The Anatomy of Melancholy
AN INTRODUCTION TO AN INDISPENSABLE BOOK
On the sparkling language, fantastical imagination, sound good sense and vivifying personality of Robert Burton
This book is very long. What’s more, like the book Alice’s sister was reading on that famous summer afternoon, it has no pictures or conversation in it. To add to the drawbacks, parts of it are in Latin. And finally, as if that wasn’t bad enough, it is founded on totally outdated notions of anatomy, physiology, psychology, cosmology and just about every other -logy there ever was.
So what on earth makes it worth reading today? And not only worth reading, but a glorious and intoxicating and endlessly refreshing reward for reading?
The main reason I’m going to adduce is perhaps the least literary. It’s that The Anatomy of Melancholy is the revelation of a personality, and that personality is so vivid and generous, so humorous, so humane, so tolerant and cranky and wise, so filled with bizarre knowledge and so rich in absurd and touching anecdotes, that an hour in his company is a stimulant to the soul.
Burton (or Democritus Junior, as he styled himself) may claim, in his brief 106 pages or so of introductory remarks, the writer’s ventriloquial privilege: “ ’Tis not I, but Democritus, Democritus dixit: you must consider what it is to speak in one’s own or another’s person, an assumed habit and name—a difference between him that affects or acts a prince’s, a philosopher’s, a magistrate’s, a fool’s part, and him that is so indeed” (Democritus to the Reader)—but even if we agree to pretend with him that the voice that speaks in these thirteen hundred or so pages is not Burton’s own but that of a character of his invention, it is nevertheless the voice of a character it’s very good to know.
Those readers who have some experience of the disorder of the mind we now call depression will know that the opposite of that dire state is not happiness but energy; and energy is contagious. We can catch it from others. They cheer us up. Burton’s energy is as free and abounding as that of Rabelais, and its effect on the reader is similar: an invigorating of the natural spirits (created in the liver), causing a quickening of the vital spirits (produced in the heart), leading to a stimulation of the animal spirits (formed in the brain). In other words, a tonic.
That energy is visible in the way the great onward stream of his argument overflows into digressions of every kind—digressions that never settle into stagnation, but flow on to rejoin the main stream.
Burton is fully conscious of this habit of his, and defends it stoutly:
Which manner of digression howsoever some dislike, as frivolous and impertinent, yet I am of Beroaldus his opinion, “Such digressions do mightily delight and refresh a weary reader, they are like sauce to a bad stomach, and I do therefore most willingly use them.”
(1.2.3.2)
The longest of these digressions is Partition 2, Section 2, Member 3, the great digression of the Air. And what an epic opening it has:
As a long-winged hawk, when he is first whistled off the fist, mounts aloft, and for his pleasure fetcheth many a circuit in the air, still soaring higher and higher till he be come to his full pitch, and in the end when the game is sprung, comes down amain, and stoops upon a sudden: so will I, having now come at last into these ample fields of air, wherein I may freely expatiate and exercise myself for my recreation, awhile rove, wander round about the world, mount aloft to those ethereal orbs and celestial spheres, and so descend to my former elements again.
And off he goes, for thirty-five pages, taking in “that strange Cirknickzerksey lake in Carniola, whose waters gush so fast out of the ground that they will overtake a swift horseman, and by and by with as incredible celerity are supped up,” the mystery of where birds go in winter and the possibility that they lie at the bottom of lakes holding their breath, a fossil ship with forty-eight carcasses on board discovered at Berne, showers of frogs, mice, rats, “which they call lemmer in Norway,” the likelihood of life on other planets, his certainty that Columbus did not discover America by chance, but because God willed it so, the similarity between the air in a region and the character of its inhabitants (“In Périgord in France the air is subtile, healthful, seldom any plague or contagious disease, but hilly and barren; the men sound, nimble and lusty; but in some parts of Guienne, full of moors and marshes, the people dull, heavy, and subject to many infirmities”), the desirability of building a house in a place “free from putrefaction, fens, bogs, and muck-hills,” the benefits to melancholy persons of juniper smoke, “which is in great request with us at Oxford, to sweeten our chambers,” and the importance of light and fellowship: “wax candles in the night, neat chambers, good fires in winter, merry companions; for though melancholy persons love to be dark and alone, yet darkness is a great increaser of the humour.”
The point about Burton’s digressions is not how far he roams but how firmly and certainly he comes back. He holds the whole argument in his mind, and every example or quotation or excursion grows from it organically. I mentioned the energy visible in his digressive impulses, but what keeps the whole book from bounding apart like a carelessly packed box of springs is an intellectual quality: a power of memory and comparison.
In this capacity of his, he reminds me of another great Englishman, John Constable. Paintings such as Stratford Mill of 1819–20, or Wivenhoe Park, Essex, of 1816, display a complexity of light and shade in which every patch of clouded shadow on the grass, every glow of sunlight among foliage, every reflection of sky in water, has exactly the value and intensity it should have next to all the rest. Constable remembered the colour of the reeds at the water’s edge in sunlight, and the glitter of the distant façade of that white house among the trees, and adjusted them precisely to the values they would have at one precise moment under the constantly changing light of an English summer afternoon. The painting took hours, days, weeks, to make; it shows one moment, exactly.
