'To the Learning of Some Art or Science'

A young reader finds himself attracted to and intimidated by the prospect of reading The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton (1577-1640). I sympathize with his contradictory impulses. The book is vast and densely laced with passages from dozens of writers, ancient to seventeenth century. Burton in his prose loves synonyms and expansive catalogs. He is never minimalist. He is not a man with a twenty-first-century sensibility. Perhaps the writer he most resembles is another polymath, Montaigne, or Sir Thomas Browne. 

Modern editions translate Burton's Latin and other languages. I discovered his book as an undergraduate and read it on my own over a summer. No professor ever told me about the Anatomy. I was already following my brother’s practice at the time – letting one book lead me to the next, whether cited by the author or linked chronologically or by subject. This affirms Burton’s notion that all literature is one, not unlike Borges’ conceit in the prologue to “Catalog of the Exhibition Books from Spain” (1962):

 

“Each in his own way imagines Paradise; since childhood I have envisioned it as a library. Not as an infinite library, because anything infinite is somewhat uncomfortable and puzzling, but as a library fit for a man. A library in which there will always be books (and perhaps shelves) to discover, but not too many. In brief, a library that would allow for the pleasure of rereading, the serene and faithful pleasure of the classics, or the gratifying shock of revelation and of the foreseen.”

 

To read Burton is to visit and consume a library. I have not read his book sequentially, cover to cover, in more than half a century but it is eminently what Max Beerbohm called one of the “bedside books. Dippable-into.” Three editions sit on my shelves and periodically I read a favorite passage or randomly dip in as an act of bibliomancy, usually in the three-volume Everyman's Library edition. Burton himself encourages a prospective reader:

 

“Amongst those exercises, or recreations 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. . . . Who is not earnestly affected with a passionate speech, well penned, an elegant poem, or some pleasant bewitching discourse? . . . To most kind of men it is an extraordinary delight to study. For what a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts, and sciences, to the sweet content and capacity of the reader? In arithmetic, geometry, perspective, optics, astronomy, architecture, sculpture, painting. . . . in mechanics and their mysteries, military matters, navigation, riding of horses, fencing, swimming, gardening, planting. . . . in music, metaphysics, natural and moral philosophy, philology, in policy, heraldry, genealogy, chronology. . . . What so sure, what so pleasant?”

 

It's nearly impossible to excerpt briefly Burton’s prose. Sentences go one for pages. The best strategy is probably to read a given section per day. Burton arranges his book into partitions, sections, subsections and members. Reading Burton can be therapeutic in a manner advocated by the author himself. The passage above continues:

 

“Whosoever he is therefore that is overrun with solitariness, or carried away with pleasing melancholy and vain conceits, and for want of employment knows not how to spend his time, or crucified with worldly care, I can prescribe him no better remedy than this of study, to compose himself to the learning of some art or science.”

 

George Saintsbury, a critic and scholar as learned as Burton, writes in Vol. 4 of A History of English Literature (1920):

 

“Only by reading him in the proper sense, and that with diligence, can his great learning, his singular wit and fancy, and the general view of life and of things belonging to life, which informs and converts to a whole his learning, his wit, and his fancy alike, be properly conceived. For reading either continuous or desultory, either grave or gay, at all times of life and in all moods of temper, there are few authors who stand the test of practice so well as the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy.”