The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  In the understanding of black bile, as it worked within us, morbidity and blackness were tied together. In Greek the verb melancholan – as it were, to be black-bilious – became synonymous with mainesthi, to be insane. The madness of the melancholy person might be raving lunacy – or it might be moral lunacy. Plato thought a tyrant must be a melancholic. In the rationalist age of Plato and Aristotle the god-inflicted rage of the tragic heroes was reinterpreted as mental illness, and Hercules and Ajax were judged melancholics. The question of insanity was complicated, however, because it was also believed that frenzy could be a transcendental and visionary state. Black bile might cause insanity and psychopathic crime, but at times could break into revelation, even genius. An author known as the Pseudo-Aristotle compared the different effects of black bile to those of wine; he makes it sound like an alcoholic secretion of the body.

  Lunacy, suicidal depression, criminal violence and revelation were the extremes, and the wise man sought to regulate the dangerous swing of the humours. If too cold, black bile could lead to impotence, and if too hot, to sexual hyperactivity. A bland diet was recommended, and unexciting conversation. The view that darkness would allay the black fumes gave way to an early form of seasonal affective disorder therapy, recommending rooms filled with light.

  The Greek understanding of the humours was accepted by Rome, and it was a Greek doctor who settled in Rome (in 162 CE) who advanced the theory of black bile. Galen examined the dark fluids he drew from the body, and concluded that there were two black biles: ‘One is like the dregs of the blood, very thick and not unlike the dregs of wine. The other is much thinner and so acid that it eats into the ground.’ The former, he decided, was a concentrated, degenerated, black form of blood (as undoubtedly it was), while the latter was a toxic, burned form of yellow choler, black from combustion. It may be that both of these were distempered blood, but the effect of his discovery was to increase the unique morbidity of black bile, since it became now both the morbid humour as such, and the morbid form of another humour. His analysis was extended by the great Persian physician Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’, c. 980–1037), who specifically argued that black bile both existed in its own right and also could be the scorched, degenerated form of each of the other humours: it could be yellow bile ‘when burnt to ashes . . . phlegm when burnt to ashes . . . blood when burnt to ashes . . . natural melancholy when burnt to ashes’. This meant that we now had not one but five forms of black bile within us: one natural, four ‘adust’ or combusted, and all of them deleterious.2

  Galen himself had made diagnosis easier, since he argued that heat made men tall and cold made them short, while moisture made them fat and dryness thin. A thin, short, black-haired, swarthy man was liable therefore to an excess of black choler, and care must be taken that he did not self-harm, or harm others. Thus, by a different path from the Christian understanding of sin, a new shadow fell on people of a dark complexion, who need not be Africans; they could be Celts. A tall, well-fleshed, fair-haired person with a rosy complexion was likely to be both fit and noble.

  Nor would black bile, and the blackness of sin, stay forever separate, and in medieval theology they became united. Before the Fall, St Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) explained, the bile in the human body could not have been black. Even Adam’s gall ‘sparkled like crystal and shone like the dawn’. Black bile originated in the breath of the serpent, such that the moment Adam ate the apple, his blood curdled and blackened ‘as when a lamp is quenched, the smouldering and smoking wick remains reeking behind’. Then Adam’s ‘gall was changed to bitterness, and his melancholy to blackness’. In sexuality also, St Hildegard explained, black bile had lethal consequences, since it caused the melancholic to be ‘a sadist driven by hellish desire: one who runs mad if he cannot sate his lust, and, simultaneously hating the women he loves, would kill them by his “wolfish” embraces if he could’.3

  The symptomatology of black bile had grown complex: depending on the humour in which it originated, and whether it was too hot, cold, moist or dry, it could produce lethargy or mania, taciturnity or loquacity, workaholism or paralysis, insomnia or stupor and anorexia or gluttony (showing in obesity or emaciation); it could make one a voluptuary or an ascetic. Though elaborate, the symptomatology gave a good accommodation for the ‘bipolar’ dimension of melancholia.

