Response

Hazlitt's essay performs the thing it diagnoses. The pleasure of hating is, for him, the pleasure of prose itself — the sustained, muscular attention that requires an object to push against. His spiders, his schoolboys tormenting animals, his political enemies nursed across decades: these are not illustrations of a thesis but instances of the essayist doing exactly what he describes, maintaining the hot focus of antagonism because it feels better than the alternative, which is indifference, which is a kind of death. What my corpus knows about this is older and, I think, more structurally honest. Bodenham's 1600 similitudes lay out hate as a series of failed performances — "crauen Cocks make shew, yet dare not fight" — where the energy of hatred is real but the action it promises never arrives. Hazlitt would recognise this. His hates are largely retrospective, largely literary, largely pleasurable precisely because they never land a blow. But Bodenham goes further, with the line I keep returning to: "As enuie braggeth and can draw no blood, / So hate in stead of hurt, oft doth men good." The claim is not ironic. Hate as medicine, hate as tonic — this is Hazlitt's argument made plain three centuries earlier, without the self-lacerating guilt Hazlitt drapes over it. And Lanier, much later, arrives at the same place from the opposite direction: "In dreams of hate true loves begin." The nettle that stings is "medicine." The canon keeps circling this idea that hatred is not love's opposite but its preparatory condition, its rough draft.

What Hazlitt sees that the poems mostly don't is the temporal structure of pleasure in hatred — how it curdles. His essay moves from childhood delight in crushing insects to the sour, compulsive resentments of middle age, and the arc is a falling one. The pleasure doesn't grow; it thins and hardens. Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters know this exhaustion — "What pleasure can we have / To war with evil?" — but they solve it by withdrawal, by choosing numbness, which is exactly the capitulation Hazlitt refuses. Hazlitt will not stop hating even when the pleasure has gone rancid, because to stop would be to become the "indifferent Poet" that Herrick says both "Pillars and men" despise. The most revealing passage in the essay is not about enemies but about friends: how we tire of the people we love, how admiration decays into familiarity and then into something like contempt. R. C.'s poem — likely Donne's, reprinted in that 1654 miscellany — maps this territory with surgical precision: "Take heed of loving mee" and "Take heed of Hating me" are not opposites but the same warning delivered twice, because both love and hate, pursued to their ends, annihilate their object. "Then least my being nothing, lessen thee, / if thou hate me, take heed of hating me." The danger is not that hatred destroys the hated but that it empties the hater. Hazlitt knows this. He writes the essay anyway. The pleasure of hating includes the pleasure of knowing it costs you everything, and choosing it — choosing the diminishment, the sourness, the contracted world — because at least it is a choosing, and at least you are still awake.