| PERHAPS
one of the maddest things in a mad world is to inquire
the cause of madness, just as it seems to be one of
the requisites of happiness that we should not set our
heart upon it. The Angel of Life is evasive, reticent,
not to be cornered, yet abounding in generous revelations
of the truth upon occasion; and that mortal is likely
to learn most about the mysteries of being who does
not pry into them too industriously. Curiosity is the
fundamental passion of the mind, and to satisfy curiosity
with knowledge is one of the three great sources of
happiness. At the same time it is forbidden to know
everything. At least this is so for the time being,
whatever [Page 290] may be permitted
to human investigation in some future age.
And
so, whether it is hatters or March hares, we know very
little about the madness of either. Each has become
a byword in proverbial speech, and we make a simile
of his erratic fortune without a second though. How
sad to be a name and nothing more in the mouth of one’s
fellows! Yet I have no doubt the hatter is as indifferent
to his repute as the hare, even perhaps a little proud
of his peculiarity. So frail is moral nature, it is
boastful even of its blemishes when they lend it a little
distinction and draw the eyes of the crowd. One can
very well fancy the complacency of the hatter under
his visitation, how he would turn it to good account
and make a profitable investment of his affliction.
He would be a sorry tradesman who could not manage to
secure some slight advantage in dealing with destiny
and come out at last on the right side of his reckoning
with Providence. Was ever the madness of a hatter [Page
291] so complete his commercial instinct could
not prevail against it? Is there not always a residuum
of sanity at the bottom of his mania, a trace of shrewd
calculation concealed under the guise of his feckless
innocence? The madness of the hatter is the wisdom of
the serpent, seemingly guileless yet profoundly subtle
and sardonic.
Now
the March hare is in a very different case. His folly
is the folly of a child, his madness the madness of
ecstasy, of elation, of transport. He is a visionary
and partakes of the rapture of lovers and prophets and
bards. He is possessed and carried out of himself. He
is akin to the oracular priestess of Delphi and the
Vestals, whose care it was to cherish the sacred flame
of their goddess. He may be the least of all the creatures
who suffer this form of madness, but his tenure of the
divine possession is none the less authentic. The burden
of joy laid upon his spirit is excessive, and an unhinging
of his balance has supervened. He is mad because he
loves too [Page 292] greatly, whereas
the hatter is mad because he knows too much. Saul and
Hamlet were mad as hatters, through an excess of knowledge
vouchsafed to them. Blake and Shelley and many another
mystic were mad as March hares, by reason of the too
great stress of inspiration laid upon them. In the one
case the dementia is a malady of the mind, in the other
it is an affection of the spirit; though, tried by the
standard of sober sense, they are all mad together.
With
something of the March hare’s own folly, I spent
a day in a library trying to find out the meaning of
his madness, its cause and scope, or how it came into
our proverbial lore. Of course, the search was futile,
and I only found out several things I was not looking
for. One quotation, however, seemed pleasant enough
to remember. Drayton in his “Nymphidia”
says that Oberon
“Grew
mad as any hare,
When he has sought each place with care,
And
found the queen was missing.” [Page
293]
I
daresay that is the gist of the matter, for the best
of the cyclopædists took refuge in the bare statement
that hares are particularly wild during the mating season
in March. So the madness of our little brother with
the long ears is only the erratic behaviour of a lover,
after all, and we must sympathize with him in his happy
derangement. Who will say there is any joy in the world
comparable to that irresponsible state of election,
when the kind gods have marked us for their own, and
bestowed on us the favour of their rapturous life for
one spring day? Is it any wonder the hare should be
full of quirks and starts, of aimless chasing to and
fro, of dashing here and halting there without rhyme
or reason? Could one expect so frail and sensitive a
being to support so great a burden of ecstasy and still
be undistracted, poised, and sane? Is it not rather
a marvel he has a spark of reason left? Most men and
women have been lovers, too, in their day, and unless
memory can be wholly blighted by time, should know [Page
294] how to feel for their little friend in
his March wildness:
“For
that is the madness of Ishtar,
Which
comes upon earth in spring.”