  This systematic and vastly imaginary science is wonderfully revelled in by Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621. His huge, encyclopaedic book is a patchwork of quotations and learned allusions – restated with demotic vigour – for he had read everything both within and beyond his subject (reading the Arabs in Latin), back to Hippocrates and before. Needless to say, the colour that recurs is black, since melancholy, in all its forms, derives from the ‘depraved humour of black choler’. Black choler itself is ‘cold and dry, thick, black, and sour’. Physical signs of melancholy include skin that is ‘black, swarthy’; a stool that is ‘hard, black’; black spots on the fingernails; and blood that is ‘corrupt, thick and black’. The excess of black choler may originate in the liver, or in ‘black blood drawn from the spleen’, or in ‘the black blood about the heart’, or elsewhere again (he cites also the brain, womb, small intestine and the abdominal wall). But wherever it originates, the transmission is direct. From that ‘inflamation, putridity’ ‘black smoky vapours’ arise. These ‘fuliginous and black spirits’ ascend to the brain, where they darken perception and thought. He cites Galen’s view that ‘the mind itself, by those dark, obscure, gross fumes, ascending from black humours, is in continual darkness, fear and sorrow’. Colour vision is affected (‘to melancholy men all is black, to phlegmatic all white, etc.’). Melancholy may then in turn bring on other diseases, like ‘black jaundice’.4

  Burton certainly participates in the superstition (on the one hand) and the crude materialism (on the other) which were part of the old understanding of melancholy. He accepts that melancholy may be sent by the Devil (‘if it is from the devil, the sufficient sign is that it turns the humour to black bile’). He also accepts astrological arguments, quoting Melancthon and noting that a man born under Saturn may be ‘sullen, churlish, black of colour’. Superstition combines with materialism when Burton discusses – at length – the risks of eating black foods. He warns against ‘black meat’, like the flesh of hares (‘melancholy, and hard of digestion’) or of ‘fenny fowl’ (‘as ducks, geese, swans, herons, cranes, coots . . . their flesh is hard, black, unwholesome, dangerous, melancholy meat’), against ‘bread that is . . . black . . . causing melancholy juice and winds’, and against black drinks, such as ‘thick, black Bohemian beer’ and ‘all black wines . . . as muscadine, malmsey, alicant, rumney, brown bastard, metheglin’. He warns against drinking black standing water, though he notes that it is good for washing horses.

  Burton had a purpose in marshalling these diverse symptomatologies. They were the evidence and ammunition for his primary diagnosis of a continent, a world, gone melancholy-mad. For so he read the political blundering of the Stuarts and their darlings; the wanton militarism of the nation states, who in his lifetime began the Thirty Years War; and the self-inflicted terrors of both Catholic and Calvinist ‘enthusiasts’ who decided, with wild wailings, that they were damned for eternity. Burton is clear too about the fundamental character of melancholy as in the mindset of an individual: melancholy consists of ‘fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion’. Melancholy may be manifest in extreme delusions – for instance, the belief that one is a shellfish, or that one’s legs are made of glass – and Burton remarks several times that melancholics may ‘see, talk with black men’ (not Africans, but hallucinated black figures). But his thinking is sound at the centre, for he does include, together with picturesque lunacies, states and ideas which we too would associate with true depressive illness. He says melancholics

  cannot avoid this feral plague; let them come in what company they will . . . they are weary of their lives . . . often tempted, I say, to make away with
themselves . . . they cannot die, they will not live . . . they dream of graves still, and dead men, and think themselves bewitched or dead . . . Anno 1550, an advocate of Paris fell into such a melancholy fit, that he believed verily he was dead.

  One might put this beside a more recent description of being ‘racked by melancholia . . . an abyss of sorrow . . . a life that is unlivable . . . wan and empty . . . I live a living death’.5

  The Anatomy includes a psychological theory of depression. It was not hard for Burton to pursue this line of thought, since it was believed that the body would secrete black bile in response to emotional hurts, ranging from bereavement to disappointment in love. It was also thought that black bile could collect in the system, and poison the mind, as a result of physical inactivity. Both idleness and solitary, sedentary occupations were dangerous, as was life in a monastery, a convent or an Oxbridge college – something Burton understood, since he was an Oxford college librarian for the four decades of his adult life. He said contemplation ‘dries the brain’. He notes, as current psychology would, that melancholy may arise in ‘such as are born of melancholy parents’. Also that melancholy may result from ‘immoderate Venus in excess . . . or in defect’: that is, from too much sex or none at all. He cites Valescus, saying that Venus omitted ‘makes the mind sad, the body dull and heavy’, and Avicenna, saying of Venus ‘moderately used . . . that many madmen, melancholy, and labouring of the falling sickness, have been cured by this alone’.

