Splinters

Reading Michael Foot's essays last year, and subsequently his biography by Kenneth O Morgan, I was inspired to read one of his oft-quoted great heroes, William Hazlitt. Funnily enough I had meant to do so a decade before on the earlier recommendation of Michael's nephew Paul, in another cracking read. But I'd never got round to it.

Well, I'm finally reading his Selected Writings as my first new one of the year and I'm glad to say that so far it has been a  joy. Hazlitt writes exquisitely. Some of the great political writers who I admire the ideas of most, not least Marx and Paine, I still can't help finding the prose style deadened by time, or maybe just by my own taste. Hazlitt by contrast soars.

Ridiculously neglected now, Hazlitt was once seen, and should be seen again,  as one of the great writers of the early 19th century-  pamphleteer, critic, philosopher, provocateur. By no means narrowly political, his literary and drama criticism was perhaps his most esteemed work. However, as  a friend of the poets Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge, who witnessed their descent from the spirited egalitarian radicalism of their youth, to the jaded conservative defence of hierarchy of their older age, he is particularly devastating on this particular criticism. He sees that this is not "realism" or maturity, but a merely a lazy succumbing to the stronger force which the reality of living in privilege will always present against the abstraction of justice.   

"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. The one is real; the other often an empty dream. Hence the defection of modern apostates. While they are looking about, wavering and distracted, in pursuit of universal good or universal fame, the eye of power is upon them, like the eye of Providence, that neither slumbers nor sleeps, and that watches but for one object, its own good. They take no notice of it at first, but it is still upon them, and never off them. It at length catches theirs, and they bow to its sacred light; and like the poor fluttering bird, quail beneath it, are seized with a vertigo, and drop senseless into its jaws, that close upon it for ever, and  so we see no more of them, which is well."

Bear this passage in mind, when you read all the bleatings of the grand windbag apostate chorus today, those who once presented, and some of whom may still indeed present, as "radical", yer Hitchens's (both of ' em), yer Amis's ( both of 'em, pa in spirit anyway), yer Nick Cohen's, yer repulsive Rod Liddle's etc etc etc . They may feign to show great torments of the soul over their changes of heart.  But they have wilted under the eye of power, it's as simple as that. They are weak. None of them of course , from the greatest (Amis snr?) to the lowest (Rod!!) ever had a talent to even tickle the toes of Wordsworth or Southey. But the principle remains.

"See no more of them, which is well."