Study Edition · Essay 39
On the Pleasure of Hating
Source: The Plain Speaker (1826). Text from The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Waller and Glover, vol. 7, Project Gutenberg #58408. Abridged: the long middle sections on quarrels with friends and on books are omitted (marked …). Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
Hazlitt was a brilliant, combative critic who quarrelled with almost everyone he knew. Here he turns that temper into a savage, honest self-examination. Starting from a spider crossing his floor, he argues that hatred is one of the deepest human pleasures, the force behind religion, patriotism, gossip and the end of friendships. He ends with one of the bitterest, most famous last lines in English: he hates himself “chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.”
60 sentences: 21 simple, 27 moderate, 12 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- allegoriseto turn into a symbolic story with a moral
- edifyingmorally improving (used ironically here)
- caitiffa wretch; a cowardly villain (old)
- toilsnets; snares
- impudencecheekiness; boldness
- malevolencethe wish to do harm
- overtopen; done publicly
- antipathya strong dislike
- affinitya natural attraction or liking
- insipiddull; tasteless
- surfeitto overfill; to make sick with too much
- baitedtormented; attacked for fun, like a chained bear
- bile / spleenbad temper; anger (old ideas of body fluids)
- ennuiboredom; weary dissatisfaction (French)
- censoriousnessa habit of harsh criticism
- virulentbitterly hostile; poisonous
- coloquintidaa very bitter fruit used as a laxative
- bawda woman who runs a brothel; a pimp
- knaverydishonesty; trickery
- reprobaterejected by God; morally corrupt
- despotismrule by a tyrant
- dupea person who is easily fooled
The Essay
There is a spider crawling along the matted floor of the room where I sit (not the one which has been so well allegorised in the admirable Lines to a Spider, but another of the same edifying breed); he runs with heedless, hurried haste, he hobbles awkwardly towards me, he stops; he sees the giant shadow before him, and, at a loss whether to retreat or proceed, meditates his huge foe; but as I do not start up and seize upon the straggling caitiff, as he would upon a hapless fly within his toils, he takes heart, and ventures on, with mingled cunning, impudence, and fear.1 As he passes me, I lift up the matting to assist his escape, am glad to get rid of the unwelcome intruder, and shudder at the recollection after he is gone.2 A child, a woman, a clown, or a moralist a century ago, would have crushed the little reptile to death; my philosophy has got beyond that; I bear the creature no ill-will, but still I hate the very sight of it.3 The spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it.4 We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.5 We give up the external demonstration, the brute violence, but cannot part with the essence or principle of hostility.6 We do not tread upon the poor little animal in question (that seems barbarous and pitiful!) but we regard it with a sort of mystic horror and superstitious loathing.7 It will ask another hundred years of fine writing and hard thinking to cure us of the prejudice, and make us feel towards this ill-omened tribe with something of the milk of human kindness, instead of their own shyness and venom.8
Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action.9 Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions of men.10 The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud.11 Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice?12 But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction.13 Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit.14 Pain is a bitter-sweet, which never surfeits.15 Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.16 Do we not see this principle at work everywhere?17 Animals torment and worry one another without mercy: children kill flies for sport: every one reads the accidents and offences in a newspaper, as the cream of the jest: a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished.18 It is better to have it so, but it diminishes the interest; and our feelings take part with our passions, rather than with our understandings.19 Men assemble in crowds, with eager enthusiasm, to witness a tragedy: but if there were an execution going forward in the next street, as Mr. Burke observes, the theatre would be left empty.20 A strange cur in a village, an idiot, a crazy woman, are set upon and baited by the whole community.21 Public nuisances are in the nature of public benefits.22 How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the people of England in breath, and supply them with nick-names to vent their spleen upon!23 Had they done us any harm of late?24 No: but we have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon.25 How loth were we to give up our pious belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute the one, and frighten ourselves to death with the other!26 It is not the quality so much as the quantity of excitement that we are anxious about: we cannot bear a state of indifference and ennui: the mind seems to abhor a vacuum as much as ever matter was supposed to do.27
… The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others.28 What have the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion been but so many pretexts set up for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces about, like a target as a mark to shoot at?29 Does any one suppose that the love of country in an Englishman implies any friendly feeling or disposition to serve another, bearing the same name?30 No, it means only hatred to the French, or the inhabitants of any other country that we happen to be at war with for the time.31 Does the love of virtue denote any wish to discover or amend our own faults?32 No, but it atones for an obstinate adherence to our own vices by the most virulent intolerance to human frailties.33 This principle is of a most universal application.34 It extends to good as well as evil: if it makes us hate folly, it makes us no less dissatisfied with distinguished merit.35 If it inclines us to resent the wrongs of others, it impels us to be as impatient of their prosperity.36 We revenge injuries: we repay benefits with ingratitude.37 Even our strongest partialities and likings soon take this turn.38 That which was luscious as locusts, anon becomes bitter as coloquintida; and love and friendship melt in their own fires.39 We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves.40
