Customer Reviews (2)

"No man is truly great, who is great only in his lifetime."
"What abortions are these Essays!" William Hazlitt laments in 'The Indian Jugglers' - the second essay in this lovely little tome. "What errors, whats ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do." Hazlitt is, of course, selling himself very short. I had never heard of Hazlitt (1778 - 1830) until I saw the Penguin Great Ideas series. The title of this sleak paperback intrigued me, since I am a true misanthrope at heart. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that Hazlitt was more than just another intellectual grump. Instead he proves himself a champion of liberality and the common man, even if he is more than a little sick of humanity at large.

The brunt of his anger is directed at hereditary monarchy, loyalist Torys, and the idea of 'Legitimacy.' But don't think that dates or couches his speech firmly on England's shores. His speeches on those subjects could just as easily be applied to the power structure of modern economy and government:

"He who has the greatest power put into his hands, will only become impatient of any restraint in the use of it. To have the welfare and the lives of millions placed at our disposal, is a sort of warrant, a challenge to squander them without mercy."

And another favorite, "Wherever the Government does not emanate...from the people, the principle of the Government, the esprit de corps, the point of honour, in all those connected with it, and raised by it to privileges above the law and above humanity, will be hatred to the people."

But of course the shining star is the title essay. When writing down quotes from 'On The Pleasure of Hating' I found myself taking down whole pages. I will not quote that much, but only this extended passage from the cover:

"Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal."

In this collection you will see passioned arguments against slavery 40 years before the end of the civil war. You will see bitter rationalism applied to hell and religion at large. But most of all you will see essays from a man whom was voted one of the best literary essayists England ever produced. I wasn't fond of 'The Fight', and so I gave this a 4 of 5. But I would recommend it to anyone with a mind.

The Pleasure of reading Hazlitt.
"Hatred alone is immortal," Hazlitt observes in his title essay.Children kill flies for sport.Men assemble in crowds with eager enthusiasm to witness a tragedy.Cannibals eat their enemies.Christians cast those who differ from them into hell-fire for the glory of God.Hatred turns religion into bigotry, patriotism into war, and others' defects into ridicule."Seeing all of this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others and ignorance of ourselves--seeing custom prevail over excellence, itself giving way to to infamy-mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong, always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself?Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough" (p. 119).

Praised for his eloquent writing style, and reviled by conservatives for his radical politics, I encountered essayist and literary critic, William Hazlitt (1778-1830), for the first time while reading my way through the Penguin Great Ideas series. Although Hazlitt is best known work for THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE, a collection of portraits of his contemporaries, Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Jeremy Bentham, and Sir Walter Scott, this edition includes several of Hazlitt's best-known essays, "The Fight," "The Indian Jugglers," "On the Spirit of Monarchy," "What is the People?" "On Reason and Imagination," and "The Pleasure of Hating." His engaging insights into art, culture, politics, and philosophy, together with his superb prose, make him a pleasure to read.It is perhaps impossible to imagine a contemporary writer with Hazlitt's talent and keen intellect. I'm eager to return to Hazlitt by adding the Oxford World Classics SELECTED WRITINGS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT (1999) and METROPOLITAN WRITINGS (2005) to my reading list.

G. Merritt ... Read more

Book Description
In The Day-Star of Liberty, Tom Paulin sets out to place William Hazlitt-master of the essay form, the first major art and drama critic, and one of the most outstanding political and literary journalists Britain has ever produced-in his rightful position as a great prose writer and an exemplary literary artist. Not only are the importance of Hazlitt's Irish background and the significance of the Unitarian culture in which he was brought up central to this portrait but the sheer intellectual joy that is evident in Hazlitt's writing and that he wished his readers to share is communicated with comparable energy and relish through Paulin's own prose. A work of critical restitution, The Day-Star of Liberty restores an unjustly neglected figure to the literary canon and shows the means by which Hazlitt's creative genius transformed journalism and criticism into art forms, making it possible for Hazlitt's collected works to be read as one of the great Romantic autobiographies.

