A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  These new authorities, who often elbow Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to one side, supply evidence of two kinds: first, of the breadth of the author’s learning, and second, of the rightness of his opinions, because the facts that matter are still those mostly found in books, not those picked like posies out of a meadow or distilled in an alembic; moreover, the words themselves are magical; you cannot have too many of them; they are like spices brought back from countries so far away, they’re even out of sight of seas; words that roll, Poloniusly, into the reader’s ken in lists that subside, only to resume in no time at all with words even more exotic, redolent, or chewy; for instance, the names and kinds of terrestrial devils that lurk about to pester us: lares, lemurs, genii, satyrs, fauns, fairies, wood nymphs, trolls, and foliots, those visitors to forlorn houses, about whom you may not be familiar, who make “strange noises in the night, howl sometimes pitifully, and then laugh again, cause great flame and sudden lights, fling stones, rattle chains,” and if you wake to find your beard shaved and your chin smooth, they will be the impish cause. (Anatomy, part 1, section 2, member 1, subsection 2).

  To ridicule superstition or succumb to it, embrace the new learning or belabor it, celebrate change or condemn it, relate every tale or tell none; or, more characteristically, to quote, testify, enlarge upon every subject with such serious thoroughness that there could be no response but laughter: In Robert Burton, these impulses blew like winds; no one was ever more an arena for the contest between what was pagan and what was pious, what seemed demonstrable to science and mathematics or what seemed sensible upon textual scrutiny and harmonious with settled doctrine, than this nonconformist clergyman, this quiet monkish man who would pursue secular studies behind the walls of a famous college, a skeptic whose credulity was a welcome you could count on, a pessimist and melancholic whose great celebrational comedy will last as many years as its thousand pages.

  Robert Burton may have momentarily put aside his pen on December 5, 1620, to declare his work done; however, since sales were solid and four fresh editions needed, he let his baby grow from gigantic to gargantuan. We have ourselves continued to manufacture material for his Melancholy, and were Burton as immortal as his book, he could keep the Anatomy routinely up-to-date with the distraughts, foul humors, and tragedies that trouble us today and will beset us tomorrow. What the present reader may find strange is Burton’s eager allowance of hearsay and observation, myth and science, superstition and common sense, to help him in his hunt for causes, and provide more than cosmetic in the makeup of his explanations: not merely citing heredity, disease, dotage, and personal loss as sources of melancholy, while displaying a skepticism as ardent as his faith, but blaming God, evil angels as well as devils, a bad balance among the four humors, the discoveries of chiromancy and physiognomy, indurate dishes and sharp sauces, unsuitable parents, odors of the earth, even the stars themselves.

  What may strike one as quaint and unfashionable at one time may be the latest wisdom to another. When I was first engaged to Robert Burton’s book (my copy’s flyleaf says December 1944), the mother’s womb was sturdier and more insulated than it is believed to be now, so, when I read that if the mother “be over-dull, heavy, angry, peevish, discontented, and melancholy, not only at the time of conception, but even all the while she carries the child in her womb … her son will be so likewise affected” (part 1, section 2, member 1, subsection 6), I thought the risks overstated, for wasn’t the moat of amniotic fluid about the baby nearly unswimmable?—what else was it there for?—but I would not think so now—now everything, including noise, gets through and, unless it is the music of Mozart, wreaks havoc.

  Unlike Erasmus’s famous work, this is no praise of folly; it is, however, a parade of them: every day in Burton’s year is Saint Patrick’s, bands brag in the streets, beer is the only proffered drink, and the beer is green. Moreover, the parade has a settled order of march; the word anatomy signifying its dissected analytical layout, its deployment of commentary descending through partitions, sections, members, into subsections, and adding to those body parts appendices, poetic addresses, a daunting synopsis, and a preface nearly the length of an ordinary book. The analytical outline should not daunt. Burton pays as much attention to his own schematisms as he pays to the syntax of his sentences. Imposing indeed are his interconnections, but it is rather as if a net had been flung down on top of fish that continue to roil and flop freely about beneath it.

