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.
3 comments:
One of my favorite books is, despite its status as a classic sports book, essentially a book of essays. A.J. Liebling's The Sweet Science uses boxing as a mirror which can reflect many aspects of both Liebling's life and life in general. The last piece in the book (on the epic Rocky Marciano - Archie Moore heavyweight title fight) ends with a beautiful paragraph (and one of my favorite sentences) that blends the elegiac and the optimistic:
"I reflected with satisfaction that old Ahab Moore could have whipped all four principals on that card within fifteen rounds, and that while Dempsey may have been a great champion, he had less to beat than Marciano. I felt the satisfaction because it proved that the world isn’t going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young."
The personal essay is in decline nowadays, with too few that are unpretentiously personal and familiar and too many that are impersonal and bloated.
That's why I'm glad Joseph Epstein is still with us (he turns 90 in January).
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