How one sermon by Coleridge turned a stalled young philosopher into a great essayist
In January 1798 a twenty-year-old William Hazlitt walked to a chapel in Shrewsbury and heard Samuel Taylor Coleridge preach. He said it was like hearing the music of the spheres. Hazlitt had spent years unable to get his ideas onto paper, and he later credited Coleridge with giving him a language.
Hazlitt was born in Maidstone on 10 April 1778, the youngest surviving child of a Unitarian minister of Irish Protestant stock who had studied under Adam Smith in Glasgow. His father's search for a liberal congregation dragged the family to Ireland and then to the United States, where he helped inspire Boston's first Unitarian church before they settled back in Shropshire. Of America the boy retained almost nothing except the taste of barberries.
At thirteen he was already in print, with a letter to the Shrewsbury Chronicle in July 1791 denouncing the riots against Joseph Priestley. At Hackney College, where Priestley himself taught, he argued politics with classmates as revolution convulsed France, quietly lost his faith and left without becoming a minister. What he kept was a lifelong loathing of tyranny. Decades later he wrote that he could not sit quietly under the claims of barefaced power.
Home again, he set out to become a philosopher, working through Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau and the French materialists. He met William Godwin in September 1794 and never fully agreed with him. His big project was a treatise arguing that the human mind is naturally disinterested rather than selfish at root, a direct challenge to much moral philosophy of the day; it did not appear until 1805. The retired clergyman Joseph Fawcett widened his taste, pairing Paradise Lost with Tristram Shandy.
After the Shrewsbury sermon Coleridge invited him to Nether Stowey, and that April he met William Wordsworth, watched him gaze at a sunset and felt a new spirit in poetry while reading Lyrical Ballads in manuscript. The three weeks of walking and talking did not produce lasting agreement; Hazlitt was startled that Coleridge could call Hume a charlatan. Coleridge nonetheless praised the young man's thoughts as arrows flying straight to the mark. Hazlitt, who died on 18 September 1830, is now ranked with Samuel Johnson and George Orwell among the finest English essayists, and yet his books are largely out of print.
Source: William Hazlitt
