CHAPTER XII

MINOR CAROLINE PROSE

THE greatest, beyond all doubt, of the minor writers of the Caroline period in prose is Robert Burton. Less deliberately quaint than Fuller, he is never, as Fuller sometimes is, puerile, and the greater concentration of his thoughts and studies has produced what Fuller never quite produced, a masterpiece. At the same time it must be confessed that Burton's more leisurely life assisted to a great extent in the production of his work. The English collegiate system would have been almost sufficiently justified if it had produced nothing but The Anatomy of Melancholy; though there is something ironical, no doubt, in the fact that this ideal fruit of a studious and endowed leisure was the work of one who, being a beneficed clergyman, ought not in strictness to have been a resident member of a college. Yet, elsewhere than in Oxford or Cambridge the book could hardly have grown, and it is as unique as the institutions which produced it.

The author of the Anatomy was the son of Ralph Burton of Lindley in Leicestershire, where he was born on the 8th of February 1576. He was educated at Sutton Coldfield School, and thence went to Brasenose College, Oxford. He became a student of Christchurch-the equivalent of a fellow-in 1599, and seems to have passed the whole of the rest of his life there, though he took orders and enjoyed together or successively the living of St. Thomas in Oxford, the vicarage of Walsby in Lincolnshire, and

the rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire, at both of which latter places he seems to have kept the minimum of residence, though tradition gives him the character of a good churchman, and though there is certainly nothing inconsistent with that character in the Anatomy. The picture of him which Anthony à Wood gives at a short second hand is very favourable; and the attempts to harmonise his "horrid disorder of melancholy" with his "very merry, facete, and juvenile company," arise evidently from almost ludicrous misunderstanding of what melancholy means and is. As absurd, though more serious, is the traditionary libel obviously founded on the words in his epitaph (Cui vitam et mortem dedit melancholia), that having cast his nativity, he, in order not to be out as to the time of his death, committed suicide. As he was sixtythree (one of the very commonest periods of death) at the time, the want of reason of the suggestion equals its want of charity.

The offspring in English of Burton's sixty-three years of humorous study of men and books is The Anatomy of Melancholy, first printed in 1621, and enlarged afterwards by the author. A critical edition of the Anatomy, giving these enlargements exactly with other editorial matter, is very much wanted; but even in the rather inedited condition in which the book, old and new, is usually found, it is wholly acceptable. Its literary history is rather curious. Eight editions of it appeared in half a century from the date of the first, and then, with other books of its time, it dropped out of notice except by the learned. Early in the present century it was revived and reprinted with certain modernisations, and four or five editions succeeded each other at no long interval. The copies thus circulated seem to have satisfied the demand for many years, and have been followed without alteration in a finely-printed issue of recent date.

Fuller, in

The book itself has been very variously judged. one of his least worthy moments, called it “ a book of philology.” Anthony Wood, hitting on a notion which has often been borrowed since, held that it is a convenient commonplace book of classical quotations, which, with all respect to Anthony's memory (whom

I am more especially bound to honour as a Merton man), is a gross and Philistine error. Johnson, as was to be expected, appreciated it thoroughly. Ferriar in his Illustrations of Sterne pointed out the enormous indebtedness of Tristram Shandy to Democritus Junior. Charles Lamb, eloquently praising the "fantastic great old man," exhibited perhaps more perversity than sense in denouncing the modern reprints which, after all, are not like some modern reprints (notably one of Burton's contemporary, Felltham, to be noticed shortly), in any real sense garbled. Since that time Burton has to some extent fallen back to the base uses of a quarry for half-educated journalists; nevertheless, all fit readers of English literature have loved him.

The book is a sufficiently strange one at first sight; and it is perhaps no great wonder that uncritical readers should have been bewildered by the bristling quotations from utterly forgotten authorities which, with full and careful reference for the most part, stud its pages, by its elaborate but apparently futile marshalling in "partitions" and "members," in "sections" and "subsections," and by the measureless license of digression which the author allows himself. It opens with a long epistle, filling some hundred pages in the modern editions, from Democritus Junior, as the author calls himself, to the reader-an epistle which gives a true foretaste of the character and style of the text, though, unlike that text, it is not scholastically divided. The division. begins with the text itself, and even the laziest reader will find the synopses of Burton's "partitions" a curious study. It is impossible to be, at least in appearance, more methodical, and all the typographical resources of brackets (sub-bracketed even to the seventh or eighth involution) and of reference letters are exhausted in order to draw up a conspectus of the causes, symptoms, nature, effects, and cure of melancholy. This method is not exactly the method of madness, though it is quite possible for a reader to attach more (as also less) importance to it than it deserves. It seems probable on the whole that the author, with the scholastic habits of his time, did actually draw out a

programme for the treatment of his subject in some form not very different from these wonderful synopses, and did actually endeavour to keep to it, or at any rate to work on its lines within the general compass of the scheme. But on each several head