  Nor are all his blacks negative, for he notes the sexual charge of black. Of all human beauties, he observes, the greatest is in the eyes, and ‘of all eyes (by the way) black are most amiable, enticing and fairest’. He cites Homer’s celebration of the black ox-eye of Juno and quotes Ovid’s praise of his mistress for her black eyes and her black hair. Julius Caesar, he notes, was ‘of a black quick sparkling eye’, adding that (as Averroes had said) ‘such persons . . . are the most amorous’. Writing of lovesickness, or love-melancholy, he cites Aelian Montaltus, ‘for if this passion continue, it makes the blood hot, thick, and black’, and he describes the burned and blackened organs observed by Empedocles during the dissection ‘of one that died for love’ (‘his heart was combust, his liver smoky . . . roasted through the vehemency of love’s fire’).

  The Anatomy of Melancholy was first published in 1621 and though already large was expanded again for each of the four editions that followed, up to Burton’s death in 1640. We might call it a runaway bestseller, and it clearly responded to what was both a fashionable and a serious interest of the time. Though Burton mentions many hundreds of books, one he does not mention is William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, published seven years after the Anatomy, in 1628 in Frankfurt, and launched in the city’s annual book fair. We know it by its title in translation, Of the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. In it Harvey recorded the calculation he had made – which no one had made in 2,000 years – as to the weight in fluid ounces of the blood which the heart pumped out, each hour, to the extremities of the body, where it was assumed to evaporate. ‘Now, in the course of half an hour, the heart will have made more than one thousand beats . . . Multiplying . . . by the number of pulses, we shall have . . . one thousand half ounces . . . a larger quantity . . . than is contained in the whole body.’6 For so much blood to vanish at the fingertips and toes, and be replaced from new food eaten hourly by the hundredweight, was clearly impossible. It followed that blood must be recycled. Harvey studied the means and route of this circulation, and from his investigations especially there followed the slow collapse of the old physiology, and with it the medicine of humours, which had been 2,000 years in the building.

  Not that Harvey found no blackness in the body. He notes in his preface that the blood found in the ventricles of the heart on dissection is ‘black in colour and coagulated’, and again in chapter Five he refers to ‘thick, black and clotted blood’. He refers respectfully to ‘the divine Galen’ and uses the old language, referring now to blood that is ‘hotter and more spirituous’, now to blood that is watery or ‘thick and more earthy’. But the black stuff in the body is blood: there is no more black bile.

  IF BLACK BILE ceased to control behaviour, the name ‘melancholia’ survived; as did melancholia itself, the condition we call depression. In 1516 – long before the new medicine, and a hundred years before Burton wrote – melancholia as a mental state had been the subject of a major masterpiece. And in art, as in life, ‘melancholia’ was to flourish for further whole centuries, with a recurring reference to the colour black.

  In Dürer’s copperplate engraving Melencolia I (the spelling is Dürer’s), a large, handsome woman sits slumped in despondency, idly holding a geometer’s compass, while unused tools – a plane, a saw, a hammer and nails – lie round her (illus. 51). And the skin of her face is dark or black. It may be that it is not always seen as black because one could say her face is deeply shadowed. But the shadow on her face is deeper than the shadow on her dress, and the contrast between her cheeks and temples, and the white of her eyes, make it clear that she is dark-skinned. Her features are European, not Indian or African: she is black from the rising fumes of Black Choler, as melancholics were said to be, and the blackness shows most in her face, the window to her mind or soul. That soul is not well: she is marked by despondency and perhaps ill will. She could be said to scowl, to be sullen.

  I make a point of her mood, because in criticism she is sometimes romanticized. Erwin Panofsky describes her thus: ‘her gaze, thoughtful and sad, fixed on a point in the distance, she keeps watch, withdrawn from the world, under a darkening sky, while a bat begins its circling flight’. The elegiac tone makes her sound like a Pre-Raphaelite maiden, though her look is surely more discontented, even baleful? Robert Burton, who (of course) knew Dürer’s print, described her as ‘a sad woman leaning on her arm with fixed looks . . . surly, dull, sad, austere’. Nor is it clear that she is, as Panofsky says, ‘thinking hard’. Her excess of black bile could be a symptom, not a cause, of her darkened state of being, for this engraving has always been felt to touch the mystery of real depression. One could say it shows the ill will of the deeply unhappy.7