16 Pages of Black-and-White Art Notes/Bibliography/Index

Tom Paulin was born in Leeds, England, in 1949. He is the G. M. Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford University. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
The `only pretension, of which I am tenacious,' declares William Hazlitt in The Plain Speaker, `is that of being a metaphysician'; yet up till now his metaphysics, and particularly what is here identified as his `power principle', have not been examined in detail. This book identifies the metaphysical Hazlitt within the other and better-known Hazlitt, long acknowledged as a master of `the familiar style' and more recently celebrated for the fierceness and intensity of his political prose. Studying his development of the power principle as a counter to the pleasure principle of the Utilitarians, it examines the revelation of power in his philosophy of discourse, his account of imaginative structure, his theory of genius, and his moral theory, and asserts the tenacity of this principle throughout his work. Disseminated through the range of his writings, Hazlitt's metaphysics becomes a metaphysics of power in more senses than one: it is both argument and example, itself manifesting that force of human intellect that it seeks to explicate. ... Read more

Book Description
A pioneer work in biography of Hazlitt, told largely in the words of various witnesses of events and episodes in Hazlitt's life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Review Of Hazlitt's Work
This tiny book is an excellent analysis and assessment of Hazlitt's work (arguably the most unfairly negelected of writers -- something like Priestley is nowadays). Priestley oultines to what extent Hazlitt had animpact on his own writing and unfortuneatlely praises him at the expense ofthe "Angry Young Men" whom he unfairly maligns as being primarilynegative in tone. This book is an excellent introduction to an unjustlyforgotten genius, but for a better notion of the man's worth, read hisessays, and only look at this book AFTER reading Hazlitt himself. ... Read more

Book Description
In this selection from the two-volume Plain Speaker, Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu have given priority to essays that address some of the most important critical issues both in romantic studies today and the poetics of prose.

• Provides the only edition of The Plain Speaker available outside libraries since 1928.
  
• Contains Hazlitt's seminal essays on plain speaking and the major romantic topics.
  
• Includes a brilliant introduction by Tom Paulin, the greatest poet-critic of his generation and the editorial expertise of Duncan Wu.

Customer Reviews (3)

Why Paulin Loves Hazlitt
One of the great quotes from Hazlitt says that if something isn't controversial, it isn't interesting. Paulin hates the Brooklyn born land-grabbers because he sees in them the same bigotry and fanaticism that he saw in his fellow Protestants growing up in Belfast. He resents the fact that they are using the bible as a real estate development manual and he resents the notion that some clown from New York can simply get off a plane and claim land that has belonged to local families for generations. As this volume shows, Hazlitt dedicated his life to sparking thought and piercing the pieties of the self righteous. A knitted yarlmuke does not entitle one to the keys to the kingdom. I'm sure Hazlitt (and Paulin!) wouldn't really want them shot; but they would surely wish for them a ticket back to Bensonhurst.

A review of the actual book
Hazlitt is one of the greatest writers of English prose. The Plain Speaker is an essential book and Blackwells have done our culture a service by re-issuing it.

Duncan Wu is a highly-regarded scholar of romanticism. Therefore one can totally rely on the integrity of the text.

Tom Paulin is a foremost authority on Hazlitt and his book The Day-Star of Liberty is also, incidentally, one of the most stimulating books on Edmund Burke of recent times.

Hazlitt's work, sadly, has become obscure even to well-educated readers. It is most regrettable that a 'reviewer' abuses this public platform to mug this fine edition because he is angry at Paulin's intemperate views on Israel. Giving a one-star rating to a great work by one of the finest writers in world literature is surely an inappropriate response.

The best essays in English
One can admire William Hazlitt for his criticism (and I do) but his major contribution, I think, comes in the form of the personal essay, in which he outstrips all other competitors in English. (I don't count Samuel Johnson,since his genre was not really the "personal" essay but ratherthe prudential and moral one.)

This volume, edited by the well-knownRomantic scholar Duncan Wu, includes all the essential Hazlittessays--especially the one I consider most ignored, "The Pleasure ofHating": his masterpiece, I feel. I am still a "young man"(20), and whenever I read these essays I figure Hazlitt had some directconnection to whatever makes youth youth. His writing is perpetuallycontroversial, stormy, eloquent and NEW. ... Read more

Book Description