In my family, certain pet hatreds were passed down with the bone china and the silverware. These were heirloom hatreds, swaddled in tissue as painstakingly as any precious brooch or cherished cameo. Several lovingly despised relatives figured high on the list – this wastrel cousin or that dissolute aunt. Their portraits never graced our walls, but their features were indelibly engraved upon our memories. We felt a special crackling closeness when we spoke of these malignly enshrined kinfolk.

Even as a child I could feel, and share, the stealthy pleasure these animosities afforded. Not by coincidence do we speak of “nursing a grudge.” In our case there weren’t only nurses but an entire intensive care unit to revive old hatreds before the final gasp. Yet, to be perfectly honest, who among us hasn’t warmed himself from time to time over the smoldering embers of some old hostility?

Everyone from Plato to Proust has had his say about love. But where are the great treatises on hatred? Poets pluck love’s harp strings for eon after monotonous eon: “How do I love thee?” Elizabeth Barrett Browning lisps, and then proceeds to give us her numbing enumeration. But of “How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways” we have barely the beginnings of an inventory. This is pretty strange when you think of it; after all, hatred has been – demonstrably, if sadly – as powerful a motive force in human history as love. Think of the line from the Psalms: “I hate Thy enemies with a perfect hatred, O Lord.” There’s a capsule history of civilization in that outburst.

I’ve been prompted to these unsavory reflections by a re-reading of William Hazlitt’s immortal essay “On the Pleasure of Hating,” recently reissued in the United Kingdom as part of Penguin’s “Great Ideas” series (120 pages, $7.62), together with five other equally trenchant pieces. The compilation doesn’t include his wonderful “On the Ignorance of the Learned,” a little treatise I’ve been unwise enough to cite at Faculty Club lunches, but it does have his incomparable “The Indian Jugglers” as well as “On Reason and Imagination.” Hazlitt never penned a boring sentence; his wit, his robust common sense, and his genial venom guarantee that, and these essays are no exception.

Hazlitt wishes to persuade us not only that we hate, but that we do so with considerable relish. To this end he begins with the sight of a spider at his feet and notes the sensations of dislike this arachnid inspires. He doesn’t stamp “the little reptile” under his shoe; he hates the thing but he won’t kill it. For “the spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it. We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity.” We’ve learned not to act on our hates, but we still feel them, and we enjoy the feeling.

Hazlitt, who was born in 1778, formed part of that extravagant generation of Romantics that included Coleridge and Wordsworth. For him, as for them, what mattered was intensity. As we read his essay, we realize that it is the energy of hatred that attracts him. Love is intense, but love cools; affections turn tepid. Or, as Hazlitt put it in his aphoristic manner: “Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.”

Hazlitt’s position is not entirely fang-in-cheek. Like some early Manichean, he believes that nature depends upon conflicting antipathies. “Without something to hate,” he writes, “we should lose the very spring of thought and action.” Even more, he goes on, “there is a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind, and … it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction.” Why else do people gather to watch a house on fire? And he notes that “the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished.”

Hazlitt was a radical, not only in his opposition to such evils as slavery but in his ruthless honesty. After noting the various satisfactions we derive from the misfortunes of others, he vents his most furious spleen on those who hold out the prospect of eternal hell for miscreants. “What a strange being man is!” he exclaims, “Not content with doing all he can to vex and hurt his fellows here … where one would think there were heart-aches, pain, disappointment, anguish, tears, sighs, and groans enough, the bigoted maniac takes him to the top of the high peak of school divinity to hurl him down the yawning gulf of penal fire; his speculative malice asks eternity to wreak its infinite spite in, and calls on the Almighty to execute its relentless doom!”

As Hazlitt proceeds, we begin to understand that his essay is no simple sardonic denunciation of hatred, but a kind of sorrowful miserere over the beings we are. “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.”

What makes his essay profound is that Hazlitt appreciates how pleasurable even such poisons can be. He doesn’t exempt himself; because he loves to gossip, he loves friends with faults. When closeted with one of his cronies, he tells us with glee, “we sacrificed human infirmities at the shrine of truth.” And in a magnificent metaphor, which recalls the noxious spider of his opening, he writes, “The skeletons of character might be seen, after the juice was extracted, dangling in the air like flies in cobwebs: or they were kept for future inspection in some refined acid.”

Life is a series of successive entropies. We love our friends but grow sick of them; certain activities engage us but become boring in time; our very opinions turn stale, they disgust us and we shake them off for others. In this process, hatred serves as a spur, leaving in its wake only furious distaste. Passion itself dies. This Hazlitt finds unbearable. He closes with a fierce flourish:

What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? 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 despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

Like all the greatest essayists, Hazlitt begins with a general proposition but ends inside his own raging heart. That, after all, is where the spider sits, feeding upon itself.