  Nor is there much that’s melancholy, in our present sense of the word, about the Anatomy; and the principal reason for this is that the illnesses Burton discusses and the causes and cures he proposes, have not, in the main, been drawn from bedsides, battlefields, or courts, but from books and reports, descriptions and disquisitions; for it is easy, even agreeable, while enjoying the safety of the page, to face without qualms a situation and its solution as they are set down in some chronicle or almanac, harsh or bizarre as they may combine to be, when in life what it is being reported may encourage harrowing practices and produce deplorable pains, such as drilling a hole in a patient’s skull to release noxious vapors that have gathered there, or, latterly, prevailing on leeches to bleed a body already badly in need of its blood.

  What is not secondhand are Burton’s pages on the melancholies of the scholar, the vices of princes, and the deficiencies of the Catholic Church. He has both read and lived these—through an impending civil war, contending clergies, the machinations of a parliament seeking new powers, and royals protecting traditional privileges. Yet when one’s nose is in a book, it is as alive and alert as if it were treeing a possum or anticipating the serving of soup—more so, because it is bent over concepts; it is breathing forms; it is becoming acquainted with minds. For Burton, learning is the disease that will cure his other ailments, the way consolidating your debts will bring due only one—still crushing—lump-sum payment.

  But Thomas Hobbes, who had Burton and Browne and Montaigne in view, was of a different, and, as usual, impressively put, opinion:

  From whence it happens, that they which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little summs into a greater, without considering whether those little summes were rightly cast up or not; and at last finding the errour visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to cleere themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their bookes; as birds that entring by the chimney, and finding themselves inclosed in a chamber, flutter at the false light of a glasse window, for want of wit to consider which way they came in. (Leviathan, part 1, chapter 4.)

  If he could have had his way, Burton would have preferred to be a poet and playwright, and he did write a comedy in Latin verse, which his students performed in the Great Hall of Oxford’s Christ Church in 1617. We have several samples of his occasionally charming doggerel in front of us, one with the well-known refrain: None so sweet—so sad, so sour, so harsh, so damned—as melancholy. He would also have preferred to write in Latin, but publishers were increasingly reluctant to constrict their sales to the rich and learned; what, after all, was the vernacular to Dante, Descartes, and Hobbes but a paddle to place across the rumps of the schoolmen and punish their inhibiting pedantries? The languages of Italian, French, and English were those of increasingly secular states and their mercantile interests. Robert Burton would also seek a popular public, but under a protective nom de plume, in the shelter of a life whose movements rose and fell as calmly as a cork amid the tumults of the times.

  If Burton had wanted us to know who the author of the Anatomy was, he should not have chosen a pseudonym behind which to hide (as he himself says); yet if he had not wanted us to know who he was (as he claims) he should not have chosen a name like Democritus behind which to pretend to conceal himself, for that name plainly points toward a position on the nature of things that is material, quantitative, and scientific; moreover, one that soon would have, in the strengthening temper of the time, two great spokesmen—Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes—to represent the rational spirits of Gal
ileo and Copernicus, in whom the Renaissance was realized. But it is the life and character of Democritus (taken from authorities as unreliable as ancient) that our coy author wishes to suggest bear a semblance to his own, and that his epithet, “the Laughing Philosopher,” is one Burton also deserves: the sage’s quiet, solitary regularities, his ardent devotion to his studies, the elevation that philosophy confers upon his occupations, such as Burton’s ministry allowed, and with an interest in mathematics they could share, the enjoyment of rueful laughter, as well as a fondness for the rhetoric of skepticism—the same with men like Montaigne, Lipsius, and Muret, who left their busy lives to dwell in sheltered cells, where their amusement at human behavior would disturb not even the sobriety of birds.

