Melancholy

REVIEWS MELANCHOLY' Falstaff recommended a sweet sherry as an antidote to melancholy; John Wesley experimented with an 41electrical machine" for the same purpose; Keats wrote a great ode on «the wakeful anguish of the soul"; Durer engraved the iconography of melancholy for a whole culture; and Aristotle (or rather Problem xxx, I, over his name) started it all. Melancholy is a European disease, part of the Mediterranean heritage, hence the study of it is one prerogative of scholars who work in the colleetions of Aby Warburg and Fritz Sax!. This book was long in the making; Saxl is dead. And what results from the labour of his collaborators is not anything one can read, from end to end, and be satisfied. It is a mine, not a thesis. The authors examine the sources of melancholy as a temperament and as a disease, and the transformation of these ideas in the rich literature of the sul>ject , up to its exploitation by the new scholars of the early seventeenth century. They have read Robert Burton's sources and much more besides not available to him, and in his honour have photographed his tomb as a frontispiece, having written the scholia to The Anatomy of Melancholy. Melancholy is either an accident of temperament or an aberration of personality , and the SOUIces of these divergent views of this condition are examined hcre in all their complexity, though with necessarily little attention to what each contributes to the language of comedy or the substance of theology. The best accounts are of the metamorphoses of the Saturn-figure, who has presided over manure and utopia, old age and the golden age, mourning and contemplation, as mythographers brooding over the human condition have turned again and again to the antique image of the old man with the sickle in a harvest field, and, in a bewildering intellectual choreography, have made him the focus for all sorts of astrological, medical, and psychological speculation. It should be understood that the authors are interpreting certain emblems, figures ( including figures of speech), and academic discourses in their various historical settings; there is nothing therapeutic about this great hook. It tells us what Durer knew, the sources (as they put it) of his inspiration; it leaves us before IIMelencolia I," before Hamlet, or In Memoriam, or Roy CampM bell's Tristan cia Cunha, or Ivanov, as we were. Except, perhaps, that we may be helped to understand how the idea of melancholy, destructive or creative, is an artifice to keep men from themselves, and raises the paleolithic "'Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art. Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd. 1964. Pp. 146. $18.50. Voh,me XXXVI, Number I, October, 1966 question of free will. We in the West have created an elaborate mythology of neurosis, of which this study is an important testament. In the admirable index there is only one reference to Aeschylus, to the Eumenides, on a small historical point. The experience of the whole play would put this major work of scholarship into its proper perspective. ( M,LLAR MAcLuRE) ...