A woman
among my readers has been “dipping into,” as she says, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and finding treasure. “Under all the
learning and the Latin quotations,” she writes, “is a lot of insight into human
behavior. [Robert Burton] was like an intelligent psychologist.” She’s right. The
book is more than a quaint and heavily learned curiosity. Overlook the theory
of humors -- black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood – and you discover an
anatomist of our nature (especially our ruling passions, vanity and folly). My
reader savors this lovely metaphor from the Third Partition, Member V, Subsection
III:
“[T]heir
beauty fades as a tree in winter.”
A good
metaphor is immediately understood and delights us with its precision and wit.
Burton’s prose is so dense with information and poetry that we find this little
beauty easy to miss, flanked as it is by a passage from Drayton and another
from Seneca. He is writing of women but men are hardly immune. Keep in mind Burton
titles this subsection “By counsel and persuasion, foulness of the fact, men’s,
women’s faults, miseries of marriage, events of lust, &c.” A few paragraphs
earlier he writes:
“This beauty
is of the body alone, and what is that, but as Gregory Nazianzen telleth us, a
mock of time and sickness? or as Boethius, as mutable as a flower, and ’tis not
nature so makes us, but most part the infirmity of the beholder.”
We’ve all
known young people already anxious about losing their looks, what Dr. Johnson
refers to as “the fortune of a face.” Such vanities fuel vast industries.
Burton continues:
“[L]et her use all helps art and nature can yield;
be like her, and her, and whom thou wilt, or all these in one; a little
sickness, a fever, small-pox, wound, scar, loss of an eye, or limb, a violent
passion, a distemperature of heat or cold, mars all in an instant, disfigures
all; child-bearing, old age, that tyrant time will turn Venus to Erinnys;
raging time, care, rivels her upon a sudden; after she hath been married a
small while, and the black ox hath trodden on her toe, she will be so much
altered, and wax out of favour, thou wilt not know her.”
Burton is
just getting warmed up:
“One grows
to fat, another too lean, &c., modest Matilda, pretty pleasing Peg,
sweet-singing Susan, mincing merry Moll, dainty dancing Doll, neat Nancy, jolly
Joan, nimble Nell, kissing Kate, bouncing Bess, with black eyes, fair Phyllis,
with fine white hands, fiddling Frank, tall Tib, slender Sib, &c., will
quickly lose their grace, grow fulsome, stale, sad, heavy, dull, sour, and all
at last out of fashion. . . . Those fair sparkling eyes will look dull, her
soft coral lips will be pale, dry, cold, rough, and blue, her skin rugged, that
soft and tender superficies will be hard and harsh, her whole complexion change
in a moment.”
2 comments:
I believe Dr. Johnson said that Burton's book was the one book he would arise an hour early in the morning to read.
What about the "Love is blind" passage: "Love is blind, as the saying is, Cupid's blind, and so are all his followers. Quisquis amat ranam, ranam putat esse Dianam. Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, have a swollen juggler's platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed, or with staring eyes, she looks like a squissed cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-eyed, black or yellow about the eyes, or squint-eyed, sparrow-mouthed, Persian hook-nosed, have a sharp fox nose, a red nose, China flat, great nose, nare simo patuloque, a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven, brown teeth, beetle browed, a witch's beard, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer, with a Bavarian poke under her chin, a sharp chin, lave eared, with a long crane's neck, which stands awry too, pendulis mammis, "her dugs like two double jugs," or else no dugs, in that other extreme, bloody fallen fingers, she have filthy, long unpared nails, scabbed hands or wrists, a tanned skin, a rotten carcass, crooked back, she stoops, is lame, splay-footed, "as slender in the middle as a cow in the waist," gouty legs, her ankles hang over her shoes, her feet stink, she breed lice, a mere changeling, a very monster, an oaf imperfect, her whole complexion savours, a harsh voice, incondite gesture, vile gait, a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker (si qua latent meliora puta), and to thy judgment looks like a merd in a lantern, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world, but hatest, loathest, and wouldst have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosom, remedium amoris to another man, a dowdy, a slut, a scold, a nasty, rank, rammy, filthy, beastly quean, dishonest peradventure, obscene, base, beggarly, rude, foolish, untaught, peevish, Irus' daughter, Thersites' sister, Grobians' scholar,
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