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- Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: On
- Sprache: Englisch
Journey through the subject of melancholia in this easily accessible volume, touching on topics from love and sex to religion and geography. A new volume to add to Hesperus's unique and bestselling 'On' series.
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Seitenzahl: 187
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Burton onmelancholy
Edited by Nicholas Robins
Contents
Introduction
Exuberant, copious, colloquial and chaotic; crammed with arcane erudition and interrupted by intemperate satire and playful exaggeration, The Anatomy of Melancholy, the masterpiece of a seventeenth-century Oxford don, was a popular success on its first appearance in 1621. In the eighteenth century it was borrowed by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy and was the only book that got Dr Johnson ‘out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise’.1 After it resurfaced in 1798, Keats drew on it for his narrative poem ‘Lamia’ and his ‘Ode on Melancholy’; Coleridge greatly admired it, Charles Lamb imitated its style and Byron viewed it as a capacious hold-all of entertainingly obscure scholarship, invaluable to anyone who wished ‘to acquire a reputation of being well read with the least trouble’.2 It flavours the melancholy comedy of Anthony Powell and amused Anthony Burgess. It taught V.S. Pritchett’s atheistic uncle to read and armed him with a secular Bible with which to combat his hymn-singing, chapel-going relatives.3 And in 1997, a visit to the memorials of its author in Oxford brings a moment of quiet, ironic happiness to the flâneurs in Patrick Keiller’s psychogeographical film, Robinson in Space.
Who was Robert Burton? The surviving facts are few. He was born in 1577 near Nuneaton in Leicestershire, the younger son of an ancient, unremarkable, gentry family, educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and moved to Christ Church as a Student (or Fellow) in 1599. He sought ecclesiastical preferment, but failed to get it, and seems to have resigned himself to a quiet academic life. For three years he was a clerk of the Oxford market, responsible for regulating dealings between the University and the city traders; later (much more his style) he was appointed Librarian at Christ Church. He was granted church livings in Oxford, Lincolnshire and near the family home in Leicestershire, where most of his duties would have been discharged by curates. He seems not to have consorted with fellow churchmen and he resisted the temptation to add his mote to that century’s growing heap of theological books (as he might have been expected to do). He wrote some poems and one complete play, Philosophaster, an academic Jonsonian satire. Perhaps he would have preferred to live as some kind of freelance writer, but his failure to gain much from any patron, and his attachment to Christ Church, ‘the most flourishing College of Europe’ as he called it, suggest that the relatively secure existence of an academic bachelor – ‘a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life’ – suited him better. (Although Christ Church in the late 1620s was, in fact, riven by constitutional controversy, and at one point Burton considered leaving Oxford.) The rumour put about after his death in 1640 that he had hanged himself is unfounded: he would not otherwise have been buried in the cathedral at Christ Church. More intriguing is the gap in his life story in the later 1590s. Was he himself afflicted? Was he down in the dumps? Was he, in fact, the same 20-year-old Robert Burton who in 1597 consulted the doctor, astrologer and therapist Simon Forman, complaining of ‘melancholy’? The dates fit.
And it would be fitting, since the ‘heavy heart’ he complains of and the measures he took to cure it – that is, the writing of the Anatomy itself – were the major events of his life. For the primary reason, or at least the pretext, he gives us for composing his book was ‘by being busy to avoid melancholy’: the Anatomy was a vast self-help project to cure the malady in himself, and a manual to cure or at least ameliorate it in others. Like Montaigne, he took himself as a starting-point for his enquiry. But beyond this, the author had a more ambitious purpose – and this was to reform society. For Burton, though hardly straying from a few English counties – never travelling ‘but in Map or Card’ – was dismayed and disgusted at what he knew about the world. Contemporary Europe was racked by civil war, religious strife and superstition; England mired in sloth, injustice, corruption and wasted opportunities – and the cause of these, Burton believed, was melancholy. Mankind was too irrational to be reasoned into a better way of organising its affairs. What was called for was nothing less than a change in the psychological basis of mankind. Cure melancholy, and you might surely make some progress against the social inertia and chaos of contemporary society, towards something resembling the benign and reasonable utopia Burton describes in the opening pages of the Anatomy. And this is one reason why Burton’s melancholy includes not merely what we might describe as ‘depression’, but the whole ‘melancholy madness’ of mankind and made of his book an omnium gatherum of the ills of the world.
