Exuberance: The Passion for Life (38 page)

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.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was born in Edinburgh, an only child, and reared in a deeply Calvinist household. “
My childhood,” he wrote, “was in reality a very mixed experience, full of fever, nightmare, insomnia, painful days and interminable nights.” He used to lie and hold his breath, he said, in a state of “miserable exaltation.” His ancestors were lighthouse engineers who designed and built scores of lighthouses along the coast of Scotland. (When a young man, Stevenson briefly contributed to the family tradition—to the “towers we founded and the lamps we lit”—by delivering to the Royal Scottish Society of Arts a medal-winning paper about a new form of intermittent light for lighthouses.) Several others in his family were, like Stevenson, subject to violent mood swings and nervous breakdowns. “
The family evil [is] despondency,” he said. “Our happiness is never in our own hands. We inherit our constitution … we may be so built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness … we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful.”

Stevenson’s paternal uncle suffered from melancholia and had a psychotic breakdown; his cousin had severe recurrent depressions. Stevenson’s father suffered from depression as well, but also experienced
periods of great enthusiasm and vitality. He had, his son wrote, “
a profound essential melancholy of disposition,” as well as a “most humorous geniality.” He was “passionately attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes—liable to passionate ups and downs”—but his “inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the Celtic melancholy.” The biographer Frank McLynn describes Stevenson’s father as showing the classic symptoms of manic-depression, including extreme changes in his moods and behavior: “
At one moment he would be skipping about and telling strange stories to the servants,” and “at another he would become almost catatonic and immobilised with the ‘black dog.’ ”

When Stevenson was seventeen he went through a period of depression and was given medication for severe nightmares. He spoke of being at one with the twenty-four-year-old poet Robert Fergusson, who had died in 1774 in the Edinburgh Bedlam: “
ah! what bonds we have—born in the same city; both sickly, both vicious, both pestered, one nearly to madness, one to the madhouse.… You will never know, nor will any man, how deep this feeling is: I believe Fergusson lives in me.” In 1872 and 1873, when Stevenson was in his early twenties, he struggled to come to terms with his lack of religious belief, a struggle that was exceptionally painful for the dissension it caused with his parents. The problem was confounded by his father’s explosive moods and Stevenson’s growing tendencies in the same direction.

“
I’m getting tired of this whole life business,” he wrote in January 1873. “Let me get into a corner with a brandy bottle; or down on the hearthrug full of laudanum grog; or as easily as may be, into the nice wormy grave.” Stevenson was in no better spirits by the following September. “
You will understand the wearying, despairing, sick heart that grows up within one,” he wrote, “and how the whole of life seems blighted and hopeless and twilight.” He was diagnosed as suffering from “acute nerve exhaustion” and ordered
to France to recuperate. He was, he said, “wretchedly nervous” and felt a “fever of restlessness.” Although he was still only in his early twenties, he reported that he felt like an old man: “
If you knew how old I felt,” he wrote. “I am sure this is what age brings with it, this carelessness, this disenchantment, this continual bodily weariness; I am a man of seventy; O Medea, kill me, or make me young again!”

In
Ordered South
, Stevenson gives a signal account of his depression: “
The world is disenchanted for him. He seems to himself to touch things with muffled hands, and to see them through a veil. His life becomes a palsied fumbling after notes that are silent when he has found and struck them. He cannot recognise that this phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes burthened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick and delicate and alive.” This is one of the most succinct and best descriptions of depression I know.

Stevenson’s black moods afflicted him intermittently for most of his adult life. Five years after the attack that precipitated his treatment in France, he said, “
Black care was sitting on my knapsack; the thoughts would not flow evenly in my mind; sometimes the stream ceased and left me for a second like a dead man.” “The ill humours,” he wrote on another occasion, “got uppermost and kept me black and apprehensive.” His struggles with ill humors continued. In an 1881 letter to a friend who had complained of insomnia, Stevenson described the dull sluggishness and oversleep which so characterize some forms of deep depression: “
Insomnia is the opposite pole from my complaint; which brings with it a nervous lethargy, an unkind, unwholesome, and ungentle somnolence, fruitful in heavy heads and heavy eyes at morning. You cannot sleep; well, I can best explain my state thus: I cannot wake. Sleep … lingers all day, lead-heavy, in my knees and ankles. Weight on the shoulders, torpor on the brain.”

