There is no writer in the English language who combined so fierce a political conscience with so delicate a literary sensibility as William Hazlitt. Born in 1778 in Maidstone, the son of a Unitarian minister who had openly sympathised with the American Revolution, Hazlitt grew into the greatest essayist of the Romantic era — a radical journalist, an unflinching literary critic, a painter manqué, and above all, the supreme master of what he himself called “the familiar style.” His prose accomplished something that few writers before or since have managed: it married philosophical depth with conversational ease, so that reading a Hazlitt essay feels like being drawn into urgent talk with the most brilliant and passionate mind in the room. He wrote about Shakespeare and boxing, about the pleasures of walking and the treachery of politicians, about the Indian jugglers he saw at a London fair and the metaphysics of human will. In every case the prose moved with the same restless, probing energy — a mind thinking aloud, alive to every nuance of feeling and argument, refusing to settle for received opinion when the truth could be won through closer attention. · 12 min read
What distinguished Hazlitt from his great contemporaries — from Lamb’s gentle whimsy, from De Quincey’s opium-steeped arabesques, from Coleridge’s metaphysical flights — was the directness and force of his engagement with life as it was actually lived. He did not retreat into nostalgia or abstraction. He wrote about the world with the urgency of a man who believed that ideas mattered, that taste was a moral faculty, and that the way one responded to a painting or a play or a passage of poetry revealed something essential about one’s character. His familiar style was not a relaxation of intellectual rigour but its highest expression: the style of a writer who had thought so deeply about his subject that he could speak of it plainly, without pedantry or affectation, as one intelligent person speaks to another.
On Life and Thought
Hazlitt was a philosopher before he was an essayist. His first published work, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), was a treatise on the natural disinterestedness of the human mind — an argument that the imagination, by its very nature, carries us beyond the narrow prison of self-interest into sympathy with others. This philosophical conviction underwrote everything he later wrote. It was why he could argue that great literature enlarges the moral imagination, why he believed that political liberty was not an abstraction but a felt necessity, and why he insisted, against the gathering conservatism of his age, that the French Revolution had been right in its principles even where it had been catastrophic in its execution.
His essay “On the Love of Life” is characteristic of his method. Where a lesser writer would have produced a solemn meditation on mortality, Hazlitt produced something far more surprising: a defence of ordinary pleasure, of the small satisfactions that bind us to existence even when we have every reason to despair. “An ounce of sweet is worth a pound of sour,” he wrote, and the sentence captures the whole tenor of his thought — its preference for the concrete over the abstract, its refusal to let grand philosophical systems overrule the testimony of lived experience. Hazlitt understood that human beings do not live by ideas alone. They live by the taste of food, the warmth of a fire, the pleasure of a well-turned sentence. To ignore these things in favour of metaphysical speculation was, for him, a form of dishonesty.
Yet Hazlitt was no mere sensualist. His essay “On Thought and Action” reveals the other pole of his temperament: the conviction that ideas have consequences, that philosophy is not an idle game but the engine of historical change. “Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts,” he declared. “Again, great acts grow out of great occasions, and great occasions spring from great principles, working changes in society, and tearing it up by the roots.” This is Hazlitt at his most Jacobin — the prose gathering momentum like a political argument, each clause building on the last until the final image erupts with almost violent force. The roots of society torn up: it is the language of revolution, and Hazlitt meant it. He believed that thought and action were not opposed but continuous, that the thinker who refused to act on his convictions was as contemptible as the activist who had no convictions to act on.
This double commitment — to the pleasures of the senses and to the demands of principle — gave Hazlitt’s writing its peculiar tension and vitality. He was suspicious of greatness that existed only in the abstract. “No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime,” he observed, and elsewhere he cautioned that “a man should not be greater in himself than the work he has to do.” These are the maxims of a writer who valued accomplishment over reputation, substance over show. Hazlitt had seen too many men of genius — Coleridge above all — squander their gifts in talk and opium and unfulfilled promises. He admired Napoleon not because the Emperor was virtuous but because he had acted, had imposed his will on history, had made thought real in the world. And he despised the Lake Poets not because they lacked talent but because they had betrayed their early radicalism for pensions and the approval of the powerful.
