Exuberance: The Passion for Life (10 page)

Writers with such genius for tapping into the emotions of childhood nearly always find ample room for exuberance and joy in the worlds and characters they create. They give a second-to-none view of what it is like to be exuberant—by nature or transiently so—and what it is like to be in the often delightful, occasionally annoying company of someone who is infectiously, boundingly ebullient.

There can be no more unforgettable examples of exuberance than Toad in
The Wind in the Willows
and Tigger in
The House at Pooh Corner
. They are the
grands mousseaux
of the temperament: bubbling and exhausting; exasperating, irrepressible, and unavoidable. Both are irritating, charming, and faintly if not overtly ridiculous. Their enthusiasms are urgent but fickle.

Tigger, a less nuanced exuberant than Toad, bounces into and out of the lives of Winnie-the-Pooh and the other inhabitants of A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood. Nearly everyone is unsettled by Tigger’s high-springing, discombobulating ways, but his presence is particularly ungluing to the dyspeptic Eeyore and timorous Piglet. “
Could
you ask your friend to do his exercises somewhere else?” Eeyore peevishly implores Pooh. “I shall be having lunch directly, and don’t want it bounced on just before I begin. A trifling matter and fussy of me, but we all have our little ways.” Piglet, a Very Small Animal, finds the high-voltage Tigger a Very Bouncy Animal, and unnerving, “
with a way of saying How-do-you-do, which always left your ears full of sand.” Despite Tigger’s warmth and friendliness, his energy and impulsiveness overwhelm the anxious Piglet. To Rabbit, who finds Tigger more annoying than intimidating, Tigger is the sort “
who was always in front when you were showing him anywhere, and was generally out of sight when at last you came to the place and said proudly ‘Here we are!’ ”

Pooh, who is less disconcerted by Tigger (even though Tigger hides behind trees and jumps out on Pooh’s shadow when he isn’t looking), and more predictably focused on food and figure, takes his measure of Tigger into verse:

Pooh’s point is a good one: exuberance tends to leave the impression that its possessor is larger than life. (Piglet, less interested in the fine points of temperament, objects to the shillings: “
I don’t think they ought to be there.” Pooh explains, “
They wanted to come in after the pounds so I let them.”)

The lively and gregarious Tigger bounds about the forest, leaping from one short-lived enthusiasm to the next: honey to haycorns, haycorns to thistles, thistles to Extract of Malt, which he then has for breakfast, dinner, and tea. The certainty with which Tigger holds his enthusiasms is met only by the quickness with which he abandons them. He is sure beyond reckoning, until forced to reckon. Tiggers are very good flyers, he exults, “
Stornry good flyers.” And excellent jumpers. And swimmers. Or, at least, until they are not. “
Can they climb trees better than Pooh?” asks Roo, himself no piker in the bounce-and-joy division. “
Climbing trees is what they do best,” declares Tigger without equivocation. And thus begins their catastrophic scramble up the tree and subsequent plummet through the branches. It is considerably easier to be propelled up the tree by one’s exuberance, Tigger finds, than to get back down. Tiggers cannot climb downward—their tails get in the way—and only by crashing to the ground can Tigger finally get himself untreed. Tigger is irrepressible, however; despite the ignominy, he springs upward and onward, unencumbered by the prudence that might attach to anyone else less helium-borne. Experience slows him not at all.

Nearly twenty years earlier, Kenneth Grahame had described in
The Wind in the Willows
a similarly irrepressible animal. The “gay and irresponsible” Mr. Toad of Toad Hall is a whirligig of energy and contradictions: self-absorbed, yet generous; self-satisfied, yet quick to contrition; restless, yet oddly content. Most of all, Toad is a caricature of exuberance: carefree, expansive, impulsive, and hopelessly given to short-lived enthusiasms. He is, in all things and
at all times, utterly over the top. Toad chases after one horizon only to find that he really seeks another. He is dazzled by new fads and smitten by delusions of his own cleverness.

Mole, an enthusiastic but not exuberant animal, is eager to meet Toad but warned of his excesses by the Rat, who knows Toad all too well: “
Once, it was nothing but sailing,” said the Rat. “Then he tired of that and took to painting.… Last year it was house-boating.… It’s all the same, whatever he takes up; he gets tired of it, and starts on something fresh.” Toad’s current enchantment, Mole learns, is a canary-yellow, horse-drawn Gypsy caravan with bright red wheels. Soon Toad’s infectious enthusiasm becomes Mole’s:

Mole is no sooner swept up by Toad’s ardor for life on the road than Toad is fanatically into his next obsession, a magnificent motorcar, which blasts down the highway stirring up dust and
Toad’s combustible passions with it. The canary cart is forgotten; it no longer has any hold on him. Toad is capsized by rapture: a new world is in front of him: “
The poetry of motion! The
real
way to travel! The
only
way to travel! Here to-day—in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped—always somebody’s else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!” Toad’s world is the road ahead.

Toad’s exuberance, like that of Tigger, is put into relief by the countervailing temperaments of the other animals. In Tigger’s world there are, in addition to the bouncier characters, cautious, melancholic, and fearful animals as well: Piglet, for example, is afraid of All Things Fierce, and Eeyore is a moper who tries to convince Pooh that “
We can’t all, and some of us don’t…[do] Gaiety [or] Song-and-dance.” Toad, too, is surrounded by characters very different from himself: the wise and gruff and balanced Badger; the practical, then poetic and dreamy-minded, and then again practical Rat; and Mole, “
an animal of tilled field and hedgerow,” of quiet but determining enthusiasms, an animal needful of the anchorage of his old home, yet passionately open to the wider world of sun and air and the River. Their adventures are far different from the flamboyant ones of Toad.

