The Guardian view on The Anatomy of Melancholy: a timely masterpiece
A 17th-century prose text peppered with Latin and Greek quotations, based on an ancient medical system entirely superseded by modern science – and clocking in, in its new 400th anniversary edition, at a mighty 1,376 pages – sounds impossibly forbidding. It is true that Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, the first edition of which was published in 1621, is not for the faint of heart. But there is a good reason why Penguin Classics is reissuing it next week; why Laurence Sterne stole chunks of it for Tristram Shandy; why it was a favourite of Samuel Johnson’s (“the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise”, according to Boswell); why Jorge Luis Borges borrowed from it an epigraph to his great short story, The Library of Babel; why Anthony Burgess called it “one of the great comic works of the world”. This is a work that, as the novelist Philip Pullman has pointed out, contains enormous humanity, wit and common sense; one, above all, that vibrates with energy and life.
Born in 1577, Burton was a cleric and fellow at Oxford who worked in the library at Christ Church. He himself was a sufferer from melancholy, he wrote. It is a disorder that modern readers would probably define as depression, but in his own time – when William Harvey was just beginning to conduct research that would transform understanding of the workings of the human body – the condition was seen in relation to the theory of the four humours (blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm) that had persisted, thanks to the writings of Galen, since antiquity.
According to this schema, keeping the humours balanced was the key to good health. This could be achieved by a number of things, including exercise, diet and environment. Completely outmoded as the theory is, there are aspects of it – the notion that mental, physical and spiritual matters are entangled – that certainly make sense to the modern reader.
Indeed, in his attempt to cut up, pin down and scrutinise the various aspects of melancholy – to anatomise them – Burton hits upon much that we would regard as level-headed counsel. Seeking out the company of good friends, keeping busy, avoiding those things that make you unhappy – all are advised. Moderation is preferred. (For instance, too much “chamber work” – that is, sex – as well as too little, can have deleterious effects on the spirits, he says. The same goes for reading.) The book hums with generosity and sympathy. Melancholy is taken seriously, in a way that it has not always been in the history of mental healthcare.
But Burton’s masterpiece is much more than this, too. It is also one of the finest prose works in English, for all that its author avers that its “periods are all as rough as nutmeg graters”. It is funny, a laugh-aloud book, one that seems to convey the character of its writer with a rare clarity. It is an ode to reading that overflows with allusions and quotations, making it a book that feels, at times, as if it is about the whole of human knowledge. In its wonderfully capacious digressiveness, it pulsates with a life force that is, in itself, a charm against the terrors, the fears and the loneliness of melancholy.