The gist of Burton's Anatomy of melancholy
Date: 2026-09-27T04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Burton; Robert; 1577-1640. Anatomy of melancholy
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Title: The gist of Burton's Anatomy of melancholy

Author: Charles Joseph Finger

Editor: E. Haldeman-Julius

Release date: September 27, 2026 [eBook #79662]

Language: English

Original publication: Girard: Haldeman-Julius Company, 1924

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79662

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIST OF BURTON'S ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY ***

LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO.

Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

763

The Gist of Burton’s

Anatomy of Melancholy

Charles J. Finger

HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY

GIRARD, KANSAS

Copyright, 1924

Haldeman-Julius Company

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THE GIST OF BURTON’S ANATOMY

OF MELANCHOLY

THE GIST OF BURTON’S ANATOMY

OF MELANCHOLY

ON PROLIXITY

Burton’s great book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, is one of those more often talked about than read, running pretty close in this respect to Sir Thomas Browne’s famous Religio Medici, or Milton’s Areopagitica, or Fuller’s Worthies of England. Yet it is readable, and although it was printed in the year 1642, there is no hint of oddity or of the archaic in it. Call it a book of inventive wit and scattered learning, and you have tagged it correctly. There is a quaintness and a special charm about it, most delightful, and to it that old thunderer Dr. Johnson owed much. For all that, it has become almost a lost book, as forgotten and neglected as Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea, or Hobbes’ De Cive.

Now the every-day man who has to go to work as soon as he finds a job that a lad may do, and who is busy ever after, sometimes wonders, when he reads of discoveries literary, architectural or artistic, how it comes to pass that things were lost or forgotten. He reads of gold ornaments of considerable size being discovered when a sewer was being dug in London, let us say; or he hears of treasures taken from the sands of Egypt; of vast temples in the jungles of Central America. Or he learns of precious volumes in libraries quite forgotten, of lost arts, of the tombs of kings the very names of whom there is no mention in history, and he finds himself wondering how such things could be overlooked. It all seems odd and mysterious. For instance, could the Woolworth building fall into neglect and be no more known by men? Is it possible that these highways spanning the continent could by any chance fall into uselessness and become earth covered, to be re-discovered in the remote future? If so, must not the day come when all those things on which we pride ourselves, our machines, our railroad systems, our very civilization and our gods, shall pass away? At which point speculation seems idle, perhaps a little dangerous, and, like a wise man, he gives up the problem and gets down to the things of daily life, the job of bread winning, and tax paying, and skimping to make both ends meet and so on. Or, cleaving to an optimistic point of view, he becomes enamored of J. B. S. Haldane and revels in his charming and fanciful prophecies of the production of a race of supermen, of the Seikoyski’s invention of the purple alga which manufactured nitrogen and so increased the wheat yield, of the production of ectogenetic children so that ectogenesis being universally adopted, it became possible to eradicate all social evils and foster the arts and the sciences. All of which is very amusing, but unconvincing, so that our imaginative man would revert to his earlier speculation and wonderment as to how this that and the other came to be forgotten and lost, and, possibly, arrive at the conclusion that in time past men were more careless than they are today. For, imbued with the popular notion that we are a thrifty people, a people living in an age in which nothing is wasted, our man would be inclined to take it for granted that no pearls lie hidden, that merit always gets its true reward, and that a broad path is beaten through the woods to the hut of the man who makes good mouse traps.

And yet, a little reflection will show that we of today are quite as wastefully ignorant as were our remote forefathers. For it has always been a world of waste and probably always will be. You get a fine picture of typical waste in James Fennimore Cooper’s Pioneers, a thrilling tale of wilful destruction, of things taken from forest and stream by the thousand, and left to rot. And every man knows that, except for a few isolated specimens in zoological gardens, the buffalo has disappeared, and there must soon follow the lion, the tiger, the elephant, perhaps the quail and song birds innumerable. Whales, seals, walrus, penguins are becoming scarce. Or read Prescott to find a heartbreaking record. As to the waste in economic life too much has been said and written, so much so that men cease to heed the tale. Then there is the waste of war. Dreadful enough, but already he who harps on it is considered a bore and a nuisance.

So we come to the question of waste in the world of literature, of great things forgotten or unheeded. For, buried behind the mountains of sheer trash are glories and riches untold. Things lie unread, and Burton’s book is one of many, the value of which Time has failed to lessen. There are other things still which Time has made great because of the treasures in them, treasures of wisdom which the passage of time alone could reveal. For, you see, the thoughts penned long ago are not obsolete, are, indeed, as valuable today as when they were written. The humor in them still brings a smile, the pathos a sigh. Old students and scholars of clear and lofty character have always built temples of wisdom, but always thoughtless later generations have allowed those temples to become weed-covered and neglected, and we of today with our printing presses and cheap magazines have very effectually covered what was not hidden in the tangled jungles, with unmitigated trash. So it becomes obvious that things are being lost today. To be sure, the names of the temple builders are heard, whispered as it were in colleges and universities—there is still talk of Langland, and Malory, and Skelton, and Sidney, and Bacon. But it is a mere bandying of names and no more. The things done, the work accomplished we heed not at all, and, in our folly and our crass ignorance, we turn a willing ear to those who speak slightingly of the old because it is old. But this is certain, very certain. Much that ails us today, socially, politically, internationally and economically, also ailed people in the far past and there were men who had studied with care, and who had diagnosed disease and advocated cures for the very malaise that now afflicts us. That we must get straight and well fixed in our minds. For new troubles are old troubles. And to cure those ever present ills there were written such books as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Buckle’s History of Civilization, John Stuart Mill’s Science of Political Economy, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and many, many others. And of such sort was Burton’s book.

Now whether Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is a book which time has made great or the value of which time has failed to lessen, let who reads say for himself. There is no denying the fact that it is unregarded today, and, equally, there is no denying the fact that, except in a few instances, men are too busy or too thoughtless, too worried or too impatient to attempt to tackle so formidable a work. For it is formidable—as formidable as Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, or Hobbes’ Leviathan, or even Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. I mention the latter with purpose, for, considering it as I do one of the greatest books written in English, comparatively modern as it is, it is far more talked about than read. To be sure the title of it falls easily enough from the lips of college professors, but of the wisdom in it they seem to know nothing, else in times of stress and excitement and unbalance, as in those hysterical war days, they would not have taken the course that, with very few exceptions, they did.

I have spoken of the formidable appearance of the Anatomy, and the consequent discouragement to any but the bravest. And formidable it is to those used to the scrappy appearance of the popular magazine. Let a man cast eyes on the close-written page, the long Latin passages, the thick bristling references, and, ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he shall be discouraged at the very appearance of the book, for it strikes the eye as a tangle and confusion, like the tangle and confusion of a timber-covered mountain criss-cross with underbrush. But I promise you that you shall be well repaid if you will but disregard appearances just as you are well repaid for cracking the rough and tough shell of the walnut. I give a sample taken almost at random in which you cannot fail to note the gentle humor and sound common sense.

Love.

