“There are dead ideas and cold beliefs, wrote William James, and then there are hot and live ones. When an idea “grows hot and lives within us,” he believed, everything must recrystallize around it. The exuberant life, bursting as it does with feverish beliefs, is one of constant recrystallization; in this lies much of its value, complexity, and potential danger.
That which is most deeply felt is also most powerfully expressed to others. “We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto,” said Thoreau. “The body the senses must conspire with the spirit—Expression is the act of the whole man. that our speech may be vascular.” But our beholdenness to passion assures a darker side.
Exuberance can veer sharply into disturbing territory. Champagne enchants, but it also intoxicates more quickly than stiller wines: heed glides into heedlessness as effortlessly as the silk chemise drops to the floor. The things that excite contain the capacity for excess and the potential to shame or devastate. Enthusiasm shares a border with fanaticism, and joy with hysteria; exuberance lives in uncomfortable proximity to mania. Exuberance, as Shakespeare wrote of music, “hath such a charm / To make bad good, and good provoke to harm.”
Thwarted or deviant enthusiasms, once pro-voked, are powers to reckon with.
The fever of passion itself is not the difficulty, argued William James; rather, trouble lies in the nature of the passion and how well it holds up to the light of day. “Surely the fever process as such is not the ground for our disesteem,” he wrote. “For ought we know to the contrary, 103° or 104° Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees. It is the dis-agreeableness itself of the fancies, or their inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour.”
Disagreeable fancies are irksome at best and calamitous at worst.
Too ardent or misdirected exuberance creates mayhem for the individual and exposes others to the possibility of mishap, if not actual danger. Unchecked, enthusiasm runs roughshod over reason and intrudes into the private emotional territory of others, imposing, as it goes, its own energy and tempo. Exuberance whips its way in, dominant, and forces itself upon those trapped in its eddy. At its best, it is infectious and enlivening; at its worst, it stifles the ideas and feelings of the less exuberant.
Not everyone delights in delight, especially if it is not their own, and few wish to have their moods hijacked by those of others. Sustained or nuanced social interactions are difficult in the presence of great exuberance, and indiscriminate enthusiasm hinders the discernment necessary to sort out true friend from possible foe. The lack of fixity creates discomfort and mistrust: the mobility of mind and attachment that is artistically helpful may not prove an asset in other circumstances. Like Brown-ing’s Last Duchess, who had “A Heart how shall I say?—too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed; she liked whate er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere,” the exuberant are easily engaged. And exuberance is, in its very effusiveness, liable to misconstruction and suspicion, often misinterpreted as sexual interest when none is intended, or as implying a more sustained emotional commitment than is warranted by the high spirits that, however persuasive, may prove to be transient or directed in any number of places.
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Carter Brown was mindful, however, that not everyone found his energy to their liking (although most who knew him certainly did). His tendency, as he put it, to “lope into others’ pastures” was, he acknowledged, not infrequently experienced as “grating.” Brown, who could no more keep his enthusiasm in check than an otter can keep to the riverbank, believed that his exuberance was an integral part of his leadership of the National Gallery, but he was also aware that it caused envy in some and made others feel over-whelmed. Brown said he tried to slow down his speech and to keep his long arms and hands from waving into the “emotional space” of other people, but that it was an uphill fight.
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Where does exuberance end and mania begin? What is eccentricity, or simply a normal variation in temperament, and when does it tip over into irrational exuberance and psychopathology?
We do not know. The edges of mania may be exhilarating, as Clifford Beers relates in A Mind That Found Itself “It seemed as though the refreshing breath of some kind Goddess of Wisdom was being blown gently against the surface of my brain. … So delicate, so crisp and exhilarating was it that words fail me in my attempt to describe it”.