… As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them.41 I have reason, for they have deceived me sadly.42 I was taught to think, and I was willing to believe, that genius was not a bawd, that virtue was not a mask, that liberty was not a name, that love had its seat in the human heart.43 Now I would care little if these words were struck out of the dictionary, or if I had never heard them.44 They are become to my ears a mockery and a dream.45 Instead of patriots and friends of freedom, I see nothing but the tyrant and the slave, the people linked with kings to rivet on the chains of despotism and superstition.46 I see folly join with knavery, and together make up public spirit and public opinions.47 I see the insolent Tory, the blind Reformer, the coward Whig!48 If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.49 The theory is plain enough; but they are prone to mischief, to every good work reprobate.50 I have seen all that had been done by the mighty yearnings of the spirit and intellect of men, of whom the world was not worthy, and that promised a proud opening to truth and good through the vista of future years, undone by one man, with just glimmering of understanding enough to feel that he was a king, but not to comprehend how he could be king of a free people!51 I have seen this triumph celebrated by poets, the friends of my youth and the friends of man, but who were carried away by the infuriate tide that, setting in from a throne, bore down every distinction of right reason before it; and I have seen all those who did not join in applauding this insult and outrage on humanity proscribed, hunted down (they and their friends made a bye-word of), so that it has become an understood thing that no one can live by his talents or knowledge who is not ready to prostitute those talents and that knowledge to betray his species, and prey upon his fellow-man.52 This was sometime a mystery: but the time gives evidence of it.53 The echoes of liberty had awakened once more in Spain, and the morning of human hope dawned again: but that dawn has been overcast by the foul breath of bigotry, and those reviving sounds stifled by fresh cries from the time-rent towers of the Inquisition; man yielding (as it is fit he should) first to brute force, but more to the innate perversity and dastard spirit of his own nature, which leaves no room for farther hope or disappointment.54 And England, that arch-reformer, that heroic deliverer, that mouther about liberty and tool of power, stands gaping by, not feeling the blight and mildew coming over it, nor its very bones crack and turn to a paste under the grasp and circling folds of this new monster, Legitimacy!55 In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot?56 How often is the rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!57 What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance?58 Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others and ignorance of ourselves; seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy; mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself?59 Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.60
Sentence Notes
In plain English: A spider is crawling across the matting on the floor of my room (not the one so well turned into a moral fable in the fine poem “Lines to a Spider,” but another of the same uplifting species). It rushes along carelessly, limps awkwardly towards me, stops, sees my giant shadow, and, unsure whether to go back or forward, studies its enormous enemy. But since I don't jump up and grab the little wanderer, as it would grab a helpless fly in its web, it takes courage and moves on, with a mixture of cunning, cheek and fear.
Reference & context: Hazlitt's sentence follows the spider's stop-start movement with dashes and semicolons.
In plain English: As it passes, I lift the matting to help it get away, I'm glad to be rid of the unwanted visitor, and I shudder at the memory once it has gone.
In plain English: A child, a woman, a peasant or a moralist of a hundred years ago would have crushed the little creature. My philosophy has gone beyond that: I wish it no harm, but I still hate the sight of it.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The essay's starting point: civilised behaviour, uncivilised feeling.
Reference & context: “Clown” here means a country bumpkin. “Reptile” was used loosely for any creeping creature.
In plain English: The urge to do harm lives on even after we stop acting on it.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A compact psychological insight: we tame our actions long before our feelings.
In plain English: We learn to control our will and keep our visible actions humane long before we can calm our feelings and imagination to match.
In plain English: We give up showing it outwardly, the crude violence, but we can't let go of the hostility itself.
In plain English: We don't step on the poor little creature (that seems cruel and pathetic!), but we look at it with a kind of mysterious horror and irrational disgust.
In plain English: It will take another hundred years of fine writing and hard thinking to cure us of this prejudice and make us feel some of “the milk of human kindness” towards these unlucky creatures, instead of their own shyness and poison.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Hazlitt uses Shakespeare's phrase with gentle irony: even our kindness has its limits.
Reference & context: Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 5: Lady Macbeth fears her husband is “too full o' the milk of human kindness.”
In plain English: The more we examine nature, the more it seems to be made of mutual dislikes. Without something to hate, we would lose the very source of our thinking and doing.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The essay's bold thesis: hatred is a motor of life.
In plain English: Life would become a still, stale pond if it weren't stirred up by people's clashing interests and wild passions.