In just the same way, Burton remembers exactly where he is in his great argument, brings out precisely the right quotation, flourishes a curious story, offers a sardonic quip, and brings us back to the line of the discourse without seeming to make an effort.
And, like Constable, he does it with a dazzling quickness and dash. Close to, there is a roughness about each of them, which if it weren’t for the marvellous intelligence in charge might even seem coarse-textured. But in fact, it’s the outward and visible sign of an inward and intellectual certainty: the power of holding an immense complexity fully and consciously in mind, and of placing each detail instantly in the light of its relations to the whole. If Burton and Constable were computers, you’d say they had a great deal of RAM.
Part of this power of memory and reference is visible on every page in the overflowing abundance of quotations. Burton seems to have read everything, and remembered all of it. A wonderful example of this ability to bring out apposite examples comes early on in the Partition concerning Love-Melancholy. He begins a paragraph: “Constantine, de agric. Lib. 10, cap. 4, gives an instance out of Florentius his Georgics, of a palm-tree that loved most fervently…” A palm-tree in love? It’s impressive enough to know one example of this. But not content with citing this Constantine-who-cites-Florentius, Burton goes on to cite Ammianus Marcellinus, Philostratus, Galen, Jovianus Pontanus, Pierius, Melchior Guilandinus, Salmuth, Mizaldus, and Sandys, hardly any of whom the modern reader has heard of, but all of whom, apparently, have stories about amorous palm-trees. Burton defies us to disbelieve him:
If any man think this which I say to be a tale, let him read that story of two palm-trees in Italy, the male growing at Brundisium, the female at Otranto…which were barren, and so continued a long time, till they came to see one another growing up higher, though many stadiums asunder.
(3.2.1.1)
The story is so charming that this reader, at least, couldn’t care less if Mizaldus and Salmuth and Melchior Guilandinus and the rest w
ere figments of Burton’s imagination, and didn’t exist at all. Elsewhere (1.2.1.4) he anticipates a similar suspicion: if such examples, he says, “may be held absurd and ridiculous, I am the bolder to insert, as not borrowed from circumforanean rogues and gipsies, but out of the writings of worthy philosophers and physicians, yet living some of them, and religious professors in famous universities, who are able to patronize that which they have said, and vindicate themselves from all cavillers and ignorant persons.”
Well, I shall never know any more about Melchior Guilandinus than I have read here; but I shall never forget the palm-trees in love. And I shall certainly use the word circumforanean when I next need to refer to rogues hanging around marketplaces.
Burton’s power of finding examples doesn’t stop with other authors. He’s just as ready to find plenty of examples from life. In the Subsection from the First Partition where he’s dealing with loss of liberty as a cause of melancholy, there’s a passage that begins:
And what calamity do they endure, that live with those hard taskmasters, in gold mines (like those 30,000 Indian slaves at Potosi, in Peru), tin-mines, lead-mines, stone-quarries, coal-pits, like so many mouldwarps underground, condemned to the galleys, to perpetual drudgery, hunger, thirst, and stripes, without all hope of delivery!
—and continues for a page or so with example after example of the miseries of imprisonment, before concluding with that abruptness that lovers of this book recognise like the quirks of an old friend:
But this is as clear as the sun, and needs no further illustration.
(1.2.4.5)
The examples he gives to illustrate his themes are often gross—some so much so that they were kept, in many editions, in the sober obscurity of Latin. Others remind us of the dangers of embarrassment, such as the case of the unfortunate Dutchman, “a grave and learned minister,” who was “suddenly taken with a lask or looseness” while walking in the fields, and compelled to retire to the next ditch to relieve himself; but being seen by two gentlewomen of his parish, “was so abashed, that he did never after show his head in public, or come into the pulpit, but pined away with melancholy” (1.2.3.6).
As if ordinary human shame weren’t enough, we have to contend with diabolical possession as well, like the young maid who purged a live eel, a foot and a half long, and afterwards “vomited some twenty-four pounds of fulsome stuff of all colours, twice a day for fourteen days,” before going on to void great quantities of hair, wood, pigeon’s dung, parchment, coal, brass, etc. “They could do no good on her by physic,” says Burton resignedly, “but left her to the clergy” (1.2.1.2).
That the supernatural should figure in Burton’s great analysis is only to be expected; because although the first edition of The Anatomy was published in 1621, just seven years before William Harvey published his treatise on the circulation of the blood and revolutionised the study of medicine, and when Galileo had established the truth of the Copernican system, the world Burton describes is firmly pre-modern. He is not in the slightest doubt about the existence of a benevolent God (atheism is “poisoned melancholy,” he tells us in 3.4.2.1), or about the power of evil spirits, as in the case of the poor maid with the eel; and he’s careful to acknowledge the authority of experts in the matter of goblins and other devilish beings (“Paracelsus reckons up many places in Germany where they do usually walk in little coats, some two foot long”—1.2.1.2).
