#17 A Sentimental Journey
Book Six. Cambridge. Section 2. Edward Burne-Jones. The Pygmalion Myth. Part 3. Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris, or, the New Pygmalion
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) is regarded as one of the finest essayists in the English language. However, Liber Amoris, or, the New Pygmalion published anonymously in 1823, was received with critical derision and resulted in serious damage to Hazlitt’s reputation. It remains a mystery why Hazlitt agreed to the publication of such an unflattering portrait of his character and relationship with Sarah Walker, the nineteen-year-old daughter of his landlady at Southampton Buildings in Holborn, London where he had been lodging since August 1820. Hazlitt unsuccessfully sought to distance himself from what is essentially an autobiographical work in the style of Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) or De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) by presenting it in the “Advertisement” to the work as a fictional account written by a “native of North Britain.”[i] The majority of critics have dismissed Liber Amoris as a misjudged folly or simply passed over it. However, recent scholarship has revised this judgment. “For Liber Amoris represents a fully developed and self-conscious aesthetic of erotic submission, one that juxtaposes idealism and cynicism and privileges uncertainty and suspense” (Henderson 172-73).
Liber Amoris consists of three parts. Part I contains seven fragments of dialogue between Hazlitt and Walker documenting their increasingly fraught relationship and letters from Hazlitt to Walker from his lodgings in Renton, Berwickshire, thirty miles from Edinburgh, where he was staying for three months to divorce Sarah Stoddart. Part II consists of correspondence between Hazlitt and his friend P.G. Patmore, recounting the emotional distress caused to Hazlitt by Walker’s rejection, alternating with his suspicion that she was flirting at the behest of her mother as bait for himself and other lodgers - a suspicion Hazlitt in unpublished material sought to test by encouraging a friend to lodge at Walker’s house in an attempt to seduce her. Part III consists of a further series of letters by Hazlitt to Patmore and another friend, the Scottish dramatist J. S. Knowles. In Hazlitt’s final letter to Knowles, Hazlitt’s accepts the end of his relationship with Walker.
My seeing her in the street has gone a good way to satisfy me. Her manner there explains her manner in-doors to be conscious and overdone; and besides, she looks but indifferently. She is diminutive in stature, and her measured step and timid air do not suit these public airings. I am afraid she will soon grow common to my imagination, as well as worthless in herself. Her image seems fast “going into the wastes of time,” like a weed that the wave bears farther and farther from me. Alas! thou poor hapless weed, when I entirely lose sight of thee, and for ever, no flower will ever bloom on earth to glad my heart again! (Hazlitt 174)
The unexpurgated and extended version of the text, which was published in 1894 in a limited edition of 500 copies with an introduction by Richard Le Gallienne and in annex Sarah Hazlitt’s record of her travels in Scotland and Ireland in a journal, is more rancorous in tone and derogatory in judgment about Walker and her family and the language more explicit concerning the sexual liberties she allowed Hazlitt and other lodgers. One notable feature of the book is the lack of any genuine voice given to Sarah Walker. Apart from one formal letter, there is no correspondence from her to Hazlitt and the words attributed to her by Hazlitt are formulaic or defensive. She does not exist other than as a projection of Hazlitt’s irrational and obsessive desire. This gives sense to the book’s, at first impression puzzling, alterative title The New Pygmalion.
Hazlitt’s choice of the Pygmalion myth is revealing. Calling his abortive love affair “The New Pygmalion” suggests that, like Pygmalion before him, he has created the object of his affections. His desire has very little to do with an actual woman called Sarah Walker, and everything to do with his infatuation with an idealized image of a woman that he himself had created. Hazlitt tries to reconcile idealized images of women represented by cultural artefacts such as statues and paintings with the reality of a woman who does not or will not conform to the contour of his desire. The Pygmalion myth is invoked in Liber Amoris by references to statues and transformations. Hazlitt himself is turned into marble and he compares Walker to a Greek statue come to life. The metaphor of a statue coming to life is also reversed; flesh becomes marble and Walker is described as Hazlitt writes of “the petrification of a human face in the softest moment of passion” (p.155). Great symbolic weight is placed within the narrative on the bust of Bonaparte that becomes an emblem of Hazlitt’s own precarious identity. (Danahy 36)
Hazlitt creates a new Sarah Walker out of his own imagination. Whenever the reality of her feelings - her love for another suitor, her refusal to reciprocate his love - impact on this image, he reacts with the petulance of a jilted lover.