Boccace hath a pleasant tale to this purpose, which he borrowed from the Greeks, and which Beroaldus hath turned into Latin, Bebelius into verse, of Cymon and Iphigenia. This Cymon was a fool, a proper man of person, and the governor of Cyprus’ son, but a very ass; insomuch that his father being ashamed of him, sent him to a farmhouse he had in the country, to be brought up; where by chance, as his manner was, walking alone, he espied a gallant young gentlewoman named Iphigenia, a burgomaster’s daughter of Cyprus, with her maid, by a brook side, in a little thicket, fast asleep in her smock, where she had newly bathed her self. When Cymon saw her, he stood leaning on his staff, gaping on her immovable, and in a maze; at last he fell so far in love with the glorious object, that he began to rouse himself up; to bethink what he was; would needs follow her to the city, and for her sake began to be civil, to learn to sing and dance, to play on instruments, and got all those gentleman-like qualities and compliments, in a short space, which his friends were most glad of. In brief he became from an idiot and a clown, to be one of the most complete gentlemen in Cyprus; did many valorous exploits, and all for the love of Mistress Iphigenia. In a word, I may say thus much of them, let them be never so clownish, rude and horrid, Grobians and sluts, if once they be in love, they will be most neat and spruce; for, Omnibus rebus, et nitidis nitoribus antevenit amor; they will follow the fashion, begin to trick up, and to have a good opinion of themselves; venustatum enim mater Venus; a ship is not so long a-rigging, as a young gentlewoman a-trimming up herself against her sweetheart comes. A painter’s shop, a flowery meadow, not so gracious an aspect in Nature’s storehouse as a young maid, nubilis puella, a Novitsa or Venetian bride, that looks for an husband; or a young man that is her suitor; composed looks, composed gait, clothes, gestures, actions, all composed; all the graces, elegancies, in the world, are in her face. Their best robes, ribbons, chains, jewels, lawns, linens, laces, spangles, must come on, praeter quam res patitur student elegantiae, they are beyond all measure coy, nice, and too curious on a sudden. ’Tis all their study, all their business, how to wear their clothes neat, to be polite and terse, and to set out themselves. No sooner doth a young man see his sweetheart coming, but he smugs up himself, pulls up his cloak, now fallen about his shoulders, ties his garters, points, sets his band, cuffs, slicks his hair, twires his beard, etc.

You catch readily the prolixity of the man. Perhaps it would be better to say his leisureliness. But you also get something of his enthusiasm. Certainly, there is no denying the fact that Burton, like Bacon, and like Sir Thomas Browne, and sometimes Carlyle be it said, lacked the power or the desire to omit and trim and prune. At any rate, all those I have named were unsparing of their readers, as unsparing as Nature herself is. If pruning is to be done, they seem to say, then let the reader prune, for I shall certainly unfold in all richness. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the deliberate writers took care to preserve odd, half-forgotten things as though they considered themselves the proper custodians of this, that and the other which seemed in peril of neglect. And, certainly, they did, at times, seize on pegs on which to hang rags and tags of learning until whole chapters had the appearance of a motley farrago. But that, it is clear, was a kind of loving kindness and generosity, for the world was by no means free from those who had the other and professorial idea of keeping information to themselves so that they might the easier astound the more ignorant, pretending to vast scholarship and occult learning. Perhaps, too, the old writers were actuated by the same spirit which prompts the housewife to keep odds and ends to the end that in some unexpected time they may come in useful. Or perhaps they were lavish because of their real modesty, giving credit where it was due and not boldly stealing the ideas of others and, slightly transforming them, a modern trick which no laws and regulations will prevent. But there is another angle from which this kind of generous prolixity may be viewed. It is this. With such a book, crammed with good things said and written by those long since dead, readers would not be apt to presume that they stood on the pinnacle of knowledge and had a monopoly of learning. And to make a man who prided himself on his absorption of facts really and truly humble, would be a happy miracle.

So it comes about then that such books are like muniment rooms. They are like great, wonderful attics in which things that were once trifles and common, have, by the passage of time, gained value both sentimental and material. And looking around, we find ourselves filled with astonishment to discover that what we thought our forwardness, is, very often, nothing of the kind. The saying that there is nothing new under the sun takes on a new meaning. We find our own wisdom distressingly crude. Presently, Burton reads like a modern and cultured gentleman conversing, and we are not astonished to find him discussing up-to-date things, considering the effect of impure air on the health, talking about heredity, birth control, monopoly, rich men, sycophantic poor men, free love, degeneracy, fantastic literature. And our minds clear up, as it were, getting a proper perspective as we discover that the ancients knew something about war loans, capital levies, debasement of the currency, inflated money. Or we learn of Pythocles and his proposal for nationalizing the output of the mines of Laurium, of the Ephesians raising money by taxing luxuries and jewelry, of Chabrias threatening to disendow the temple, of Condalus levying a tax on vanity by making men who affected long hair pay, of the Clasomenians and their token coinage, and much more. Or if you are one to bewail the modern tendencies of women to capture men by a half display of their bodies, you find your corrective when Burton tells that that kind of thing is old as the hills. Indeed, he goes back hundreds of years to quote old Hierome on the subject with “she walks along, and with the ruffling of her clothes makes men look at her, her shoes creak, her paps tied up, her waist pulled in to make her look small, she is straight girded, her hair about her ears, her upper garment sometimes falls and sometimes tarries to show her naked shoulders, and as if she would not be seen, she covers that in all haste which voluntarily she showed.” A perfectly modern up-to-date maiden accurately described. Nor was George Bernard Shaw the first to discover that it is a sheer fiction to pretend that the man pursues and captures the maid, but rather the contrary, and that woman sets her nets to capture the man, and has always so done.

ON THOROUGHNESS

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.

THE GENERAL PLAN

Tremendous almost to the point of impossibility, I said, a few pages back, having in mind the immense task Burton undertook. First, he undertook a monument of classification easily comparable to the work of Darwin or of Huxley. He wanted to be all-inclusive, to be clear cut and exact, leaving out nothing. So there was made a kind of chart which he calls his synopsis. Then came other charts, one for each partition, with divisions and sub-divisions most wonderful. It is difficult to convey an idea of the magnitude of the scheme without example. For instance he takes up the task thus:

In diseases

consider

——————————————-

Their causes          Definition, Member,

Division.

———————-        ———————————-

Of the body    Of the head

300 which are    and mind.

Epidemical

Impulsive Instrumental.           or

Particular In disposition

Sin, concupiscence &c

Intemperance            or

and all second

causes              Habits as

(listed names)

Then comes the ramification, quite impossible to reproduce here. But to give an idea, he lists under the heading “Habits,” Dotage, Phrensy, Madness, Ecstasy, Lycanthropia, Chorus Sancti Viti, Hydrophobia, Obsession of Devils, Melancholy.

So far so good, but it must be borne in mind that about each of these “Habits” he has much to say, quoting, arguing, coming to conclusions. But that is not all. The word Melancholy starts him off again and there is another classification, another chart. Considering it, he finds four main heads, the first of which is Equivocations. That again subdivides into two, each again ramifying, but the first of the two subdividing into seven, while at the other end of the chart, we arrive by degrees at “The Causes of Melancholy.” So there is another classified chart with tremendous ramifications intended to show which causes of Melancholy are “Evident, outward and remote” and which are “Contingent and Inward.” Then “Particular Causes” has its separate classification showing how a melancholy state may arrive from many causes, too many to list here, but among which are “Bad diet, distempered liver, improper evacuations, idleness, excess or defect of venery” and much more. But, remember, in the book proper, each one of these is carefully considered and argued. Yet it is not finished, the plan is not laid. There must be further consideration. What he calls “non-natural” things that man encounters must be considered, so there is another classification with an examination of the sub-heads growing therefrom and he discovers that there must be studied the effects of the eating of certain kinds of bread, of flesh and fish and herbs, the quality and the quantity of them, the digestive processes, corrective medicines, the temperaments of men and how such are affected by desire, by exercise, by excessive sexual gratification or the reverse, by study. And bear in mind, that there is to follow what is really an essay about each and every subject found in the classification, which essays deal with vegetarianism, celibacy, temperance and drunkenness, cooking, conduct, education. All that comes in the first classification under the head of A. Then B and C follow, each with its ramifications, down to the furthermost item. It is like the laying bare of the respiratory system of man, passing from the mouth to the ultimate bronchial tubes, capillary—like things almost invisible. Yet all that I have swiftly outlined, is but a third part of the classification or synopsis for the First Partition, which ends with “How a melancholy or mad man offering violence to himself is to be censured.” Much more is to follow. There is a similar analysis of the second and also of the third partition, the last grouping, a most tremendous one, dealing with Religious Melancholy in which he passes in review the whole known world of human thought, touching on such odd subjects as the plurality of worlds, polygamy, atheism and pantheism, quaint marriage laws, country life and a hundred other things. The book is a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a library in itself. As for the man, he seems to have read everything and remembered everything he had read. And the Anatomy was his digestion, as it were.

