The Anatomy of Melancholy

The latest issue of New York Review of Books has an essay on Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, the sixteenth century classic study of, mainly Melancholy, but also every other thing on the planet. I first came to know about the book after reading an article in The Guardian about it. Nicholas Lezard in his short paperback-of-the-week column says:

Paperback not so much of the week as of the year, of the decade -- or, I am inclined to say, of all time. And why ? Because it's the best book ever written, that's why. I use the word "book" with care. It's not a novel, a tract, an epic poem, a history; it is, quite self-consciously, the book to end all books.

I later came to know more about the book and no reference of the book that I found anywhere were without the wildest superlatives imaginable, just as in the Guardian article above. This book is at the top of the Complete Review best books list. Check out its book page here.

So, when I saw the book mentioned on the front page of the New York Review I decided to pick up the copy. And the essay is quite delightful, although a trifle disappointing (at least to me) because the reviewer spends most of the time discussing medicinal history and the stylistics of sixteenth century English prose and not the nature of melancholy itself. Although when he briefly touches this aspect, it is not without some great insight. The quotes from the book are alone worth reading the entire essay. As here when Burton is lamenting the complexities and mysteries of the melancholy temperament and heart:

Who can sufficiently speak of these symptoms, or prescribe rules to comprehend them?... If you will describe melancholy, describe a fantastical conceit, a corrupt imagination, vain thoughts and different, without which who can do? The four and twenty letters [of the alphabet] make no more variety of words in diverse languages, than melancholy conceits produce diversity of symptoms in several persons. They are irregular, obscure, various, so infinite, Proteus himself is not so diverse, you may well make the moon a new coat, as a true character of melancholy man; as soon find the motion of a bird in the air, as the heart of a man, a melancholy man.

As noted by the reviewer, what actually makes The Anatomy a work of literature, rather than simply a dense medical and philosophical treatise, is Burton's ability to transcend the specificities of medicinal aspects to reach some profound understanding of the general human condition. Although he does it by looking at everything through the prism of melancholy:

And who is not a fool, who is free from Melancholy? Who is not touched more or less in habit or disposition?... And who is not sick, or ill-disposed,in whom do not passion, anger, envy, discontent, fear and sorrow reign?

What I found most interesting in the article was a discussion of the ways in which Melancholy was viewed throughout history. In sixteenth and seventeenth century, an affectation of melancholy was a favourite pose for those who made claim to a superior refinement, a noble spirit and a sensitive, poetic heart. The somber delights of melancholy were generally supposed to outweigh its anguish and misery. Keats even composed an Ode on Melancholy and Burton himself opens his book with a poem which enumerates all its lugubrious pleasures ("naught so sweet as melancholy"). There are innumerable passages from Byron (most memorably from Manfred, my all time favourite English poem) which also explore and celebrate similar mental states.

After Burton, the term lost its poetical, personal meaning and got subsumed into a larger word ennui, or boredom, which had more sociological and impersonal import than the previous meaning. Most of the greatest works of nineteenth century literature capture this meaning quite truthfully. Julien Sorel's quest, in Stendhal's Red and Black, is to find that abstract thing called Happiness (the novel, by the way, is dedicated to "the happy few") but in more concrete terms it is its inverse -- quest to find some way to escape from boredom. All his amorous conquests, love affairs and political machinations, at the most basic level, are means to escape the boredom of small-town, petit-bourgeois life. And talking of the boredom of provincial life who can forget Madame Bovary and its creator Flaubert, who would himself, as his greatest creation, have definitely fit the description of a melancholy man perfectly. The great Russian novels of nineteenth century also explore this with great success. They even coined a new term for this kind of personality; they called it "the superfluous men". The anarchists and rebels in Dostoevsky's novels are not the idealistic young men that they think they are, they are merely a confused lot who have read lots of romantic literature and philosophy (Byron was very popular in Russia at that time) and want to escape the boredom of their lives. Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time clarifies some of these themes in its title itself. Here is a nice article on the book and an extract:

Pechorin, the hero, is a strong, silent man with a poetic soul who, either from shyness or a contempt for the herd, especially the aristocratic herd, assumes the mask of a snob and a bully. Unlike the classic type of "superfluous men" who opt out of society, Pechorin is a strong character at odds with the world. He is proud, ambitious, strong-willed but having found that life does not measure up to his expectation of it, he has grown embittered, cynical and bored. At the age of 25 (as he is in the book) he has experienced all that life has to offer and found nothing that gives him more than a passing satisfaction or interest. He sees that life has let him down, failed to provide for him some cause that would be worthy of his superior powers. So, he is reduced to dissipating his considerable energies to petty adventures. And he embarks on his adventures with no illusions that he was doing no more than a temporary escape from boredom.

The essential characteristics of boredom as depicted in these great works of literature were an alienation from the society, because of the superiority of refinement and spirit, a deep sensitivity of the heart and disgust at the vulgarities of bourgeois life (Flaubert and Homais come to mind). The word soon took on a grand meaning of, not just a void of interest or a sophisticated indifference, but a dissatisfaction with the world, with civilization. And with this last thing we enter into modern literature and its profoundly pessimistic world, of Proust for example. The following passage excerpted in the article from somewhere else is so Proustian, in its description of pervading ennui and in its profound and final devastating insight into the human condition:

Yesterday evening I admired the numerous guests who were at my house; men and women like machines with springs who came and went, spoke and laughed, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling; each one played his role through habit; Madame de Duchess of Aiguillon burst with laughter, Mme De Forcalquier showed her disdain for everything. Mme de la Valliere jabbered about everything. The men were no better, and as for myself, I was buried in the deepest reflections; I thought that I had passed my life in illusions; that I had hollowed out for myself all the abysses into which I had fallen; that all my judgments were false and rash and always too precipitate; and finally that I had never really known anyone, that I had never been known, and that perhaps I did not know myself.

This is perhaps the reason why melancholy has been able to retain a curious if perverse fascination for writers and thinkers throughout the history of human civilization and I can now understand all the superlative adjectives that writers and scholars heap on a book like this. Because they know what Burton is saying is true. But with all the "somber delights" that a melancholy heart offers, Burton also warns the ingenuous readers not to fall for its perverse charms just for its own sake. As he says, "For the unhappy few, melancholy could be irresistible". Yes, indeed.