Along Earl Street, in the centre of Maidstone, and by the local theatre, a small pedestrian alleyway runs from here to the parallel High Street. On the left of this opposite the arcades and the sheltered walkway underneath is a red bricked building, marked as a unitarian chapel. The pastor of this, William Hazlitt, came here from Scotland and then Wisbech in Cambridgeshire in 1770 with his wife Grace. Eight years later, a son – also called William – was born, in the nearby Mitre Lane (now on the site of Rose Yard and Market Buildings). Only two years later, the family moved again, first to Ireland, and then Boston in the USA. On returning to Britain in the early 1790s, the son William, after initial study to follow his father’s profession, rejected this, training instead to be a painter. His path from the latter part of the decade into the early 1800s was to associate with figures like William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Thomas de Quincey. It was his encounter around 1798 with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge however which was to be the most fateful. Hazlitt’s criticism and recollections of Coleridge in the ensuing years are amongst the most important, earliest and influential works, on the great romantic thinker and writer. If Johnson had Boswell to record his personality and life story, then to an extent Coleridge had Hazlitt to testify to his intellectual trajectory and offer the first critical assessments of his complex thought and work. Hazlitt died in London in 1830.
That the theatre in the county town of Kent today is named after Hazlitt (and has been since 1955, when it was renamed from the previous concert hall) because of his two years there before moving on testifies to the fact that in the recent past his work was still regarded as important. The local museum too has portraits of he and his father. Sadly, the immensely important output of this key figure has in recent decades fallen into neglect. This is a real pity. Hazlitt was a significant intellectual figure at a time when politics, society and culture was undergoing enormous change. He knew not just Coleridge, but many of the other key people in his time. His criticism is penetrating and sharp, and his writing style easy, elegant and distinctive. Despite this, as a more recent collection of his writings starts by saying, there is a `conspiracy of caution’ which has grown up around him. An author accorded with the label `great’ with no one quite knowing what this really means applied to him (Ronald Blythe, Editor, in `William Hazlitt: Selected Writings’, Penguin, 1970, 9).
One way to try to work out what sort of writer Hazlitt is looking at perhaps the most personal, and unusual, of Hazlitt’s works was after his first marriage in 1808 to Sarah Stoddart, and his gravitation full time away from painting to working as a journalist and writer. The marriage turned out to be an unhappy one, with frustrations and anxieties that came to a head in 1820 when he was largely separated from his wife and rented rooms at Southampton Buildings, central London. Here he promptly became infatuated with the landlord’s 20 year old daughter Sarah. `Liber Amoris’ written in 1822 has a remarkably contemporary feel to it, recording as it does what would be crudely labelled today a severe mid-life crisis. Hazlitt’s style fitted well the descriptions of inner turmoil and persistent self-punishment and self-doubt. `Shall I not love her for herself alone, in spite of her fickleness and folly?,’ Hazlitt writes in Letter XII:
`To love her for her regard to me, is not to love her, but myself. She has robbed me of myself; shall she also rob me of my love of her? Did I not live on her smile? Is it less sweet because it is withdrawn from me? Did I note adore her every grace? Does she bend enchantingly, because she has turned from me to another?’ Is my love then in the power of fortune or her caprice?’ (Ibid, 337).
The relentless exposure of his self to questions, piled on top of each other, often pointing in wholly different ways, is symptomatic of the unbearable tension between reason and passion which this sort of love brings into the open. Hazlitt knew well in his own experience, and conveys well in the book, the bewildering reality of knowing the object of this sort of highly idealising love is incompatible, and probably disappointing in every way, and yet having this powerful attraction which overrides that, even to the point of inspiring acts of self-destruction. As one of the greatest descriptions of this terrifying, and very common, state of affairs, this work would be hard to improve on. It captures the paradox of a single individual utterly unwillingly loving someone, and yet being unable to fight free from this without enormous, sometimes perhaps catastrophic, emotional effort.
`Liber Amoris’ was heavily autobiographical. Its publication resulted in some criticising the author for mawkishness and self-indulgence. For Hazlitt, though, the costs were all too real. Divorce in 1822 led to what appears to have been a near nervous breakdown and contemplation of suicide. The description in the book of the final meeting with the object of the author’s infatuation was true to life; Hazlitt had sought after his divorce a meeting with Sarah Walker in which her remoteness finally removed the scales from his eyes. Somehow, he prevailed, and in 1824 remarried – Isabelle Bridgewater.
One of Hazlitt’s many excellent essays goes by the title `On Going a Journey’. Published in the connection, `Table Talk’ in 1821, it ends with this consolation:
`Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recall them: but we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth’ (Ibid, 147).
It is good that Maidstone remembers Hazlitt. Hopefully, in time there will be a reappraisal and reassessment of his work. He was an important writer, at an important time; a complex, varied, and often very modern one. He deserves to be more widely read.