Essays | Page 8

wishing them away is merely that they are "thin." A man does
not always say everything.

A NORTHERN FANCY
"I remember," said Dryden, writing to Dennis, "I remember poor Nat
Lee, who was then upon the verge of madness, yet made a sober and
witty answer to a bad poet who told him, 'It was an easy thing to write
like a madman.' 'No,' said he, ''tis a very difficult thing to write like a
madman, but 'tis a very easy thing to write like a fool.'" Nevertheless,
the difficult song of distraction is to be heard, a light high note, in

English poetry throughout two centuries at least, and one English poet
lately set that untethered lyric, the mad maid's song, flying again.
A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries--the age of the re-discovery of death; against the
crime of tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that had made
the poets walk in one way of love, scorn, constancy, inconstancy--may
have caused this trolling of unconsciousness, this tune of innocence,
and this carol of liberty, to be held so dear. "I heard a maid in Bedlam,"
runs the old song. High and low the poets tried for that note, and the
singer was nearly always to be a maid and crazed for love. Except for
the temporary insanity so indifferently worn by the soprano of the now
deceased kind of Italian opera, and except that a recent French story
plays with the flitting figure of a village girl robbed of her wits by woe
(and this, too, is a Russian villager, and the Southern author may have
found his story on the spot, as he seems to aver) I have not met
elsewhere than in England this solitary and detached poetry of the
treble note astray.
At least, it is principally a northern fancy. Would the steadfast Cordelia,
if she had not died, have lifted the low voice to that high note, so
delicately untuned? She who would not be prodigal of words might yet,
indeed, have sung in the cage, and told old tales, and laughed at gilded
butterflies of the court of crimes, and lived so long in the strange health
of an emancipated brain as to wear out
Packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by the moon.
She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry
and strange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and the maid
called Barbara.
It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemona
remembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth. Of all the songs of
the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there is nothing
more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some have died for
love." To one who has always recognized the greatness of this poem
and who possibly had known and forgotten how much Ruskin prized it,
it was a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in _Modern Painters_,
where this grave lyric is cited for an example of great imagination. It is
the mourning and restless song of the lover ("the pretty Barbara died")
who has not yet broken free from memory into the alien world of the

insane.
Barbara's lover dwelt in the scene of his love, as Dryden's Adam
entreats the expelling angel that he might do, protesting that he could
endure to lose "the bliss, but not the place." (And although this
dramatic "Paradise Lost" of Dryden's is hardly named by critics except
to be scorned, this is assuredly a fine and imaginative thought.) It is
nevertheless as a wanderer that the crazed creature visits the fancy of
English poets with such a wild recurrence. The Englishman of the far
past, barred by climate, bad roads, ill-lighted winters, and the intricate
life and customs of the little town, must have been generally a
home-keeper. No adventure, no setting forth, and small liberty, for him.
But Tom-a-Bedlam, the wild man in patches or in ribbons, with his
wallet and his horn for alms of food or drink, came and went as fitfully
as the storm, free to suffer all the cold--an unsheltered creature; and the
chill fancy of the villager followed him out to the heath on a journey
that had no law. Was it he in person, or a poet for him, that made the
swinging song: "From the hag and the hungry goblin"? If a poet, it was
one who wrote like a madman and not like a fool.
Not a town, not a village, not a solitary cottage during the English
Middle Ages was unvisited by him who frightened the children; they
had a name for him as for the wild birds--Robin Redbreast, Dicky
Swallow, Philip Sparrow, Tom