CAN'T GET IT OUT OF HIS HEAD

Melancholy, to Robert Burton, the philosopher of melancholy, could encompass many states of mind; mild regret, peaceful contemplation, bitter grief, the hatching of  pleasing visions, jealous torments and dementia:

I’ll change my state with any wretch,
Thou canst from gaol or dunghill fetch;
My pain 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.

These lines, and many, many more, come from the preliminaries to Burton’s ”Anatomy of Melancholy” ; probably the greatest work ever written on the subject , and by far the longest. It is a leisurely book of half a million words, which has room not only for a verse preludium but for a preface, ”Democratus Junior to the Reader” as long as many a novel, as well as for the first study of climatology, ”A Digression of the Air” ; a pioneering examination of the psychology of sex; a multitude of good stories; the first serious study of the morbid effects of too much religion; a compendium of classical literature; and pleas for pacifism , better roads, canals, marsh reclamation, economic tariffs, and old-age pensions. But essentially it is, in Sir William Osler’s words, ”the greatest medical treatise written by a layman” . It first appeared in 1621, two years before the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays and five years after Shakespeare’s death. It may be one of the few books that one regrets Shakespeare was unable to read in his retirement.

As for Burton, his life was all retirement. He settled early to the life of a scholar and pluralist clergyman, becoming a Vicar of St. Thomas in Oxford. He seems not to have had a powerful call to the ministry and there is justification in seeing him as a not overzealous incumbent , glad to leave the pulpit and get back to his library. He is a man who lived for books, a giant of the shelves like Dr. Johnson. On his own admission, Burton’s life was uneventful. He said, ”I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life , mihi et musis in the university, as long almost as Xenocrates in Athens, ad senectam fere, to learn wisdom as he did, penned up most part in my study.”

Certainly Burton suffered from melancholy, and he confessed he wrote his masterwork in order to cure it. But it seems that Burton for all his witticisms and volubility, was essentially a spectator and auditor of life. He accepted his melancholy as part of the Adamic inheritance  and made the best of things. That he was a humorist in our sense of the word we need no biographical facts to attest; The Anatomy of Melancholy is by a magnificent and somehow very English irony, one of the great comic works of the world. Not comic by dogged intention, nor by the pathetic accident that makes what is meant to be grave unconsciously funny. Burton’s humor is, in fact, a natural fluid that washes everything he writes, a temperamental secretion that characterizes every sentence. Breathe deeply and take in one of Burton’s saltier periods:

”Love is blind, as the saying is, Cupid’s blind, and so are all his followers. … Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, have a swollen juggler’s platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed, or with staring eyes, she looks like a squissed cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-eyed, black or yellow about the eyes, or squint-eyed, sparrow-mouthed, Persian hook-nosed, have a sharp fox nose, a red nose, China flat, great nose, nare simo patuloque , a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven, brown teeth, beetle browed, a witch’s beard, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer, with a Bavarian poke under her chin, a sharp chin, lave eared, with a long crane’s neck, which stands awry too, pendulis mammis , her dugs like two double jugs, or else no dugs, in that other extreme, bloody fallen fingers, she have filthy, long unpared nails, scabbed hands or wrists, a tanned skin, a rotten carcass, crooked back, she stoops, is lame, splay-footed, as slender in the middle as a cow in the waist, gouty legs, her ankles hang over her shoes, her feet stink, she breed lice, a mere changeling, a very monster, an oaf imperfect, her whole complexion savours, a harsh voice, incondite gesture, vile gait, a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker (si qua latent meliora puta ), and to thy judgment looks like a merd in a lantern, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world, but hatest, loathest, and wouldst have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosom, remedium amoris to another man, a dowdy, a slut, a scold, a nasty, rank, rammy, filthy, beastly quean, dishonest peradventure, obscene, base, beggarly, rude, foolish, untaught, peevish, Irus’ daughter, Thersites’ sister, Grobians’ scholar, if he love her once, he admires her for all this, he takes no notice of any such errors, or imperfections of body or mind, …he had rather have her than any woman in the world. ( Robert Burton, Section on Love Melancholy )

This Rabelaisian effort is Burton all out, making up the sentence as he goes along and, like Shakespeare, not blotting a line. As he writes, apt quotations from the classics come to him unbidden, an

wn they go to swell the flood of words. His writing is like talk, learned but earthly, and one he starts he is hard to stop. Note that falling in love for Burton is assumed to be a one sided matter; it is Romeo sighing for Rosaline, not in bed with Juliet. it is an ailment, an impairment of vision foretold in Shakespeare’s ”Midsummer Night’s Dream”, where ”The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact”.

There are various cures for the disease: ”labour, diet, physic, abstinence… good counsel, persuasion… philters, magical and poetical cures,” and so on, but the best cure of all is what most of us would regard as the only possible one: ”To let them have their desire.” This is how, with characteristic corsucations of Latin, Burton puts it:

The last refuge and surest remedy, to be put in practice in the utmost place, when no other means will take effect, is to let them go together, and enjoy one another: potissima cura est ut heros amasia sua potiatur , saith Guianerius, cap. 15. tract. 15. Aesculapius himself, to this malady, cannot invent a better remedy, quam ut amanti cedat amatum ,  (Jason Pratensis) than that a lover have his desire.
Et pariter torulo bini jungantur in uno,
Et pulchro detur Aeneae Lavinia conjux.

And let them both be joined in a bed,
And let Aeneas fair Lavinia wed;

‘Tis the special cure, to let them bleed in vena Hymencaea , for love is a pleurisy, and if it be possible, so let it be,—optataque gaudia carpant .  Arculanus holds it the speediest and the best cure, ’tis Savanarola’s  last precept, a principal infallible remedy, the last, sole, and safest refuge.
Julia sola poles nostras extinguere flammas,
Non nive, nun glacie, sed potes igne pari.

Julia alone can quench my desire,
With neither ice nor snow, but with like fire.

It is not enough to say a man will risk all for love. Before reaching these kinds of conclusions, Burton leads the reader on a long, wandering and meandering near nightmare of old tales and classical allusions, supersitions, and paranormal fables both ancient and Jacobean.