On Writing and Conversation
No English writer has thought more penetratingly about the relationship between writing and speech than Hazlitt. His essay “On the Conversation of Authors” is one of the finest pieces of literary psychology ever written — a study of why brilliant writers are so often dull in company, and why the most sparkling conversationalists frequently produce flat, lifeless prose. Hazlitt observed that the two arts require fundamentally different temperaments. The conversationalist must be quick, responsive, willing to sacrifice precision for effect; the writer can afford to be slow, deliberate, willing to follow a thought through all its complications without fear of boring the company. The best writers, Hazlitt argued, are those who have internalised the rhythms of speech without being enslaved to them — who write as if they were talking, but with a depth and coherence that actual talk rarely achieves.
This was, of course, a description of his own method. Hazlitt’s prose reads like the most brilliant conversation you have ever overheard: spontaneous in manner, rigorous in substance, moving from anecdote to argument to aphorism with the unpredictable grace of a mind fully alive to its subject. He achieved this not through carelessness but through painstaking craft. “What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence,” he wrote, and the sentence applies to nothing more exactly than to his own prose style. That appearance of effortlessness was the product of enormous labour — of draft after draft, of sentences worried over and revised until they achieved the precise weight and rhythm he was after.
Hazlitt understood that the familiar style was the hardest style of all. Anyone can write obscurely; it requires nothing more than a willingness to confuse one’s readers. But to write with clarity about complex subjects, to make the reader feel that difficult ideas are being communicated as naturally as the weather — this demands a command of language that few writers possess. The familiar essay, as Hazlitt practised it, was not a minor form but a major one: a mode of writing that could accommodate philosophy, criticism, autobiography, and polemic within a single conversational frame. Montaigne had invented the form; Hazlitt perfected it.
What animated all of Hazlitt’s writing — his criticism, his journalism, his political essays — was an abiding love of the people and of liberty. These were not separate commitments for him but a single one. He loved the people because he loved liberty, and he loved liberty because he had seen what tyranny did to ordinary human lives. His prose was itself a democratic instrument: written not for scholars or specialists but for any reader willing to think. He addressed his audience as equals, never condescending, never flattering, always assuming that the person reading his words was as capable of following a complex argument as he was of making one. In an age when most political writing was either servile propaganda or rarefied abstraction, Hazlitt wrote political prose that was at once intellectually serious and genuinely popular.
The Shakespeare Criticism
If Hazlitt had written nothing but his Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), he would still deserve a permanent place in English letters. The book was revolutionary not merely in its conclusions but in its method. Where previous Shakespeare criticism had been largely concerned with questions of dramatic construction — whether the plays obeyed the classical unities, whether the plots were well managed — Hazlitt approached Shakespeare as a reader, a theatregoer, and above all as a man of feeling. His criticism was an act of empathetic immersion. He did not stand outside the plays and judge them by abstract rules; he entered into them, inhabited the minds of the characters, and reported back on what he found there with the precision of a novelist and the passion of a poet.
His essay on Hamlet remains one of the most penetrating things ever written about that inexhaustible play. Hazlitt saw that Hamlet’s paralysis was not a dramatic flaw but the essential subject of the work — that Shakespeare had created in the Prince of Denmark a figure whose thoughts were too complex, too self-aware, too scrupulous for the brutal world of action in which he found himself. “It is we who are Hamlet,” Hazlitt declared, and in that single sentence he transformed Shakespeare criticism from an academic exercise into an existential encounter. To read Shakespeare, for Hazlitt, was to recognise oneself — to find in the mirror of the plays one’s own desires, fears, contradictions, and capacities for both grandeur and degradation.
Shakespeare was, for Hazlitt, the universal dramatist precisely because he was the least dogmatic of writers. Shakespeare did not impose his own personality on his characters; he allowed them to live on their own terms, to speak in their own voices, to be fully themselves even when they were villains or fools. This was what Hazlitt meant by Shakespeare’s “negative capability” — a phrase he used before Keats made it famous — the capacity to enter into the being of another without losing oneself. Hazlitt saw in Shakespeare the supreme example of the disinterested imagination he had described in his philosophical treatise: a mind so capacious, so free from egotism, that it could contain multitudes. Iago was as real to Shakespeare as Desdemona; Falstaff as real as Prince Hal. The dramatist did not take sides; he understood.