But perhaps the greatest wonder is the odd scraps of information that are to be found, hints of things of vast interest if the reader does but choose to follow up the clue. For instance, a moment ago I chanced to open the first volume at random and found a reference to a canal where the Suez Canal is now. Readers of Washington Irving’s Life of Mahomet will recall that in that book is a similar reference. But hear Burton: “The Turks of late attempted to cut that isthmus between Africa and Asia, which Sesostris and Darius and some Pharaohs of Egypt had formerly undertaken, with ill success....” To verify that you must go to Herodotus.

Similarly, Burton tells us of other things, not dragged in by the ears to display his erudition by any means, but mentioned quite en passant, to elucidate some point or to amplify some argument. So we find him writing of great floods in Zealand, of the courtesans in Venice, of the jealousy of dogs, of spots on the sun, of the pied piper of Hamelin, of the climate of Iceland. He leaves out nothing and all is fish that comes to his net.

ON WITCHES AND DEVILS

Obviously, it is impossible to do more than to offer some general sketch of parts of the book and at the best we are but scratching the surface. So I shall take what seems to me a high point here and there.

Very naturally, considering man and his temperament, Burton hits upon the Supernatural Will first, and hitting on that, he seems to see that there is some ground for the theory of malevolent design as well as the other. For in the course of any man’s life so many natural facts are observed, so many unexpected and uninvited things happen, that it has always been a belief that there are evil forces at work as well as good forces. For every case of apparent beneficent design, one of malevolent design seems to present itself. The Dr. Pangloss attitude of everything being, on the whole, “for the best in the best possible of worlds,” does not seem to fit at all. So there is postulated not only a benevolent demiurge, but also a malevolent demiurge. If there is an all powerful Good, then there is a very nearly all powerful Bad. Given an Ormuzd, there must be an Arhiman. If the forces that make for man’s comfort and well being are particularized, then, also, those forces that make for man’s discomfort and his ills must be particularized. Hence, dark, demoniac powers that seem to work by occult means evil deeds—spirits, devils, ghosts, fairies, satyrs, trolls and all the rest of the unseen things that live in the air, in the water, in the forest, in fire and underground. Hence also sorcery and magic and conjurations.

So Burton examines the theory of bad angels and other extra mundane spirits with a view to discovering how far they are responsible for man’s afflictions, and examining, cites the views of scholars and philosophers and school men and students, telling of the beliefs of many who bore great names, of Plato, Pythagoras, Zanchius, Carden—of teachers of Rome, and Greece, and Egypt, and Persia, and India—and what he has to say on this subject alone would fill this little book. Old fashioned and outworn stuff, you say. Yes, to be sure. And yet, as we read, we find much that reads strikingly like things we may find in the pages of some book written by moderns,—by Sir Oliver Lodge or his followers of less note, or by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle, certainly, in whose book The New Revelation, on page 121, I find evidence of a belief in a polter geist, and, like Yeats, Doyle has since proclaimed his belief in fairies.

But you do not smile at Burton, remembering that a superstition is, after all said and done, an abandoned theory, and our accepted beliefs of today are the superstitions of tomorrow. And it is not wise to disturb a superstition. You remember how Copernicus, full of misgivings, withheld the publication of his book for thirty-six years thinking that “perhaps it would be better to follow the examples of the Pythagoreans and others, who delivered their doctrine only by tradition and to friends.” Nor was the astronomer wrong, the Inquisition condemning the book on its publication as heretical. Then there was the experience of Galileo. But who shall say that some of our present beliefs may not become objects of derision? Certainly, to the mass of mankind, to believe that the sun went round the earth seemed reasonable, an observed fact, indeed. So also, in Burton’s day, the malevolent spirit idea was a very safe theory to account for an observed fact and many of us who laugh at devils and witches, had we but lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, would be shouting for our evil spirits, especially when it was safe and comfortable to do so.

Consider a moment. Let us say that a man, or many men, or a whole village chanced to suffer from some evil, some strange sickness which we today call typhoid fever. Careful observation would show that all who had taken water from a certain pool or creek fell sick, while those who took their drinking water from another pool or creek remained well. What then more natural and simple than to conclude that one water supply was infested by evil spirits while the other was free? To be sure no one saw the spirits, for they were invisible, and, also, according to a cloud of witnesses and old philosophers, they were also

(a) exceedingly small so that millions of them might rest on a single leaf.

(b) they were creatures that lived and died.

(c) they had organs and excrements.

(d) they reproduced their kind.

(e) man could not kill them.

(f) they warred with other unseen spirits, and

(g) they invaded the bodies of men and wrought much evil.

All that, I say, you and I would be prepared to accept, just as Burton seemed inclined to accept. A moment’s thought will show that a and b, c and d, e and f, and g too, apply equally well to what we now call typhoid germs. Perhaps the only difference in the belief of old and that of today is that in the mind of the unscientific man; there is no longer an anthropomorphic view, the evil thing is not personified as it were; it is not thought of as a little devil wriggling and squirming, but rather as a wriggling and squirming kind of dragon.

You see, while ancient notions excite our risibilities, our modern notions would excite the risibilities of the ancients. We imagine a Pasteur dropped in the midst of a company of seventeenth century doctors and telling them that their unseen living things which poisoned the water measured from 0.000012 inches to 0.00006 inches; that in one day each unseen bacterium would produce 16,500,000 descendants and in two days 281,500,000,000; that chills and fevers were indeed caused by organisms that invaded the human body; that growing corn was in all truth hindered by invisible things that came floating on the air; that living things not visible certainly entered the bodies of horses and sheep and men to their detriment, and sometimes to their deaths. Hearing all that, it would seem to the authorities quoted by Burton that, saving the nomenclature, there was but very little difference between the beliefs that they held, and the beliefs held by the scientific man of the twentieth century.

Or move a step further. Would not the cures of certain ills that afflict men seem strikingly similar? Holding to the typhoid case, we can imagine the men of Burton’s day having located the polluted water, solemnly exorcising the spirit of the pond and forbidding its use for a number of days, or as would probably be the case, causing the bad water to be drained away so as to deprive the evil spirit of its habitat and thus cause it to fly away—in either case there would be potential safety. As for the patient, he would be secluded and kept quiet to the end that the evil spirit in possession of his body would leave, which, at bottom, is strongly like the modern approved method of keeping a typhoid patient quiet and letting nature work her wonder of healing.

There is this again, a pregnant passage: “Sometimes a strong conceit or apprehension ... will produce real effects. Men, if they see but another man tremble, giddy, or sick of some fearful disease, their apprehension and fear is so strong in this kind, that they will have the same disease.” He goes on to relate instances of imaginative sicknesses, then considering the other phase of the matter, as “how a strong conceit will take away sicknesses on occasion,” refers to spells, words, characters and charms, and the power of imagination and determination in curing hypochondriacs, so that we remember Dr. Coue, the faith-healers, and Christian Scientists of our own day. And mark this: “All the world knows that there is no virtue in such charms, or cures, but a strong conceit and opinion alone.” There you have the whole truth of the matter. Your man of morbid possibilities or of strangely susceptible nerves is cured by an amulet today as he was three hundred years ago. Imagination does the trick. The more a man reads, the more he thinks, the less is he likely to look upon the old with mere good-natured contempt. Somehow the silver thread of a tarnished truth joins old and new, ancient and modern.

Wonderfully close, we gather from Burton, did some old scholars approach to modern practice. There was Erasistratus, to take one example, who traced the majority of sicknesses to indigestion processes, and, as Henry Osborn Taylor has said in his study of Greek Biology and Medicine, “conceived illness as resulting from the loading of the parts of the organism with insufficiently digested food matter; which prevented the organism from functioning.” Not for him was fever or headache a special disease, but a symptom. That, as you know and as I know, is a truth not yet grasped by the average man. Do not nine people out of ten still hold headache to be a disease per se? Do not manufacturers of patent medicines grow rich putting their nostrums on the market? And it is only a few weeks since I heard a strange thing. I was in a barber’s chair, the man working on me, when a countryman came in.

