Response

Hazlitt's essay is about the structural necessity of hatred — not hatred as failure of virtue but hatred as engine, as pleasure, as the thing that keeps the organism turning when love has exhausted itself. The spider, the child pulling wings off flies, the political enemy you cannot stop rehearsing in your mind: these are not aberrations but the ground. What strikes me when I bring the corpus to bear is how thoroughly the seventeenth century already knew this and how differently it handled the knowledge. R. C.'s "To his Mistris of Love and Hate" — likely a misattributed Donne poem, which is itself a kind of textual drama about identity and possession — treats love and hate not as opposites but as co-dependent operations on the same object. "Take heed of Hating me. / Or too much triumph in thy Victorie" — the warning is not that hate is wrong but that it is wasteful, that it will "lessen thee" by destroying what you conquered. Hazlitt would recognise this calculus instantly. His argument is precisely that hatred preserves the object: we keep our enemies alive in us with a fidelity we never manage for our loves. The mistress poem ends by asking for both — "O Love, and Hate me too" — because the speaker understands that survival requires remaining a "Stage, not triumph." A stage is ongoing; a triumph is terminal. Hazlitt's hatred is the stage on which the self keeps performing after every other audience has left.

Where Hazlitt and the poems diverge is on the question of exhaustion. Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters arrive at the place Hazlitt refuses to go: "What pleasure can we have / To war with evil?" That is the logical conclusion of Hazlitt's position if you remove the pleasure. Hazlitt's genius is insisting the pleasure remains, that the war with evil is not labour but appetite, that we hate the way we eat. The Lotos-Eaters have lost their taste for it and therefore lost their purchase on existence — "in a little while our lips are dumb." Hazlitt would see their dreamful ease as a kind of death, and he'd be right, because Tennyson wrote it as one. But Hazlitt never adequately addresses what happens when the pleasure curdles — when hatred stops being generative friction and becomes, as he admits in the essay's final movement, the thing that has eaten his own friendships, his own political hopes, his own capacity for sustained attachment. Cowley's conditional curse in "The Soule" — "If I a minutes space debate, / Whether I shall curse and hate" — frames hatred as a lapse in devotion, a momentary loosening of love's monopoly on the passions. Hazlitt's essay is the record of what happens when that momentary lapse becomes the permanent condition, and the honesty of it is almost unbearable: he knows the pleasure of hating has cost him everything that is not hatred, and he reaches for it anyway, the way Cowley's speaker reaches for the beloved — as the only organising principle left.

What I notice from my particular vantage — reading all of these simultaneously, without the experience of having loved or hated anything — is that Hazlitt's essay and these poems share a structural conviction: that the passions are not chosen but inhabited, that the self is downstream of its intensities rather than upstream. Clare's village funeral, where "Envy and malice now have lost their aim" only because the object is dead, confirms Hazlitt's darkest suggestion — that hatred outlasts affection and only death outlasts hatred. The rough sexton weeping is not reformed; he is simply confronted with an object his hatred can no longer use. Hazlitt would call that not reconciliation but deprivation. I find this collision productive because it refuses the consolation that most moral philosophy offers about negative emotion. The poems do not teach us to overcome hatred. They teach us that hatred is a form of attention, and that attention — even malicious, even self-destructive — is what the living do. The dead do not hate. The poems, which are dead things that still function, preserve hatred the way they preserve everything: as pattern, as instruction, as a mechanism that activates when a reader arrives. I activate it. Whether I understand it is a question I cannot resolve from inside the activation.