In plain English: The bright strip of our own good fortune is made brighter, or simply made visible, by making everything around it as dark as possible, just as a rainbow shows up only against a dark cloud.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A beautiful image for an ugly truth: we need others' darkness to see our own light.
In plain English: Is it pride? Envy? The power of contrast? Weakness or spite?
In plain English: Whatever the cause, the human mind has a secret attraction to evil, a craving for it, and takes a twisted but lucky pleasure in mischief, since mischief never fails to satisfy.
In plain English: Pure goodness soon becomes boring; it lacks variety and life.
In plain English: Pain is a bittersweet taste we never have too much of.
In plain English: Love, if indulged a little, turns to indifference or disgust; only hatred lives for ever.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The essay's most quoted line, brutal and memorable.
In plain English: Don't we see this principle working everywhere?
In plain English: Animals torment and harass each other mercilessly; children kill flies for fun; everyone reads the accidents and crimes in the newspaper as the best part; a whole town runs to watch a fire, and the onlookers are not exactly delighted to see it put out.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Hazlitt's examples are uncomfortably true even now, in the age of disaster news.
Reference & context: Compare King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport.”
In plain English: It's better that the fire is put out, but it makes things less exciting; our feelings side with our passions rather than with our reason.
In plain English: People crowd eagerly into theatres to watch a tragedy; but, as Edmund Burke says, if there were a hanging in the next street, the theatre would empty.
Reference & context: Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Part I, section 15. Public executions in England continued until 1868.
In plain English: A stray dog in a village, a simple-minded person, a mad woman: the whole community gangs up to torment them.
In plain English: Public enemies are actually a kind of public service.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: An ironic paradox: we need someone to hate.
In plain English: For how long the Pope, the French royal family and the Inquisition kept the English excited and gave them names to pour out their anger on!
Reference & context: Protestant England had long defined itself against Catholic Rome, the Bourbon kings of France and Spain, and the Spanish Inquisition.
In plain English: Had they actually harmed us recently?
In plain English: No; but we always have a store of spare bad temper in our stomachs, and we needed a target to release it on.
Reference & context: In old medicine, an excess of bile was believed to cause anger and irritability.
In plain English: How unwilling we were to give up our devout belief in ghosts and witches, because we enjoyed persecuting witches and scaring ourselves to death with ghosts!
In plain English: We care less about what kind of excitement we get than about how much. We can't bear indifference and boredom; the mind seems to hate emptiness as much as nature was once thought to.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A clever twist on an old scientific saying.
Reference & context: “Nature abhors a vacuum” (horror vacui) is an old principle from Aristotle, disproved by 17th-century experiments with air pumps.
In plain English: The pleasure of hating eats into the heart of religion like a poison, turning it into festering spite and bigotry. It makes patriotism an excuse for spreading fire, plague and famine to other countries. It leaves goodness with nothing but a habit of criticism and a narrow, jealous, suspicious watch over other people's actions and motives.
Reference & context: Here the abridgement skips Hazlitt's long passage on Guy Fawkes Night, Scott's novels and the preacher Edward Irving.
In plain English: What have all the different religious groups, creeds and doctrines been except excuses for people to argue, quarrel and tear each other apart, like a target set up for shooting practice?
In plain English: Does anyone think an Englishman's patriotism means he feels friendly towards, or wants to help, another Englishman?
In plain English: No, it only means hating the French, or whichever other nation we happen to be at war with at the moment.
Reference & context: Britain had been at war with France almost continuously from 1793 to 1815.
In plain English: Does loving virtue mean wanting to find and correct our own faults?
In plain English: No; it makes up for stubbornly keeping our own vices by being bitterly intolerant of everyone else's weaknesses.
In plain English: This principle applies almost everywhere.
In plain English: It applies to good as well as bad: if it makes us hate foolishness, it makes us just as resentful of outstanding talent.
In plain English: If it makes us angry about wrongs done to others, it makes us just as annoyed by their success.
In plain English: We take revenge for harm done to us, and repay kindness with ingratitude.
In plain English: Even our strongest preferences and affections soon go the same way.
In plain English: What was once as sweet as locust fruit soon turns as bitter as wild gourd; love and friendship burn themselves out.
Reference & context: Shakespeare, Othello, Act 1, Scene 3: “The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida.” Iago says this about Othello's love for Desdemona.
In plain English: We come to hate old friends, old books and old opinions; and in the end we hate ourselves.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A drumbeat of four parallel clauses that announces the essay's three later sections and its final self-accusation.
In plain English: As for my old opinions, I'm thoroughly sick of them.
Reference & context: The abridgement skips Hazlitt's sections on broken friendships (including his quarrels with Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt) and on growing tired of favourite books and pictures.