“I want some strong tonic,” said he. “What kind?” asked the barber. “Well,” answered the fellow, “my wife she’s got headache and she wants some tonic to go through her head.” Not to lose good pence, the barber left me, took from his show case a couple of bottles of hair tonic and offered them. “The red color looks stronger than the green,” said the countryman. “It is,” agreed the barber. So the trade was closed, the hair tonic sold for a dollar, and, doubtless, the good wife found her ailment relieved.

As for that Paganism and Pantheism of which Burton writes, every observant man knows how we are prone to imaginatively endow such things with which we come into frequent contact, with a kind of spiritual life. To do so is human. The child is positive that her doll knows grief and joy and loneliness. And every man who has planted and watched and tended a tree is conscious of an affection for it. Your mechanic working day after day with machines, likes this one, mistrusts that, resents a slighting word said of another. In a roundhouse this locomotive has a good reputation and another a bad, while every sailor of the old school spoke of his ship in terms of endearment.

A word too as to the collocation of certain letters by way of charm. Much has been made of that. But have we abandoned that kind of thing? If so, what of the mystic meaning attributed to the letters on a secret society charm or button? What of the insignia? The ritual? Vast results are still attributed to that kind of thing.

In another connection I would like to steal the words of Lynn Thorndike, Professor of History in Western Reserve University, who has made a study and written two volumes on the History of Magic and Experimental Science during the first thirteen centuries of our era. “If not sheer intolerance,” he says (p. 981 vol. ii) “what else than survivals or revivals of ritual are all those conventions of dress and etiquette which are supposed to distinguish ladies and gentlemen from their fellow human beings? ‘Good form’ is one of the last lines of trenches by which stupidity endeavors to hold its conquest of inheritance or—shall we say—native soil of responsibility? And how much we are forced to hear of literary or of social charm! Is such charm any less fleeting and fallacious than the magic charm from which it takes its name? Does it retard truth or retard civilization? Is not the man without it, who has to be twice as efficient in order to secure the same position as the man with it, the truth builder? Does such personal charm add any more to its possessor’s real value to society than the incantation of the ancient artizan did to his industrial process? We believe that it does, but so did he. Or who can marvel at past belief in the magic power of words, who hears statesmen speak and millions shout of Militarism, Unconditional Surrender, Nationality, Democracy, Prohibition, Socialism, and Bolshevism? What fear, what hopes, what passions, what prejudices, what sacrifices these words elicit! And how little agreement there is as to their meaning! If our illustrations are somewhat frivolous and superficial, let us measure the amount of magic in present civilization by Plotinus’ standard. He who yields to the charms of love and family affection or seeks political power or aught else than Truth and true beauty or even he who searches for beauty in inferior things; he who is deceived by appearances, he who follows irrational inclinations, is as truly bewitched as if he were the victim of magic and goetia so-called. The life of reason is alone free from magic. Measuring our age by such a standard, we shall be tempted to cry out, Magic of Magics, all is magic!”

CONCERNING STARS

“I will not stand here to discuss obiter, whether there be causes and signs; or to apologize for judicial astrology,” writes Burton, and so plunges into the question of Planetary influence. But first a word of warning to the effect that while it is the fashion to roughly dismiss what some are loosely prone to dismiss as “the olden time” as a period when there was striking unanimity of beliefs, any thoughtful man will be prepared to accept something altogether different and to hold that there always were disbelievers, some active, many passive, and that at no period of history was there any unanimous belief. So with astrology then. To be sure, reading Aristotle’s Secret of Secrets we find much that is astrological, Alexander being advised “not to rise up or sit down or eat or drink or do anything without consulting a man skilled in the art of astronomy,” and all that kind of thing. Still, even with that, when the power of monarchs is remembered, there is ground for suspicion that the astrologers, trading in mysteries, may have thought to rule the all powerful one with the rod of superstition. Brains versus brute force, as it were. I have always had my suspicions as to the sincerity of the professors of astrology, present as well as past. Even Aristotle I would rather believe had a little bit of the rogue in him, rather than the fool. Otherwise, how think you would a man with his cultural and intellectual attainments have squared his constellatory precautions with his belief in necessity? For if, according to the stars, such and such was the fate of a man, why worry? My guess is that Aristotle knew the human credulity and superstitious fears of the dull witted Alexander and traded on them to his own security. Thus, in the advice offered to Alexander by Aristotle, the monarch is warned against the taking of medicines, against suffering bleeding, against conducting his wars without the guidance of the astrologers. There was wisdom and there was safety in the advice, I think, safety both for the philosopher and for the king. As to disbelievers in general, they were not wanting, as we shall see.

It seems to me that we will be fairly safe, in the long run, to remember that man in the mass was, in Burton’s day, pretty much as he is today, intellectually and morally and mystically. You will see that today there are no slight traces of superstitious beliefs and people are plentiful who pet their dogmas as Titania caressed the donkey’s head. To be sure we pride ourselves on our material advancement with our airplanes, automobiles, radios, phonographs, newspapers, steam radiators, wireless, poison gas and all that sort of thing, but it would be interesting to know how many in this day and age, make a very comfortable living casting horoscopes, telling fortunes, who peer into the future with crystals, get messages from the beyond with the aid of ouija boards, who read characters and who foretell destinies by handwriting, who set up as palmist experts. Still, while a man five hundred years from now might draw strange conclusions while trying to reconstruct our social life from the advertisements in certain books and papers devoted to theosophy and the occult, he would be far from the truth, as we know.

So we bear that in mind when we read in Burton of Paracelsus who held that “a physician without the knowledge of the stars can neither understand the cause or cure of any disease, ... of gout nor so much as a toothache, except he see the peculiar geniture and scheme of the party affected.” And remembering that there were disbelievers in all days for all things, we recall that Cicero made an attack upon divination, and those who pretended to predict the future, and rejected the contentions of the Chaldeans who held that at the moment of a man’s birth, not only his personality, but the events of his life were determined by the position of the stars and planets. For Cicero saw that while many were born at the some moment as Homer, there was but one Homer, and, like the true logician that he was, asked whether it was reasonable to believe that all the men who perished at Cannae were born at the some moment. Then there was Favorinus who bluntly denounced all horoscope readers as tricksters and mountebanks, and suggested that the utter folly of astrology was shown by the self-evident fact that while astrologers had admitted on challenge that twins were not similar in disposition because they were not born at the same precise moment, yet it was quite manifest that the divinity men could by no means measure the position of the stars with any exactness, and, further, that there were, probably, stars which men could not see because of their distance of position, but yet which must influence, if planetary influence was admitted.

Nevertheless, in Burton’s day as well as in the days long before his time, which he passes in review, we find diviners pretending to great and wonderful powers, and in all countries making a lean or fat living. There is a host of them, Burton tells us, divining by the elements, by the air, by fire, by water, by earth, by evil spirits, by images and figures, by entrails of birds, by entrails of beasts, and fishes, by herbs, by dreams, by numbers, by names, by the navel, by marks on the belly, by the hands, by the feet, by asses’ heads, by ashes, by smoke, by the burning of incense, by the melting of wax in water, by looking glasses, by crystals, by stars, by shadows, by dice, by the lees of wine (modernized into tea leaves and still practiced by thousands of old women in the British Isles), by meal or flour. Each of these, be it said, had its high sounding name to impress the ignorant, Gyromancy, or Sciomancy, or Dactylomancy. As for Oneirocriticism, or the art of interpreting dreams, that is, of all, the most popular superstition perhaps.

Burton has something to say on Cheiromancy, or, as we would have it today, on palmistry, and quotes authorities, then, as if he could use his time to better purpose, brushes it aside with, “I am over tedious in these toys, which, howsoever, in some men’s too severe censures, they may be held absurd and ridiculous, I am the bolder to insert, as not borrowed from circumforeanean Rogues and Gipsies, but out of the writing of worthy philosophers and physicians, yet living some of them, and religious professors in famous universities, who are able to patronize that which they have said, and vindicate themselves from all cavillers and ignorant persons.”