This is also why Burton takes little interest in the familiar idea, begun by Aristotle and later refined and elevated in the Renaissance by Marsilio Ficino, that melancholy could lend its objects intellectual and spiritual prestige or that it was the badge of genius. There is no sense in the Anatomy that anyone might wish to cultivate melancholy or adopt it as an artistic pose. For Burton, it was a degenerate state, and his object was to collect and summarise everything significant written on the subject since antiquity; to describe, as his elaborate title page declares ‘what it is, with all its kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics and several cures’. The scientific foundation of this exploration was the ancient theory of the four humours – sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic – and in particular the idea of ‘melancholy adust’, the condition which arose from the burning or corrupting of any person’s dominant humour. His method was to examine hundreds of literary examples, separating, dividing and dissecting them (like an anatomist) and observing parallels, qualifications and contradictions to arrive at some kind of truth. The persona he adopted in this pursuit – at least in the opening section of the Anatomy – is that of Democritus, the ‘laughing philosopher’, who, when visited by Hippocrates, was found dissecting animals to discover the source of ‘black bile’, the seat of melancholy. The result was a vast summation of the received wisdom of centuries of writing on morbid psychology, and an English encyclopedia to rival contemporary achievements on the continent.
Fortunately, it is a good deal more and less than any modern notion of an encyclopedia, with all the familiar qualities of impersonality, rigorous organisation, strict editorial control – and eventual obsolescence. For, like its own subject, the Anatomy is a great ‘stupend’, a gallimaufry of different moods, styles, subjects, digressions and contradictions. There may be method in the madness – following his long address to the reader (a book in itself) Burton divided his work into three main ‘partitions’, dealing in the first with the causes of melancholy, the second with its cures and the third with the special problems of love and religious melancholy – but most readers of the whole work, wonderingly following Burton on one of his extended digressions on spirits, fossils, foreign travel or astronomy must sometimes question whether the author had complete control over his material and often struggle to keep his submerged logic in view. Is he leading himself and his readers into a Serbonian Bog of his own making? Looking at the elaborate synopses created for each partition, it’s sometimes difficult to resist the suspicion that there was a touch of insanity in Burton’s approach, complicated by the huge additions he made to subsequent editions of his work.
But there is nothing insane about the voice that carries us through his long journey – nothing saner or more reasonable; more personable or personal. Burton’s prose is especially lively than when his subject leads him into some personal domain – the tyranny of a grammar school education, the miseries of scholars, the pains of disappointed preferment – or (and they sometimes overlap) when he has one of his pet hates in sight – the English gentry (stingy, philistine, lazy, superficial), the Catholic Church (bullying, grasping, dishonest), Islam (cruel, superstitious, ridiculous). In these passages, Burton often seems at his most modern, liberal and humane. The overall impression is Janus-faced, or, as the Burton scholar Michael O’Connell4 has pointed out, of two books coexisting in one:
One is the complete medical treatise on melancholy, an ‘anatomy’ properly speaking. The other is a work of humanist wisdom, a kind of commentary on human nature and, implicitly, on human knowing.
There is a very long history of abridging and of extracting material from The Anatomy of Melancholy and the book is so long and various that any number of different selections might have been made which would hardly repeat the same material. On the whole I have shied away from Burton’s supernatural divigations or the more technical and medical passages, and picked those in which he seems most emotionally engaged. The selection is taken from the edition edited by Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith in 1927, the only one to replace the author’s huge quantity of Latin quotations with English translations. Burton – who was only discouraged by his publishers from writing the whole of the Anatomy in Latin – would have deplored this innovation, but I make no apology for choosing their version. The greatest problem for most readers presented with a copy of the original text is the frequent Latin citation, even when Burton, as he often does, follows these with an approximate translation or paraphrase. The translated passages are rendered here in italics.
