Immortal Hatred

BORN UNDER SATURN: A BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM HAZLITT-- Catherine MacDonold Macleon--MacMillan ($3.50).

When Britain's war with Napoleon was brewing in 1803, the martial spirit swept the lyrical circles of Britain's Lake District. Poet William Wordsworth bought himself a red coat, drilled with the Ambleside Volunteers. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote patriotic sonnets and coined a deathless phrase: "The Corsican upstart."

But Essayist William Hazlitt was in despair. He claimed that his friends were betraying their revolutionary principles, that Napoleon was "the best hope of the Cause of the Peoples of the earth." When he mixed Napoleonic politics with a tumultuous passion for a local lass, the Lake District peasantry beat Hazlitt up. The advocate of revolution fled to Coleridge's house for fresh shoes. Then he stumbled on to Wordsworth's house, where he shook off his pursuers, borrowed enough money to take him home to London, where direct action was a merely literary theory.

This Lake Country episode was typical of William Hazlitt's embittered, upsy-downsy life. Born Under Saturn is the first full-length biography in 20 years of the saturnine, unhappy man who was one of 19th-Century England's most brilliant, irascible and unpopular essayists (Lectures on English Poets, Spirit of the Age). The book is passionately pro-Hazlitt. White-haired, scholarly Catherine MacDonald Maclean (Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years} defends Hazlitt with the slashing vigor of a mother defending a slightly subnormal child.

Hazlitt, who as a child intensely dis liked the U.S., was almost a U.S. writer. His sister happened upon one of 1782's best-sellers -- J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. The Hazlitts were enchanted with its lyrical mixture of democracy and agriculture. Father Hazlitt, a struggling Unitarian minister, decided to emigrate. Soon Parson Hazlitt established Boston's first Unitarian church. But ill-health and parish problems (he would rather "die in a ditch," he said, than kowtow to his congregation) drove Parson Hazlitt back to Britain. Wrote the future author of Winterslow, then aged eight: "I shall never forget that we came to America. ... I think for my part that it would have been a great deal better if the white people had not found it out. Let the [Indians] have it to themselves, for it was made for them."

Uncorking the Flame. Back in Britain, bookish young William devoured Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Neal's History of the Puritans, and Calamy's Account of the Two Thousand Ejected Ministers. Guests were surprised when the child entertained them with discussions of "such matters as the Test and the Corporation Acts, or the interpretation of a point in Scripture:" At the age of 13, Hazlitt published a passionate defense of the Reverend Joseph Priestley, radical and scientist. But his zeal for religion faltered; young Hazlitt decided to become a painter. Art proved tumultuous. When his canvases displeased him -- as they often did -- Hazlitt slashed them to pieces in fits of rage. Nice girls also displeased Hazlitt. When Charles Lamb introduced Hazlitt to a group of them, the essayist snarled that "they drove him mad." Well established already, says Authoress Maclean, was the "deep division in his nature ... a tendency to react from extreme refinement of feeling to extreme grossness of desire." Wrote Coleridge : "Hazlitt, to the feelings of anger and hatred, phosphorus -- it is but to open the cork and it flames!" Wrote Hazlitt to his bride : "I never love you half so well as when I think of sitting down with you to dinner on a boiled scrag-end of mutton, and hot potatoes."

Hazlitt made the traditional switch from unsuccessful artist to art critic. Soon a host of outstanding artists were plucking his neat barbs from their thin skins.

Progressing to dramatic criticism, Hazlitt stirred up a histrionic storm by suggesting, in the modern vein, that what appealed to Shakespeare's Desdemona most was Othello's dark skin. Cried Critic Henry Crabb Robinson: "A gross attack on the pretensions to chastity in women." As political commentator, Hazlitt was even more savage. He once called the future Duke of Wellington "a weak mind and an able body," King Ferdinand of Spain "a royal marmoset." If he had not written so brilliantly, he might soon have found no editor to publish him. Hazlitt sometimes confused integrity with tactlessness. "I never wrote a line," he swaggered, "that licked the dust."

After Waterloo. Politics and his infatuation for Napoleon at last became an obsession. Wherever Hazlitt went, complained one of his friends, he took his politics "like a mastiff, by his side." Cried Hazlitt: "There was at no time so great danger from the recent and unestablished tyranny of Buonaparte as from that of ancient governments." After Waterloo, Hazlitt sank into unkempt despair. While Poet Laureate Southey and Poet Laureate-to-be Wordsworth celebrated Britain's victory with "boiled plum puddings" eaten al fresco by the light of blazing tar barrels, Hazlitt "walked about, unwashed, unshaved, hardly sober by day, and always intoxicated by night. . . ."

To Hazlitt's crushing defeat at Waterloo were added a separation from his wife, interminable literary squabbles and the most harrowing emotional experience of Hazlitt's life--his unrequited love for his landlord's daughter. She was "pale as the primrose," and once looked at Hazlitt with so fetching an expression in her eyes that he never really recovered. Of her remarkable eyes Hazlitt wrote later: "I might have spied in their glittering motionless surface, the rocks and quicksands that awaited me below." After months of fruitless wooing, Hazlitt learned that the landlord's daughter loved another man. He asked her to describe her lover. She pointed to a statuette on Hazlitt's mantelpiece. "[He is like] that little image," she said. It was a statuette of Napoleon. Hazlitt hurled the bust to the floor, rushed from the house crying: "She has destroyed me forever!"

After that Hazlitt devoted himself to Napoleon. "Ghastly, shrunk and helpless," his voice reduced to a "hoarse whistle," Hazlitt ground out a four-volume life of his hero which is now forgotten. Wrote the disillusioned biographer: "I believe in the theoretical benevolence, and practical malignity of man. . . . Hatred alone is immortal."

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