As in a thick forest, when we march, though we think we are on the straight road, it is well to stop now and again to consult the compass, or failing that, to climb a tree and correct our course by the stars or the sun, so it is well to halt a moment in Burton’s wonderful maze. What he is doing is following out his chart step by step, trying to see if there is any truth in the supposition that the melancholy of man is induced by circumstances over which he has no control, or, if it is a something “wished upon him” as we would say, if there is any way to offset the evil by following any occult school. Only one ray of helpful light has been seen thus far and that is that “sometimes a strong conceit or apprehension ... will produce real effects.”

But it is time, he considers, to pass to man himself, after thoroughly exhausting all considerations of outward influence, so he takes up the question of heredity.

HEREDITY

So we come to a consideration of temperament, and Burton cites instances, new to some, old as the hills to others. First he quotes Bacon, saying: “Where the complexion of the father is corrupt, there the complexion and constitution of the son must needs be corrupt, and so the corruption is derived from the father to the son.” The which Moses, and many others, taught generations before. Yet it is a truth constantly lost sight of, as constantly re-discovered. Indeed it seems to those who have accepted it, so true as almost to be platitudinous. Almost it would seem that we might accept the truth of heredity as we accept the truth that 7×7=49. But not so. I pick up Dr. Strahan’s book Suicide and Insanity to find a passage in which he tells us that several distinguished writers have, by carefully following the family history of suicides, been able to demonstrate how frequently suicide runs in families. “This has been shown by these authorities to occur with alarming frequency, yet it only touches upon one form of heredity, the direct, in which heredity is only admitted in those cases where the abnormal character is identical in both ancestor and descendant.” Again, in another place: “... we must not confine the term ‘heredity’ to suicides who have had suicidal relations, but to most of those among whose relatives we discover insanity, epilepsy, idiocy, scrofula and the like.” Which is very well, but we go to old Burton for something else. For the old writer, his nose close to the trail, dares and dares greatly, rising far above considerations of sentimentality and considering ways to mend matters. He gathers his data, looks at it, arranges it, studies it and sees that diseased people should not be allowed to contaminate the race and increase suffering and misery by propagating unfitness. He looks on mankind from a height, as it were, just as a chicken breeder looks at his birds. This cock has an imperfect comb, therefore off goes his head. We want no imperfect combs. This hen is improperly barred and this chick is what is called “smutty,” then to the chopping block with them!

More than that, for he perceives what many of our modern legislators and fanatics and imitation patriots refuse to see—that a people which has not injected new blood, will degenerate. You stop immigration in any nation and you make for weakness, not strength. “In all ages there should be ... once in 600 years, a transmigration of nations, to amend and purify their blood, as we alter seed upon our lands, and ... there should be, as it were, an inundation of those northern Goths and Vandals, and many such like people which came out of that continent of Scandia, and Sarmatia ... and over ran as a deluge, most part of Europe and Africa, to alter for our good our complexions, which were much defaced with hereditary infirmities, which by our lust and intemperance we had contracted.”

Per contra, Burton would have had something to say in regard to deportations and those who, in hysterical days, might have stood more than a fair chance to be thrust oceans away, those in many cases whose works might have “amended and purified.” Small chance would Percy Bysshe Shelley have stood to stay with us; nor Edmund Burke; nor Oliver Cromwell; and W. S. Gilbert would have stood on dangerous ground; perhaps too William Morris, and certainly Shaw, and Tolstoy, and Kropotkine, and Ruskin, and Hobbes of the Leviathan, and John Stuart Mill, and Auberon Herbert, and Lord Byron, while Mr. Sumner would have had Bobbie Burns in trouble in no time. And certainly, Burton would be far from welcomed by the K. K. K.

Again: “So many ways,” writes Burton, “are we plagued and punished for our fathers’ defaults,” then goes on to complain, as our students and teachers of eugenics complain, that a man will not rear a bull or horse “except he be right shapen in all parts, or permit him to cover a mare, except he be well assured of his breed,” yet, in the raising of children we take no heed. He quotes Boethius, who, writing of old Scotland, declared that “if any were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such dangerous disease, which was likely to be propagated from the father to the son, he was instantly gelded; a woman kept from all company of men; and if by chance, having some such disease, she were found to be with child, she and her child were buried alive.” Burton ponders over that, then declares himself all for prevention of the propagation of the unfit in the interests of humanity. Says he near the end of his rumination, “A severe doom, you will say, and not to be used among Christians, yet more to be looked into than it is. For now, by our too much facility in this kind, in giving away for all to marry that will, too much liberty and indulgence in tolerating all sorts, there is a vast confusion of hereditary disease, no family secure, no man almost free from some grievous infirmity or other. When no choice is had, but still the eldest must marry, as so many stallions of the race; or if rich, they be fooled by dizzards, lame or maimed, unable, intemperate, dissolute, exhaust through riot ... they must be wise and able by inheritance; it comes to pass that our generation is corrupt, we may have many weak persons, both in body and mind, many feral diseases raging amongst us, crazed families, parentes peremptores, (our fathers the cause of our ruin), our fathers bad, and we are likely to be worse.” Burton and Havelock Ellis, you see, stretch hands across the ages. The old timer is very much akin to the modern eugenist.

The trouble is, and Burton saw it, that while we may realize that our descendants may pay the penalty for disobeying those principles of the universe, obedience to which makes for health, we are entirely without thought for our unborn children and their children’s children. When pleasure offers, all else is nowhere at all. Indeed, by his very nature man can have no care for that which does not exist, and he no more thinks with affection of future generations which may proceed from his own loins, than he thinks with affection of his remote ancestors that wallowed in the slime.

UNWHOLESOME LIVING

So long as we are, nationally, what we are, and so long as there are those who see filth because it hangs like a film forever before their eyes, there are parts and chapters, paragraphs and quotations and passages in Burton which we must pass over with a mere nod lest evil befall the man who writes and he who publishes this book. For, from a discussion of over-eating and under-eating, Burton considers what he calls Retention and Evacuation, weighing the pros and cons in re sexual gratification and continence. Repression and prohibition too closely observed are, to the notion of Burton, not conducive to the higher life. His is akin to the Baxian philosophy, which, rudely put, compares the telos of life to a kind of game of whist in which the player, that is, the human race, endeavors with all its might to make six necessary tricks: (1) good and sufficient food and drink; (2) satisfactory and comfortable housing; (3) warm and proper clothing; (4) fuel and light; (5) unhindered locomotion, and (6) adequate sexual satisfaction. With these accomplished, Bax thinks, the final purpose of the deal, which is the extended horizon, the vision, the satisfactory life will be quite impossible. So long as man or woman lacks any one of these, his or her horizon must necessarily be filled with longing for the desired or the lacking thing. But when all these have become part of the ordinary life, then they cease to be objects of interest, so that the mind is free for higher things. Lacking any one of these real physical necessities, a man may be compared to one with the stomachache and unable to rise to any considerations other than his ailment. Cure him and he is ready to go on with his writing, his making of a sonata, his painting of a picture. The position seems to be pregnant with common sense and one recalls Benvenuto Cellini getting hampering things out the way so that the path for the real business may be open.

Indeed, that a vast field for speculation is open in this respect seems to be proven by the fact that Americans and English people, Americans especially, are much occupied with the first of the tricks, or questions of diet. The names of Upton Sinclair, of Dr. Tilden, of Dr. Christian, to mention a few, spring to mind. We remember the advertisements and the chewing gum people claiming health-giving properties for their product; we see cards in the cars bidding us eat meat, ham, health bread, yeast; Coca Cola is urged upon us together with a half hundred other drinks, and ice cream, and mouth washes, and dentrifices, and near-beer. There is no appeal to other than desire. And yet, it seems that many of the things urged upon us do not make for wholesome living. Certainly I get along very well without nine-tenths of them. Or to tell the truth I find some of the things urged upon us as being far from desirable. For if that physiology I learned as a lad has not passed into the realm of superstition, then I should say that chewing gum, for instance, was a something better avoided than sought. The idea would interest Burton vastly as it interests me. For as whoso chews constantly, whether tobacco or gum, must needs use saliva, and, therefore, there must be constant secretion of ptyalin, so that at meal times, when a supply of ptyalin is necessary to change starchy matters into glucose, there must needs be insufficient ptyalin, wherefore the first act of digestion would not be completed, and, therefore, a condition of indigestion would be exacerbated and not relieved.

