Essays | Page 9

Tit, Tom-a-Bedlam. And after him
came the "Abram men," who were sane parodies of the crazed, and
went to the fairs and wakes in motley. Evelyn says of a fop: "All his
body was dressed like a maypole, or a Tom-a-Bedlam's cap." But after
the Civil Wars they vanished, and no man knew how. In time old men
remembered them only to remember that they had not seen any such
companies or solitary wanderers of late years.
The mad maid of the poets is a vagrant too, when she is free, and not
singing within Bedlam early in the morning, "in the spring."
Wordsworth, who dealt with the legendary fancy in his "Ruth," makes
the crazed one a wanderer in the hills whom a traveller might see by
chance, rare as an Oread, and nearly as wild as Echo herself:-
I too have passed her in the hills Setting her little water-mills.
His heart misgives him to think of the rheumatism that must befall in
such a way of living; and his grave sense of civilization, bourgeois in
the humane and noble way that is his own, restores her after death to

the company of man, to the "holy bell," which Shakespeare's Duke
remembered in banishment, and to the congregation and their
"Christian psalm."
The older poets were less responsible, less serious and more sad, than
Wordsworth, when they in turn were touched by the fancy of the maid
crazed by love. They left her to her light immortality; and she might be
drenched in dews; they would not desire to reconcile nor bury her. She
might have her hair torn by the bramble, but her heart was light after
trouble. "Many light hearts and wings"--she had at least the bird's heart,
and the poet lent to her voice the wings of his verses.
There is nothing in our poetry less modern than she. The vagrant
woman of later feeling was rather the sane creature of Ebenezer
Elliott's fine lines in "The Excursion"--
Bone-weary, many-childed, trouble-tried! Wife of my bosom, wedded
to my soul!
Trouble did not "try" the Elizabethan wild one, it undid her. She had no
child, or if there had ever been a child of hers, she had long forgotten
how it died. She hailed the wayfarer, who was more weary than she,
with a song; she haunted the cheerful dawn; her "good-morrow" rings
from Herrick's poem, fresh as cock-crow. She knows that her love is
dead, and her perplexity has regard rather to the many kinds of flowers
than to the old story of his death; they distract her in the splendid
meadows.
All the tragic world paused to hear that lightest of songs, as the tragedy
of Hamlet pauses for the fitful voice of Ophelia. Strange was the charm
of this perpetual alien, and unknown to us now. The world has become
once again as it was in the mad maid's heyday, less serious and more
sad than Wordsworth; but it has not recovered, and perhaps will never
recover, that sweetness. Blake's was a more starry madness. Crabbe,
writing of village sorrows, thought himself bound to recur to the legend
of the mad maid, but his "crazed maiden" is sane enough, sorrowful but
dull, and sings of her own "burning brow," as Herrick's wild one never
sang; nor is there any smile in her story, though she talks of flowers, or,
rather, "the herbs I loved to rear"; and perhaps she is the surest of all
signs that the strange inspiration of the past centuries was lost, vanished
like Tom-a-Bedlam himself. It had been wholly English, whereas the
English eighteenth century was not wholly English.

It is not to be imagined that any hard Southern mind could ever have
played in poetry with such a fancy; or that Petrarch, for example, could
so have foregone the manifestation of intelligence and intelligible
sentiment. And as to Dante, who put the two eternities into the
momentary balance of the human will, cold would be his disregard of
this northern dream of innocence. If the mad maid was an alien upon
earth, what were she in the Inferno? What word can express her
strangeness there, her vagrancy there? And with what eyes would they
see this dewy face glancing in at the windows of that City?

PATHOS
A fugitive writer wrote not long ago on the fugitive page of a magazine:
"For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is the most real
personage of the piece, and not without some hints of the pathos that is
worked out more fully, though by different ways, in Bottom and
Malvolio." Has it indeed come to this? Have the Zeitgeist and the
Weltschmerz or their yet later equivalents, compared with which "le
spleen" of the French Byronic age was gay, done