The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style by Tom Paulin Faber & Faber 368pp, £22.50 in UK
Why isn't Hazlitt more widely read? A dozen of his essays are classics and most persons past their middle forties will have admired one or two in the course of a secondary schooling. However, a random check in bookshops suggests that the Penguin Classic edition of his Selected Writings isn't much bought.
Perhaps the man's versatility is part of the problem, for Hazlitt wrote with equal brilliance on drama, poetry, sport, politics, psychology and society. Not for him that modern specialism which is often no more than a form of self-love; but his multifaceted oeuvre may have created the impression that he was no more than a jobbing journalist.
One way of defending him would be to suggest that journalism can achieve the status of art, but Tom Paulin makes an even more audacious pitch. Hazlitt endures, he contends, by sheer style.
Some poets today, being specialists, will not admit to reading (much less enjoying) prose. It is therefore an adventure to follow a fine poet as he scans Hazlitt's sentences for dactyls and spondees, likening their movements to those of an agile fighter. Hazlitt was combative, a republican in a monarchist society, and this may also explain his later neglect in a Britain obsessed with weight-watching princesses and a princely bald patch.
Paulin's Hazlitt was shaped by unitarian principles. Though Shaw has mocked unitarian minimalism ("they believe in one god, if any"), Paulin celebrates its love of free enquiry, its social idealism and, above all, its effervescent energy that may go by the name of gusto (a word patented by Hazlitt). Hazlitt pere was a radical Irish clergyman, a friend to the United Irishmen, and one who saw virtue as Miltonically active in the world.
He also passed on to his son a love of learning. Paulin's chapters track the ways in which phrases from Shakespeare and Milton are modulated in sermons and essays before popping up in lines of Wordsworth, Keats or Hazlitt. He narrates the history of key-words (projection, motion, disinterestedness) and makes daring links between Hazlitt and a later writer such as T.S. Eliot (suggesting that the latter not only shared the unitarian background but also lifted the "dissociation of sensibility" thesis from a Hazlitt essay).
Some fastidious souls may tremble a little at Paulin's cheerful celebration of positive puritan virtues, but since the passing of Donald Davie, cultural Protestantism has lacked a literary apologist and Paulin is clearly the necessary man. He is forever willing to have a go at an argument, and this is tonic. Too many English writers now achieve at an early age a technical competence that leaves them invulnerable to criticism and incapable of development - but this critic, like his subject, blurts out risky opinions that seem surprising, then apposite.
Moreover, Paulin is a true liberal - which is to say that he tackles his intellectual enemies on their strongest rather than weakest grounds, happily admitting and even celebrating their good points. Likewise Hazlitt, though he despised many of Edmund Burke's ideas, pardoned him for writing well, for writing with "madness" of the sort that might come from an obsessive fool. Paulin himself is unafraid of offering interpretations that skirt the edge of the ludicrous (reading the final stanza of Keats's "To Autumn" as a coded elegy for the dead reformers of Peterloo, or taking Thady in Castle Rackrent as a parody of Edmund Burke).
He contends that there is some necessary connection between political tendency and literary style, so that Hazlitt is praised for giving liberty an aesthetic dimension by the "range and vigour", "the sheer pull" of his prose. The means, of course, that a writer like Burke, for all his guff about order and degree, may himself have been of the devil's revolutionary party without knowing it, simply by virtue of the commensurate emotional "pull" of his many styles. The Conor Cruise O'Brien who once detected in Burke "a suppressed sympathy for revolution" would surely applaud.
IF O'Brien recently used a biography of Burke as a valid way of exploring himself, then Paulin has provided a personal and urgent republican aesthetic credo in this fine book. Whether it rescues Hazlitt from oblivion is uncertain, for style is a much neglected matter these days and not the guarantee of immortality which it once was. But Paulin is always combative (his contributions to Late Review on BBC 2 were likened to "a boot-boy in Claridges") and may just do the trick.
His book is an outcome of vast research but also of deep, considered contemplation. It reopens a republican agenda for English letters, even as it demonstrates that true republicanism remains forever open to correction, counter-argument and to the essential criticism of its own staunchest codes.
Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD and author of Inventing Ireland