It is Rat and Mole, not Toad, who hear the Piper at the Gates of
Dawn, the strangely elusive and beautiful music of Pan: “
‘O, Mole!’ cries the Rat, ‘the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear happy call of the distant piping!’ ” It is they, the more sensitive and reflective of the animals, not the swift-to-act and slow-to-think-it-through Toad, who propel themselves into action when faced with Otter’s anguish that his young son, who has swum away, might drown or perish in a trap. It is Rat and Mole who set out on a midsummer night to search river and field in order to track down the baby otter, and it is they who find—in contrast to the dust and distractions of Toad’s motorcars and the open road—a nighttime miracle on an island fringed with willow and silver birch and alder, crabapple and wild cherry and sloe. Their music is Purcell and Mozart, not Sousa.

The reactions of other animals to the exuberant Toad and Tigger reflect the complexity of children’s attitudes toward those more energetically enthusiastic than themselves, and prefigure some of the benefits and liabilities of exuberance seen in adults: the joie de vivre and infectious, expansive (often imaginative) qualities on the one hand, and the intimidating, interfering, rash, and impulsive characteristics on the other. Milne and Grahame overdraw both sides of this ambivalence, of course, and few of the exuberant are in reality as extreme in behavior, or as impervious to reflection, as Tigger and Toad. Still, the other animals’ reactions to their bubbly friends are illuminating.

Most are attracted to the sheer life force of Tigger and Toad, to the ebullience, adventure, and excitement they create in the wake of their enthusiasms. But the less exuberant animals are wary as well, mindful of the Right Way to do things and feeling a need for the social order. Exuberance is not entirely to be trusted or admired: it may be delightful, for a while, but it is potentially reckless and disorderly; it may lead to new places in the mind and heart, but it is not always to be taken seriously. Tigger and Toad are lively, but they
are buffoons. They are enthralled with the possibilities and pleasures of life but, disconcertingly to the more restrained animals, they also tend to have a glorious time in the midst of their self-made maelstroms. Things are fabulous, until they are catastrophic. The two exuberants are intensely independent actors upon their worlds until disaster hits. Then the other animals, who are more usually overshadowed by the ebullient Tigger and Toad, gather power from the need to reestablish order and to exert moral authority. The ballasting animals act out of concern, outrage, and often a trace of envy as well. When necessary, they band together to take the erring animal in hand.

Rabbit, for one, in the wake of suspicions that Tigger has bounced Eeyore into the river, determines that Tigger is “too bouncy.” He goes further: “
It’s time we taught him a lesson.” The problem with Tigger is that “
there’s too much of him, that’s what it comes to.” Eeyore, the aggrieved, is indeed offended: “
Taking people by surprise. Very unpleasant habit. I don’t mind Tigger being in the Forest,” he says, “because it’s a large Forest, and there’s plenty of room to bounce in it. But I don’t see why he should come into
my
little corner of it, and bounce there.”

Piglet, who is inclined to defend the affable Tigger, protests—“
He just
is
bouncy … and he can’t help it”—but gradually he, too, is brought around to Rabbit’s plan for Tigger’s redemption: “
Piglet settled it all by saying that what they were trying to do was, they were just trying to think of a way to get the bounces out of Tigger.”

Rabbit concocts a plan for Piglet, Pooh, and Rabbit to take Tigger to a place he has never been before, to lose him, and then find him again the next morning. He will be, Rabbit assures Piglet and Pooh, “
a different Tigger altogether … he’ll be a Humble Tigger … a Sad Tigger, a Melancholy Tigger, a Small and Sorry Tigger, an Oh-Rabbit-I
-am
-glad-to-see-you Tigger.” Tigger will be deflated, unbounced, newly appreciative, and cut down to size:
“
If we can make Tigger feel Small and Sad just for five minutes,” explains Rabbit, “we shall have done a good deed.”

Far from losing Tigger in the Forest, of course, Pooh, Piglet, and Rabbit themselves become hopelessly lost in the mist. Tigger effortlessly finds his way out. Pooh and Piglet, after much aimless and anxious wandering about, eventually make their way to the clearing, but Rabbit remains stranded, unable to navigate back to safety. The maligned and still very much bounced Tigger bounces to Rabbit’s rescue, and into a different perspective:

Toad is similarly taken to task by his fellow animals after exhibiting a level of rashness staggering even to those who know him well. Having obtained his fabulous motorcar, Toad speeds his way into disaster. He smashes up his car, not once but many times, recklessly forces others motorists off the road, and is put into hospital on three separate occasions. Badger has had it: “
We’ll take Toad seriously in hand. We’ll stand no nonsense whatever. We’ll bring him back to reason, by force if need be. We’ll
make
him a sensible Toad.” As with Tigger, this is easier said than done. Certainly, verbal entreaties go only so far. Badger at first believes he has persuaded the Toad of the error of his overly exuberant ways, but Toad soon sets him straight: “
I’m
not
sorry. And it wasn’t folly at all! It was simply glorious!”

Badger and the others dig in, strip the backsliding Toad of his freedom and finery, and lock him up in his bedroom. His ill-advised enthusiasm for motorcars is treated as a fever that wants breaking: “
It’s for your own good, Toady, you know,” says the Rat. “Think what fun we shall all have together, just as we used to, when you’ve quite got over this—this painful attack of yours!” Mole assures Toad that his money will be well looked after, not wasted as it had been: “
We’ll take great care of everything for you till you’re well, Toad.” The animals settle in for a nursing siege not altogether dissimilar to the type used in dealing with manic patients on slightly more conventional psychiatric wards: