SOURCE: "The Logic of Passion: Hazlitt's Liber Amoris," in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter, 1975, pp. 41-57.

[In the following essay, Ready evaluates Liber Amoris as a literary exploration into the nature of the sympathetic imagination.]

No matter what their attitudes toward his involvement with Sarah Walker, most readers of Hazlitt's Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion (1823) have been more concerned with the book as biography than they have with the book as literature.¹ Assuming that Hazlitt's only sustained narrative, and one of his longest works, can be viewed critically as well as biographically, I hope to demonstrate the integral position of Liber Amoris in Hazlitt's recurrent theme of the sympathetic imagination and to sketch the chief structural and imagistic characteristics of the text.

I

In "On the Spirit of Obligations" (1823), Hazlitt responded to the hostile reception Liber Amoris received. "What I would say to any friend who may be disposed to foretel a general outcry against any work of mine, would be to request him to judge and speak of it for himself, as he thinks it deserves" (XII, 79).² If we accede to this request, by examining Liber Amoris within the context of Hazlitt's other writings, we may find it illuminating to determine what connection the work has to the theme many commentators find at the center of the Hazlitt canon. From the time he wrote An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), "the natural disinterestedness of the human mind," or the sympathetic imagination, was the fundamental proposition of Hazlitt's thinking and writing. This statement needs multiple qualification beyond the scope of this essay, but essentially, his belief that egoism can and must be transcended by the conjunction of feeling and imagination germinates the convictions and the dramatic tensions of Hazlitt's morality, politics, criticism and familiar essays. "Hazlitt's principle of the sympathetic imagination," writes Ralph Wardle, "… is, in fact, the keystone of most of his thinking, political and aesthetic as well as philosophical. For he recognized his own sympathetic imagination as the noblest of his faculties: thanks to it he could feel with other human beings, real or fictional…. "³

Liber Amoris is about sympathy in a negative way, a retelling of the Pygmalion legend as a dramatization of an unsympathetic imagination, a lover's attempt to force an earthly girl into the mold of a goddess. The book is Hazlitt's major demonstration of passion blocking the sympathetic perception of an existence separate from one's own.

H.

… I would gladly die for you.

S.

That would give me no pleasure. But indeed you greatly overrate my power.

H.

Then that is because you are merciful, and would spare frail mortals who might die with gazing.

S.

I have no power to kill.

H.

… if such is thy sweetness where thou dost not love, what must thy love have been? I cannot think how any man, having the heart of one, could go and leave it.

S.

No one did, that I know of.

H.

… By Heaven, you are an angel! You look like one at this instant! Do I not adore you—and have I merited this return?

S.

I have repeatedly answered that question. You sit and fancy things out of your own head, and then lay them to my charge.
(IX, 101, 102, 103, 108)

The modern term "pedestalism" accurately describes H's vision of S. Each time his insistence that she be what he says she is to him crowds her and each time her curt responses guard the little room he leaves her.⁴ Often enough she tells him to come down, or at least to let her come down from on high. When he says, "Thou art to me more than thy whole sex," she replies straight enough, "I require no such sacrifices" (IX, 101). Liber Amoris, then, is a record of what Hazlitt knows to be a most basic human failing—the inability to allow a person to be other than what we want her (or him) to be.

Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote to Mary Russell Mitford that Hazlitt meant "with certain arrangements" to publish his conversations with Sarah Walker and his letters to P. G. Patmore "as a tale of character."⁵ Given H's bitter "a more complete experiment on character was never made" (IX, 160), the tale may seem to be the woman's, yet the sheer preponderance of H's dialogue and first-person narration shows the focus to be on the man. Intellectually, Hazlitt had long rued the sight of a man trapping himself in his own fixed ideas. In an aside to "Mr. Kean's Iago" (1814), he wrote of those "whose romantic generosity and delicacy ought not to be sacrificed to the baseness of their nature, but who treading securely the flowery path, marked out for them by poets and moralists, the licensed artificers of fraud and lies, are dashed to pieces down the precipice, and perish without help" (XX, 401). How ideals of love can become obsessive is explained in an essay of the following year. "Mind and Motive" (1815) argues against self-interest as the dominant principle of action by citing instances of self-destructive behavior. John Kinnaird has demonstrated in what way Hazlitt's theory of the natural benevolence of the mind was finally matched by his realization that the mind can just as naturally sympathize with "power," that is, with an act not conducive to its own or another's good.⁶ In "Mind and Motive" Hazlitt writes, "The two most predominant principles in the mind, besides sensibility and self-interest, are imagination and self-will, or (in general) the love of strong excitement, both in thought and action." He continues: "The attention which the mind gives to its ideas is not always owing to the gratification derived from them, but to the strength and truth of the impressions themselves, i.e., to their involuntary power over the mind. This observation will account for a very general principle in the mind, which cannot, we conceive, be satisfactorily explained in any other way, we mean the power of fascination." As an instance of the involuntary power of imagination, Hazlitt cites "the necessity which lovers have for confidants, auricular confession," and he concludes: "There are a thousand passions and fancies that thwart our purposes and disturb our repose … they assimilate all objects to the gloom of our own thoughts, and make the will a party against itself. This is one chief source of most of the passions that prey like vultures on the heart, and embitter human life" (XX, 44-47). We see that long before he met Sarah Walker, Hazlitt planted a warning before the "flowery path" and gave evidence that imagination can veer into destructive passion.

