`Favourites' in Dotage

Few writers possess as unlikely and proportionate a mingling of passion and common sense as William Hazlitt. His work is always amusing, whether read in isolated samples as I have been doing this morning, or great chunks. Here’s a passage from his essay “On the Pleasure of Hating,” in which he spends nearly as much time on the pleasure of loving and admiring, the way doctors study the diseased in order to learn more about the healthy:

“I am half afraid to look into Tom Jones, lest it should not answer my expectations at this time of day; and if it did not, I would certainly be disposed to fling it into the fire, and never look into another novel while I lived. But surely, it may be said, there are some works that, like nature, can never grow old; and that must always touch the imagination and passions alike! Or there are passages that seem as if we might brood over them all our lives, and not exhaust the sentiments of love and admiration they excite: they become favourites, and we are fond of them to a sort of dotage.”

Hazlitt was 48 years old when he wrote that – nearly “dotage” in the third decade of the 19th century. I test his theory against my own experience in my sixth decade, and it proves him, as usual, correct. I have never read anything by Kenneth Burke, but I have always liked his description of literature as “equipment for living.” Hazlitt’s “favourites” are just that. The old cherished titles sustain us, like the Roman armies with their impedimenta.