  As Democritus Junior, Burton is free to parade folly after folly past Democritus Senior’s amused yet scornful eye. The operative phrase is “what would he have said” were he to have thought X, felt Y, seen Z; although the indictment that follows the question has been drawn up by Burton alone. Concerning wars, for instance (the ellipses signify omitted quotations):

  What would he have said to see, hear, and read so many bloody battles, so many thousand slain at once, such streams of blood able to turn mills: because of one man’s mad offense, or to make sport for princes, without any just cause … whilst statesmen themselves in the mean time are secure at home, pampered with all delights & pleasures, take their ease, and follow their lusts, not considering what intolerable misery poor soldiers endure, their often wounds, hunger, thirst, &c., the lamentable cares, torments, calamities & oppressions, that accompany such proceedings … (Anatomy.)

  The book was so popular, it went into six editions during Burton’s lifetime, and its gratified author was eager to doff his anonymity after the first. It should have been popular. Although it gave expression to the pains of the people (always a kind of comfort), his Anatomy recounted so many sorts of follies that most of them had to have been performed or believed by others rather than ourselves; we could then happily send a hearty guffaw around the common table like a pitcher of ale, and drink to the dunces who had so deluded themselves as to think thus, do such. When the mind enters a madhouse, Burton shows, however sane it was when it went in, and however hard it struggles to remain sane while there, it can only make the ambient madness more monstrous, more absurd, more bizarrely laughable by its efforts to be rational.

  For a contemporary Robert Burton whom we might imagine sitting down now with tireless zeal and companionable sorrow to record our melancholy lot, there’d be no lack of data either, and the sections he’d have planned for his book would fill up faster than a thimble. What about bad diets as a cause of nervous illness? Both Burtons would have room for that. Or foul air? They could jointly bewail it. Or immoderate exercise? Or a love of gambling? Nothing unfamiliar there, nor with the desperations of imprisonment or the glooms that follow prolonged study, or the despairs impoverishment brings on. What of the consequences, both devious and direct, of festering discontents, of local resentments and historic hatreds, concerning which we have always had an apparently inexhaustible supply? Or the dangerous delusions brought on by self-love and vainglory in an era of shameless self-promotion like our own? Surely our obsession with sex and what Burton calls its “artificial allurements” would shock our scholar, while the space in the plan of his book set aside for the miasmas of religion would find sects jostling one another for booths from which to sell their latest absurdities and repeatedly boast of their unique merits and cry aloud their bewares.

  Burton himself will pretend to be a plain speaker, and plainly enough he does speak, if one considers the time, and the artificiality of his predecessors; but when he says that his book is “writ with as small deliberation as I do ordinarily speak, without all affectation of big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms, tropes, strong lines, that like Acestes’ arrows caught fire as they flew, strains of wit, brave heats, elogies, hyperbolical exornations, elegancies, etc., which many so much affect”, what are we now to think? “Strong lines” refers to a preference orators had, in that time, for balance, gnomic terseness, and an elevation of thought and diction that could seem, when it failed, to yield the artificial, riddling, and bombastic; nevertheless, Burton’s looseness can only be called “exuberance” now, a form of celebration, and indicative of a nominalism that feels that if every person huddling under an umbrella is not named, they shall have no protection.

  One can only listen. Robert the Ranter rails. It is delicious.

  To see [we are still in this rhetorical mode of address, so it is Democritus Senior who is the imagined observer] a man turn himself into all shapes like a Chameleon, or as Proteus … to act twenty parts and persons at once for his advantage, to temporize and vary like Mercury the planet, good with good, bad with bad; having a several face, garb, and character for every one he meets; of all religions, humours, inclinations; to fawn like a spaniel … rage like a lion, bark like a cur, fight like a dragon, sting like a serpent, as meek as a lamb, and yet again grin like a tiger, weep like a crocodile, insult over some, and yet other domineer over him, here command, there crouch, tyrannize in one place, be baffled in another, a wise man at home, a fool abroad to make others merry. (Anatomy.)

  The sentence indeed does unravel, but into a flouncy tuffet, not into a maze or a strew. Meaning, motion, and emotion are superbly fused. It achieves the tone of a tirade that, in the midst of its fury, smiles at itself—recognizes itself as a recital of fearful changeability and confident clichés. I am also tempted to admire (for it may be merely a textual error, of which in the Anatomy there are so many) the odd and awkward phrase “and yet other domineer over him” as a creative misprint for “let.” In its anger, its energy, its rhythm, its terminological greed, its sermoniacal excoriations, this prose is a seedbed for the high semisacred styles of Browne’s Urne Buriall, Donne’s Sermons, and Taylor’s Holy Dying.