Even at the time of Hazlitt's intense misery over Sarah Walker, he occasionally shows a double perspective on what was happening to him. "On the Conduct of Life," written in February, 1822, in Scotland, shows him in a black mood, but more importantly it shows him observing the irrational self-laceration of his obsession. He advises his son, to whom this essay is addressed, to choose a woman carefully in order to avoid ridicule and a lack of understanding and sympathy: "We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us. 'We hunt the wind, we worship a statue, cry aloud to the desert'" (XVII, 98-99). The quotation, varied from Ambrosio's eulogy for the shepherd Chrysostom in Don Quixote, functions ironically if we remember Marcela's plea that she is not responsible for the self-destructive passion of Chrysostom.⁷ In a stylized passage that he later suppressed from "On the Conduct of Life," Hazlitt warns his son not to "let your blood stagnate in some deep metaphysical question, or refine too much in your ideas of the sex, forgetting yourself in a dream of exalted perfection" (XVII, 396).

The literary significance, however, of the "book of love" Hazlitt formed out of his dream of Sarah Walker emerges in part from its kinship with some of the literary subjects of the time. P. P. Howe states that Liber Amoris is Hazlitt's "Werther or Nouvelle Héloise" (IX, 263). The influence of these recognizable antecedents on Hazlitt ought not shift attention away from the distinct nature of Liber Amoris as a work concerning imaginative projection in love. This theme places Liber Amoris in a tradition of writing that emerges distinctly in Hazlitt's own period and becomes particularly central to twentieth-century works. Thus in England, Liber Amoris suggests the Romantic preoccupation with a certain figure of woman which produced Blake's "Tirzah," Coleridge's "Lewti" and "Christabel," and Keats's "Lamia" and "La Belle Dame." In France Benjamin Constant published Adolphe in 1816, a work that also makes structural use of the device of an "editor" publishing the manuscript of a love affair of a man now dead. It has also been noted that Stendhal and Hazlitt had some correspondence prior to this period, that Stendhal's De l'amour appeared in 1822 and that Stendhal's theory of crystallization, by which one projects attributes onto one's beloved, finds perfect embodiment in Liber Amoris. It is doubtful, though, that Hazlitt knew De l'amour at this time, and he did not really come to know Stendhal until the two met in 1824.⁸ A review of De l'amour did appear in the New Monthly Magazine at the end of 1822 (the same magazine in which Hazlitt's "On Great and Little Things" appeared in 1822, an essay which is a notable example of crystallization in its long reference to Sarah Walker). Hazlitt could have read this skeptical review that summarized Stendhal's theory of crystallization and the progressive stages of love. The review ended by exhorting "M. Beyle" to flesh out his theory in a novel.⁹

Like De l'amour, Liber Amoris should be read as one of the earliest studies of the projective psychology of love. I use the word "study" advisedly, because obviously Hazlitt did not discover the literary material inherent in the projective psychology of love. That material is as old as the Pygmalion legend itself, and one could trace Pygmalion motifs through all of love literature. But as a "tale of character," an extensive treatment of the particular trouble the lover's imagination gets him into, Liber Amoris previews a twentieth-century interest in the phenomenon.

To read Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament (1897) is to find the closest literary analogue to Hazlitt's book; both delineate temperaments that try to duplicate their experience in art with intractable human material.¹⁰ Three other writers should be mentioned: Proust, whose narrator projects his youthful love fantasies onto Gilberte and whose character Swann forges an unlikely idol from Odette; Yeats, who frequently employs themes similar to Hazlitt's Pygmalion theme in such poems as "The Hero, the Girl and the Fool," "The Statues," "The Mask," "Towards Break of Day," "The Grey Rock," "A Memory of Youth," "On Woman," "Broken Dreams," "The Tower" (Part II), "Among School Children," and "The Living Beauty"; and Sartre, whose overview of the futility of the love enterprise is that love is perpetual conflict, ultimately an impossibility, since the ideal of both lovers is the appropriation of the beloved's "freedom" or "subjectivity" (Being and Nothingness, "Concrete Relations with Others," Section I). Finally, we are not very far away from Jung's concept of the anima when we find Hazlitt writing in "On Great and Little Things" (1822), "The image of some fair creature is engraven on my inmost soul …" (VIII, 236), and in "On the Knowledge of Character" (1821): "The idol we fall down and worship is an image familiar to our minds. It has been present to our waking thoughts, it has haunted us in our dreams, like some fairy vision" (VIII, 311).¹¹

