'My Best Consolation for the Future'

If pushed to choose my favorite literary form, I would reluctantly reject novels and aphorisms and settle on the essay which, in the right hands, can boast the generosity of the former and the pithy tartness of the latter. Essays are elastic and an essayist can confidently take on any subject if he possesses sufficient learning and experience because one of his shadow-subjects is himself. Don’t confuse that with straight autobiography. A good essayist melts into the matter at hand. Consider William Hazlitt’s “A Farewell to Essay-Writing,” dating from 1828, two years before his death. 

Hazlitt recalls a walk with Charles and Mary Lamb, admiring the “Claude Lorraine skies” and picking mushrooms “to throw into our hashed mutton at supper.” A pleasant memory, rather conventional, not life-changing. Hazlitt, for once, doesn’t inflate the importance of the recollection. He shares an observation known to many writers, if not always so well-articulated:

 

“It is in looking back to such scenes that I draw my best consolation for the future. Later impressions come and go, and serve to fill up the intervals; but these are my standing resource, my true classics. If I have had few real pleasures or advantages, my ideas, from their sinewy texture, have been to me in the nature of realities; and if I should not be able to add to the stock, I can live by husbanding the interest.”

 

Along with the qualities cited above, memory is essential to an essayist. There’s an elegiac quality to Hazlitt’s essay, apart from the title. We sense a man perhaps coming to terms with himself and giving up the life-long fight – not surrendering but accepting. Prose of this quality is rare and should be cherished. Hazlitt closes his essay with these words:

 

“As to my speculations, there is little to admire in them but my admiration of others; and whether they have an echo in time to come or not, I have learned to set a grateful value on the past, and am content to wind up the account of what is personal only to myself and the immediate circle of objects in which I have moved, with an act of easy oblivion,

 

“'And curtain-close such scene from every future view.'”

 

Hazlitt took that stand-alone line from William Collins’ “Ode on the Poetical Character” (1770). The essayist has been dead for almost two centuries. He could be a difficult man, stupid about women, who spent his final years writing a four-volume biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. And his prose still moves us.