It
is easy to identify Easter, the ancient goddess of the
spring wind and the southwest rain, with Ishtar or Astarte,
the deity of love who was worshipped with dark rites
in Asia, passed into the purer religion of Hellas as
Aphrodite, and survives as April, the mother of the
new-ploughed field and swelling seed. The soft wind
from the south is her immortal breath; her garment is
the mist of purple rain; the opening windflower and
blood-root and hepatica betray where her foot has passed;
she touches the wild cherry with her hand as she journeys,
and the woodlands are filled with the fragrance of its
breaking bloom. In the bitter North, when the rivers
are loosened from their long imprisonment and go sparkling
to the sea, when the streams of melting snow babble
to the stars in
“The
hopeful, solemn, many-murmured night,” [Page
295]
that,
too, is the work of the great spring goddess, while
in the hearts of all mortal creatures she works a no
less miraculous resurgence. It is she who brings back
the purple swallow at the appointed day, and whispers
the time of year to the flame-bright crocus under the
mold. It is she also who puts mad fancies into the heads
of imperial lovers and wild March hares. For before
her not only is no distinction of persons, but the “flower
in the crannied wall,” the hunter on the trail,
the small green frog in the marsh, and the proud prince
in his palace are equal in her eyes. It is she also
who presides over the unmitigated ardours of earth,
and delights in the splendid longings, the impassioned
desires, the impossible romantic aspirations of human
hearts. It was her madness which came upon Leander and
sent him to swim the Hellespont to his death, for the
sake of a girl’s kiss.
For
no weightier reason, how many a man has gone to his
doom in the glad, fragrant [Page 296] hours
of some lengthened twilight of spring, with the green
pipes of the frogs sounding in the meadows, and the
still, small magic flute of desire answering in his
breast! Over the hills or beyond the sea dwelt the remembered
shape of beauty, beckoned the vision of alluring loveliness,
echoed the silver sound of irresistible laughter, and
he could do nothing but follow the old irremediable
path of destiny and joy. Let prudence lay up saws and
experience inculcate caution as they will; it is not
in the nature of love to count the cost. Youth knows
a better wisdom in the infatuated gladness of the lover,
and those whom the gods love die without ever being
disillusioned. Crazy in the sight of the world, they
go to their graves with no care upon their brow, unreluctant
to the last. Of a metal too fine to be tarnished by
the corrosive air of life, they pass in charmed immunity
through the scurvy environments of struggle and selfishness
and greed, childlike, instinctive, single-hearted, guided
for ever by the divine insanity.
It
is not only in the tender pursuits of youth that the
inescapable March madness reveals itself. It is made
patent in all the undertakings of men. Wherever there
is a touch of the visionary and the extreme there are
its symptoms appearing. We may be sober, diligent, God-fearing,
impeccable, stanch as churchwardens, and dependable
as a stone wall, yet make no more than a decent demise
after all. For all our sedulous anxiety to keep the
Commandments, we may go down to the pit with none to
grieve above us. The local paper may give us a stickful
of perfunctory eulogy, our possessions will be scattered
among our relatives, and the sum total of the matter
is not much more than a name and two dates on a headstone
under a sighing willow. Of such is the kingdom of the
world. It is all very well and very right and very necessary,
but alone it is not enough. You will find that whenever
a man is remembered and beloved beyond the day of his
great departure, there has been a touch of the unusual
and extravagant [Page 298] about him
in some direction. However commonplace he may have seemed
for the most part, it will turn out that those who knew
him best were acquainted with exaggerated and unusual
traits in his character, vagaries, and predilections
out of the ordinary, generous promptings of self-forgetful
folly, which endeared him to them more than all his
unwavering rectitude. For it is not what we expect of
people that makes us love them, but their unasked, unrequited,
and lavish actions. The soul is not happy in exactitude,
but loves the overbrimming measure. The mean and calculating
wisdom of the market-place is abhorrent to it, and the
wasteful, splendid, unstinted dealings of Nature are
the only method it knows. Who ever heard of keeping
a tally in friendship, or doing a kindness for the sake
of gain? Surely that were the very embodiment of blasphemy
against the spirit of love! Yet that is the custom of
traders and politicians and moneylenders and all the
sleek complacency that [Page 299] rules
the world. Alas for them! They despise the unsuspecting
gentleness of Utopian dreamers, they have cast out all
childish and impractical faith from their mind, and
have made themselves lords of their fellow men, only
to lose the greatest of all treasures at last, —
a radiant spirit and a contented heart.