I doubt that Liber Amoris was read by any of these other writers; nor is my point to read these writers back into Hazlitt. Yet to go on reading Liber Amoris as if it served only Hazlitt's personal ends of confession or catharsis is to tear it out of its proper literary perspective and to treat it as a freak. The frequency with which modern writers have turned to the subject of love's projective psychology shows that Liber Amoris anticipates later works as much as it looks to Rousseau and Goethe. It is one of the first extended treatments in a line of modern writing on men who try to make women fit their illusions. In this modern line, Hazlitt's special perspective is that love's projective imagination is an unsympathetic imagination. He does not subtitle his book "The New Pygmalion" without irony. Hazlitt and his character H are the "new" Pygmalions in that Pygmalion's statue was given breath and life, whereas the new Pygmalions have to learn so painfully that their beloveds already have a life and breath of their own.

II

W. E. Henley remarked that Liber Amoris "is unique in English."¹² The anonymous Examiner critic of a hundred years previous had written: "Liber Amoris is a novelty in the English language." "Q." bore down precisely when he summarized the book as the tale of a "highly gifted individual, who having suited himself with a train of very tasteful and elegant associations in relation to female beauty, perfection, and sentiment, is led by a few casual coincidences to infer a perfect adaptation, where nothing of the kind existed."¹³Liber Amoris moves on a train of association, and much of the book's great uniqueness, its novelty, results from this movement. We may characterize the structure of Hazlitt's book from his understanding of the associative logic of passion.

Writing of Shakespeare, Hazlitt says that "the greatest strength of genius is shewn in describing the strongest passions." Shakespeare's descriptions of the strongest passions, as in Cymbeline, work by "the force of natural association, a particular train of thought suggesting different inflections of the same predominant feeling, melting into, and strengthening one another, like chords in music." Liber Amoris, the product of Hazlitt's strongest passion, works in this manner. It is the manner of what Hazlitt calls, in his essay on King Lear, "the logic of passion": "We see the ebb and flow of the feeling, its pauses and feverish starts, its impatience of opposition, its accumulating force when it has time to recollect itself, the manner in which it avails itself of every passing word or gesture, its haste to repel insinuation, the alternate contraction and dilatation of the soul" (IV, 271, 184, 259).

For Hazlitt, Shakespeare is the very model of the sympathetic imagination. Shakespeare's plays embody the logic of passion because Shakespeare has sympathized with the ebb and flow, the fits and starts of passion. The passion in Liber Amoris is the passion of an unsympathetic imagination, the obsession of a lover who refuses to accept a woman as she is. It takes sympathy to follow the logic of this obsession and to recreate that logic in a literary structure. Hazlitt the artist sympathizes with the associative logic of H's unsympathetic passion. The result is the particular structure of Liber Amoris.

Hazlitt presents the logic of H's passion in three parts, each of which offers a different perspective on character and action. The work does not have a linear structure. Its progression is a series of movements backward and forward. One result of this kind of progression is a number of shifts in the base line of time, that is, in the time of the narrator in each of the book's three sections.¹⁴

In the fourth conversation of Part I, we learn that S has been rejected by a previous lover. The fifth scene doubles back in time to depict the first time S told of this rejection. This scene not only precedes the fourth chronologically, but also the second scene. For in the fifth scene, S says that "he is one to whom I feel the sincerest affection, and ever shall, though he is far distant" (IX, 104). In the second scene H imagines himself in Italy: "Ah! dearest creature, I shall be 'far distant from you,' as you once said of another, but you will not think of me as of him, 'with the sincerest affection'" (IX, 101). This shift in time points out that the associative logic of passion remembers conversations according to their importance in the development of the relationship rather than their order in time. Short and honed-down, the scenes of Part I enrich one another, but they are without sequence, except for the last two.

The time when the beginning letters of Part II are written overlaps with the time when the final conversations of Part I are written. In the first letter of Part II, H tells C. P., "I have begun a book of our conversations" and he describes the quarrel that made up the penultimate conversation of Part I (IX, 116-117). Since we are then to think of H's letters in Part II as beginning a good deal before most of the conversations took shape, the result is that the process of writing Liber Amoris becomes part of the dramatic action. The base line in time of Part II overtakes Part I when Letter III of Part I reports that the conversations have been finished.

