'The Past Is Alive and Stirring With Objects'

Published in the January 1821 issue of London Magazine are thematically linked essays by two friends, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt: “New Year’s Eve” and “On the Past and Future,” respectively. Lamb’s is better known, and I'm aware of several readers who, like me, read it every year, as some of us do Pickwick Papers and Kim. Lamb begins with a folksy look at the holiday, already associated two centuries ago with alcoholic revelry, before modulating into a meditation on mortality: 

“I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces, new years,--from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years.”

 

As always, Lamb celebrates the past at the expense of the future and even the present. Sensing that he skirts an unbecoming self-pity, he rebounds with a gesture of gratitude, celebrating the coming of the New Year:

 

“I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here.”

 

This back and forth is typical of Lamb. His wavering lends the Elia essays a human certainty. We accept the whole man, contemptible and admirable, Jeremiah and joker, as we accept the world. This leads to a grand exultation of being:

 

“A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?”

 

Hazlitt, too, prefers the past to the future, the real to the imaginary: “I have naturally but little imagination, and am not of a very sanguine turn of mind. I have some desire to enjoy the present good, and some fondness for the past; but I am not at all given to build castles in the air, nor to look forward with much confidence or hope to the brilliant illusions held out by the future.”

 

While sometimes fancying himself a political radical, Hazlitt’s sentiment on this occasion is classically conservative. He recalls Michael Oakeshott in his great essay "On Being Conservative" (Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962):

 

“To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

 

A temperamental hothead, Hazlitt, on rare occasion, could he cool-headed and commonsensical:

 

“The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot. The future is like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view; the past is alive and stirring with objects, bright or solemn, and of unfading interest.”