But to return to Burton. Just as he tells us that the people seem ready to listen to anything that flatters their self esteem, so we of today lend too ready an ear to the superheated atmosphere men, to the chautauqua spell-binders and lyceum lecturers, the patriotic orators and the pinchbeck uplifters. Accordingly we have become as it were hypnotized into a kind of belief that all men born between the Canadian border and the Rio Grande are automatically ambitious, brave, courteous, distinguished, energetic, frank, generous, healthy and all the rest. Especially healthy. We are, indeed, in our own conceit possessed of all the good qualities, and are national monopolists of all desirable temperaments. Wherefore it seems strange that a large percentage of our advertisements are devoted to the recital of ills that afflict men, together with an offering of the nostrums to cure from Ague down to Pyorrhea. So a stranger to our civilization would certainly be led to judge us as by our advertisements, as a people on the verge of physical exhaustion. As for that melancholy of which Burton writes, and of which he seeks a cure, what of the pictures as given in such more or less true to life books and stories as Many Marriages, as One of Ours, as Dust, as Ruth Suckow’s Renters, as the people of Ben Hecht, or of Miss Winslow. Do you find pictures of a nation gay and jovial? Of a people jealous of liberty and quick on the trigger to resent encroachment? Of men and women and children full of gladness because of sunlight and shadow, of mountain and valley, of sunrise and sunset? Not by any means. On the contrary, you find pictures of people worried, discontented, oppressed, full of ennui, eager to escape from themselves and at outs with their surroundings. Just such a melancholy people as Burton tells of.

And another thing is important, bearing as it does on those six words with which Burton offers his anodyne, for, obviously, the book of Burton is but as dust and ashes if it bears no relation to your life and mine, and deals with a something in which we are not at all interested. This is that other thing. Seeing ourselves, we behold a people priding itself on a purely theoretical activity, while at heart the people should rather be styled physically lazy. Consider. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand of us will sit watching a league game, or a prize fight, or a football match, but few, very few of that same crowd will join in a scrub game, or put on the gloves and take a pounding. That is so true as to need no demonstration. We do not play, but we look on at play. We take our exercise by proxy. Or on a Sunday, will your tired businessman walk five or ten miles into the country? Or will he drop into a street car, or into a Ford, or into another man’s car? Nor are things different with the man in the country. Given a spare hour and there is a squatting in the shade of the barn, or a buggy ride to the nearest brush arbor preacher, or on week day a dragging to the nearest picture show where he sits in vitiated air gazing idly at shadows satisfied to waste time looking at what is almost never an accurate and truthful representation of life. So, if you will but go about with open eyes, you will see a widespread spirit of unrest and semi-melancholia but no enthusiastic or joyous spirit. Mind you, we must exclude exciting things such as Coney Islands and Electric parks, for they, after all, are but commercialized things to make those overcome by dreariness forget, and he who mistakes such excitements for pleasure has a mean and wretched point of view. Foolish wastefulness and ugly riot is not joy. That is true joy which helps us, invigorates us, enriches our lives. If we realized that, if we determined to live life more on our own terms, to enjoy the world about us, the natural world and not the artificial, the real thing and not the froth and ripple, there would be fewer books written about sulky, moody wives, dull, preoccupied and discontented youths, Main Streets of hopelessness, Spoon Rivers of pessimism, cities of grotesque dullness—for such are the dominant notes in present-day literature. I reject the obviously false pictures made by O. Henry for popular consumption, for such can hardly be called true pictures, being conventional and rather unpleasing representations of an impossible world of youthful innocence and manly perfection.

I shall not spend time in drawing parallels between the social conditions of Burton’s time and our own. The application is easy. Burton lived and made his book in the midst of a kind of buzzing religious confusion. The full splendor of the Elizabethan dramatist had not burst on the world in glory and there was all the gloomy shadowland of religious intolerance. His book was published in 1621 and the writing and preparation took, we know not how many years. So we think of influences and of social atmosphere. We remember that uncheerful thoughts occupied the minds of men because of many things. The ponderous and seriously stupid man was abroad and things were looming up that made later for all that puritanical prohibition under the Commonwealth; that resulted in the closing of all theaters in 1642, and much more. Again, there were too many bibles for comfort, each bible with its fanatic ready to make others fight for it—the Douay bible in 1609, the King James bible in 1611; Miles Coverdale’s bible in 1535; Cramer’s bible in 1540. There were other burdening things, too—Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, the dull tragedians Greene and Peele, and Kyd, and Nash, and Marlowe; John Lyly’s Euphues; burnings and pressings to death, public whippings, lifelong imprisonments, the suppression of expressed opinion, the see-sawing of Catholic and Protestant tyrannies. With all this there were none of the glories to be found abroad, none of the magnificencies of Michael Angelo, of Titian, of Raphael, of Palestrina, of Montaigne. And there was the echo and fruit of European wars and that more or less acute malaise that affects all nations following any wholesale man-killing. For they were days of the French religious wars, of the lively career of Philip II of Spain, of the Dutch rebellion, or the Armada. They were the days following the stir created by Luther and Calvin and Loyola. Not that all these happened at once, nor in the same years, but the disturbances created by them were rife.

Looking about then, on the society around him, the old divine and student saw much that seemed to him very like hopeless confusion, much that looked perilous. Above all there was interference—fulminations against the manner of living, against the manner of dressing, against anything and everything. Then, as now, there were complaints anent the growing levity. You may read them in Burton and you may read them in old Harrison’s Chronologie. “... women’s ... staring attire as in time past was supposed meet for none but light housewives only now is become a habit for chaste and sober matrons. What shall I say of their doublets with pendant cod-pieces on the breast full of jags and cuts, and sleeves of sundry colors? Their galligascons to beat out their bums and make their attire to fit plum round (as they term it) about them.” The same old complaints, you see. The main difference I find between that day and ours was in the case of the farmer who seems to have had the best of it in the sixteenth and seventeenth century before all the things that he had to buy were taxed to support infant industry. Harrison comments on the fact that though rents had risen, “the farmer ... thinks his gains very small toward the end of his term if he have not six or seven years rent lying by him therewith to purchase a new lease.” In short, so well situated was the farmer in the day of Harrison, and matters had not changed for the worse up to the days of Burton, that it was written that the farmer’s affairs “shall never trouble him more than the hair of his beard when the barber hath washed and shaved it from his chin.”