Time displacement avoids straight linear narration in favor of a fragmented or angular presentation of a shattering experience. Since no one perspective sees multiple angles of the exprience, Hazlitt forces our perception of character and action to fragment. We must supply our own continuity. (Thus, Letter VI of Part II is written on a steamboat going back to Scotland; that H has returned to London and thrown a violent scene goes quite unexplained until Part III.) The continuity Hazlitt constructs is psychological rather than narrative; it is the continuity of the logic of passion in H's associating mind as he remembers and writes.

This associating mind, to return to the incisive remark of the Examiner reviewer, is that of "a highly gifted individual," who has "suited himself with a train of very tasteful and elegant associations in relation to female beauty, perfection, and sentiment." Hazlitt has significantly altered his own personality in creating H. Not only, for example, has he edited out the obscenities in his original letters to Patmore, but he has also given a good deal more coherence to some of the disconnected ravings we find in the original letters.¹⁵ The cooler, more even H who results from this revision is indeed a tasteful, elegant and highly gifted individual. Hazlitt's character is a man who often perceives life through the mediation of art. He continually thinks in terms of previous literature, of writers, and of images both plastic and literary.

The first conversation, a microcosm of the whole, demonstrates the complex mediation by which H transforms S. "The Picture" immediately allies with the Pygmalion motif. H shows S a miniature by Raphael.

H.

Don't you think it like yourself?

S.

No: it's much handsomer than I can pretend to be.

H.

That's because you don't see yourself with the same eyes that others do.

She changes the subject, asking what the picture is. He replies: "Some say it is a Madona [sic]; others call it a Magdalen, and say you may distinguish the tear upon the cheek, though no tear is there. But it seems to me more like Raphael's St. Cecilia, 'with looks commercing with the skies,' than anything else" (99-100).¹⁶

His reply is packed. By being associated with the patron saint of music, S now belongs to its harmony, and the other dialogues sometimes speak of her in terms of music. H's own St. Cecilia also has '"looks commercing with the skies,'" that is, her harmony bridges to higher harmony, perhaps the music of the spheres. The quotation is line 39 of Milton's Il Penseroso, where the poet addresses Melancholy, the "pensive Nun, devout and pure" (1. 31). S's reticence may suggest melancholy; but following immediately after the Cecilia reference, the quotation, by evoking Il Penseroso re-enforces the high seriousness of H's vision of S. Furthermore, H seems to refer to the whole passage from Milton:

Com, but keep thy wonted state,
With eev'n step and musing gate,
And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes:
There held in holy passion still,
Forget thy self to Marble, till
With a sad Leaden downward cast,
Thou fix them on the earth as fast.
(ll. 37-44)

Liber Amoris makes a good deal of S's graceful manner of walking and the singular expression of her eyes. It persistently uses "marble" to describe her, sometimes adoringly, sometimes bitterly. And of course, something akin to "holy passion" is attributed to her several times. Also, as this conversation ends, H speaks of "your mouth full of suppressed sensibility, your downcast eyes, the soft blush upon that cheek" (99-100). The features he sees could well be those of the "pensive Nun, devout and pure," and S's "downcast eyes" recall specifically line 43 of the poem (with perhaps another echo, Spenser's "Epithalamion," 1. 234, "her eyes still fastened on the ground").

In addition to this Miltonic mode; other literary references abound in Liber Amoris. H is Aeneas: "But even in another world, I suppose you would turn from me" (103; see The Aeneid, Book VI, 469-473). He sarcastically refers her to the Carthaginian wars: "Her's is the Fabian method of making love and conquests" (118). As he returns to Scotland on "a sort of spectre-ship, moving on through an infernal lake, without wind or tide, by some necromantic power," like the Mariner he feels "the eternity of punishment in this life" (121); and, like the Coleridge of "Dejection: An Ode," he has "conversed too long with abstracted truth" (124). One has, in fact, only to glance at Howe's notes to see the fabric H weaves out of literary and mythological references throughout Liber Amoris. "Those lines in Tibullus seem to have been written on purpose for her…. Or what do you think of those in a modern play, which might actually have been composed with an eye to this little trifler—" (143). When he asks S's sister to convey three books to S "in lieu of three volumes of my own writings" and the young girl replies, '"AND THOSE ARE THE ONES THAT SHE PRIZES THE MOST!'" [sic], H swells into "If there were ever words spoken that could revive the dead …" (148-149). This almost hyper-literary sensibility, so imbued with quotations that give substance to his unreciprocated love, and so betokened by the physical presence of books themselves, has only to be equipped with several passages relating his communion with or disjunction from the picturesque and sublime in nature (125, 126, 128-131, 138, 140-141), to create the complete man of feeling who projects the world from his own center and whose fallacies are truly pathetic.