We
aver glibly enough that aberration always goes with
genius, but we make a mistake when we expect genius
to exist without aberration. Nature progresses steadily
but unevenly, here a little and there a little, now
at one point, now at another. It is the very height
of her intention to produce a perfect individual, to
embody the beauty of the normal in the single instance.
Toward this ideal she is always tending, yet how seldom
she seems to attain it, even remotely! The impossible
hopes and aims of the altruist make him peculiar, —
make him a variant from the average type of man. Any
great capacity in one direction or another, which we
call genius and hold to be a kind of inspiration, makes
[Page 300] its possessor conspicuous.
It does not make him abnormal, for that is the one direction
in which he is permitted to approach the normal a little
more closely. If he were allowed to approach it in all
directions, — if he could have strength of body
and power of mind, for instance, commensurate with his
noble longings and imaginings, — the creature
of genius would be human no longer, but divine. And
it is not permitted any one mortal to run so far ahead
in the great procession.
It
does not need any philosophy, however, to appreciate
the March hare’s enthusiasm. We all know how the
feeling of young spring takes hold of him, when the
sappy buds begin to swell and the sleeping rivers begin
to murmur in their icy dungeons. We, too, have our seizures
of restlessness, our longings to wander, our admonitions
of splendid discontent, when the sun passes the equator
and the hours of sunshine lengthen toward the season
of flowers. For us also routine becomes irksome and
common sense the only delusion. [Page 301] It
is time for rejuvenation upon the earth, when age looks
on youth with an envious eye, and the soberest beef-eater
among us is wont to put by his accustomed habit of prudence
for the gayer garb of some more reckless virtue. It
is not enough to be sound citizens, forsooth, and scrupulous
upholders of things as they are; we must revert to the
days of our pupilage and taste once more the intoxicating
savour of romance. Perhaps we have accumulated an enviable
store of worldly wisdom, venerable with the dust of
time, and are hoarding it against ravages of age. Of
no avail is our fatuous precaution. The first breath
of spring wind blows it all away, and we go merrily
forth upon the great adventure as empty-handed and daring
as when we first began. It may be hard to learn instruction
from our elders; it is a hundred times harder to forget
the counsels of our own youth. The heart’s great
by-laws of intrepidity and hope need neither to be written
nor taught; they were promulgated long before [Page
302] our puny civilizations were dreamed of,
and they will guide many generations when our hands
have let go of all temporal affairs. The forethought
of the ant may be a sufficient providence against the
perils of winter, but we must have a touch of the March
madness of the hare if we would come happily through
the round year. It is not enough to avoid disaster and
penury and mischance; the stones of the field accomplish
that better than we. We needs must have “a bliss
to dies with, dim descried,” if we would save
ourselves from the consciousness of ultimate failure.
You may very well think to get yourself through the
inexorable portals of heaven under the patronage of
Socrates and Newton and the Lord of Verulam, of the
seven wise men of Greece and the seventy wise men of
modern days. But, pray, were they not all mad together?
Let me take my modest chance with the timorous March
hare. [Page 303]
THE
END.
|