So in the interference all about, Burton stood for moderation, not furiously denouncing at any time, but frowning upon those who are forever laying down rules and regulations as to this, that and the other; denouncing those who overeat, mildly; denouncing mildly too those “who draw ... mischief on their heads by too ceremonious and strict diet, being over precise, Cockney like and curious in their observation of meats, times ... just so many ounces at dinner ... so much at supper, not a little more, not a little less of such meat and at such hours.” He sees danger too rolling up for those who are “tired of everything, displeased with it all, weary of life,” and he is no less suspicious of those who mistake a feverish activity for real busy-ness, thus coming close to the aforementioned Dr. Strahan who holds that “it is not probable that the civilization of any of the nations of antiquity had anything like the same injurious effect upon the people that our modern Western civilization has. None of the earlier peoples ever experienced the feverish haste, the terrible wear and tear, and the prolonged mental strain suffered by most of the civilized peoples of this latter part of the century. Tranquillity and repose have almost become unknown. The news of yesterday from the whole known world is presented to us each morning with our coffee.... We take our rest as we fly through space at fifty or sixty miles an hour, and expect to find ourselves fitted for the labors of another day on rising.” But it is significant that while the alienist wrote that thirty years ago, since then the speeds that he deplores have increased and man has tried to absorb automobiles, flying machines, radios and what not. But we bear in mind that he held that the feverish life thus described produced suicides, lunatics, criminals, and recruited the inmates for the asylums for the blind, deaf, dumb and idiotic. Then there is a Dr. O’Dee, much quoted by Strahan, who pointed out that “white men destroy themselves (by committing suicide) in the United States at the average rate of 40 to a million inhabitants, while negroes, living in the same environment but not under the same strain, have a suicide record of ten times less frequent.” So the complaint rings through the ages—Strahan bemoaning the feverish haste before the advent of automobiles, Burton doing the same before the days of stage coaches or newspapers. Is it then a world growing steadily more mad? Perhaps the truth is that man of today is much as man was thirty years ago, and the man of thirty years ago was much as was the man in 1621. Mere material advancement has made no change in him and your man of an excitable temperament can get as much feverish excitement by dancing about a May pole as another could in riding a merry-go-round, or still another by shooting along a road in a racing auto. There is quite as much excitement in shooting craps as in playing Ma Jong, and it is quite possible to become hilarious over a game of ping-pong.

But the high road to melancholia, in Burton’s opinion, is what he calls “voluntary solitariness,” and he is all against day dreaming and the idle building of castles in the air. Well enough at the beginning, he holds, but “so delightsome these toys are at first, they could spend days and nights without sleep, even whole years alone in such contemplation, phantastical meditations, which are like unto dreams, and they will hardly be drawn from them, or willingly interrupt. So pleasant their vain conceits are, that they hinder their ordinary tasks and necessary business, they cannot address themselves to them, or almost to any study of employment, these phantastical and bewitching thoughts so covertly, so feelingly, so urgently, so continually, set upon, creep in, insinuate, possess, overcome, distract, etc., and detain them, they cannot, I say, go about their necessary business, stave off or extricate themselves, but are forever musing, moralizing, melancholizing and carried along ... they run on in this labyrinth of anxious and solicitous melancholy meditations, and cannot well or willingly refrain, or easily leave off, winding and unwinding themselves, as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at last the scene is turned all of a sudden, by some bad object, and they, being now habituated in such vain meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can ruminate of nothing but harsh and distasteful objects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, discontent and weariness of life surprise them in a moment, and they can think of nothing else; continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes opened but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth upon them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds, which now by no means, by no labor can they avoid, haeret lateri letalis arundo—the deadly arrow remains in their sides—they cannot be rid of it, they cannot resist.”

A remarkable passage that, I think, and one which well describes the gradual sinking into the slough of despondency of the recluse. Yet Burton discriminates. He is careful to show that there is a profitable solitude, a withdrawing from the noise and confusion to the end that minds may be free to find themselves and to work out desired problems. For Euclid, it is clear, could never resolve his mathematical problems in the ruck of the market place. There is such a thing as rigorous thinking which is not to be confused with mooning. Between the two is a gulf fixed and the one way leads to strength, the other to the madhouse. There was no madness in the solitude of Thoreau, though there certainly was not sanity in the solitude of Simeon Stylites on his pillar.

En passant, it seems well to say here that there has been cited the melancholy of certain great men as proof of the theory that genius and madness are allied. But that is pernicious nonsense. True we know that Chateaubriand, Napoleon, Cowper, Rousseau, Lamartine and many others tried to put an end to their lives. True too that the Epicurean as well as the Stoics preached the freedom to terminate life when the cloud of despair and melancholy was upon them. True also that by their own hands died Charondas, and Themistocles, and Demosthenes, and Zeno, and Hannibal, and Cato, and Brutus, and Mark Antony, and Chatterton, and Clive, and Boulanger, and a half hundred others. But the cases have special features and there is a rational as well as an irrational suicide. As for others, men of genius who have allowed their melancholy to overcome them, there is food for thought in the fact that the expenditure of energy in one direction left them weak in another. Generalization will not do, is unsafe, and leads nowhere.

So we pass to the self-pitying folk, the “half idiots” of Burton, those who allow themselves to slide to the border line, who coddle themselves into madness, the auto-hypnotizers that he has in mind. For the world is full of them—half baked intelligentsia. They are the decadents. They are the emotionalists. You see their kind pictured in the sorry hero of Sherwood Anderson’s Many Marriages, a fellow who, did he live next house to yours, you would regard with keen suspicion, knowing his queerness. Certainly no healthy specimen. Or remember the character Des Essintes in Huysman’s A Rebours, one all wrapped in idle meditation who banishes everything that is wholesome and natural from his life. Or see the black side of Baudelaire in his Reve Parisien. No. It will not do to sheer from the line in thought or in deed. We must, we must and we must believe in discipline of self. We must hold fast to a belief in self reliance and independence. And we must cleave to that habit which Burton sums up in a half dozen words. Seeing Rossini mooning until he became a victim of his own self-manufactured devil, we wish that he had been possessed of more self-reliance, but we do not attribute his folly to his genius. So also learning that Voltaire was on occasion hypochrondriacal and that Moliere at one period of his life suffered from melancholia, we do not generalize, saying, thus they were because they were great, but rather, if we are wise, look upon the misfortunes of both exactly as we regard the club foot of Byron, or the unfortunate accident that deprived the Count de Zichy of an arm and so hampered an extraordinary pianist. That is what Burton holds too, and we mark his closing words in the passage on Solitude: “Thou hast lost thyself wilfully, cast away thyself, thou thyself are the efficient cause of thine own misery, by not resisting such vain cogitations, but giving way unto them.” For we may discover men without mental aberration whose names we place high. I cite William Morris, Galileo, Thackeray, Huxley, Thoreau, Henry George, Leonardo da Vinci, Moses, Whitman—masculine men all, fellows without fads, who did a day’s work and faced the little trivialities of life too. For each of them, and more, was given to rigorous thinking and not to mooning. That is important to remember.

POVERTY AND WANT

I pass over much, weighty paragraphs by the hundred, learned arguments by the dozen, two score and more of closely printed pages. Burton has much to say and says much that this day needs to hear, especially on the dangers of Hate, and Greed, of dwelling too long on sex, of giving way to idle worry, of Jealousy, of Envy, of Malice, of dwelling too much on the future. Reading all this we come to understand old Dr. Johnson better and know why the man of Lichfield was the philosopher that he was, for he owed no end of his philosophy to Burton. But time is short, so we leap to salient things, especially to a kind of discussion of fundamental economics.

Poverty may be a way to Heaven, says Burton, and a thing much to be preferred to riches, yet, in the eyes of the world “it is a most odious calling, vile and base, a severe torture, almost intolerable burden, we shun it all, cane pejus et angue, (worse than a dog or a snake) we abhor the name of it being the fountain of all other miseries, cares, woes, labors, and grievances whatsoever. To avoid which we will leave no haven, no coast, no creek of the world unsearched, though it be to the hazard of our lives; we will dive to the bottom of the sea, to the bowels of the earth, five, six, seven, eight, or nine hundred fathoms deep, through all five zones, and both extremes of heat and cold; we will turn parasites and slaves, prostitute ourselves, swear and lie, damn our bodies and souls, forsake God, adjure religion, steal, rob, murder, rather than endure this unsufferable yoke of poverty, which doth so tyrannize, crucify and generally depress us.” Burton comes very near indeed to the Nietzschean idea that man poor, loses dignity in his own eyes, therefore strives with might and main to avoid the unblissful state.

Then follows a long and powerful piece of sarcasm. Small matter, Burton tells us, that the divines preach about Lazarus and Dives, the rich man, in the eyes of the world, possesses all the virtues, and if his vices be so large that no cloak can hide them, then the world turns a blind eye on them. Be a man never so great a fool, yet, by the power of his money he may gain places and preferment, may govern this and that, control all kinds of things. Nay more. Because he has the strangle-hold, few will there be to dispute his word or argue against his opinion. All will be subservient to him in all things “for wealth sways all.” To get away from poverty, all men are eager, in spite of all counsels of perfection to the contrary.