Literary references, the overlay of nature topoi familiar from the literature of the time, books, and the reader's unbroken awareness of the process of this epistolary work are further reinforced by a complex system of image and symbol. The overall illusion-reality theme is elaborated in imagery of two main types: what I will term a lamia group (such as serpent, poison, witch, enchantress) and a Pygmalion group (such as statue, picture, marble, stone). There are also brief but important instances of flower and weed images. Hazlitt's complex uses of imagery flow naturally from the sub-title, "The New Pygmalion." The associative logic of H's passion continually works changes on a set body of images. I will first sketch the movement of the imagery in Parts I and II in order to devote space to imagery in the climactic Part III.

The fourth conversation, "The Flageolet," first develops the Pygmalion motif: "Cruel girl! you … resemble some graceful marble statue…. I could worship you at this moment." He reverses the motif in an important pre-figuring of a crisis point in Part III: "You see you can mould me as you like" (103). The sixth conversation, "The Quarrel," concludes by introducing the imagery which Hazlitt later inverts to close Liber Amoris: "Thou wert to me a little tender flower, blooming in the wilderness of my life; and though thou should'st turn out a weed, I'll not fling thee from me, while I can help it." He then entreats her, "Kiss me, thou little sorceress!" (109). As the conversations began about a picture, they end focusing on a statue, when H asks if he resembles her old lover:

S.

No, Sir…. But there was a likeness.

H.

To whom?

S.

To that little image! (looking intently on a small bronze figure of Buonaparte on the mantelpiece).

The Pygmalion theme is now complete; they both have their images. H's final gloss ironically counterpoints the theme: "[ … And then I added 'How odd it was that the God of my idolatry should turn out to be like her Idol, and said it was no wonder that the same face which awed the world should conquer the sweetest creature in it!' … ]" (111-112). Part I ends with two letters followed by a note "Written in a blank leaf of Endymion" (presumably Keats's); he wishes for the picture "to kiss and talk to" and begs pardon for the quarrel: "I hope the little image made it up between us &c" (113-114). That the note is written in a blank leaf of Endymion allies H with the prototype of a man who falls in love with an ideal woman. And the note may also have further connection with Keats's Lamia volume (1820): "—But by her dove's eyes and serpent-shape, I think she does not hate me; by her smooth forehead and her crested hair, I own I love her; by her soft looks and queen-like grace (which men might fall down and worship) I swear to live and die for her!" (114).

In Letter I of Part II, H tells C. P., "I have begun a book of our conversations (I mean mine and the statue's…)." H recounts the quarrel swiftly, prefaced by "She cajoled me out of my little Buonaparte as cleverly as possible," and concluding with "So I must come back for it." H encloses the first of the two letters to S that ended Part I; he remarks that the letter "might move a stone" (116-117). Letter II encloses her frigid reply and begins to dress his fears and imaginings. He is of two minds about her: "I suspect her grievously of being an arrant jilt, to say no more—yet I love her dearly." His role as cynical lover is contained in the phrase "before you set about your exposition of the new Apocalypse of the new Calypso," certainly a facile remark but in line with the enchantress-witch complex. H goes on to relate additional conversations, but he now remembers her remarks as nonsequiturs or as coy and ambiguous: "After all, what is there in her but a pretty figure, and that you can't get a word out of her" (117-118).

Despair in the third letter intensifies the "arrant jilt" suspicion through the lamia imagery: "If I knew she was a mere abandoned creature, I should try to forget her; but till I do know this, nothing can tear me from her, I have drank in poison from her lips too long—alas! mine do not poison again" (119). Reassured in Letter IV that S is chaste, H raises the Pygmalion strain: "my heart's idol … the dear saint … the sweet apparition" (119-20). This relative altitude continues in Letter V as H launches into her praise: "I could devour the little witch. If she had plague-spot on her, I could touch the infection: if she was m a burning fever, I could kiss her, and drink death as I have drank life from her lips…. It is not what she says or what she does—it is herself that I love" (121). The morbid imagery recurs from "The Quarrel," where H exclaimed, "wert thou a wretched wanderer in the street, covered with rags, disease, and infamy, I'd clasp thee to my bosom, and live and die with thee, my love" (109). In Letter VI, the Buonaparte statue symbolizes S's old lover: she "only played with my credulity till she could find some one to supply the place of her unalterable attachment to the little image." His own Pygmalion sickness worsens as he writes, "I cannot forget her; and I can find no other like what she seemed," and as he closes by asking P to see if any reconciliation is possible or if she is "quite marble" (122). Disaffected from nature in Letter VIII—"The sky is marble to my thoughts"—an inanimate figure haunts him: "I wake with her by my side, not as my sweet bedfellow, but as the corpse of my love…. " An apostrophe following Letter VIII recasts the theme of the inanimate: "'Stony-hearted' Edinburgh! What are thou to me? … City of palaces, or of tombs—a quarry, rather than the habitation of men! … Thy cold grey walls reflect back the leaden melancholy of the soul!" (125-126). Thus divorce from both nature and city is expressed in terms of inanimate substance. The logic of passion, through its preoccupation with the hard, unresponsive beloved, links all other things in a chain of similar images.