The best modern editions of the full text are published by the New York Review of Books, edited in one volume by Holbrook Jackson, and the magnificent six-volume edition published by Oxford University Press.
– Nicholas Robins, 2013
1 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1791
2 Byron, Letters, 1807
3 V.S. Pritchett, A Cab at the Door, 1968
4 Michael O’Connell, Robert Burton, 1986; quoted in J.B. Bamborough’s introduction to the first volume of the Oxford University Press edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1989
On melancholy
Democritus Junior to the Reader
Burton addresses the reader in the guise of a latter-day Democritus, the ‘laughing philosopher’ of ancient Greece.
Gentle reader, I presume thou wilt be very inquisitive to know what antick or personate actor this is that so insolently intrudes upon this common theatre to the world’s view, arrogating another man’s name; whence he is, why he doth it, and what he hath to say. Although, as [Seneca] said, In the first place, supposing I do not wish to answer, who shall make me? I am a free man born, and may choose whether I will tell; who can compel me? If I be urged, I will as readily reply as that Egyptian in Plutarch, when a curious fellow would needs know what he had in his basket, When you see the cover, why ask about the thing hidden? It was therefore covered, because he should not know what was in it. Seek not after that which is hid; if the contents please thee, and be for thy use, suppose the Man in the Moon, or whom thou wilt to be the Author; I would not willingly be known. Yet in some sort to give thee satisfaction, which is more than I need [do], I will shew a reason, both of this usurped name, title and subject. And first of the name of Democritus; lest any man by reason of it should be deceived, expecting a pasquil, a satire, some ridiculous treatise (as I myself should have done), some prodigious tenent1, or paradox of the Earth’s motion, of infinite Worlds in an infinite waste, so caused by an accidental collision of Motes in the Sun, all which Democritus held, Epicurus and their Master Leucippus of old maintained, and are lately revived by Copernicus, Brunus, and some others. Besides, it hath been always an ordinary custom, as Gellius observes, for later writers and imposters to broach many absurd and insolent fictions under the name of so noble a philosopher as Democritus, to get themselves credit and by that means the more to be respected; as artificers usually do, ascribing a new statue to Praxitiles himself. ’Tis not so with me.
No Centaurs here, or Gorgons look to find,
My subject is of man, and human kind.
– Martial
Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse.
Democritus Senior
Democritus, as he is described by Hippocrates and Laertius, was a little wearish old man, very melancholy by nature, averse from company in his latter days, and much given to solitariness, a famous Philosopher in his age, coeval with Socrates, wholly addicted to his studies at the last, and to a private life: writ many excellent works, a great Divine, according to the divinity of those times, as an expert Physician, a Politician, an excellent Mathematician, Diacosmus and the rest of his works do witness. […] After a wandering life he settled at Abdera, a town in Thrace, and was sent for thither to be their Lawmaker, Recorder, or Town Clerk, as some will; or as others, he was there bred and born. Howsoever it was, there he lived at last in a garden in the suburbs, wholly betaking himself to his studies and a private life, saving that sometimes he would walk down to the haven, and laugh heartily at such variety of ridiculous objects, which there he saw. Such a one was Democritus.
