Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

Hazlitt, the Novel,zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA and the French Revolution R O B E R T W. U P H AU S Two of the more influential approaches to the topic, the French Revo­ lution and the English novel, are those by Gary Kelly and Ronald Paul­ son. Focusing on Thomas Holcroft’s idea of “unity of design” as the distinctive impulse behind English Jacobin fiction, Kelly argues that such novelists as Bage, Inchbald, Holcroft, and Godwin “tried to show how their characters had been formed by circumstances, and how character and incident were linked together like parts of a syllogism.”1 Employing a “perfectibilian” technique that is the literary corollary of the basic millenarian philosophy of the French Revolution, these novelists used their fiction as “imaginative enactments of a philosophical argument” (Kelly, 16); the primary goal of their efforts was, as Kelly argues, to “effect a moral revolution in [their] readers” (Kelly, 19). Such a moral revolution, presuma­ bly, would function as the reader’s surrogate experience of the transfor­ mation of philosophical and political values associated with the French Revolution. In a similar fashion, though drawing on a more extensive range of materials, Ronald Paulson also deals with the subject of artistic technique and how it was accommodated to the fact (and aftermath) of the French Revolution. Paulson writes, “The ‘figuration’ of revolution could well have been my title.”2 As Paulson sees it, “The sheer novelty of the French Revolution required new forms of representation and even more basical­ ly raised the central aesthetic challenge: how to represent the unprecedent­ ed” (Paulson, 26). An example of how Paulson reads the representation of the unprecedented may be seen in his assertion that “I do not think 217 2 1 8 / U P H A u s zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA there is any doub tthat the popularity of gothic fiction in the 1790s and well into the nineteenth century was due in part to the widespread anxieof sublimation or catharsis in tales of darkness, confusion, blood, and horror” (Paulson, 221). Such a remark invites comparison with Hazlitt’s aside regarding the contemporary historical context of Radcliffe’s fiction: that is, “Mrs. Radcliffe’s ‘enchantments drear,’ and mouldering castles, derived part of their interest, no doubt, from the supposed tottering state of all old structures at the time.”3 I do not wish to dispute the views of either Kelly or Paulson; rather, I wish to extend their focus so that it falls as much on reading and readers as it does on technique or artistic representation. Through William Hazlitt we can witness the process of how one attentive and sympathetic reader read some of the principal texts that either directly or indirectly respon­ ded to the fact and consequences of the French Revolution. As a Dissenter, Hazlitt was bred a child of the French Revolution who, commenting on the revolution and its aftermath, asserted, “In the late quarrel about Liberty, upwards of five millions of men have been killed, and fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPON one king" (20:40), and who to his dying day celebrated Napoleon as “a thorn in the side of kings” (13:ix). Hazlitt’s criticism offers several important vantage points on the French Revolution and the novel: first, as a Dissenter he knew the key issues, key terms, and key English figures who were sympathetic to the French Revo­ lution; second, he was a contemporary of that generation of writers (in­ cluding Godwin, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey) who were initially enthusiastic about, and then subsequently appalled by, the revo­ lution; third, Hazlitt was the best critic of the novel in his time. His best essays on the novel are collected in Lectures on the English Comic Poets (1819) and The Spirit of the Age (1825). Many of these essays show that Hazlitt, like so many of his contemporaries (whether for or against the revolution), knew how to read ideologically. That is, he realized that the literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was based on and expressed a system of interconnected literary, political, and philosophical values. Clearly, if William Blake could read Reynolds’ Dis­ courses on Art and conclude, somewhat astonishingly, “This Whole Book was Written to Serve Political Purposes...