In Letter IX, H distances himself sufficiently to ponder the illusion-reality split: "fancying a little artful vixen to be an angel and a saint"; "my life (that might have been so happy, had she been what I thought her)"; "For this picture, this ecstatic vision, what have I of late instead as the image of the reality?" The lamia returns: "I see the young witch seated in another's lap, twining her serpent arms round him, her eye glancing and her cheeks on fire…. " Even so, he plans still to offer marriage and begs that his letter be seen as "the picture of a half-disordered mind" (127-129). A descriptive passage in Letter X then recasts familiar images: " … the river winded its dull, slimy way like a snake along the marshy grounds: and the dim misty tops of Ben Leddi, and the lovely Highlands (woven fantastically of thin air) mocked my embraces and tempted my longing eyes like her, the sole queen and mistress of my thoughts!" Once more, by relating images he has employed for S with images in nature, H expresses the associative psychology of passion. Nature fuses the morbid and the inanimate into a climactic death fantasy: "As I trod the green mountain turf, oh! how I wished to be laid beneath it—in one grave with her—that I might sleep with her in that cold bed, my hand in hers, and my heart for ever still—while worms should taste her sweet body, that I had never tasted!" (130-131).

Letter XI oscillates, as did Letter IX, between hardhitting analysis of S and dejection at her loss. S is the "well practiced illusion," while H writes of himself, "abased and brutalised as I have been by that Circean cup of kisses, of enchantments, of which I have drunk!" (132). The last mythological reference was to Calypso in Letter II. Choice of witch figures intensifies with H's changing mind about S. The flip reference to Calypso gives way to Circe, whose enchantment was vicious and lethal. Short and business-like, Letter XII directs P to tell M, S's brother-in-law, that H will propose marriage. This letter is followed by pieces entitled "Unaltered Love" and "Perfect Love." The former shows that H is, in a major respect, exactly where he started: " … I will make a Goddess of her, and build a temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and raise statues to her" (133). "From C. P., Esq." then relates the outcome of P's visit to M, to the effect that H ought to come back and propose. Letter XIII is jubilant: "She is an angel from Heaven, and you cannot pretend I ever said a word to the contrary!" He has seen a painting (Hope Finding Fortune in the Sea) whose female figure mirrored S—#x0022;If it is not the very image of her, I am no judge." With the picture motif returns the statue motif: " … I have had her face constantly before me, looking so like some faultless marble statue, as cold, as fixed and graceful as ever statue did" (137-138).

Part III is a self-contained narrative of events between H's sudden visit to London through the final break with S: he returns to London, throws a violent scene following the most distancing reception from S, returns to Scotland until his divorce is finalized, comes back only to see S in the street one day with another man. Part III concludes with H's analysis of her character.

He begins, "My dear K—, It is all over, and I know my fate" (140). Physical motion is also fated in Part III, as a kind of enchantment or magnetism seems to control H, forcing him to play out the drama almost unwittingly. When S is "frank and cordial" to him for the first time—"This of course acted as a spell on me." He goes out with his son, but "I found that I still contrived to bend my steps towards her, and I went back to take tea" (143). There follows a maddening interview with S; he snaps, and screams out his anguish. Again he tries to get away and again he is riveted back: " … I was no sooner in the street, than the desolation and the darkness became greater, more intolerable; and the eddying violence of my passion drove me back to the source, from whence it sprung" (146). These two motions out and back anticipate the book's climax, where motion is choreographed, the figures encountering one another as if in a passing dream:

I passed a house in King Street where I had once lived, and had not proceeded many paces, ruminating on chance and change and old times, when I saw her coming towards me. I felt a strange pang at the sight, but I thought her alone. Some people before me moved on, and I saw another person with her. The murder was out…. We passed at the crossing of the street without speaking…. I turned and looked—they also turned and looked—and as if by mutual consent, we both retrod our steps and passed again, in the same way. I went home. I was stifled.

(157)

After so long in his obsessive maze, the way out comes simply, and the effect is masterful. The two previous movements have solidified its power.

