Another sleepless night found me reading throughout the essays and letters of the early 19th-century British literary critic and political commentator, William Hazlitt. I regret not having read him years ago, for here was a mind full of the sour milk of human bile, poured out in the most delicious, delightful ways. He hated all forms of oppression, prejudice, pomposity and narrow-mindedness, and he said so with unequaled invective. He detested king, court and their propaganda organs, The Times and the Quarterly Review, sort of the Fox News of the Georgian age.
Most exemplary of Hazlitt's vindictive wit was a letter he sent to the QR's editor, William Gifford. He opened with, "Sir, — You have an ugly trick of saying what is not true of any one you do not like; and it will be the object of this letter to cure you of it." What Hazlitt wrote to Gifford I wish to hell I had written to Hugh Hewitt, or Dinesh D’Souza, or Bill Bennett, or perhaps anyone at the Gateway Pundit, Breitbart or the short-lived Journal of American Greatness — all of them suck-ups to Donald Trump, as Mr. Gifford was to the royal court and assorted Tories of his day.
"You are a little person," wrote Hazlitt. "Your clandestine connexion with persons high in office constantly influences your opinions, and alone gives importance to them.... It is your business to keep a strict eye over all writers who differ in opinion with his Majesty's Ministers.... Accustomed to the indulgence of your mercenary virulence and party-spite, you have lost all relish as well as capacity for the unperverted exercises of the understanding, and make up for the obvious want of ability by a bare-faced want of principle."
Today the mind handily reaches for the sycophant Hewitt, whose mercenary columns The Washington Post inexplicably publishes. It is Mr. Hewitt's business, too, to keep a strict eye over all writers who differ in opinion with his high priest of political virtue, Trump. Following the CNN town hall fiasco, he wrote that "[The] comprehensive disdain for the media isn’t so 'startling' if you pause to consider that much Donald Trump-related reporting resembles an unmediated Superfund site." He attacked writers at The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Insider and the media research institute Poynter for their coverage. It was biased, he said, against his heartthrob of Mar-a-Lago — a man he once compared to a stage 4 cancer — and bias is something Hugh won't tolerate.
Of Gifford's — or Hewitt's or D'Souza's — high-placed patrons: "To crawl and lick the dust is all they expect of you, and all you can do.... If you cease to be a tool, you cease to be anything.... Your slowness to understand makes you quick to misrepresent; and you infallibly make nonsense of what you cannot possibly conceive." What the pretentious and overblown defender of the Georgian court could not possibly conceive was the same as what is unintelligible to Trumpian pundits: Truth, Reality, Graciousness, Competence. "You deny the meaning altogether, misquote or misapply; and then plume yourself on your own superiority to the absurdity you have created."
Hazlitt finishes his letter to Gifford in a manner of which I am jealous. "Every instance of prevarication he willfully commits makes him more in love with hypocrisy, and every indulgence of his hired malignity makes him more disposed to repeat the insult and the injury.... Grown old in the service of corruption, he drivels on to the last with prostituted impotence and shameless effrontery.... Such, Sir, is the picture of which you have sat for the outline."
Most of Hazlitt's writings were prime-cut savagery — one of his essays is titled "On the Pleasure of Hating" — though he held in eternal esteem the literary gods of Shakespeare and Montaigne. He could lavish love and praise on those who thought broadly, fairly and humanistically. But poseurs were in for beatings. And he delivered them with wit, eloquence and charm.
His honesty was, as they say, brutal, yet fitting for vainglorious kings, courtiers and their groupies and hangers-on — the poor, miserable literary Trumpers of Hazlitt's day. Of those who think the anti-Trumps and Never Trumps of this age are signally unprecedented in their caustic, scorched-earth assessments of the vile Orange Blight, then they have not read William Hazlitt. He was the scintillating prototype of enchanting rhetorical malice.