Revolution and Romanticism

WILLIAM HAZLITT

Liber amoris: or, the New Pygmalion 1823

Hazlitt, as Pygmalion, mythologizes the obsessional love of his early forties. Galatea is Sarah Walker, the twenty-year-old daughter of a tailor in whose house in Chancery Lane Hazlitt took lodgings after separating from his wife. He describes the joys, agonies and humiliations experienced as he worships in Sarah the perfection that he himself has created. The book is written from within the experience, consisting mainly of letters written at the time. It has an immediacy not to be found even in Rousseau and Goethe, Hazlitt’s two great predecessors in this confessional mode. We live the constantly shifting moods and terrible self-delusions of the writer as they occur. We respond as if to fiction, but with a heightening awareness that this is the thing itself.

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H. Oh! is it you? I had something to shew you - I have got a picture here. Do you know anyone it’s like?
S. No, Sir.
H. Don’t you think it’s like yourself?
S. No: it’s much handsomer than I can pretend to be.
H. That’s because you don’t see yourself with the same eyes that others do. I don’t think it handsomer ... Ah, if you are never to be mine, I shall not long be myself. I cannot go on as I am.
My faculties leave me: I think of nothing, I have no feeling about any thing but thee....
S. Do not, I beg, talk in that manner...
H. Thou art heavenly-fair, my love - the idol of the painter’s heart, as thou art of mine! Shall I make a drawing of it, altering the dress a little, to shew you how like it is?
S. As you please.
(from pages 1-4)

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