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Normal exuberance can escalate into pathological enthusiasm, anger, or even mania. Those who have what Emil Kraepelin called a “manic predisposition” are not only extraverted, cheerful, and overly optimistic, they also possess highly unstable and irritable moods. Indeed, those most inclined to exuberance are often most subject to despair and hopelessness. These dark sides of exuberance both help and hinder: if enthusiasm switches quickly to wrath or is bound too often to impetuous action, many of the dangers we have discussed are made more likely. If melancholy gives a humanizing perspective to exuberance, however, there is less risk of hazardous behavior and shallow thought. As we shall see, a close familiarity with both exuberance and despair may lead to a profound understanding of human nature, as well as an ability to more complexly express it in the arts and sciences.
Moderation in strong emotions is not always easily come by. Lucretius observed two thousand years ago that the destructive motions “can never permanently get the upper hand and entomb vitality for evermore. Neither can the generative and augmentative motions permanently safeguard what they have created.
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There was, he said, “a sort of uncommon celerity in changing expression, in thought and speech.” His legendary restlessness was summed up most graphically by Henry Adams, who said that Stevenson “seems never to rest, but perches like a parrot on every available projection, jumping trom one to another, and talking incessantly.” Keeping to his bird analogy, but switching species, Adams wrote to another friend that Stevenson looked like “an insane stork, very warm and very restless.” An acquaintance of Stevenson’s in Samoa concurred: “He was as active and restless as if his veins had been filled with quicksilver.”
W. E. Henley wrote of Stevenson that he was as “mutable as the sea,/ The brown eyes radiant with vivacity…/ A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace/ Of passion, impudence, and energy.” Another friend said that “there were two Stevensons … this strange dual personality… I have seen him in all moods… chatting away in the calmest manner possible; and I have seen him become suddenly agitated, jump from that table and stalk to and fro across the floor like some wild forest animal … his face would glow and his eyes would flash, darkening, lighting, scintillating, hypnotising you with their brilliance and the burning fires within.” Stevenson had, in short, a febrile temperament.
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The intensity and variability of Stevenson’s moods-his not infrequent black depressions and his contrasting exuberance— certainly contributed to his understanding of the underbelly of delight. His temperament was peculiarly tuned to not only the darker side of human nature and its ready accessibility but to a firsthand knowledge of man’s multiplicity of selves. Stevenson’s own fluctuating and wildly disparate moods made him especially sensitive to the ambiguities, shadings, and inconsistencies of human enthusiasms and, indeed, of life itself. “It is in vain to seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views,” he wrote. “In this flux of things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation…. All our attributes are modified or changed; and it will be a poor account of us if our views do not modify and change in a proportion.” Stevenson’s close knowledge of dark and inconstant moods inevitably influenced his work. It provided him a keen sensitivity to mood states of all kinds, and enhanced his genius for portraying their nuances. It also gave him a hard appreciation for the seductiveness of uninhibited states of mind. Stevenson’s intimate acquaintance with contrary and unpredictable moods did not account for all, or even perhaps most, of his perspective on life. But to underestimate it is to underestimate Stevenson himself; it is, as well, to underestimate the raw, knowing, and deeply human power of his greatest writings.
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The juxtaposition of the exuberant and the malignant is potentially dangerous, but a balance between the two can provide ballast and gravitas. Excessive lightness can be given a grace note by the dark, as melancholy and mania can give each other depth and height. To make use of despair is an ancient gift of the artist: to learn from pain; to temper the frenzied enthusiasm; to rein in the scatter, the rank confidence, and the expansive ideas generated during times of unchecked exuberance. Melancholy has a way of winding in the high-flying expectations that are the great gift of exuberance but its liability as well; it forces a different kind of look-ing. “In these flashing revelations of grief”s wonderful fire,” wrote Melville, “we see all things as they are; and though, when the electric element is gone, the shadows once more descend, and the false outlines of objects again return; yet not with their former power to deceive.” Melancholy forces a slower pace, makes denial a less plausible enterprise, and constructs a ceiling of reality over sky-borne ideas. It thrusts death into the mental theater and sees to it that the salient past will be preserved.
Exuberant ideas benefit from skepticism and leadshot. Whether the ballast comes from melancholy, from law or social sanction, from an astringent intellect or the incredulity of others, discipline and qualm are conducive to getting the best yield from high mood and energy.”
{selections from Kay Redfield Jamison, ‘Exuberance’}
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