'He Evades the Present, He Mocks the Future'

In the doctor’s waiting room an elderly couple sat across from me. They looked at ease in each other’s company, holding hands and sitting close as though a single being. The man, with a black cane leaning against his leg, was reading a Louis L’Amour paperback turning brown with age. I would guess he had read it many times before. L’Amour published eighty-nine novels and fourteen story collections, and his readership was devoted. I knew a guy in Indiana who read L’Amour’s oeuvre in constant rotation, the way some people read from Genesis to Revelation and start over again.

The eight or ten others in the room were looking at their phones, staring at nothing or murmuring in Spanish. Most appeared healthy, without visible symptoms, except one man who was pale and gaunt. While I waited to see the doctor I was reading the 1910 Everyman’s Library edition of Hazlitt’s Lectures on English Poets & The Spirit of the Age. The bookplate at the front identified it yet another volume formerly owned by Edgar Odell Lovett (1871-1957), the first president of Rice University, and now part of the Fondren Library’s circulating collection. Over the years I have read dozens of books once a part of Lovett’s personal library. He was a mathematician, not an English major, and by all accounts a well-read, broadly learned man. I wonder about the reading habits of today’s college presidents.

I have always favored Hazlitt for his prose style, especially in his non-critical essays – “The Fight” and “The Indian Jugglers.” Of late, I’ve paid more attention to him as a critic. His analysis is not typically cerebral or academic, as we think of it. He makes no claims to being “scientific.” He can be hot-headed, and seems to have read books with his entire being. He is not infallible in his judgments. Like many of the best critics – Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Yvor Winters – when Hazlitt is wrong, he is often interestingly wrong.

The final essay in The Spirit of the Age is “Elia, And Geoffrey Crayon” – that is, Charles Lamb and Washington Irving. The latter is of little interest but Lamb, Hazlitt’s friend, is pure pleasure. Hazlitt gets him:

      

“Mr. Lamb has succeeded not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it. He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction. He prefers bye-ways to highways. When the full tide of human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day, Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a tottering door-way, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient manners.”

Lamb is indelibly sui generis, and Hazlitt, a very different sort of writer and man, approves. I thought of the old man contentedly reading his Louis L’Amour when I read this assessment by Hazlitt:

“He has no grand swelling theories to attract the visionary and the enthusiast, no passing topics to allure the thoughtless and the vain. He evades the present, he mocks the future. His affections revert to, and settle on the past . . .”