Figure 30 Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I (1514).
Figure 31 Francis Cleyn, Geometry, from Cleyn’s The Seven Liberal Arts (1646).
The connection between Saturn, melancholy, and the mathematical sciences appears to perfection in the Melancholia of Jacques II de Gheyn (Figure 32), whose work Cleyn knew well. The Saturn figure sits on a generalized terrestrial globe with his back to a dramatic scene of mountains, stars, and a crescent moon. He looks not at nature but gazes listlessly toward its model, a small celestial globe, which he cannot see to measure because his cloak obscures the zodiacal sign at which he appears to aim his calipers. Will he shake off his black mood and investigate the cosmos or remain stagnant in unprofitable thought? Will he be another sidereus nuncius or a terrestrial nincompoop? The writing gives a hint but no certainty: Atra, animaeque, animique, lues aterrima, bilis ǀ Saepe premit vires ingenii, & genii, “melancholy, the blackest plague of mind and soul ǀ often overcomes the powers of talent and genius.”88
Figure 32 Jacques II de Gheyn, Melancholia, from Gheyn’s The Four Temperaments (1596/7).
Its Doctor
Robert Burton died within a fortnight of the time he had calculated from his geniture. Meanwhile he lived with the knowledge that Saturn was the lord of his birth chart, the source of his mathematics and melancholy. Long experience taught him the pain and perplexity of the gifted sick scholar oscillating between joy and misery, a predicament he set forth in affecting doggerel at the beginning of his Anatomy. First the pleasure of idling with his thoughts and books in sweet solitude:
I’ll not change life with any king
I ravisht am: can the world bring
More joy than still to laugh and smile
In pleasant toys time to beguile?
Do not, O do not trouble me
So sweet content I feel and see
All my joys to this are folly
None so divine as melancholy.
Then the distress of confronting stale ideas, loneliness, and despair:
I’ll change my state with any wretch
Thou canst from gaol or dunghill fetch
My pain’s past cure, another hell
I may not in this torment dwell!
Now desperate I hate my life
Lend me a halter or a knife
All my griefs to this are jolly
Naught so damn’d as melancholy.89
Burton began the second and later editions of his Anatomy with folly. “Folly, melancholy, madness are but one disease.” Democritus of old, supposed deranged by his fellow citizens, proved his sanity to Hippocrates by laughing at the ridiculous scrapes and stupidities of the human race. Were he alive today, in the 1620s, he would guffaw until he collapsed over papal claims, religious wars, lawyers, litigants, and place seekers (“parasites’ parasites”), and, by far the worst, unworthy sycophants promoted over “Scholar[s forced to] crouch and creep to an illiterate peasant for a meal’s meat.”90 The world is topsy-turvy. “Every silly fellow can square a circle, make perpetual motions, find the philosopher’s stone, interpret Apocalypses, make new theories, a new system of the world,” while idiots, tyrants, and children reign, and lawyers and doctors proliferate. Not a missed stroke! “[I]t is a manifest sign of a distempered, melancholy state.”91 We have come to this pass because we are lazy, idle, indolent; “we live solely by tippling-inns and ale-houses,” leave menial work to foreigners, fill the countryside with beggars, are governed by imbeciles.92
Where shall we find anyone fit to govern? Kings are either anxious and miserable or, if cheerful, irrational. Great men incline to hair-brained schemes; scholars and philosophers to “absurd tenets, prodigies, paradoxes.” But then, as Aristotle has it, nothing valuable can be accomplished without a little madness. Let us therefore not despair, for everyone is mad. As evidence whereof, Burton cites an episode from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso in which Orlando’s cousin Astolfo flies to the moon to recover the great knight’s wits. There they were, since everything lost on earth ends up on the moon. Great was Astolfo’s surprise, however, to stumble over his own wits: he had not noticed that he had lost any. With a little further searching, he discovered large parts of the brains of his fellow half-witted paladins. Galileo, whose power of invention and physical suffering made him an exemplary melancholic, loved the story of Astolfo, which applies to theologians as well as to warriors.93