Stevenson wrote that he at times wished he were dead, that
there was “
devilish little left to live for.” His mood swings were seasonal, with his depressions usually occurring in the fall and winter; they often followed periods of high energy and mood. Only after he moved to Samoa toward the end of his life did he report a steadying in his moods. “
Half of the ills of mankind might be shaken off without doctors or medicine by mere residence in this lovely portion of the world,” he wrote. Later he reaffirmed this belief: “
Health I enjoy in the tropics. The sea, islands, the islanders, the island life and climate, make and keep me truly happier. These last two years I have been much at sea, and I have
never wearied.”

For most of his life, however, Stevenson felt the brunt of shifting moods and an inconstant temperament. A year and a half before he died, in response to a humorous self-portrait sent to him by James Barrie, Stevenson summed up his own disposition: “
Drinks plenty. Curses some. Temper unstable … Given to explaining the universe. Scotch, sir, Scotch.” The phrase “temper unstable” is critical to understanding not only Stevenson but also one of his most important works,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, for it is a book that deals with the multifariousness of moods and mental states in all of us.

Dr. Henry Jekyll, a distinguished physician and heir to a large fortune, has, he says, “
every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future.” The worst of his faults is a “
certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures.” Man, he said, is a multiplicity of conflicting selves:

No sooner had
Jekyll and Hyde
been published than it was subject to a variety of moral, social, and psychological interpretations. It has been construed as, among other things, an indictment of Victorian hypocrisy, an extension of earlier literary concepts of doubles, a portrayal of repressed homosexuality, and an archetypal telling of the primitive conflict between good and evil. No single interpretation ever suffices for a great piece of writing, of course, but one cannot help but be struck by Stevenson’s extraordinary portrayal of starkly contrasting moods, the spreading, staining force of evil, and the incapacity of Hyde’s vileness to exist outside of the sustaining petri dish of Jekyll’s life and values. The description of Jekyll’s mood state after he drinks the potion that transforms him into Hyde is telling: he feels “
younger, lighter, happier”; there is “something strange in [his] sensations, something … incredibly sweet.” Images run in his head “
like a mill race.” He experiences, most intoxicatingly, a “
solution of the bonds of obligation.” He knows himself to be “
tenfold more wicked” and the thought of it, he says, “brace[s] and delight[s] me like wine.” Hyde’s love of life, Jekyll relates, is “
screwed to the topmost peg”; his faculties seem sharpened, and his spirits “more tensely elastic.” He feels a pervasive “
contempt of danger.” The temptation to again take the potion, to “
spring headlong into the sea of liberty,” is inevitable as well as deadly. Jekyll’s at first bidden, then unbidden, mutations into Hyde bring him a joy he has not known, but it comes tied to perfidy and death.

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 looking. “
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. “
Write with fury, and correct with flegm,” said Thoreau. “
Keep your early enthusiasm,” Louis Pasteur advised his fellow scientists, “but let it ever be regulated by rigorous examinations and tests.… Worship the spirit of criticism.… Without it, everything is fallible; it always has the last word.… When, after so many efforts, you have at last arrived at a certainty, your joy is one of the greatest which can be felt by a human soul.”

(photo credit 10.1)

T
he New England Puritans cannot have been as bloodless as we have been led to believe. Certainly the Pilgrims who sailed on the
Mayflower
in 1620 were resilient. Enough of them also carried an improbable optimism—bound, in turn, to ingenuity and vigor—to plant the seeds of commerce and revolution. Whether or not to cross the Atlantic—having fled England, now to leave Holland—had
been the subject of intense moral and pragmatic debate. The cautious had indisputable cause to be so; those who were hopeful about settling a new land had to persuade the reluctant to set sail for the edges of a continent about which they knew little and which they were right to fear.