The Anatomy of Melancholy: Robert Burton

In 1621, Robert Burton first published his masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy. His work is remarkable for its breadth, humor, innovativeness, and literary excellence; said to be a favorite of both Samuel Johnson and Keats, and a major literary inspiration for Melville.

For Burton, the titular malady is enigmatic and all-pervasive, transcending the bounds of the merely medical. It encompasses nearly every area of life, and as Burton's treatise widens, it become a meditation on the whole human condition.

Burton's encyclopedic manner of writing (shared also with Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, and others) functions as a kind of library (or text of texts): collecting verses, lists, charts, anecdotes, and alleged remedies for the condition. Melville's debt to this style is evident throughout Moby-Dick and elsewhere, articulated perhaps most explicitly in Mardi: "...like a frigate, I am full with a thousand souls.... In me, many worthies recline, and converse." (1.15)

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael elaborates on Burton's theme when he conceives his own melancholy as a prelude to adventure, susceptible to what might be termed a "whaling cure" for his depression. "Whenever...it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul...then, I account it high time to get to sea...." Likewise the blacksmith: "to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does...the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted...“" But insofar as all personalities have roots in particular sufferings and disturbances, any character might equally be said to come under Burton's purview.

Melville's mention of "that theory of Paracelsus and Campanella, that every man has four souls within him" (Redburn, 49) is traceable to Burton's discussion of the soul. Scholar Merton Sealts, with reference to Burton, suggests that Melville's characters function allegorically as parts of the soul in Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre.

Burton's concern for the soul--understood as the principle that animates life--overlaps with that of the ancient alchemists such as Paracelsus. In its most extreme manifestation (e.g., Albertus Magnus), this concern is even alleged to have resulted in the creation of an automaton. This theme is made explicit in modern science fiction--most obviously, Frankenstein--but also in in Melville's "The Bell Tower" and "The Tale of a Traveler" chapter from Mardi.

For this meetup, we will read an early section of The Anatomy, in which Burton discusses the nature of the soul and a host of supernatural agents--wolfmen, God, devils, angels, witches, and magicians (but no mermaids):

• Section 1.1.1.1, "The First Partition: Man's Excellency, Fall, Miseries, Infirmities; The causes of them"
• [through] Section 1.2.1.6, "Parents a cause by propagation"

Anatomy of Melancholy:

• Ex-Classics
• Gutenberg
• Amazon (400th anniversary edition)
• Librivox (parts 16-25) 4h25m

Extracts:

• "And what to me, thus pining for some one who could page me a quotation from Burton on Blue Devils; what to me, indeed, were flat repetitions of long-drawn yarns, and the everlasting stanzas of Black-eyed Susan sung by our full forecastle choir? Staler than stale ale." (Mardi, 1.1)
• "The first day this man came, he brought his dinner with him, and volunteered to eat it sitting on his buck in the snow-storm. From my window, where I was reading Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, I saw him in the act." ("Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!")
• "...I can imagine you seated on that dear, delightful, old-fashioned sofa; your head supported by its luxurious padding, and with feet perched aloft on the aspiring back of that straight limbed, stiff-necked, quaint old chair, which, as our facetious W— assured me, was the identical seat in which old Burton composed his Anatomy of Melancholy." ("Fragments from a Writing Desk")
• "A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that." (Moby-Dick, 16)
• "...in ten thousand ways, as if by a malicious agency, we mortals are woefully put out and tormented; and that, too, by things in themselves so exceedingly trivial, that it would seem almost impiety to ascribe them to the august gods. No; there must exist some greatly inferior spirits...and through them it must be, that we are thus grievously annoyed." (Mardi, 1.87)
• "All men are possessed by devils; but as these devils are sent into men, and kept in them...limboed in a bridewell; so, it may be more just to say, that the devils themselves are possessed by men..." (Mardi, 1.104)

This meetup is part of a series on Muses and Monsters.