In his despondent moments, Burton thought no one crazier than his fellow scholars, “silly fools, idiots, asses,” for giving up everything for knowledge that the rest of the world despised. Most students, seeing how little profit there is in mathematics and philosophy, go into law, medicine, and divinity, swelling the professions with incompetents who make their way among mountebanks and fools; although, to quote the world’s opinion again, divinity is contemptible, the law mere wrangling, physicians loathsome, philosophers madmen, schoolmasters drudges. And university dons, Burton’s colleagues? They are at the root of the problem. They teach the idiots who enter the professions; they prostitute themselves for fees and “huckstering the word of God.”94 But then, the problems the dons agitate when left to themselves are unprofitable, like the details of astrology and the conundrums of theology—“what fruitless questions about the Trinity, resurrection, election, predestination, reprobation, hell-fire, etc., how many still to be saved, damned!” It is better not to ruin mind and body with the asinine questions of deep study. Strive instead for healthy ignorance, like Americans.95
Nonetheless, the cultivated melancholic mind is a wonderful inventor. Just look at Dürer’s Melancholia, “proud, soft, sottish, or half mad…and yet of a deep reach, excellent apprehension, judicious, wise, and witty.” Look to the work of painters, mechanics, and mathematicians. Our greatest challenge is to promote fruitful melancholy. Burton advises diet, good air, exercise, avoidance of all refined products of the “science of cooking,” idleness of body or mind, solitude, and “those two main plagues and common dotages of human kind,” wine and women. Unfortunately, the delight of a gentle melancholy promoted by abstinence and exercise often turns bitter. It may end in an untreatable depression. Does the wretched incurable have the right to end his life? The ancients approved it, for euthanasia and to escape dishonor; Christian women committed suicide to avoid something worse than death; but the Gospels and the church condemn it. Still, acute, incurable melancholy is a desperate and ghastly affliction. Let us not judge.96
Burton deals in detail with two kinds of melancholy that grew luxuriantly in the celibate society of university fellows; one had to do with sex, the other with religion, with “impertinent, needless, idle, and vain ceremonies,” gross superstition, “incredible madness and folly,” blind zeal, “the worst of all plagues.” They have something in common: like love, “superstition makes wise men beasts and fools.”97 But religious fanatics are worse than erotomaniacs. Christmas, adoration, exorcism, indulgences expose the Catholic Church as ridiculous, and Jesuits show it to be dangerous; which, as to stupidity and menace, Puritans equal by their refusal to fast, kneel at communion, or hear music in church; or to allow sports, holidays, bishops, degrees, and universities. Do you require a more persuasive example of doctrinal stupidity? The well-known case of the Jew who fell into a privy on a Saturday should do. None of his co-religionists could fish him out, it being the Sabbath; nor could any Christian on the Sunday; wherefore he died.98 Toleration is not the way to handle such crackpots: they belong in Bedlam.99
More serious religious melancholy surrenders to fear and reaches the depths of the soul. The sufferer feels “a privation of joy, hope, trust, confidence…the heart is grieved, the conscience wounded, the mind eclipsed with black fumes arising from these perpetual terrors.” “Fear of God’s judgment and hell-fire drives men to desperation.” The usual remedies—long fasts, endless meditation, fear of the afterlife—only worsen the condition. “But the greatest harm of all comes from those thundery ministers” who damn everything, “and so rent, and tear and wound men’s consci
ences, that they are almost mad.”100 The devastating result: “’Tis an epitome of hell.” Mental torture often prompts suicide, which, again, Burton does not condemn provided the victim has tried the efficacy of exercise, diet, and abstinence from wine, worry, and women.101
Burton works down to love melancholy from the general operations of the universe, from the sympathies and antipathies among animate creatures and the transformations of the four elements, from the attractions implied by gravity and levity, magnetism, and the desires that inspire the sun, moon, and stars to circle around their centers. Amor mundum fecit, “love made the world.” Men love all sorts of things, gaming, hunting, fame, riches, women, as their temperaments and their stars drive them. Scholars love their books and one another, mulus mulum scabit, “as one mule scratches his fellow.” If we could only love one another! Alas, we are nasty animals, “our whole life is a perpetual combat, a conflict, a set battle, a snarling fit.” Our charity is only vainglory, our philanthropy a bid for salvation.102