Hazlitt maintains an increasingly symbolic use of the Buonaparte statue before the King Street climax. When H first returns from Scotland, he finds the statue back on his mantelpiece, which he considers "a sort of recognition of old times." He spins the fact that she has kept it into new hope, and the evening when he breaks loose in rage begins as he tries to get S to sit and talk with him. When she refuses, he says, '"Well, then, for the sake of the little image!' The appeal seemed to have lost its efficacy; the charm was broken; she remained immoveable" (144). After she leaves, he rails hysterically, and grabbing the statue, smashes it to pieces. The next day he picks up the pieces and sends them contritely to S. He tries to bring the next conversation around to sentimental matters, but she puts him off: "I was sadly afraid the little image was dethroned from her heart, as I had dashed it to the ground the other night.'—'She was neither desperate nor violent'" (152). Upon his return from Scotland, he asks her to get the statue repaired. Within a few days her mother tells him that S is out doing just that: "My heart, my poor fond heart, almost melted within me at this news." The next morning she returns with the statue whole again. They shake hands in reconciliation, "and she went waving out of the room" (155-156). This is the day before King Street, after which we hear no more of the statue, except for one contemptuous reference to the "little image" so suddenly displaced from her breast by the new suitor.

Hazlitt continues to orchestrate the other image clusters through Part III. As they first speak of the Buonaparte again: "Her words are few and simple; but you can have no idea of the exquisite, unstudied, irresistible graces with which she accompanies them, unless you can suppose a Greek statue to smile, move, and speak" (143). Poison and death: "I had drank in the poison of her sweetness too long ever to be cured of it; and though I might find it to be poison in the end, it was still in my veins. My only ambition was to be permitted to live with her, and to die in her arms" (147). His fantasy of picking her off the street returns: "I felt that my soul was wedded to hers; and were she a mere lost creature, I would try to snatch her from perdition" (148).

Through Part III, H continues thinking of S in the Pygmalion terms. When he asks her to get the Buonaparte fixed, he marvels at her face, the "finest expression that ever was seen … but without speaking a word, without altering a feature. It was like a petrifaction of a human face in the softest moment of passion" (155). Before King Street she is his "earthly Goddess"; afterwards he sees only a "pale cold form" and a "lifeless image" (156, 159). Life has finally left Pygmalion's substance.

The most climactic use of imagery in Part III merges the lamia and Pygmalion groups shortly before the King Street denouement:

It was a fable. She started up in her own likeness, a serpent in place of a woman. She had fascinated, she had stung me, and had returned to her proper shape, gliding from me after inflicting the mortal wound, and instilling deadly poison into every pore; but her form lost none of its original brightness by the change of character, but was all glittering, beauteous, voluptuous grace. Seed of the serpent or of the woman, she was divine! I felt that she was a witch, and had bewitched me. Fate had enclosed me round about. I was transformed too, no longer human (any more than she, to whom I had knit myself) my feelings were marble; my blood was of molten lead; my thoughts on fire. I was taken out of myself, wrapt into another sphere, far from the light of day, of hope, of love. I had no natural affection left; she had slain me, but no other thing had power over me. (153)

We saw the reverse Pygmalion theme briefly in Part I, "The Flageolet." Here in Part III, the metamorphosis of the artist is complete. Hazlitt also ends his book by reversing the flower-weed imagery of "The Quarrel": "Her image seems fast 'going into the wastes of time,' like a weed that the wave bears farther and farther from me. Alas! thou poor hapless weed, when I entirely lose sight of thee, and for ever, no flower will ever bloom on earth to glad my heart again!" (162).

At the end H sees the whole affair as a "frightful illusion" (159). And though, as the final long indictment of S shows, he does not blame himself, he does discern that she resented his vision: "She in fact knows what she is, and recoils from the good opinion or sympathy of others, which she feels to be founded on a deception; so that my overweening opinion of her must have appeared like irony, or direct insult" (162). As difficult as it is for him to believe other than that "she still is what she so long seemed," he will not relinquish the original vision for having been tricked and deluded by it. Tortured, he is far from broken, and confesses nothing. The anima, if you will, remains: "I know all this; but what do I gain by it, unless I could find some one with her shape and air, to supply the place of the lovely apparition?" (160).

We may infer that as long as H longs for apparitions he will fail to see real existences. Hazlitt's "tale of character" tells how what is protects itself against what one would have. Wrenched out of his own worst years to be a negative example in his pervasive concern with the practical and aesthetic value of sympathy, Liber Amoris articulated the logic of passion and dramatized that no person can successfully appropriate the being of another. Hazlitt spoke from experience in "On Personal Identity" (1828) when he wrote that despite a man's high intentions, a woman resents being insistently thought of as something she is not. "We are not," the essay concludes, "to be cozened out of our existence for nothing" (XVII, 273).

