Duncan Wu has written a fine biography that gets inside the pith and muscle of Hazlitt's critical rage, shows the meaning behind its blows, and explains the articulacy of its fury. He begins, quietly enough, with Hazlitt's meeting with the young Coleridge, famous from Hazlitt's “On My First Acquaintance with Poets” (1823); continues beyond the untenable, idealistic “Xanadu” (1816), with which the poet's aura tantalized all who listened to him; and then moves into the London of hard living, which forged the tough journalist, savvy theatre critic, and bohemian Hazlitt was to become. In between, Hazlitt acquired the enormous intellectual and aesthetic armory that was to ignite the colloquial infectiousness and good sense of his writing. His considerable analytic power as a philosopher and his not inconsiderable talent as a painter refined his increasingly polemical stance and deepened and made more speculative its sentimental asides and pauses. By the time he could put them all together, “the thoughts of a metaphysician expressed by a painter,” he had reached standards of critical observation that have rarely been matched. His portraits, political and literary, start by playing catch-up with James Gillray, but then surpass the cartoonist in an authentic marriage of high and low, a modern language that, as Robert Louis Stevenson famously noted, we have ever since being trying to match.

Hazlitt has provoked some excellent short articles but few full-length studies of sustained interest. John Kinnaird wrote perhaps the most brilliant short study of him in the Partisan Review in 1963, but then the book that followed, despite containing, like David Bromwich's work, much originality, palled. Others have stuck to the shorter format successfully, limiting themselves to chapters or articles—for example, Terry Eagleton, John Whale, and Kevin Gilmartin—and Tom Paulin has written a long and tremendous hymn of praise to Hazlitt's prose, which leads by example. Roy Park, on “abstraction,” and Uttara Natarajan, on “power,” succeed by mapping the consistent originality of the aesthetics. Wu is a meticulous scholar, but it is as if he realizes that you need to risk a biography to get on terms with this man who repudiated institutions and academies of all kinds and relentlessly sought the personal bias he believed limited or inflected with gusto any authorial expression. Wu's study gets increasingly assured. There are a couple of wobbles or descents into biographese early on, but thereafter Wu puts flesh on Stanley Jones's long-pondered, revelatory but emotionally abstemious Life of 1989, which had left its predecessors looking either schematic or tabloid. Especially attractive is Wu's willingness to confront moments of biographical speculation and admit openly to the opportunity as he seizes it rather than assume the cold, omniscient intimacy beloved of successes in the literary biographical trade.

Above all, this robust defense of Hazlitt's critical violence stems from Wu's accurate appreciation of the “metaphysical discovery” with which Hazlitt plied Coleridge at that first meeting in 1798 and consecrated in his “metaphysical choke-pear,” the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, published in 1805 (on which Wu coedited a collection of essays). One's private self-understanding and one's sympathy with the public around an individual are constructed, Hazlitt argued, out of the same imaginative, sympathetic faculty. We live in a republic of ends in which the self is not sovereign but exists on reciprocal epistemological footing with other people. The better we appreciate them, the richer will our own lives be, for the same imaginative virtue is responsible for both kinds of familiarity, individual and social. On the other hand, in line with mainstream post-Kantian philosophy, we are then left with the implication that our essential self lies where we are not. Instead it is created by our dramatic facility either to project those futures which give our present lives direction or to take the part of others whose existence lends gusto to our own. So imaginary a human core is, as Keats saw, haunted by nothingness. We are engaged, as Hazlitt said once in a coda, in “a continual struggle to be what we are not,” which also can mean to believe others what they are not, as he unsparingly documented in his amatory confession Liber Amoris (1823).

Wu sees how this philosophical sophistication in handling the problem of defining personal identity feeds Hazlitt's extraordinary talent for dramatic prose writing. It also explains Hazlitt's overcharged and unscrupulous moral honesty: anyone who tries to separate private integrity from public demeanor, supposed selfishness from altruism, or supposed altruism from selfishness is a hypocrite. Outrageous attempts to preserve this artificial divide by saying one thing in private and another in public met with Hazlitt's most implacable opposition. But his foundational philosophical conundrum also explains how he could be simultaneously so critically willful and forensically sympathetic. If, for example, you cannot make sense of Coleridge's poetic mysteries as a kind of skeptical experiment, then give up. If you cannot rationalize a philosophical frisson gained from his often bipolar theoretical behavior, the essay in The Spirit of the Age (1825) suggests, then you are indeed left with a kind of “everlasting inconsequentiality.” Hazlitt's indictments challenge the reader to come up with alternative interpretations in a way that the vituperation practiced by Lockhart, Gifford, or Croker does not.

This kind of provocation, as democratizing as his use of quotation in its invitation to dispute, is what repeatedly renders Hazlitt's enemies and calumniators trivial in comparison. Of course, there are some absolute party-political differences, but, as much as Kevin Gilmartin, Wu is alive to the sincerity of Hazlitt's republican stance, as he attacks the secularization of his own Dissenting background (to which one might be forgiven for thinking he was contributing) as much as he does Legitimacy. His politics are truly literary, Shakespearean in the generosity with which they both affront narrow partisanship and embarrassingly see things in the round. Allies like Jeffrey, Godwin, Hunt, and even Lamb find this difficult, never mind the castigated enemies. Wu is Hazlitt's indefatigable defender. Inevitably some things seem beyond even his powers of recuperation, such as Hazlitt's treatment of his son, or the agonized Parnassian, full of “dead surprises,” as Paulin put it, in which Liber Amoris wallows, not ironically I think. Wu asserts that Hazlitt's modernity is still ahead of us here, but he defends him as much elsewhere by claiming him to be a man of his time. He is marvelous on Hazlitt's quirky affinities with characters from Soane to Landor, and the quiet tone in which he evokes the elegiac quality of Hazlitt's last days and writings is perfect. Does Wu succeed in making a case for Hazlitt as “the first modern man”? Well, no one, least of all Hazlitt, ever thought of him as a formative modern like Rousseau or Kant. If Wu succeeds, he does so subtly, by writing in the most popular modern form of literary art at the moment, a biography, and by relating it to Hazlitt's key ideas about the powerful connectedness of our most abstract ideas and our most personal self-estimations. In doing so, he maps a world of post-Revolutionary compromise, unprincipled subservience to authority, despotic political inefficacy, and journalistic resistance. That sounds like the Britain I live in.