But on the whole, there is less of that sort of thing than we might expect. “The stars incline, but not enforce,” as he says in 3.2.5.5. The greatest current in Burton’s interest and sympathy is not towards superstition (“that great torture, that infernal plague of mortal men”—, 3.4.1.3), but towards real human life and human feelings. After all, this is why he wrote the book: “The chief end of my discourse,” he says near the opening, is to make this great mass of material and knowledge “more familiar and easy for every man’s capacity, and the common good” (1.1.1.3).
In fact, Burton is on the side of human nature. These days, the very existence of something called “human nature” is the subject of passionate disputation, with the evolutionary psychologists on one side and the theorists of post-modernism on the other; and I’d like to hear what Democritus Junior might have had to say about that debate. But there’s no doubt that he knew human appetites, fears, affections, and sufferings very well, and felt that the natural inclinations of men and women were to be dealt with kindly, and not suppressed:
How odious and abominable are those superstitious and rash vows of popish monasteries, so to bind and enforce men and women to vow virginity…to the prejudice of their souls’ health, and good estate of body and mind!
(1.3.2.4)
The best evidence for his wide-ranging human sympathy comes in the great Third Partition, on love and jealousy. “After a harsh and unpleasing discourse of melancholy, which hath hitherto molested your patience and tired the author,” he says in the preface, he is relieved to turn to love. “ ’Tis a comical subject,” he admits, and in hundreds of pages and thousands of examples, he proves it to us.
His very language sparkles. The famous passage demonstrating the blindness of love begins:
Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, have a swollen juggler’s platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face…
and continues with over a hundred epithets, to conclude:
he would rather have her than any woman in the world.
(3.2.3)
You don’t write a sentence like that without enjoying it. Men don’t escape, either: the absurdities of aged lechery frequently move him to eloquence. “How many decrepit, hoary, harsh, writhen, bursten-bellied, crooked, toothless, bald, bleary-eyed, impotent, rotten old men shall you see flickering still in every place?” he asks in 3.2.1.2. I saw that very man myself in New York not long ago, being helped out of a limousine by a fair maid who was young enough to be his granddaughter, but probably wasn’t.
On the other hand, love can work wonders with such unpromising material.
Ancient men will dote in this kind sometimes as well as the rest; the heat of love will thaw their frozen affections, dissolve the ice of age, and so far enable them, though they be sixty years of age above the girdle, to be scarce thirty underneath.
(3.2.3)
And honest love aroused by beauty wins his hearty approval:
Great Alexander married Roxane, a poor man’s child, only for her person. ’Twas well done of Alexander, and heroically done; I admire him for it.
(3.2.2.2)
In fact, although The Anatomy shows us scoundrels in plenty, such as that oily rascal (suave scelus) Bishop Beventinus, who commends sodomy as a divine act, and says that tributes to Venus should be paid in no other way (3.2.1.2); and although it becomes positively Jonsonian in its dramatic power when depicting extremities of passion, as in 3.3.2, where an obsessed man, deranged by jealousy, is pictured in two or three pages of intensely imagined action—“He pries into every corner, follows close, observes to a hair…Is’t not a man in woman’s apparel? Is not somebody in that great chest, or behind the door, or hangings, or in some of those barrels?…If a mouse do but stir, or the wind blow, or a casement clatter, that’s the villain, there he is,” etc.—the great sane balance of the book is in its sympathy with ordinary human affections and sorrows and happinesses. So we have the story of the honest country fellow in the kingdom of Naples, whose beloved wife was taken by pirates, and whose willingness to become a galley-slave in order to be near her so moved the Moors that they set them both free and gave them a pension (3.2.5.5).
And this humanity of Burton’s blows like a gale through the final section, on the melancholy caused by religious madness. This species of insanity, he says:
…more besots and infatuates men than any other above na
med whatsoever, doth more harm, works more disquietness to mankind, and hath more crucified the souls of mortal men (such hath been the devil’s craft) than wars, plagues, sicknesses, dearth, famine, and all the rest.
(3.4.1.1)
True, it’s a Protestant gale, blowing from an Anglican quarter, but we can make allowances for that; and there are things he has to say about other religions that would give a living author no end of trouble if they were newly written today, but that fact simply bears out what he says about religious madness. Blind zeal, as he says, is religion’s ape. Temperance, kindness and hope make up Burton’s recipe for coping with the ravages of this variety of melancholy, as of many others; and I think it is a good one.
So finally: is the book in any sense a cure for melancholy? Because it is a dreadful condition still: “if there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart” (1.4.1) is as true now as it was then. Our word “depression” has always seemed to me far too genteel, too decorous for this savage and merciless torment. Anything that can palliate it is worth knowing; and certainly no disorder has ever had so rich, so funny, so subtle and so eccentric an anatomy.
We can learn much from his psychology, which is acute and wise: “many dispositions produce an habit” (1.2.4.7) anticipates the American psychologist William James; his passage in 1.3.1.4 on the seductive pleasure of the early stages of melancholy looks ahead to some of the stories of Poe that so impressed Baudelaire, the first melancholic of modernism. His recommendation of St. John’s Wort, whose “divine virtue drives away devils,” is taken seriously by some modern doctors, who see it as a mild but effective herbal version of Prozac; his advice to keep busy is honest good sense.
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