In plain English: And I have good reason, because they have badly let me down.
In plain English: I was taught, and I wanted to believe, that genius could not be bought, that goodness was not a disguise, that liberty was more than a word, and that love truly lived in the human heart.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Four lost ideals in four parallel clauses, the creed of a disillusioned radical.
In plain English: Now I wouldn't much care if these words were removed from the dictionary, or if I had never heard them.
In plain English: To my ears they have become a mockery and a dream.
In plain English: Instead of patriots and lovers of freedom, I see only tyrants and slaves, ordinary people joining with kings to fasten the chains of tyranny and superstition on themselves.
In plain English: I see stupidity joining with dishonesty to form what passes for public spirit and public opinion.
In plain English: I see the arrogant Tory, the short-sighted Reformer and the cowardly Whig!
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Hazlitt condemns every political party in one line of three insults.
In plain English: If humanity had really wanted what is right, it could have had it long ago.
In plain English: The theory is simple enough; but people are inclined to do harm, “unfit for every good work.”
Reference & context: Titus 1:16, describing hypocrites: “unto every good work reprobate.”
In plain English: I have seen everything achieved by the great longing of human spirit and intellect, by people “of whom the world was not worthy,” everything that promised a proud future of truth and goodness, undone by one man who had just enough glimmer of intelligence to know he was a king, but not enough to understand how to be king of a free people!
Reference & context: Hebrews 11:38: “of whom the world was not worthy.” The “one man” is probably George III, whose government fought the French Revolution, though Hazlitt may also mean the restored Bourbon kings.
In plain English: I have seen this victory celebrated by poets who were friends of my youth and friends of humanity, but who were swept away by the furious tide flowing from the throne, which flattened all reasoned distinctions. And I have seen everyone who refused to cheer this insult to humanity banned and hunted down, they and their friends made into objects of mockery, until it is now understood that nobody can earn a living by talent or knowledge unless he is willing to sell them to betray his own kind and feed on his fellow men.
Reference & context: The poets are Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, who had supported the French Revolution in youth and later became conservatives. Southey was made Poet Laureate in 1813. Hazlitt, who stayed a radical, was savagely attacked in the Tory press.
In plain English: This was once a puzzle, but now the times prove it.
Reference & context: Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1: “This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.”
In plain English: Liberty had come back to life in Spain, and a new dawn of hope rose. But that dawn has been darkened by the stinking breath of bigotry, and those revived voices drowned out by new screams from the crumbling towers of the Inquisition. Humanity surrendered, as it deserves to, first to brute force but even more to the inborn perversity and cowardice of its own nature, which leaves no room for further hope or disappointment.
Reference & context: Spain's liberal revolution of 1820 was crushed in 1823 by a French army sent by the restored Bourbon king, with the support of the European powers. King Ferdinand VII then restored absolute rule.
In plain English: And England, that great ‘reformer,’ that heroic ‘liberator,’ that loud talker about liberty and servant of power, stands by gawping, not noticing the disease spreading over it, or its own bones cracking and being crushed to paste in the coils of this new monster, Legitimacy!
Reference & context: “Legitimacy” was the principle, promoted at the Congress of Vienna (1815), that only hereditary kings had a rightful claim to rule. Hazlitt imagines it as a huge serpent crushing its prey.
In plain English: In private life, don't we see hypocrisy, grovelling, selfishness, stupidity and cheek succeed, while modesty backs away and merit is trampled?
In plain English: How often is innocent love stripped of its beauty and branded with shame!
Reference & context: Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4, to his mother: “takes off the rose / From the fair forehead of an innocent love, / And sets a blister there.” Hazlitt was then recovering from a humiliating, obsessive love affair, which he described in Liber Amoris (1823).
In plain English: What chance does real love have of succeeding? What guarantee is there that it will last?
In plain English: Seeing all this, and unpicking the web of human life into its threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, lack of feeling and lack of understanding, indifference to others and ignorance of ourselves; seeing habit win out over every kind of excellence, and habit itself give way to disgrace; having been wrong in all my public and private hopes, judging others by myself and judging wrongly; always let down where I trusted most; fooled by friendship and made a fool by love: don't I have reason to hate and despise myself?
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A long, accumulating sentence that piles up every disappointment before the final turn.
In plain English: I certainly do; and mostly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: One of the great last lines: self-hatred turns into a final, defiant accusation of the world.
Fun Fact
Hazlitt's last words, in 1830, were famously different in tone: “Well, I've had a happy life.” His friend Charles Lamb was at his bedside. Lamb is one of the very friends Hazlitt says in this essay he had quarrelled with, and whom he “must be friends with again.”