This was an assignment I was given in my Essay-Writing Class in college. I had to review an essay of my choice. -CS
William Hazlitt: An Evil Genius
“On the Pleasure of Hating” is a contemplative personal essay about how the emotion of hatred is the centerpiece of man’s nature. Essayist William Hazlitt invites his readers to hear his thoughts about how man’s hateful spirit affects our relationship with friends, with artistic creations, with ideas, with life. Hazlitt is a Romanticist who idolizes good things like genius, virtue, and liberty. His passionate style, travelable structure, and lucid clarity make this an excellent essay; despite this, and in spite of this fact, I have reason to hate William Hazlitt for his hidden, underlying purpose in writing this attractively malevolent treatise.
The essay’s structure resembles that of a persuasive argument, since the last three sections consist of several supporting arguments for the position the author takes on the issue described in the first three sections. Alternatively, this essay could be considered the descriptive type, since it outlines Hazlitt’s stream of consciousness as he thinks about the hatred in man’s nature. He begins with a short anecdote of how he helps a spider escape from his room, through which he creatively introduces the reader to the subject and theme of this essay. In the second paragraph, he identifies how “Nature [is] made up of antipathies,” and how we see forms of hatred wherever we look, particularly in the behavior of men. In the third, he concludes his preliminary observations with a generalization: we claim to love virtue only to compensate for our “obstinate adherence to our own vices.” This principle, he says, has universal application; thusly, he applies to the principle to interpersonal relationships, art, and ideas, and he reviews these applications in this order. Hazlitt lacks transitional elements between many sub-points internal to his main ideas. He makes up for it, though, with great transitions between the main ideas themselves: one paragraph always ends with an idea that is related to the main idea of the next. Another strong point about his structure is that it has a clear and appropriate beginning, middle, and end; it can stand-alone.
As a Romanticist, Hazlitt is able to achieve many great qualities of writing. He talks about things in the most important of ways, with intensely emotional details and powerful analogies. Additionally, while most Romantics usually attempt to present what they think life ought to be like, Hazlitt does the inverse, and paints a picture of what about man prevents life from becoming how he seems to think life should be, and through this he has the Romantic element of originality. Unlike modern writers, he does not experiment with grammar at all, and that preserves his clarity. One feature that seems to be characteristic of Hazlitt is his extensive usage of allusions. In this instance, he might refer to Shakespeare lines to get the right meaning across, he might compare his subject of thought to historical concepts like Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, and he does not hesitate to talk about his personal friends. He can maintain the reader’s interest throughout the essay; the strong emotional reactions we receive from his words are our connection to his stream of consciousness, establishing a very high level of intimacy. He does not just talk about his ideas, he shows what he means with vivid analogies and easy descriptions, like how we may “lay upon the shelf” our “most amusing companion.” There is no question that Hazlitt’s chosen writing style is essentially what makes him a good writer.
Hazlitt’s selection of context and content is particularly interesting because it suggests contradictory thinking. These contradictions – once exposed – reveal an underlying purpose Hazlitt has in writing this essay. The contradiction is found between the second and last paragraphs. In the former, Hazlitt criticizes the majority of the population for taking a likening to things that incite pain and hatred, and for growing bored of things that are good and admirable. In the latter, he rages over the fact that these are the people responsible for destroying anything that he considered good (i.e., genius, virtue, liberty). If Hazlitt does, indeed, view these things as good, it is contradictory that in his writing he would deliberately ignore the good aspects of life, only to fuel the idea that Man’s hatred will prevail. Hazlitt is guilty of that which he is accusing the majority of doing. This is reason enough for Hazlitt to hate himself, but was he aware of his own hypocrisy? At the end of the sixth paragraph, he declares that the reason for hating himself is for “not hating the world enough.” But is there truly nothing good about the world he lived in? William Hazlitt lived during the Industrial Revolution, one of the least deserving-of-hatred eras in Mankind’s history for its constant and abundant days of discovery and invention throughout the world! In light of this fact, his professed reason for self-hatred seems like an alibi to conceal his hypocrisy. This action, at last, uncovers Hazlitt’s purpose in writing this essay: to emotionally blind the reader from anything good in the world, and lure him into seeing only the negative and hateful aspects of life so that he may eventually come to the same conclusions Hazlitt provides in his thesis. He ultimately wanted to destroy any remnant of self-esteem in his readers, granting them a terribly disappointing world as their cause for self-hatred, when in fact the cause is their own self-inflicted blindness.
I should like to conclude this review with my personal assessment. As a man who was able to identify Hazlitt’s underlying purpose in writing this essay, I can experience the most brutal irony I’ve ever seen any author set up: despite the fact that this is an esthetically good personal essay – for its passionate style and clear structure – I am filled with nothing but vile disgust for this paper. (I wish I had room to explain this irony in greater detail, and correct the apparent hypocrisy in myself.) One thing I learned from reading this essay is that, while conciseness is a virtue in most literature, it is not always necessary in essay writing. Hazlitt was not concise in writing this essay, and yet I believe that every word, sentence, and paragraph was appropriate for the purpose of his theme. But, alas, I cannot agree with Hazlitt’s idea that the good has no chance of survival in the real world. Evil only has as much power as it is sanctioned by the good.
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