(and reducing them to their lowest terms the heads are legion) he allowed himself the very widest freedom of digression, not merely in extracting and applying the fruits of his notebook, but in developing his own thoughts, a mine hardly less rich if less extensive than the treasures of the Bodleian Library which are said to have been put at his disposal.

The consequence is, that the book is one quite impossible to describe in brief space. The melancholy of which the author

treats, and of which, no doubt, he was in some sort the victim, is very far from being the mere Byronic or Wertherian disease which became so familiar some hundred years ago. On the other hand, Burton being a practical, and, on the whole, very healthy Englishman, it came something short of "The Melencolia that transcends all wit," the incurable pessimism and quiet despair which have been thought to be figured or prefigured in Durer's famous print. Yet it approaches, and that not distantly, to this latter. It is the Vanity of Vanities of a man who has gone, in thought at least, over the whole round of human pleasures and interests, and who, if he has not exactly found all to be vanity, has found each to be accompanied by some amari aliquid. It is at the same time the frankly expressed hypochondria of a man whose bodily health was not quite so robust as his mental constitution. It is the satiety of learning of a man who, nevertheless, knows that learning, or at least literature, is the only cure for his disease.

In mere style there is perhaps nothing very strongly characteristic in Burton, though there is much that is noteworthy in the way in which he adapts his style to the peculiar character of his book. Like Rabelais, he has but rarely occasion to break through his fantastic habit of stringing others' pearls on a mere string of his own, and to set seriously to the composition of a paragraph of wholly original prose. But when he does, the effect is

remarkable, and shows that it was owing to no poverty or awkwardness that he chose to be so much of a borrower. In his usual style, where a mere framework of original may enclose a score or more quotations, translated or not (the modern habit of translating Burton's quotations spoils, among other things, the zest of his own quaint habit of adding, as it were, in the same breath, a kind of summary or paraphrase in English of what he has said in Latin or Greek), he was not superior to his time in the loose construction of sentences; but the wonder is that his fashion of writing did not make him even inferior to it. One of his peculiar tricks the only one, perhaps, which he uses to the extent of a mannerism-is the suppression of the conjunctions "or" and "and," which gives a very quaint air to his strings of synonyms. But an example will do more here than much analysis:

"And why then should baseness of birth be objected to any man? Who thinks worse of Tully for being Arpinas, an upstart? or Agathocles, that Sicilian King, for being a potter's son? Iphicrates and Marius were meanly born. What wise man thinks better of any person for his nobility? as he 1 said in Machiavel, omnes codem patre nati, Adam's sons, conceived all and born in sin, etc. We are by nature all as one, all alike, if you see us naked; let us wear theirs, and they our clothes, and what's the difference? To speak truth, as Bale did of P. Schalichius, I more esteem thy worth, learning, honesty, than thy nobility; honour thee more that thou art a writer, a doctor of divinity, than earl of the Hunnes, baron of Skradine, or hast title to such and such provinces, etc. Thou art more fortunate and great (so Jovius writes to Cosmus Medices, then Duke of Florence) for thy virtues than for thy lovely wife and happy children, friends, fortunes, or great Duchy of Tuscany. So I account thee, and who doth not so indeed? Abdalonymus was a gardener, and yet by Alexander for his virtues made King of Syria. How much better is it to be born of mean parentage and to excel in worth, to be morally noble, which is preferred before that natural nobility by divines, philosophers, and politicians, to be learned, honest, discreet, well qualified to be fit for any manner of employment in country and commonwealth, war and peace, than to be degeneres Neoptolemi as so many brave nobles are, only wise because rich, otherwise idiots, illiterate,

1 Burton, with others of the time, constantly wrote "he" as the equivalent of the classical demonstratives. Modern, but not better, use prefers "the man," or something similar.