sphinx-like eyes, her demure silence, and her round face and slender figure, all recur in Hazlitt's account as matters for celebration, and as the barbs that snagged his soul and would not let him go.
Hazlitt longed for the kind of romantic love found in novels. He was sceptical about whether it could exist, for such love would amount to something truly metaphysical: to a companionship of hearts and souls that would cure the inexpressible loneliness of being. Yet he hoped for it anyway, and sought it endlessly. By the time he fell in love with Sarah Walker his longing for the realisation of this dream had grown acute. He was ripe for love, and fell hopelessly into it at the first faint, imagined touch of its presence.
For 18 months after Sarah Walker's sinuous movements and meaningful looks captivated Hazlitt, she spent hours every day in his room, sitting on his knee, kissing and fondling him endlessly, and being fondled in return. He did not try to have sexual intercourse with her, because he idealised her and wanted to marry her, and therefore wished to believe her "pure". But their intimacy did not fall far short.
During the first year he was often blissfully happy. She was "the only woman that ever made me think she loved me, and that feeling was so new to me, and so delicious, that 'it will never from my heart' " (sic). She made him think that she loved him without ever telling him so directly - on the contrary, she refused to say that she loved him, nor would she promise him anything for the future. When he asked, "Do you love me? Could you love me?" she merely said, "You should judge by my actions" and "Do I seem indifferent?" Indeed, her actions made Hazlitt hope, and hope was enough at the outset. He showered her with gifts, some of them expensive: an ivory flageolet, a gold heart-shaped locket, a cap and gown, silk cloth, tickets for the theatre, copies of the books he had written, even his most treasured miniature statue of Napoleon.
But one day she told him something he had not known before. The reason she could never feel more than friendship towards him, she said, was that she still nurtured a tenderness for someone else, a former lodger in the house who, because of a "difference of station", had been obliged to leave to prevent their mutual feelings going further. This continuing attachment posed a barrier, she said, to her ever loving anyone else.
This was a severe blow. Instead of answering his questions evasively, she was now, Hazlitt reported, saying, "No, never." He was hurt and troubled by the news, but it did not kill his hope. He thought that his passion must surely one day make her love him in return, so exalted was it, and so profound. And then he found that he was charmed by her fidelity to one she had loved, and he honoured her for it. And still she sat in his lap daily, twining her arms round his neck, kissing him, enjoying his caresses.
But that was before an even more devastating blow precipitated a crisis in their relationship. A new lodger arrived, younger and more handsome, and Sarah Walker discovered for herself what it was like to fall in love. She rejected Hazlitt therefore, and his suffering over the next three years is almost indescribable. He did everything he could to win her back, not least divorcing his estranged wife so that he could be free to marry Sarah; but it only prolonged his agony. Mary Shelley, the daughter of his friend Godwin, having not seen him during those years because she was in Italy, described his appearance when the crisis was nearly over: "I never was so shocked in my life - gaunt and thin, his hair scattered, his cheekbones projecting - but for his voice and smile I should not have known him. His smile brought tears to my eyes, it was like a sunbeam illuminating the most melancholy of ruins."
And yet in the years during and after Hazlitt's great passion for Sarah Walker, he wrote his best works - essays of incomparable power and beauty, exploring the human condition, discussing art and letters, dissecting ideas, offering instruction and wit, insight, controversy, and pleasure - and, in the most famous of his books, The Spirit of the Age, choosing with unerring accuracy those among his contemporaries whose reputations he thought would last into history, and anatomising them in his penetrating and witty way. As with everything he wrote, his genius as a writer of prose takes one's breath away, and leaves a vivid impression of a man whose passionately lived life was turned by great art into literature, and made a lasting monument to the human spirit.
• AC Grayling's The Quarrel of the Age, a biography of Hazlitt, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£25).
To obtain a copy at the discount price of £21 plus 99p p&p, call the Guardian CultureShop on 0800-3166 102, or send a cheque to Guardian CultureShop, 32-34 Park Royal Road, London NW10 7LN.