It is, then, the most self-conscious, the most continuously literary of love affairs, though some of the sense of contrivance arises because Sarah has scarcely any words of her own, and seems to be waiting, like an actress, for her part to be written. Hazlitt, stage-managing as well as writing and performing, takes all the initiatives and dictates the course of the scenes. He tries Sarah physically by pulling her on to his knees and fondling her; he tests her morally by trusting her with his most prized possession, a little bronze statue of Napoleon. In late May, when he had served his Scottish time but not completed the divorce proceedings, he paid a flying visit to his London lodgings, where he found Sarah chillier then he had hoped for. In his rage he smashed the statue, and thus by a fine symbolic act pronounced the end of the affair. (Butler 215-16)
This solipsistic viewpoint is evidenced by Hazlitt’s fascination for Sarah Walker’s resemblance to images in two paintings. The first is introduced in the first scene of Part I, “The Picture,” when Hazlitt shows Sarah a miniature picture which he uncertainly identifies as a copy of Raphael’s The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia (1516-17).
In Raphael’s painting of St. Cecilia, the figures of St. Paul, Mary Magdalene, St. John, and St. Augustine all look down, out towards the viewer, or towards one another, while St. Cecilia looks up towards the sky, where a vision of heavenly musicians is revealed. So rapt is she by this heavenly music that her earthly instruments go unnoticed at her feet and even the one she holds seems to be slipping from her fingers. As Giorgio Vasari describes it, she is “wholly absorbed in the harmony; and in her countenance is seen that abstraction which is found in the faces of those who are in ecstasy.” For H, such abstraction serves as a figure for S’s distance, the difficulty of capturing her – even of capturing her attention. H wants in S a palpable object, something to have and to hold; but it is clear that he also wants S to be the image of abstraction and the unattainable. (Henderson 178)
Andrea Henderson interprets the use of this image as fetishist, displacing Hazlitt’s physical desire to possess Sarah onto the image. “THenderson, Andrea K. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life..” (178). Hope Finding Fortune in the Sea, a painting attributed to Pietro Liberi (1605-1687), is mentioned in one of Hazlitt’s letters to Patmore.
Do you know I saw a picture, the very pattern of her, the other day, at Dalkeith Castle (Hope finding Fortune in the Sea) just before this blessed news came, and the resemblance drove me almost out of my senses. Such delicacy, such fulness, such perfect softness, such buoyancy, such grace! If it is not the very image of her, I am no judge. (135)
In a letter to Patmore of July 8, 1822, Hazlitt is more explicit. “I saw a picture of her naked figure the other day at Dalkeith Palace, before these blessed news came, and it drove me mad” (236). Sarah records that she had met her husband Hazlitt at Dalkeith House on 6 July 1822. In her journal entry of 13 July, she records meeting him in Edinburgh and asked his opinion of the collection at Dalkeith House: “He said: No, very poor; there were but two tolerable, one a female figure floating on the water in an historical picture, which he thought a copy of some good picture. I told him I had remarked it; and thought that figure exceedingly good” (322).
A Catalogue of the Pictures at Dalkeith House describes the painting thus: “Fortune, a nude female figure, lies on the sea, on a raft on which are objects emblematic of riches. Truth, a flying figure, slightly draped, raises her. In the right hand of the painting are fairy and satyr children, some swimming”. (Henderson 180)
Since Fortune is portrayed naked as a mature woman seen in profile, it is hard to see how Hazlitt could say that the resemblance to nineteen-year-old Sarah “drove me almost out of my senses,” let alone that it could be “the very image of her” (Hazlitt 135). Either Hazlitt was indeed out of his senses or, more likely, engaging in a literary conceit. His preferred image of Sarah was not that represented by St. Cecilia or Fortune, but rather an image drawn from her humble background. “Do you know I like to think of her best in her morning gown, in her dirt & her mob-cap. It is as she has sat on my knee with her arms around my neck. Damn her, I could devour her. It is herself that I love” (212). Hazlitt’s jealous preference was to keep Sarah for his eyes only. “I should almost like thee to wear a veil, & to be muffled up from head to foot; but even if thou wert, and not an inch of you could be seen, it would be to no purpose – you would only have to move, and you would be admired as the most graceful creature in the world” (183).
[i] On the literary connections between Liber Amoris and other Romantic autobiographical writings, see Marilyn Butler, “Satire and the Images of Self in the Romantic Period: The Long Tradition of Hazlitt’s ‘Liber Amoris’”, The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 14. 1984, pp. 209-225.
Illustration by Danny Hellman.