It is very probable, very human, too, that what Burton, and Browne,
and Herbert Spencer, and all the rest of the leisurely writers who
gave their lives to the production of a mighty work did, was to play
a magnificent game, a game that most men who try to think would like
to play, but lack the courage or the perseverance to continue. That
is, they took a thought, or an idea, and traced it through all its
convolutions and ramifications to an end.
Such a task seems easy enough until you ponder awhile, then, from being
merely interesting, it looms vast and mighty. Still more pondering
makes it seem tremendous to the point of impossibility. Because, to
put the matter in paradoxical form, anything becomes everything. You
start at any given point thinking to arrive somewhere in all ease and
simplicity, to find that your course leads you into the universe. Take
by way of example the man who would set out to study an apple and its
growth. Doing the thing thoroughly he has accepted a life’s task. Not
only into the infinity of the minute must he go, but also into the
infinity of space, into the microcosm and into the macrocosm too. For
down he must go to the roots, studying the very nature of the soil,
the plant food, and, therefore, chemistry and physics and the atom. Or
up he goes to the leaves, and so leaps into a world of new things; to
considerations of light and heat, of form and color. He makes a study
of the sun and the solar system, of space and of time, of force and
matter. He will be led into anthropological questions, into folk lore,
into history and into philosophy. His apple tree will have become a
true tree of knowledge of good and evil, of life and of death. In his
tree he will see a world of order and a world of disorder; a world of
waste and of malady, of corruption and of paralysis. He will see in his
tree world disease warring with health, generation and degeneration, a
world visible and a world invisible marching hand in hand to conquer
and destroy. He will see insect and worm and fly and germ all enemies
leagued to overcome effort, just as in the world of men, military and
commercial imperialism march hand in hand to overcome peaceful efforts
leading towards peaceful industry. Such a man must become a pessimistic
philosopher seeing a world of strife and disorder, rather than unity
and peace.
In something of the same spirit then, a spirit of disinterested
thoroughness with which a man might take an apple tree, or a pond by
the roadside, or the subject matter of a book for a life’s study, so
Burton took the most unpromising subject on earth--the Blue Devils,
if you like, or Man’s Grouchiness. Unpromising, but of great purport,
especially if it be remembered that moping melancholy is the gateway
opening on the path that leads to the door of the house of Insanity.
And Burton finds that “all the world is melancholy, or mad, dotes, and
every member of it,” more or less, wherefore the whole world needs
the cure, or at least the knowledge of how to ward off the Beast of
Melancholy, which being the case, his _Anatomy_ must needs be one of
the most important works of mankind, if not of all time. As for great
men, Burton comes within an ace of reaching the same conclusion as
Lombroso, that moral insanity and epilepsy are closely allied with
genius and that “the true normal man is not the man of letters or of
learning, but the man who works and eats--_fruges consumere natus_.”
Indeed, in some respect, Lombroso picks up one of the threads left by
Burton, carrying the pattern forward to later times, telling of the
melancholy of Robert Burns who complained that his constitution was
“blasted with a deep incurable taint of melancholy which poisoned
existence”: of the melancholy of Schiller: of Constant: of Dupuytren:
of Cavour: of Chopin: of George Sand: of John Stuart Mill: of
Chateaubriand and a couple of dozen of others. Burton, more downright
than Lombroso, declares that those we admire “are like these double or
turning pictures; stand before which you see a fair maid on the one
side, an ape on the other, an owl; look upon them at the first sight,
all is well; but further examine, you shall find them wise on the one
side, fools on the other; in some few things praiseworthy, in the rest
incomparably faulty.”
So also did Max Nordau pick up one of the Burton threads when he
wrote his book _Degeneracy_, though Shaw tangled the Nordau pattern
sadly with his _Sanity and Art_. Or take that other instance of the
working out of Burton’s theme which you see in Dr. Strahan’s _Suicide
and Insanity_, for while the author named divides suicides into two
classes, rational and irrational, he discovers that of melancholiacs,
58.3 per cent were suicidal, but arrives at the conclusion that only
by increasing the vital energy of the people, can self-destruction be
reduced, which is another way of stating the finding of Burton, as we
shall see in good time.
Who then is sane and wise? Burton quotes Horace, satire ii. 7. 83-86,
thus:
“Sapiens sibique imperiosus,
Quem neque pauperies, neque mors, neque vincula terrent,
Responsare cupidinibus, contemnere honores
Fortis, & in seipso totus teres atque rotundus.”
