Don’t take offense at my use of the second person, but you know what it’s like to write something in a late night haze—the "liquor-induced" is silent—only to find the next morning that your big epiphany was gobbledygook. Back when I was hung up on whether or not I was Zhuang Zhou or a butterfly, I tried to figure out whether I could get my drunken epiphanies to make sense again by reexamining one in a similar delirium—after all, maybe the problem was not with what I’d written but with the limits of my sober mind. The answer, apparently, is "Wait, where did I put that sheet of paper?"
This was the memory that came to mind when I read John Derbyshire’s piece on the love life of William Hazlitt, who ended his marriage and nearly his career over Sarah Walker, a nineteen-year-old serving girl and idiot. Everything Hazlitt wrote under the influence of Sarah Walker was lovestruck drivel, but I am sure that to men in similar straits it sounds like inspired Gospel. Bright Eyes is drivel, too, but when I was sixteen I couldn’t get enough of it.
The man suffering from philocaption—Derbyshire’s term for amour fou , which, aptly, makes it sound clinical rather than sexy and French—knows only two things, that he is mad and that he prefers his madness. That second is what makes him interesting. Traditionalists are accused of preferring their pleasing fictions, and Hazlitt’s sad story makes self-conscious irrationality sound like a fool’s preference. The bottom-line, then: Presuming you have the intellectual honesty to admit that tradition, like amour fou , looks delusional to anyone not caught up in it, does it make sense to stand by your madness anyway? Hazlitt’s story suggests not, but traditionalism begs to differ . . .
Not to give away the answer, but "Yes, it does." In order to justify this opinion in a way that lets me to look my postmodern self in the eye the next morning, I need to invoke a third kind of madness: poetic madness. But I’m getting several sentences ahead of myself.
Magnanimous liberals will usually admit that irrational traditions like Christianity have good effects. Jesus Christ is about as intellectually respectable as Thor, they’ll say, but Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King were pretty good, as are the thousand minor acts of charity that Christianity inspires every day. If this particular irrational belief makes you volunteer at a soup kitchen, then rock out with your Rock out, right? But the liberal ace in the hole here is that there are other beliefs that inspire the same acts and don’t rely on (not to put too fine a point on it) faith in a zombie carpenter.
In the case of poetry, though, there’s no substitute for Crazy. Writing a poem is a kind of delirium for which there is no rational equivalent . There’s sane love versus insane love (Hazlitt), and sane morality (humanism) versus insane morality (Christianity), but there is no rational poetry that can hold a candle to poetry written under the influence of divine madness. Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris sounds stupid to the non-philocaptioned, but "Kublai Khan" sounds good to everybody. Any man who’s ever lost control as he’s swept along by a poem he’s writing will know what I mean. One doesn’t have to be a starry-eyed Romantic to understand that a poet is not in control of himself when he writes—why do you think the Muse metaphor is so popular?
So Derbyshire has proven that Hazlitt made a big doofus of himself over a girl. Fine. The bigger question—can a man trust himself even when he knows himself to be acting irrationally —is more interesting, and more open.