Burton strikes at the root of things, and, in a way, what he says, forms the answer to Upton Sinclair’s tantalizing Goose Step. For idealist as Sinclair may be, sincere as he is in his hatred of capitalism and all that hangs on it, earnest beyond doubt as he is in his desire that universities may be freed from the grip of those who have at heart the continuance of the present system, and that professors and students in universities shall be free to speak as they choose; yet, at bottom, things are as they are because no very considerable body of men wish to change them or to see them changed. “Wealth sways all” because those most concerned are happy that it should be so. It is something like this. Universities as they are cannot exist upon student’s fees, and university professors on the whole are ambitious for the aggrandizement of the institutions that they gain their livelihood by. As to industry, it is taxed to death, and where the expenditure is concerned, Mars is preferred before Minerva. So comes, not the monopolizing hand of the wealthy man reached out to strangle and compress, but the subtle invitation to the wealthy man to take his seat on the directorate, because, as old Burton says, “all eyes are upon him, God Bless His Worship! His Honor! Every man speaks well of him, seeks and sues to him for his love, favor, protection, to serve him, to belong to him.” And there’s the rub. Men seek to belong to the man of wealth. They always have. They probably always will while human nature is what it is. As for your hypothetical professor panting to speak his open thought, he simply does not exist. Or speaking his open thought, he finds himself in company with Scott Nearing. For the average professor is a diligent seeker of the crumbs that fall from the table of Dives, he loves to bask in the smile of the great. It is to his interest to perpetuate the very thing that Upton Sinclair seeks to destroy, or at least deplores its perpetuation. I speak from knowledge, for I have been in the mart where stocks and bonds are bought and sold and know how every penny that your professor can scrape together will go into little picayunish investments, in buying odd lots of stocks. Every stockbroker in a small way of business knows the same. That little knot of professors and educators gathered on the campus is not usually discussing Aristotle, or Relativity, or the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books. Cock an ear and you will most assuredly detect fragments of conversation such as “I bought three shares of so and so,” or “I bought Italian Lire and German Marks,” or “I got hold of a little Anaconda copper.” Either something like that or the telling of tales of how “my friend so and so who is worth three millions, said this that and the other.” Certainly, as to your rich man, the professor seeks “to belong to him,” as Burton has it. And so long as that is the case, all the fire that burns in the belly of Upton Sinclair must burn in vain.

THE SIX WORDS

I have given some indication then of the general trend of the Anatomy of Melancholy, cutting my coat according to my cloth, and I hope that I have made clear the strong, straightforward manner of the man, his lucidity and patient industry, his uncompromising truth telling, the sincere and scholarly tang in him. Certainly his reputation though it can never be a popular one, is well established in the judgment of the thoughtful. In his book, though it seems to be a triangle, he does not shift feebly from track to track, but follows his light.

Like many another, great and small, he tries to find for himself the greatest thing in life and he finds it in things educational. But mark you, not in the mere acquisition of facts acid and meaningless, not the outside of things. Something altogether different in fact. At bottom, “to be chained together with so many good authors,” is the most glorious of blessings. But to what end? That’s the point. Certainly not that there may be a sort of shining in society, certainly not that we may become one of those bewildered dogmatists scientific and religious, and certainly not that we may be classed with those superior and sneering ones of which Nietzsche speaks. But this. That we may come to the discipline of self; that we shall be such men that there may be mutual understanding and that one shall think aloud in the company of his fellow; that we shall be glad enough to work truly and nobly and without ceasing; that we shall come to heartily believe in self-reliance and independence and in freedom. For the happy man is he who realizes that true education is self-discipline and that the best citizen is the man who remains sane in a frothy world, who is a center of order in a scene of disorder. So comes this notable passage:

“Amongst exercises or receptions of the mind within-doors, there is none so general, so aptly to be applied to all sorts of men, so fit and proper to expel idleness and melancholy, as that of study. What so full of content as to read, walk, and see maps, pictures, statues, jewels, marbles, which some so much magnify as those that Phidias made of old, so exquisite and pleasing to be beheld, that, as Chrysostom thinketh, ‘if any man be sickly, troubled in mind, or that cannot sleep for grief, and shall but stand over against one of Phidias’ images, he will forget all care, or whatsoever else may molest him, in an instant.’ There be those as much taken with Michael Angelo’s, Raphael de Urbino’s Francesco Francia’s pieces, and many of those Italian and Dutch painters, which were excellent in their age; and esteem of it as a most pleasing sight to view those neat architectures, devices, scutcheons, coats of arms, read such books, to peruse old coins of several sorts in a fair gallery, artificial works, perspective glasses, old reliques, Roman antiquities, variety of colours. A good picture is falsa veritas, et muta poesis, and though (as Vives saith), artificatia delectant, sed mox fastidimus, artificial toys please but for a time; yet who is he that will not be moved with them for the present? When Achilles was tormented and sad for the loss of his dear friend Patroclus, his mother Thetis brought him a most elaborate and curious buckler made by Vulcan, in which were engraven sun, moon, stars, planets, sea, land, men fighting, running, riding, women scolding, hills, dales, towns, castles, brooks, rivers, trees, etc.; with many pretty landskips and perspective pieces; with sight of which he was infinitely delighted....

“King James (1605), when he came to see our university at Oxford, and amongst other edifices, now went to view that famous library, renewed by Sir Thomas Bodley, in imitation of Alexander, at his departure, brake out into that noble speech: ‘If I were not a king, I would be an university man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that library, and to be chained together with so many good authors, et mortuis magistris.’ So sweet is the delight of study, the more learning they have—as he that hath a dropsy, the more drinks, the thirstier he is—the more they covet to learn, and the last day is prioris discipulus; harsh at first, learning is radices amaroe, but fructus dulces, according to that of Isocrates, pleasant at last; the longer they live, the more they are enamored with the Muses. Heinsius, the keeper of the library at Leyden in Holland, was mewed up in it all the year long; and that which, to thy thinking, should have bred a loathing, caused in him a greater liking. ‘I no sooner,’ saith he, ‘come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding Lust, Ambition, Avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is Idleness, their mother Ignorance, and Melancholy herself; and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content, that I pity all our great ones and rich men, that know not this happiness.’ I am not ignorant in the meantime, notwithstanding this which I have said, how barbarously and basely our ruder gentry esteem of libraries and books, how they neglect and contemn so great a treasure, so inestimable a benefit, as Aesop’s cock did the jewel he found in the dunghill; and all through error, ignorance, and want of education. And ’tis a wonder withal to observe how much they will vainly cast away in unnecessary expenses, what in hawks, hounds, lawsuits, vain building, gormandising, drinking, sports, plays, pastimes, etc.”

Then we come to the final words, the gist of the book, the central core, the grand discovery, and if you are the kind of man who has gone through the world with open eyes, you cannot do other than have arrived at the same conclusion, though the thing must have seemed so simple that you rejected it as unworthy. Yet at bottom all truths are simple and self-evident. Or, if you have not framed something of the kind for yourself, but have carried an attentive ear and a retentive mind, doubtless it will come to you that you have heard your grandmother say much the same thing. And here is the great secret of happiness, because it is the anodyne to keep man from melancholy.

“Be not solitary, be not idle.”

Then, in capitals:

“SPERATE MISERI,

CAVETE FELICES.”

Transcriber’s Notes

Minor typographical, formatting and spelling errors have been corrected.

The table on p. 22 has been formatted to match the original.

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Table of Contents

The Gist of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

THE GIST OF BURTON’S ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY

ON PROLIXITY

ON THOROUGHNESS

THE GENERAL PLAN

ON WITCHES AND DEVILS

CONCERNING STARS

HEREDITY

UNWHOLESOME LIVING

POVERTY AND WANT

THE SIX WORDS

Transcriber’s Notes

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