Notes

¹ Two recent full-length studies of Hazlitt illustrate this continued neglect of Liber Amoris. In well over a hundred pages on the Walker episode in Ralph Wardle's Hazlitt (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 1971), most of the discussion the book receives as a literary work is four pages summarizing the history of its critical reception. Roy Park, Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), does not mention Liber Amoris. Herschel Baker, William Hazlitt (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U. Press, 1962), excoriates the "shabby liaison" (p. 410), but he does not evaluate the work beyond positing its function as Hazlitt's "necessary cathartic" (p. 427). In the twentieth century the book has been most extensively defended (but again, not particularly analyzed) by: P. P. Howe, "Hazlitt and 'Liber Amoris'," The Fortnightly Review, 99 (1916), 300-310; Catherine Macdonald Maclean, Born Under Saturn (New York: Macmillan, 1944); Charles Morgan, Liber Amoris and Dramatic Criticism (London: Peter Nevill, 1948); Stanley Jones, "Hazlitt and John Bull: A Neglected Letter," RES [Review of English Studies: A Quarterly Journal of English Literature and the English Language], 17 (1966), 163-170. Ronald Blythe includes the work in his William Hazlitt: Selected Writings (Baltimore: Penguin, 1970).

² References to Hazlitt's writings are to Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930-34).

³ Wardle, p. 85, his italics. Park's recent work also reiterates the crucial nature of the concept: "The Essay, therefore, established the imagination as the moral faculty, and its central importance in this respect never altered in any of his subsequent ethical writings" (p. 47).

⁴ Biographical accounts persist in caricaturing nineteen-year-old Sarah Walker on the basis of the comments Hazlitt ascribes to S. Christopher Salvesen, Selected Writings of William Hazlitt (New York: Signet, 1972), p. 14, calls Sarah Walker "intellectually inert"; S, at least, seems quite capable of warding off H's etherialized, rhetorical view of her. As for the frequent implication that Sarah Walker was a sexual tease, moral disapproval has to contend with another of S's direct statements of her own personality: "I am no prude, Sir" (IX, 108).

⁵Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard B. Pope, 5 vols, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1960-63), II, 382.

⁶ John Kinnaird, "William Hazlitt's Philosophy of the Mind," Diss. Columbia University, 1959, esp. pp. 298-316; see also Kinnaird, "Hazlitt as Poet," SiR [Studies in Romanticism], 12 (1973), 434n.

⁷ Cervantes, The Adventures of Don Quixote, Part I, chapters XII-XIV. The quotation occurs in several other essays of the Walker period (VIII, 97, 236; XX, 227) and will also be found in "Mind and Motive" (XX, 50).

⁸ See Charles Morgan's introduction to his edition of Liber Amoris, pp. 7-28. Robert Vigneron discusses the relationship between Hazlitt and Stendhal and their mutual borrowings in "Stendhal et Hazlitt," MP [Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature], 35 (1938), 375-414.

⁹ "On Love," New Monthly Magazine, 5 (1822), 423-431.

¹⁰ The similarity between Hardy's novel and Liber Amoris is most apparent in Pierston's relations with the second Avice. She is his washerwoman, and for a time serves him as a domestic in his London lodgings, where he treats her with respect and offers a plan to educate and marry her. At one point he likens her to a Rubens figure, just as H sees S as a Raphael figure.

¹¹ "Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image…. Since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected upon the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion…. [This projection often] turns out to be an illusion with destructive consequences …" (C. G. Jung, "Marriage as a Psychological Relationship," trans. R. F. Hull, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Herbert Read et. al., 18 vols. [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953-], XVII, 198-199). It is worth noting, too, that Liber Amoris dramatizes the duality of "overvaluation" and "debasement" that Freud saw in the way men sometimes choose love-objects (see particularly "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love," The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. [London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953-], XI, 179-190).

¹² W. E. Henley, Essays (London: Macmillan, 1921), p. 113.

¹³The Examiner, 22 (1823), pp. 315, 313.

¹⁴ Wardle notes that Hazlitt "might even have been anticipating some of the experiments in chronology made by later novelists" (p. 363n).

¹⁵ The changes Hazlitt made in his original material warrant a separate discussion. But one has only to compare LetterV of Part II with its counterpart, the second in the original letters in the edition of Liber Amoris "privately printed" by Richard Le Gallienne and W. Carew Hazlitt in 1894, to see that Hazlitt's originally chaotic train of thought became more shaped and pointed in the book. Nothing occurs in Liber Amoris to match the harried notations of the acidic little journal Hazlitt kept in March, 1823 (The Journals of Sarah and William Hazlitt 1822-1823, ed. Willard Hallam Bonner, The University of Buffalo Studies, XXIV, No. 23, 1959). The overall editing process is most visible in Part II: material from original letters (Le Gallienne) 1, 3, 2, 8, 6, 9, and 11 respectively becomes material for letters 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, and 13 in Liber Amoris. Wardle fills in various deletions Le Gallienne and W. Carew Hazlitt made from the original letters (now in the Lockwood Memorial Library of the State University of New York at Buffalo).

¹⁶ Remaining page references, unless otherwise indicated, are to Vol II of Complete Works.