Love between the sexes derives from the high motives that formed communities. Unfortunately, it has descended into “burning lust, a disease, frenzy, madness, hell,” into “that feral melancholy which crucifies the soul” and vexes the body with gout, arthritis, cramps, convulsions, and pox. No doubt, Burton conceded, faithful conjugal love is a treasure; but burning lust after marriage is a disease, a “heroical melancholy” endemic among the parasitic class, the “young, fortunate, rich, high-fed, idle.”103 They cannot help it. “Wine is strong [saith Esedra], kings are strong, but a woman strongest.” A beautiful woman, with her paints and perfumes, is a lodestone to undergraduates, and others too. They lose their appetite, cannot sleep, blush, leave their books. Their mistresses become their primum mobile, “they are very slaves, drudges for the time, fools, dizzards, atrabiliarii.”104
And yet love can put courage in cowards, civility in clowns, mercy in the wicked, religion in unbelievers, subtlety, wit, and elegance in boors. The love-struck fool might learn to sing, dance, play an instrument, write, rhyme. That would be a good thing. “Why are Italians to this day so good poets and painters? Because every man of fashion amongst them has his mistress.”105 Verbum sapienti. If you do not want to dabble in plays, poetry, songs, masques, then fast (“a friend of virginity”), abstain from wine, eat lemons and lettuce, travel, slander your beloved, dispraise her looks, take another paramour.106 As a last resort, you may marry, but not until you have examined your prize minutely, unclothed, from top to toe, in all her moods. For marriage is like to be a bondage, and children mean poverty. Thomas More and Francis Bacon, in their distinctive utopias, offer the same advice, although Bacon recommends that third parties perform the inspection. But better not to marry. Follow the advice of Cardinal Bellarmine, who kept the fair sex at bay with his diet of garlic and water: melius est scortari et uri quam de voto coelibatus ad nuptias transire, “it is better for a vowed celibate to go to a whore and be burnt than to marry.”107
This is not Burton’s final word, however. A scholar is not a monk. Perhaps then he should wed? No, if she takes him from his books and ruins his peace. Yes, if, like the wives of Pliny and Cicero, she holds a candle while he reads and writes. Burton ends his long book where he began it, praising and lamenting his situation. “Nothing gives more comfort than solitariness, no solitariness like this thing of a single life.” Yet…“God send us all good wives, every man his wish in this kind, and me mine!”108
Its world
Halfway through his indecisive review of love melancholy, Burton asks whether dancing is a filthy delight or an honest pastime. He finds for pastime by exploiting the latest news about the universe in extension of an old conceit about cosmic dancing. The sun and moon dance around the earth, the planets around the sun (the Tychonic system), 33 planetoids around the sun (a Jesuitical account of sunspots), four stars around Jupiter (Galileo’s great discovery), and two around Saturn (a misinterpretation of its rings).109 As to the steps and figures of the dance, Burton admitted uncertainty. That suited his method of give-and-take perfectly. In his opening message, Democritus Junior (as he calls himself) warns his reader not to expect from him “some prodigious tenet, or paradox of the earth’s motion, of infinite worlds...in an infinite waste,” as Democritus Senior had taught.110
That did not keep Burton from discussing the puzzles of the world system, like the cause of the tides, whether from the moon, “as the vulgar hold,” or from the earth’s motion, “which Galileus, in the fourth dialogue of his System of the World, so eagerly approves and firmly demonstrates;” or (two alternatives rarely satisfied Burton) from the winds, “as some will.”111 Burton prized Galileo for his melancholic brilliance: not only was he a good example himself of the madness of humankind, his observations made clear the cause of our folly. “[I]f it be so that the earth is a moon, then we are also giddy, vertiginous, and lunatic.”112 Among the craziest of us all are the crackpots raised up by Galileo and Copernicus, who have spun “insolent and bold attempts, prodigious paradoxes, and inferences.…out of their own Daedalian heads.” “[T]he earth is tossed in a blanket amongst them.”113
The tossing itself was enough to make a melancholic. Those atrabilious weathervanes, the poets, sang what every thinking man knew. John Donne, a self-diagnosed melancholic (“It is my thoughtfulnesse, was I not made to thinke?”), recognized the senescence of mind and matter.
