The love that broke Hazlitt

Weidenfeld & Nicholson, #25

Hazlitt has many claims to genius. The greatest essayist in the English language, a polymath deeply read in literature, philosophy, and history, a consummate prose stylist from whom Robert Louis Stevenson learned to write, a fine Shakespearean

critic, a political radical who saw through the cant and humbug of Regency England, a brilliant advocate for Napoleon - one could go on and on. His contemporary admirers include Michael Foot, Tom Paulin, and, ahem, your humble reviewer. But a Hazlitt biography by a professional philosopher promises to be a dry affair. It is, therefore, gratifying to record that Grayling, a philosophy don at Birkbeck College, London, has written a book which is pure delight from beginning to end.

Where others have concentrated on the literary critic, the Napoleonist, the left-winger or the friend of Keats and Coleridge, Grayling, while not neglecting these issues, opts in the main for the private life of William Hazlitt. Both in the life and the work, Hazlitt grappled with that most modern of issues - the relation of love to carnality. Two things are immediately apparent about Hazlitt. He was obsessed with probing the meaning of love; his friend Peter George Patmore said that ''he was always in love with somebody or other . . . never out of love''. And he suffered from the classical madonna/whore syndrome, whereby he could not integrate his physical desire for women with his idealised admiration for them - in a word, could not fuse love with lust. Moreover, in the hypocritical milieu of the England of ''Prinny'' (George IV), he could not discuss these matters openly without risk to

career and reputation.

Sarah Stoddart, his wife, endured an ''open'' marriage before finally running out of patience. Because she was not a virgin at marriage, Hazlitt thought he had a licence to womanise freely; in self-defence Sarah also took lovers. But her snapping point came when Hazlitt fell violently in love with a worthless innkeeper's daughter named Sarah Walker; the story of this ''affair'' is

surely one of the saddest of all tales in the annals of unre-

quited love. Smitten by coup de foudre for the 19-year-old, Hazlitt at 42 completely lost his head and made the most extravagant declarations. Although Sarah Stoddart described

Walker ''as thin and bony as the scrag end of a neck of mutton'', the second Sarah, an accomplished coquette, soon had Hazlitt in thrall in the way described by Keats in La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Bizarrely, Hazlitt and Sarah Walker spent 18 months in ''heavy petting'', stopping just short of intercourse. Even when the maddened Hazlitt obtained a Gretna divorce from Sarah Stoddart, Walker said she could not marry him, as she still harboured a tendresse for another. Hazlitt, meanwhile, became disillusioned when he heard her talking in the kitchen with her mother and sisters about the length of someone's penis; he though his ''goddess'' above such things. When Hazlitt's divorce was made absolute, Sarah Walker at last stated categorically that she was not interested. When she finally broke down and screamed at Hazlitt to leave her alone, there was a dreadful scene at the Walkers' boarding house, following which Hazlitt broke down and confessed to Sarah's father the true nature of the relationship. By now he was in an agony of sexual jealousy.

After stringing Hazlitt along cynically, the Walkers were finally compelled to admit that Sarah had a lover to whom she was devoted. Hazlitt then met and talked to his rival, John Tomkins, and discovered that Sarah had actually been running them in tandem for a year before finally opting for Tomkins. The revelation finally pricked the bubble of passion, but Hazlitt was so obsessed by revenge that he hired a decoy, to lodge with the Walkers and try to seduce Sarah. She proved as sexually permissive with the decoy as she had been with his employer.

Broken by the debacle, Hazlitt effectively shortened his life by the emotional energy he expended on a useless woman. But he could never wholly shake free of her. He foolishly published an anonymous account of his besotted passion for Sarah in Liber Amoris, but was soon ''outed'' as the author and subjected to a barrage of contempt, insult, and invective.

The reactionary, conservative, and right-wing figures who had suffered under the lash of Hazlitt's ironical rhetoric finally had ample revenge.

Although Grayling cannot resist bringing in Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and the rest of them, and even compares Hazlitt's thought to that of the Oxford linguistic philosopher Peter Strawson, he never falters or becomes dull. And we can certainly forgive the philosophical interludes when we have had such a riveting account of his private life. Grayling has written six books on technical philosophy, but this superb account of Hazlitt proves that he has a great future as a biographer, should he choose to travel that route in future.