BOOKS.

BURTON'S "ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY."

OLD copies of Thee Anatomy of Melancholy are more rarely to be met with now at the booksellers' than they were in the early part of this century, when the sight of a reprint of Burton's work so far moved the spleen of the kindliest of our hnmourists as to make him utter his well-known protest against " un- earthing the bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern censure." Universally popular as was Burton in his own generation, he will, we fear, in spite of new editions, remain, like Rabelais, a sealed book to the general reader of to-day, whom a recent essayist has somewhat superfluously recommended not to look into the Anatomy. That audience, however, fit though few, which Milton desired, Burton has never failed to secure for himself ; and those students of our older literature who are not so fortunate as. to possess one of the early copies of his work will be grateful for the very handsome three-volume edition just published by Mr. Nimmo. The type, paper, and binding are such as should satisfy the-most fastidious and exacting, and • The Anatomy of Melancholy. By Robert Burton. S vole. London: John C. Nimmo. 1885.

combine to make this reprint not merely, as the advertisement modestly expresses it, " not disgraceful to the memory of the author," but the most worthy monument that has yet been raised to him. It ought to be pointed out, however, that it is a mistake to say, as the advertisement does, that translations of the numerous classical quotations are now for the " first time" given. In the advertisement to the one volume edition published some years ago by Messrs. Tegg, the same claim was advanced; though neither in that, nor in the present edition, are there renderings of quite all the passages from those " antediluvian monsters with Latin terminations " with whom Burton would seem to have been so much more familiar than with the best hundred authors known to his own day.

The extreme length of the work, as well as its semi-scientific character, is no doubt against its popularity in our impatient and novel-reading age. Yet if it be true, as Leopardi's Fillippo Ottonieri has said, that it is impossible to enumerate all the miseries of man, or even to deplore sufficiently one of them, no just exception can be taken to Burton's work on the score of its diffuseness. For his work is not so much an anatomy of melan- choly as an anatomy of human misery. Every disease of the mind or body which he chooses, often capriciously enough, to regard as non-natural; every passion or weakness—even vanity, which, according to the Italian poet of pessimism, largely con- tributes to its possessor's satisfaction with the world—every form of madness, not excluding hydrophobia, is either compre- hended by Burton in the term " melancholy," or reckoned a cause of it. Transitory sadness, however,.from which he says no man is free, is not included. The melancholy of which he treats is, he tells us, " a habit, a chronic disease, not errant, but fixed ;" and this, he frankly confesses, is difficult, if not impossible, to cure. And the cure is, he thinks, even harder in woman than in man. Still, he does not, like the pessimists of a later day, leave his patients entirely without hope, for he has about as much to say respecting the supposed remedies for every form of the disease as respecting its various causes and symptoms. He was himself, however, so little able to profit by his own advice. that his melancholy was aggravated rather than relieved by the writing of his book. And it seems to give some colour to the general suspicion of his contemporaries that his death was hastened by his own hand, that, in writing of suicide, he quotes far more authorities for than against it, and adduces many examples from sacred and profane history of great men who resorted to it. It is probably passages of this kind which have made some well-meaning critics condemn the work as unfit for general perusal.

Most thoughtful and studious people are, in these days, prone to melancholy. It seems, indeed, to us inseparable from the sensitiveness that belongs not only to the literary character, but to all who possess true literary taste. Yet Burton tells us, in one passage of his work, that " nothing is so fit and proper to expel idleness and melancholy as study." Elsewhere, however, he recognises study as a main cause of melancholy, and often of madness. " How many poor scholars," he exclaims, " have lost their wits to gain knowledge, for which, after all their pains, in this world's esteem, they are accounted ridiculous and silly fools !" " Or," he adds, with more than his usual bitterness, writing, as we strongly suspect, from his own personal ex- perience, "if they keep their wits, yet they are esteemed scrubs and fools, by reason of their carriage after seven years' study. Because they cannot ride a horse, which every clown can do. salute and court a gentlewoman, carve at table, cringe and make cong4s, which every common swasher can do, they are laughed to scorn, and accounted silly fools by our gallants." Yet of that aggravated form of melancholy which is often, in these times, the offspring of excessive study or culture, and which pervades almost every page of Leopardi, De Senancour's .0bermann, and Thomson's City of Dreadful Night, we find but little trace in the pages of Burton. Though he was too acute not to perceive the difficulties of his faith, and though many passages in his work show that he had his dark intervals of doubt and misgiving, when the "heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world" seemed almost more than he could bear, he never, like the unhappy writers we have named, wholly relinquished his belief in an over-ruling Providence; nor do we think that he would even have consented, with Swift, to regard all happiness as " a perpetual possession of being well deceived." " With religious melancholy in defect," as he quaintly calls the melancholy of atheism or scepticism, he evinces bat little sympathy, and for the scoffer at holy things he can scarcely find epithets enough contemptuous. Despair, rather than melancholy, as Burton understood it, is the key-note of the writings of the pessimists of this century, and between despair and melancholy, which, "though often, do not always concur, there is," he says, " much difference ; melancholy fears without a cause, this upon great occasion ; melancholy is caused by fear and grief ; but this torment procures them all extremity of bitterness." " Despair," he says, " is sometimes from loss of worldly goods or friends ; but the last and greatest cause of the malady is a guilty conscience." This reminds us of Leopardi's remark that a confession of unhappiness is, with most people, tantamount to a confession of guilt. No intelligent person now would ascribe the despair of many molern thinkers solely, or even chiefly, to a guilty conscience. Burton touches on its true cause when he remarks that those affected with it "doubt whether there be any God ; they rave, curse, and are desperately mad, because good men are oppressed, wicked men flourish; they have not, as they think, to their desert." Much less space is devoted in Burton's work to the consideration of despair than to that of other less extreme forms of melancholy ; and confidence in God's mercy and goodness is almost the only cure he prescribes. Of the modern "Melen- colia," or Despair, as Burton would, more properly perhaps, have termed it, "that transcends all wit," it will be seen that there is scarcely any presentiment in the pages of the Anztomy. The most striking picture of it is to be found in the concluding stanzas of that singularly powerful but terrible poem to which we have alluded, The City of Dreadful Night, which, more than any other poem perhaps, is-