[F]reely men confesse that this world’s spent
When in the Planets and Firmament
They seek so many new…
Yes, the world is exhausted, the seasons more irregular, the sun fainter, human life shorter, than they used to be; the heavens mutate, “new species of wormes, flies, and sicknesses” spawn here below.114 Also new ideas. William Drummond, sometime poet laureate of Scotland, put the blame where it belonged: the spinning out of novelties. “Sciences by the diverse Motions of the Globe of the Braine of Man, are become Opiniones, nay Errores, and leave the Imagination in a thousand Labyrinthes.” New philosophy moves the earth, strews stars through the ether, puts comets beyond the planets, puts spots on the sun. Where can our spinning heads rest? Where find the least certainty? We do not even know why grass is green and not red. Astronomers may claim to see clearly through their telescopes, but ordinary melancholics see only “Alchemie, vaine Perspective, and decaying Shadowes.”115 Incoherence in the cosmos could only aggravate the disease of the poor melancholics whose black bile enticed them to its study.
Not much poetic imagination was needed to feel depressed by the immense empty space assumed by Copernican astronomers. Suppose with Burton that if the earth is a planet like the moon, and Jupiter and its satellites like the earth, all the bodies in the solar system except the sun should be inhabited. Even if we find these suppositious creatures socially acceptable, we must expect, in keeping with the principle of plenitude, that the ethereal spaces will harbor some unfriendly spirits. Perhaps the stars are suns circled by planets with plentiful accommodation for devils. Do not think that the vast distance to these stars, which Burton reckoned at 170 million miles in a Ptolemaic universe, provides security. A spirit or devil dwelling among the stars could be here in only 65 years (recte 194) traveling at 100 miles an hour. More woe to the melancholy!116 And if Copernicus was right, the stars must be at least 170 times 170 million miles distant and have a circumference no smaller than the earth’s orbit around the sun. A tenement for an all but infinite plague of demons! The choice of world systems involved problems more difficult than geometry. Balancing the pluses and the minuses, Burton inclined toward Tycho’s arrangement but with a rotating earth so as to remove the absurdity of the heavens’ turning at a tangential velocity of 44 million miles an hour. Reaching a definitive conclusion lay outside Burton’s psychological reach, however, and, he may well have thought, beyond the united intelligence of humankind.117
Burton had many books on astronomy and astrology in his personal library and diligently took notes from such authorities as Dee, whose spec
ial sigil, or hieroglyphic monad, he drew on the title pages of some of his books. He carefully cast the nativity of an individual born at 8:44 in the morning of 8 February 1577, at a latitude of 52°30’, that is, of himself, only to confirm, as we know, that the stars announced his austere, sullen, churlish, fearful, solitary, scholarly character. This unhappy geniture may be found on his tombstone in Christ Church together with an epitaph he composed, Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem, Melancholia, “here lies Democritus Junior, known to few [as a person], unknown to fewer [as an author], to whom Melancholy gave both life and death.”118
We must not conclude that melancholics have no fun. In 1606 Burton wrote a play in Latin, Philosophaster, revised it in 1615, and staged it at Christ Church two years later. It features Polupragmaticus, a fake academic as cynical as a Jesuit; Pantometer, a measurer of all things, a quack mathematician; Pantomagus, an all-round magician, alchemist, and physician, also a quack; Theanus, a false theologian; Pedanus, a social-climbing grammarian; and Antonius, a freshman corrupted by them all. They assemble to create a new university at the call and cost of the Duke of Andalusia. We learn from Polupragmaticus how to advance in a university: “deceive, boast, & pretend.” Counterfeit, plagiarize, dedicate your book to a numbskull, attack an authority, found a new sect. “Dost thou know some silly paradox? Rub up one that’s been rejected, or create a new one – earth is shifting, moon and stars are inhabited, & matters of that sort.”119 Antonius enters, stricken with love-melancholy, and sighs, “I know not where to turn me, so am I rack’t, miserable, and tortured.” His beloved, a harlot, has too great a liking for students; “they give of aught they have, and make love beyond all bounds.” They are much better than friars and monks, the experienced Pantomagnus declares, for women having trouble becoming pregnant.120
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