Burton’s self-description
But in the mean time, how doth this concern me, or upon what reference do I usurp his habit? I confess indeed that to compare myself unto him for ought I have yet said, were both impudency and arrogancy: I do not presume to make any parallel; he outranks me by countless numbers; I am inconsiderable, nothing at all; I do not aspire to greatness, nor hope for it. Yet this much I will say of myself, and that I hope without all suspicion of pride, or self-conceit, I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, with myself and the Muses in the University as long almost as Xenocrates in Athens, nearly to old age, to learn wisdom as he did, penned up most part in my study. For I have been brought up a student in the most flourishing College of Europe, the most august College2, and can brag with Jovius, almost, in that splendour of Vaticanish retirement, confined to the company of the distinguished, I have spent thirty-seven full and fortunate years; for thirty years I have continued (having the use of as good Libraries as ever he had) a scholar, and would be therefore loth, either by living as a drone, to be an unprofitable or unworthy Member of so learned and noble a society, or to write that which should be any way dishonourable to such a royal and ample foundation. Something I have done, though by my profession a Divine, yet being carried away by a giddy disposition, as he [Scaliger] said, out of a running wit, an unconstant, unsettled mind, I had a great desire (not able to attain superficial skill in any) to have some smattering in all, to be Somebody in everything, Nothing in anything, which Plato commends, out of him Lipsius approves and furthers, as fit to be imprinted in all curious wits, not to be a slave of one science, or dwell altogether in one subject, as most do, but to rove abroad, the servant of a hundred arts, to have an oar in every man’s boat, to taste of every dish, and sip of every cup, which saith Montaigne, was well performed by Aristotle, and his learned countryman Adrian Turnebus. This roving humour, (though not with like success) I have ever had, and like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly complain, and truly (for who is everywhere is nowhere), which Gesner did in modesty, that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our Libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgement. I never travelled but in Map or Card, in which my unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated, as having ever been especially delighted with the study of Cosmography. Saturn was the Lord of my geniture, culminating, etc., and Mars principal significator3 of manners in partile4 conjunction with mine Ascendant; both fortunate in their houses, etc.. I am not poor, I am not rich, nothing’s here, but nothing’s lacking, I have little, I want nothing; all my treasure is in Minerva’s tower. Greater preferment, as I could never get, so I am not in debt for it; I have a competency (praise God) from my noble and munificent Patrons, though Ilive still a Collegiate student, as Democritus in his garden, and lead a monastic life, a theatre to myself, sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world, as he [Heinsius] said, and in some high place above you all, like the wise Stoick, seeing all ages, past and present, as at one glance: I hear and see what is done abroad, how others run, ride, turmoil and macerate themselves in court and country; far from those wrangling lawsuits, courts of vanity, marts of ambition, I am wont to laugh with myself: I laugh at all, [each] only secure lest my suit go amiss, my shops perish, corn and cattle miscarry, trade decay. I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for. A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they act their parts, which methinks are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene. I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies5, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes6, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, etc.. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, tomorrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps etc.. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and publick news. Amidst the gallantry and misery of the world; jollity, pride, perplexities and cares, simplicity and villainy; subtlety, knavery, candour and integrity, mutually mixed and offering themselves, I rub on in a strictly private life; as I have still lived, so I now continue, as I was from the first, left to a solitary life, and mine own domestick discontents: saving that sometimes, not to tell a lie, as Diogenes went into the city, and Democritus to the haven, to see fashions, I did for my recreation now and then walk abroad, look into the world, and could not choose but make some little observation, not so wise an observer as a plain rehearser, not as they did to scoff or laugh at all, but with a mixed passion.
Burton gives his reasons for writing
If any man except against the matter or manner of treating of this subject, and will demand a reason of it, I can allege more than one. I writ of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business, as Rhasis holds: and howbeit to be busied in toys is to small purpose, yet hear that divine Seneca: Better do to no end than nothing. I writ therefore, and busied myself in this playing labour that I might avoid the torpor of laziness, with Vectius in Macrobius, and turn my leisure to purpose. […] I might be of Thucydides’ opinion: To know a thing and not express it, is all one as if he knew it not. When I first took this task in hand, and as he saith, undertook the work, my genius impelling me, this I aimed at: to ease my mind by writing, for I had a heavy heart and an ugly head, a kind of imposthume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of, and could imagine no fitter evacuation than this. Besides I might not well refrain, for one must needs scratch where it itches. I was not a little offended with this malady, shall I say my Mistress Melancholy, my Egeria, or my Evil Genius? And for that cause, as he that is stung with a scorpion, I would expel one nail with another, idleness with idleness, the antidote from the Viper, make an Antidote out of that which was the prime cause of my disease. […]
I would help others out of a fellow-feeling, and as that virtuous Lady did of old, being a Leper herself, bestow all her portion to build an Hospital for Lepers, I will spend my time and knowledge, which are my greatest fortunes, for the common good of all.