This approach to criticism had profound implications. It meant that literary criticism was not a science but an art — that the critic’s task was not to apply rules but to respond, to feel, to articulate what the work of art had done to a particular human consciousness. Hazlitt was the first great critic to insist that the test of a work of literature was not its conformity to classical models but its effect on a living reader. In this he anticipated the entire tradition of modern literary criticism, from Arnold to Pater to the best of the twentieth-century critics. Every time a reader says, “This moved me,” and asks why, they are practising criticism in the mode that Hazlitt invented.
His Radical Politics
Hazlitt was a champion of the French Revolution long after it was fashionable to be one — indeed, long after it was safe. When Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey had all made their accommodations with power, when the Lake Poets had traded their youthful radicalism for government pensions and respectability, Hazlitt alone among the major literary figures of his generation refused to recant. He had seen the revolution’s promise — the promise of human equality, of rational government, of an end to hereditary privilege — and he would not pretray that promise simply because the revolution had also produced the Terror and Napoleon. The principles remained sound even if their execution had been flawed. This was not naivety; it was moral consistency of a kind that the English literary world found deeply uncomfortable.
“I am not afraid of making enemies,” Hazlitt declared, and the record of his life proves it. He was attacked in the Tory press with a viciousness that would be remarkable even today. Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review subjected him to campaigns of personal abuse that went far beyond literary disagreement into outright character assassination. They mocked his origins, his appearance, his failed marriage, his radical sympathies. They called him a Jacobin, a leveller, a danger to the state. Hazlitt bore it all with a mixture of fury and contempt, hitting back in prose that was sharper, more eloquent, and more devastating than anything his enemies could muster. He understood that the personal attacks were political attacks in disguise — that the Tory establishment hated him not because he was a bad writer but because he was a good one who used his gifts in the service of dangerous ideas.
His essay “What Is the People?” is one of the great polemical works in the English language — a sustained argument against the notion that the people are a mob to be managed, a herd to be led, a mass to be feared. Hazlitt argued that the people were the nation itself, that their interests were the only legitimate basis for government, and that any political system which treated them as subjects rather than citizens was a tyranny by definition. The essay is remarkable for its clarity, its anger, and its refusal to sentimentalise. Hazlitt did not pretend that the people were always wise or always virtuous. He argued simply that they had a right to govern themselves, that this right was inalienable, and that those who denied it — whether kings, aristocrats, or turncoat poets — were enemies of human freedom.
The connection between Hazlitt’s political radicalism and his literary style is not incidental; it is essential. His commitment to plain, vigorous, conversational English was itself a political act. In an age when most serious prose was written in a style designed to exclude ordinary readers — ornate, Latinate, deliberately obscure — Hazlitt wrote prose that anyone could understand. This was not a lowering of standards but a raising of them. He believed that the highest truths could be expressed in the simplest language, and that the deliberate cultivation of obscurity was a form of intellectual cowardice — a way of hiding the poverty of one’s ideas behind the grandeur of one’s vocabulary. His familiar style was a democratic style: open, accessible, addressed to the common reader rather than to a coterie of initiates.
Hazlitt died in 1830, at the age of fifty-two, impoverished and largely forgotten. His last words, according to his son, were: “Well, I’ve had a happy life.” It is a sentence worthy of the man who wrote it — plain, surprising, and deeply moving. He had endured poverty, public abuse, failed relationships, and the betrayal of nearly every literary friendship he had ever formed. Yet he could say, with his dying breath, that his life had been happy. The remark is not ironic. Hazlitt had lived for the things he loved — for books, for paintings, for the theatre, for long walks in the English countryside, for the company of the few friends who remained loyal to him, and above all for the act of writing itself, that strenuous, solitary, exhilarating labour that had consumed and sustained him for thirty years. He had written the truth as he saw it, without apology and without compromise. That was enough. That was happiness.