  Be prepared to proceed slowly and you will soon go swiftly enough. Read a member a day; it will chase gloom away. The late section on religious melancholy has been particularly admired. I also have a special fondness for Burton’s pages on museums and libraries. But above all, it is the width of the world that can be seen from one college window that amazes me; what a love of all life can be felt by one who has lived it sitting in a chair; and Robert Burton’s unashamed display of his lust for the word—his desire to name each thing, and find a song in which each thing can be sung—is a passion that we might emulate to our assuredly better health.

  THE MELODIES OF MELANCTHA

  Gertrude Stein’s reputation among middle-of-the-road readers rests on Three Lives. Otherwise, there is the good gossip of the autobiographies and the soporific experimentation of Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, and A Long Gay Book, and if the first of these doesn’t appear to be worth a second look, the second isn’t worth a first. Though Gertrude Stein’s reputation has grown rather steadily through recent decades, it is a reputation in constant peril. One kick takes the stool out from under the otherwise-unattractive weight of the lady. Nor would her downfall spoil anyone’s afternoon.

  Elizabeth Hardwick’s recent essay on Gertrude Stein finds the critic compelled to take Stein seriously, forced to be respectful; but discomfort and complaint lead off, and appear and reappear as the account continues. Miss Stein, it is remarked, is a pitiless companion. She is cheerful, which sounds okay, and has lots of confidence, which is nice in moderation, but the adverb “unflagging” takes these gifts away, and in a bit “amazing” and “outlandish” will come along in case anything agreeable is left. Stein’s style is full of “insomniac rhythms and melodious drummings.” She “likes to tell you what you know and to tell it again and sometimes to let up for a bit only to tell you once more.” In short, she writes like rain.

  Hardwick quotes others against “this peculiar American princess,” as if she needed more guns, a tactic she never uses on anyone else; but T. S. Eliot (whom we know now to be a cheap shirt stuffed with expensive stra
w) is allowed to say that Stein’s writing “has a kinship with the saxophone.” This is the kind of cleverly mean comment that one likes, having thought of it, to keep around for its appropriate and most malicious moment of application. Professor Max Black (with whom I studied meanness, among other things) had a one-line review ready for its victim a long time before Irwin Edman’s book, A Philosopher’s Holiday, sailed by to receive it: “Professor Edman is the kind of tourist who sticks gum on the Parthenon.”

  Eliot was actually a good deal more definite, as Hardwick observes: Stein’s work “is not improving, it is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind.” This is a sentence, may I say, that apes its enemy. But it is Gertrude Stein’s clearly unwarranted confidence that is most annoying to Elizabeth Hardwick. “In her life, confidence and its not-too-gradual ascent into egotism combined with a certain laziness and insolence.” I don’t find a lot of confidence in Q.E.D., for instance, or in Gertrude’s lengthy dependence on her brother; but there is confidence and confidence, I suppose; for a cripple, even the thought of walking may be absurdly optimistic. For Stein, however, I think bravado might be a better word.

  Written between the spring of 1905 and that of 1906, silence was all the three stories received from good brother Leo. Gertrude wrote to Mabel Weeks, “I am afraid I can never write the great American novel. I don’t know how to sell on a margin or do anything with shorts or longs, so I have to content myself with niggers and servant girls and the foreign population generally.” She concluded her complaint, rather unconfidently to my ear, “I am very sad Mamie.” “I am all unhappy in this writing, nervous and driving and unhappy in it,” she says in another letter. Stein is as blue as Melanctha. “I am really almost despairing, I have really in me a very very melancholy feeling …” It is true, nonetheless, that for most of her life, Gertrude Stein does seem to be (in Hardwick’s wonderful phrase) “as sturdy as a turnip.”