(“He is wise that can command his own will,
Valiant and constant to himself still,
Whom poverty nor death, nor bands can fright,
Checks his desires, scorns honors, just and right”)
That is to say, to the best of each man’s ability, let him be a center
of order in a scene of disorder, which is Marcus Aurelius baldly
stated. To be sure a man must be interested in the beauty of life, must
find something of interest in its complex charm, but he must not lose
himself in the froth and whirl of it. He must be eager for happiness,
but if he should deliberately sow pleasure, then, most assuredly shall
he reap disaster. He must look upon the life about him, the life
national and social, as a kind of high-hearted game, but he must not
lose himself in the playing of it. In the ordinary business of life,
to look a little ahead is well enough, to look too far ahead is folly
and madness. To be sure an eye must be kept on the far horizon, but not
exclusively so, for it is the next step that counts. Or put it this
way. If it were possible for a man in his youth to see the mountain
of work that he would have to do in his life, to visualize the vast
morass of trouble through which he must pass, to see the desert of
difficulties across which he must travel in his three-score and ten
years, he would probably refuse to live his life. But instead, he faces
one thing at a time, one little job after another, meets his troubles
one by one as they appear and so gets to the end at last. Or your
traveller has his final goal on the far horizon, but is concerned
about the next step and the one after that, taking mountains foot by
foot when he comes to them and so the barrier that seemed to tower to
the sky, turns out to be nothing more than a stiff slope.
So, in a day of national greatness when men were talking about their
great achievements in circumnavigating the world, in penetrating the
American continent, in beating the Spanish and the French; when there
was excitement about Raleigh in this place, about the Gunpowder Plot
and Guido Fawkes in that, about James I and his favorite in another;
when there was magnificence of display and the constable drank to the
health of the king from a cup of agate set with diamonds and rubies and
to the queen from another dragon-shaped cup of crystal garnished with
gold; when the gallows were hung with petty thieves and Henry VIII was
praised for having hung seventy-two thousand rogues; when any old woman
might be burned or hanged as a witch; when men prided themselves on
their nation because
“Turkeys, Carpes, Hops; Piccarel and Beere,
Came into England; all in one yeare.”
--when all these things and more were afoot, Robert Burton in his
retirement refused to be dazzled.
“I laugh at all,” he wrote, in the early part of his book. “I am a
mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures.” “I hear new
news every day, and those ordinary rumours of wars, plagues, fires,
inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums,
prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities defeated in France,
Turkey, Persia, Poland--daily musters and preparations, and such
like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many
men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea fights, peace
leagues, strategems, and fresh alarms.” For he lived in a world which,
in its broad aspects as far as the activities of men were concerned,
was strikingly like ours, so much so that reading his catalog, it
almost seems as though he recited the headlines of a bundle of
sensational newspapers such as we are accustomed to. And there is more
of it. “New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, heresies,
controversies on philosophy, religion, and so forth.” It was the day
of the appearance of, more properly speaking, the wider acceptance
and knowledge of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Cervantes’ _Don Quixote_,
and the dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher, and Webster’s _White Devil_,
and Drayton’s _Polyolbion_, and Raleigh’s _History of the World_, and
Chapman’s _Homer_. Not that these were produced in a single year, but
rather that they had come to be talked about, for I have gathered the
more prominent literary activities of ten years, and, of course, there
were thousands of minor things, much talked about then, the very names
of which we know no more.
Burton, then, looking about him sees his fellowman not as Sovereign
Lord of an Orderly Universe, not as Viceroy of the World, not by any
means as Governor of all the Creatures in it, but rather as a kind
of be-devilled thing, sport of the elements, victim of plagues and
sickness of mysterious origin just as we are the sports of strange
sickness with which in their intensity we are unable to cope--the
influenza for example--and so finds man “his own executioner,” “a devil
to himself and others,” and, in spite of his utmost efforts to be
otherwise, a prey to black melancholy at recurrent intervals.
So, in the quiet of his country home he sets himself to work with the
purpose of tracing this melancholy to its source, and, be it said,
when he finds the cure for it, or if not the cure at least an anodyne,
he sums the matter up in no more than six words, though the tangle of
his investigation, which I am trying to trace, took more than half a
million words.