Hazlitteering

John Bayley

• Hazlitt: A Life. From Winterslow to Frith Street by Stanley Jones
  Oxford, 397 pp, £35.00, October 1989, ISBN 0 19 812840 1
• Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730-1830 by Jonathan Bate
  Oxford, 234 pp, £27.00, September 1989, ISBN 0 19 811749 3

Hazlitt has a modern feel about him. Among the poets of his age, dying young or turning, like Wordsworth, into pillars of the establishment, he represents a kind of muddling through, an honesty baffled and contingent, inconsistent even; not living in the world of romantic ideals and simplifying gestures but ground in the daily mill of intrigue and accommodation. Like many unworldly men, he was drawn inexorably into the haunts of worldliness, in the same way that he was drawn as a romantic lover to the most matter-of-fact and calculating females. He needed a milieu which hardly suited him, and from which he made efforts to escape, as he did from the women. He would be a likely character in a modern novel, and were he to appear, resurrected, among the newspapers and gossip columns of today he would be excited and disgusted and upset and at home. He would recognise that things were as in his own time. He would be familiar with Private Eye, though he would miss periodicals called the Black Dwarf and the Yellow Dwarf.