Hazlitt - On the Pleasure of Hating

PENGUIN BOOKS GREAT IDEAS
On the Pleasure of Hating

William Hazlitt
17781830

William Hazlitt

On the Pleasure of Hating

PENGUIN BOOKS GREAT IDEAS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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This collection first published in Penguin Books (U.K.) 2004
First published in the United States of America by Penguin Books 2005

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Taken from the Penguin Classics editions Selected Writings,
edited by Ronald Blythe, and The Fight and Other Writings,
edited by Tom Paulin and David Chandler

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Hazlitt, William, 17781830

On the pleasure of hating / William Hazlitt.
p. cm. (Great ideas)

Contents: The fightThe Indian jugglersOn the spirit of monarchyWhat
is the people?On reason and imaginationOn the pleasure of hating.

ISBN: 978-1-101-65117-9

I. Title. II. Series.

PR4771.B6 2005

824.7dc22 2005047451

Printed in the United States of America
Set in Monotype Dante

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The fight, the fights the thing,
Wherein Ill catch the conscience of the king.

Where theres a will, theres a way I said to myself, as I walked down Chancery-lane, about half-past six oclock on Monday the 10th of December, to inquire at Jack Randalls where the fight the next day was to be; and I found the proverb nothing musty in the present instance. I was determined to see this fight, come what would, and see it I did, in great style. It was my first fight, yet it more than answered my expectations. Ladies it is to you I dedicate this description; nor let it seem out of character for the fair to notice the exploits of the brave. Courage and modesty are the old English virtues; and may they never look cold and askance on one another! Think, ye fairest of the fair, loveliest of the lovely kind, ye practisers of soft enchantment, how many more ye kill with poisoned baits than ever fell in the ring; and listen with subdued air and without shuddering, to a tale tragic only in appearance, and sacred to the F ANCY !

I was going down Chancery-lane, thinking to ask at Jack Randalls where the fight was to be, when looking through the glass-door of the Hole in the Wall, I heard a on this memorable occasion, and had not an idea that we did not candidly impart; and so carelessly did we fleet the time, that I wish no better, when there is another fight, than to have him for a companion on my journey down, and to return with my friend Jack Pigott talking of what was to happen or of what did happen, with a noble subject always at hand, and liberty to digress to others whenever they offered. Indeed, on my repeating the lines from Spenser in an involuntary fit of enthusiasm,

What more felicity can fall to creature,

Than to enjoy delight with liberty?

my last-named ingenious friend stopped me by saying that this, translated into the vulgate, meant Going to see a fight.

Joe Toms and I could not settle about the method of going down. He said there was a caravan, he understood, to start from Tom Belchers at two, which would go there right out and back again the next day. Now I never travel all night, and said I should get a cast to Newbury by one of the mails. Joe swore the thing was impossible, and I could only answer that I had made up my mind to it. In short, he seemed to me to waver, said he only came to see if I was going, had letters to write, a cause coming on the day after, and faintly said at parting (for I was bent on setting out that moment) Well, we meet at Philippi! I made the best of my way to Piccadilly. The mail coach stand was bare. They are all gone, said I this is always the way with me in the instant I lose the future if I had not stayed to pour out that last cup of tea, I should have been just in time and cursing my folly and ill-luck together, without inquiring at the coach-office whether the mails were gone or not, I walked on in despite, and to punish my own dilatoriness and want of determination. At any rate, I would not turn back: I might get to Hounslow, or perhaps farther, to be on my road the next morning. I passed Hyde Park Corner (my Rubicon), and trusted to fortune. Suddenly I heard the clattering of a Brentford stage, and the fight rushed full upon my fancy. I argued (not unwisely) that even a Brentford coachman was better company than my own thoughts (such as they were just then), and at his invitation mounted the box with him. I immediately stated my case to him namely, my quarrel with myself for missing the Bath or Bristol mail, and my determination to get on in consequence as well as I could, without any disparagement or insulting comparison between longer or shorter stages. It is a maxim with me that stagecoaches, and consequently stage-coachmen, are respectable in proportion to the distance they have to travel: so I said nothing on that subject to my Brentford friend. Any incipient tendency to an abstract proposition, or (as he might have construed it) to a personal reflection of this kind, was however nipped in the bud; for I had no sooner declared indignantly that I had missed the mails, than he flatly denied that they were gone along, and lo! at the instant three of them drove by in rapid, provoking, orderly succession, as if they would devour the ground before them. Here again I seemed in the contradictory situation of the man in Dryden who exclaims,

I follow Fate, which does too hard pursue!

If I had stopped to inquire at the White Horse Cellar, which would not have taken me a minute, I should now have been driving down the road in all the dignified unconcern and ideal perfection of mechanical conveyance. The Bath mail I had set my mind upon, and I had missed it, as I missed every thing else, by my own absurdity, in putting the will for the deed, and aiming at ends without employing means. Sir, said he of the Brentford, the Bath mail will be up presently, my brother-in-law drives it, and I will engage to stop him if there is a place empty. I almost doubted my good genius; but, sure enough, up it drove like lightning, and stopped directly at the call of the Brentford Jehu. I would not have believed this possible, but the brother-in-law of a mail-coach driver is himself no mean man. I was transferred without loss of time from the top of one coach to that of the other, desired the guard to pay my fare to the Brentford coachman for me as I had no change, was accommodated with a great coat, put up my umbrella to keep off a drizzling mist, and we began to cut through the air like an arrow. The mile-stones disappeared one after another, the rain kept off; Tom Turtle, the trainer, sat before me on the coach-box, with whom I exchanged civilities as a gentleman going to the fight; the passion that had transported me an hour before was subdued to pensive regret and conjectural musing on the next days battle; I was promised a place inside at Reading, and upon the whole, I thought myself a lucky fellow. Such is the force of imagination! On the outside of any other coach on the 10th of December, with a Scotch mist drizzling through the cloudy moonlight air, I should have been cold, comfortless, impatient, and, no doubt, wet through; but seated on the Royal mail, I felt warm and comfortable, the air did me good, the ride did me good, I was pleased with the progress we had made, and confident that all would go well through the journey. When I got inside at Reading, I found Turtle and a stout valetudinarian, whose costume bespoke him one of the F ANCY , and who had risen from a three months sick bed to get into the mail to see the fight. They were intimate, and we fell into a lively discourse. My friend the trainer was confined in his topics to fighting dogs and men, to bears and badgers; beyond this he was quite chap-fallen, had not a word to throw at a dog, or indeed very wisely fell asleep, when any other game was started. The whole art of training (I, however, learnt from him) consists in two things, exercise and abstinence, abstinence and exercise, repeated alternately and without end. A yolk of an egg with a spoonful of rum in it is the first thing in a morning, and then a walk of six miles till breakfast. This meal consists of a plentiful supply of tea and toast and beef-steaks. Then another six or seven miles till dinner-time, and another supply of solid beef or mutton with a pint of porter, and perhaps, at the utmost, a couple of glasses of sherry. Martin trains on water, but this increases his infirmity on another very dangerous side. The Gas-man takes now and then a chirping glass (under the rose) to console him, during a six weeks probation, for the absence of Mrs Hickman an agreeable woman, with (I understand) a pretty fortune of two hundred pounds. How matter presses on me! What stubborn things are facts! How inexhaustible is nature and art! It is well, as I once heard Mr Richmond observe, to see a variety. He was speaking of cock-fighting as an edifying spectacle. I cannot deny but that one learns more of what