" The trumpet of a soul drowned deep

In the unfathomed seas of matchless sorrows."*

"Melencolia" is here represented " with cheek on clenched left hand," her right upholding a pair of compasses across a clasped book in her lap. She gazes with full-set eyes, "but wandering in thick mazes of sombre thought, beholds no outward sight." Scales, hour-glass, bell, and magic square are above her, and about her feet are instruments of carpentry and science ; and thus she "fronts the dreadful mysteries of Time," working on still, though baffled, beaten back, weary, and sick of soul ; and in her " tenebrous " regard dawns gloorning " a sense more tragic than defeat and blight :"—

" The sense that every struggle brings defeat,

Because Fate holds no prize to crown success ; That all the oracles are dumb or cheat, Because they have no secret to express ; That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain, Because there is no light beyond the curtain ; That all is vanity and nothingness."

This " Melencolia," or Despair, is identical with Culture, and the poet concludes by saying that-

" Her subjects often gaze up to her there ;

The strong, to drink new strength of iron endurance; The weak, new terrors ; all, renewed assurance, And confirmation of the old despair."

We would hope, however, that despair is not so generally the issue of modern culture as the poet thinks. It is more certain that the sadness which is not necessarily divorced from the `larger hope," characterises the majority of intelligent and sensitive people, whether their own lot be or be not cast in pleasant places. And most frequently, perhaps, when they are believed by the shallow and frivolous to be but selfishly brood- ing over their own sorrows, it is the depth of their sympathy with the universal suffering, their sense of the perpetual conflict between good and evil in which the latter principle seems so frequently to triumph, and the unfathomable mysteries of the universe, which oppress and sadden them. And even if the Millennium, whose commencement Victor Hugo is said to have been sanguine enough to promise for the next century, were come for man, there might still be enough in the contemplation of the wholly unmerited, if necessary, su.fferings of the brute creation (of which only too few people think at present) to darken the souls of the thoughtful and tender-hearted. Those—and we do not need Leopardi to tell us that they are many—who dislike the melancholy man, would do well to ponder over Burton's words in defence of himself and his sad brethren. " If we melancholy men be not so bad as he that is worst, 'tis our dame melancholy keeps us so." " Fear and sorrow keep them temperate and sober, and free them from any dissolute acts, which jollity and boldness thrust men upon ; they are therefore no roaring boys, thieves, or

assassins They are no dissemblers, liars, hypocrites, for

• Middleton.

fools and madmen tell commonly truth." Therefore, he concludes, " it is better to be miserable than happy ; of two extremes it is the best."

It seems presumptuous to add anything to the praises which have been lavished on Burton by such competent judges as Johnson, Byron, Thackeray, and others. As, however, there is at present a tendency to depreciate his great work, we may be pardoned for expressing our opinion that, in genuine humour and wit, keen observation, biting satire, and robust energy and plainness of speech, Burton is near akin to Rabelais and Swift, while in depth and variety of learning he is unsurpassed even by the Frenchman. He has in addition, what neither of those two masters possessed, true poetical feeling and fancy, as the introductory verses to his work and many of his prose passages fully prove. Those who value as it ought to be valued the literature of our greatest period, will be glad to place Mr. Nimmo's noble reprint of Burton on the same shelf with the goodly volumes of the great Elizabethan dramatists now being issued by the same enterprising publisher under the able editor- ship of Mr. Ballen.