  It does not help, in other words, to sweeten Dürer’s asperity with hints of tragic nobility, for the print has various elements of contradiction, negativity and the grotesque. Meteors were portents of sudden dire disaster, and the meteor in this print blazes at our eye, itself like an eye of rage. The bright rainbow above could be a blessed sign. It is clearly an arc from a perfect circle, perhaps marked by the compass that Melancholia holds; it suggests colour in this black-and-white plate, and God’s covenant with the new world after the Flood. And the sea beneath it has risen in flood, as seas were known to do when meteors fell. But what a contrast between the head-on fury of the meteor itelf and the inert, leaden weight of this dead-flat water. Its waveless, rippleless, stagnant surface could remind us of the dead seas – sterile and hopeless – in the late paintings of L. S. Lowry. From over this sea, perhaps out of the meteor, there flies towards us, not a bat, as Panofsky says, but a snake-rodent, a flying deformity, with ‘Melencolia I’ blazoned on its bat-wings: its snake-tail writhes, its blind rat-head snarls as it shrieks. It is the horror-face of melancholia – and stands then in a strange relation to the grand Melancholia who fills our sight. For she is an angel (or a ‘genius’), with her fair hair and flowing robes and those lustrous white wings which Dürer has chosen to give her, and which no earlier picture of Melancholia had. With their aid, one would think, she could soar to a height, though maybe they are mainly present to show that she cannot or will not fly. The wings oblige us to compare her with the bat-winged abortion in a kind of visual syllogism. For it is Melancholia and she is Melancholia: they are aspects of one thing.

  Dürer’s double vision shades towards the surreal. Some angel this, sunk in lethargy and resting her cheek not on the palm of her hand but, as Panofsky notes, on a plump, clenched fist. The beautiful, sharp-edged Dürer light – the w
hite, cold, north-European light – is in her clothes, her wings, her hair and in the victor’s wreath of cress and laurel which she wears, but her face is black; the blackness seeming more a metaphor than a medical explanation for her sterile stasis. One cannot but wonder if Dürer knew from the inside – in himself, in a parent – the state he draws from the outside here: the failure of will, impulse, art, which can befall us for reasons that stay obscure. There is an odd visual irony in the engraving – in the beautiful drawing, for instance, of the carpenter’s tools in the foreground: the plane, the straight-edge, the jagged and vicious-looking saw whose spike is the nearest thing to our eye. And in the more-than-life-size metal pincers that advance from under her skirt as though she had, beneath voluminous taffeta, not only the pretty slipper we glimpse (through which we can count her toes) but also iron crab-claws, nipping.

  Whose are these tools? Including the modern-looking clawhammer, which again is distinctly bigger than life-size, if we follow the perspective. Does this strong-limbed angel, when not seized with melancholy, tie up her loose sleeves and bend to at a bench? Or does a giant carpenter live nearby, strong enough to lift the odd stone polyhedron (known as Dürer’s solid) or the grindstone on which a sleepy cherub sits, as if it were the angel’s baby – making a picture one could lightly read as a caricature of Venus on a loveless day, beside her winged child Cupid? Christ was born to the carpenter’s trade, and died on a piece of carpentry. Does the ladder in the background lead to Heaven, or greatness – though how should the angel need it, since she has wings? For whom should the bell toll, that hangs un-rung on the wall, near the hourglass halfway through its hour? Behind Dürer’s solid a flame flares in the crucible of an alchemist. In the foreground, clear white, is that image of perfection, a sphere; it could represent the world, or the great bright globe of God’s Creation, with the stars in their spheres concentred inside it. The sleeping greyhound is drawn with the beautiful minute attention to living things with which Dürer always draws; Panofsky calls it a half-starved, shivering wretch, though one could also call the dog lean and fit for the chase.8 But it sleeps, the cherub dozes, the world in this picture is asleep or frozen, except for the rat-snake-bat, and the angel, who looks ahead, expecting nothing, from that place (within life) where journeys halt, where values are cancelled or lost, and where art, craft and science fail, not from difficulty but from the enigma that may at any time swallow everything – depression, the paralysis and death of impulse. Dürer said the purse at her feet was riches, the key at her waist was power: that is their meaning, and they have no meaning; they are no use to her now.