'Not to Have Lived Quite in Vain'

“I have more confidence in the dead than the living.”

With a few exceptions, I concur. Hazlitt is speaking of authors and books, and the superiority of older ones. A reader, Mark Marowitz, sent me a link to “The Hedonism of Reading Good Books,” in which E.J. Hutchinson looks at Hazlitt’s well-known “On Reading Old Books.” I have no doubt Hazlitt’s thesis was sincere and sound, but also that he was being true to his nature; that is, provocative. By celebrating old writers and snubbing the new, he was thumbing his nose at contemporaries, which is always a pleasant diversion.

Hutchinson’s reading of Hazlitt is sympathetic but not uncritical. “[T]he best old books,” he writes, “are both aesthetic masterpieces and good to think with.” Nicely phrased. Hazlitt differed violently with Burke’s understanding of the French Revolution but admired his writing extravagantly. Hutchinson writes:  

“He did not like Burke on politics but he respected him and saw him as a genius. ‘I took a particular pride and pleasure in [Burke’s Reflections], and read it to myself and others for months afterwards. I had reason for my prejudice in favour of this author. To understand an adversary is some praise: to admire him is more. I thought I did both: I knew I did one.’” That’s a quality found only among the best readers and critics. Hutchinson takes Hazlitt’s thinking on books a step further:

“What Hazlitt is really driving at, it seems to me, is the obligation of the thinking individual to form a personal canon of favorite authors and texts. Just as we differ as individuals, our personal canons will differ. But we should all nevertheless have one, and not take anyone else’s word for it. It is to be made, not borrowed. The reasons given are frankly somewhat epicurean: the pleasure of time well spent; the pleasure of memory; the pleasure of watching a master at work—and it bears repeating that we should include some masters whose ideas we do not like.”

Late Sunday night we returned from four days spent in Annapolis, Md., where my middle son is completing his Plebe Summer at the U.S. Naval Academy. On the trip I read two old(er) books for a second time -- Robert Liddell’s Elizabeth and Ivy (1986) and Rose Macaulay’s A Casual Commentary (1925) – and a new one for the first time: Roger Scruton’s Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (2018). Two to one, old to new, is a respectable ratio. Scruton writes of Dr. Johnson that “he was and remains a towering intellectual presence in British national culture, an example of the rooted loyalty to ‘things by law established’ that has been, among so many Anglophone conservatives, their substitute for abstract argument. What Johnson believed he also exemplified, which was a firm moral sense combined with a robust eccentricity of manner and a deep respect for aesthetic values.”

Nice to be in the company of grownups, old and new.

We visited three bookstores in Annapolis. I found nothing but Michael got lucky: a Penguin Herodotus; a deeply discounted hardback, bilingual edition of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953); and a math text from Dover Books, Introduction to Analysis (1968) by Maxwell Rosenlicht. He’s taking a statistics class in the fall. Hazlitt writes:

“To have lived in the cultivation of an intimacy with such works, and to have familiarly relished such names, is not to have lived quite in vain.”