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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Member 2. Subsection 2. Other Causes of Love Melancholy: Sight; Beauty of The…

A thousand kisses sound; their arms grow pale in the embrace, And, stretching out their arms, they clasp each other’s necks.

Inachus and Pincus—and how many rivers in love could I list, which beauty has enslaved! All this while I say nothing of idols themselves that have committed idolatry of this kind, or of mirrors that have been carried away by love, if you will believe the poets, when their ladies and mistresses looked into them to dress.

Though I have no feeling, your charm gives me Feeling, and I feel the burden of burning love. Whenever you turn your watching eyes this way, flames Set my wounded limbs ablaze, helpless as I am.

Though I have no power of feeling, Your sweet looks give me life and save me; And when your speaking eyes turn this way, My wounded limbs seem to live and burn.

I could tell you another such story of a spindle set on fire by a beautiful lady’s looks—or her fingers, some say; I am not quite sure which. But it caught fire, according to the report. And there is the story of a cold bath that suddenly steamed and grew very hot when naked Caelia entered it:

We wonder what this great cloud of steam is, and where it comes from, and so on.

But of all stories of this kind, the most memorable concerns Death himself: when he ought to have struck a sweet young maiden with his dart, he fell in love with the person before him. I could relate many more such stories, which must be believed with a poet’s faith.

Thus speechless and lifeless things fall foolishly in love; but human beings go mad, often stupefied at the first sight of beauty, struck dumb like the fisherman in Aristaenetus who caught sight of a girl bathing by the sea:

All my limbs went slack—— From head to heel, and all awareness left My heart: such immense astonishment seized my mind.

And Lucian, in his Portraits, confesses of himself that in his mistress’s presence he was bereft of all feeling and unable to move, as if he had seen a Gorgon’s head. This was no such savage monster, as Coelius interprets it in book 3, chapter 9, but the very essence of beauty, some lovely creature—as the poet doubtless meant when he first invented it—at which spectators stood astonished.

“Wretched are those for whom you shine, as yet untried”: the poor creatures are driven by the very sight of her captivating looks to go mad or kill themselves.

They await the verdict of her scornful eyes; The one she favours lives, the other dies.

Heliodorus, in book 1, presents Thyamis almost beside himself when he first saw Chariclea, not daring to look at her a second time, for he thought it impossible for any living man to see her and control himself.

The mere fame of beauty will draw them to it from many miles away—such is this magnet’s power of attraction—and the miles will seem short. They will undertake any labour or hardship, any long journey. Neither Penia nor Atalanta will outstrip them through seas, deserts, mountains and dangerous places, as people travelled to gaze at Psyche: many mortal men came from far and near to see that glorious spectacle of her age. Paris came for Helen, and Coroebus to Troy:

——who happened in those days to have come to Troy, Inflamed with a mad love for Cassandra.

King John of France, once a prisoner in England, crossed the sea to visit his old friends again; but the truth is that he came to see the Countess of Salisbury, the peerless beauty of those times and his dear mistress.

That god of the underworld, Plutus, came from hell itself to abduct Proserpina. Achilles abandoned all his friends for the sake of Polyxena, his enemy’s daughter; and all the Greek gods left their heavenly dwellings for that beautiful lady Philo, Dioneus’s daughter, the paragon of Greece in those days: “For she was so lovely that all the gods competed to have her as their wife.”

A beautiful girl commands the gods.

They will come not merely to look, but—as a falconer makes a hungry hawk hover nearby—to follow, attend and serve, spending their possessions, their lives and their whole fortunes to gain their desire:

Even if beauty were secured behind twenty locks, Love breaks through, and picks them all at last.

When beautiful Hero appeared in public, the eyes, hearts and affections of those who saw her always followed her.

Among all those faces she towers above the rest, And as she comes through the city they gaze at her as at a goddess.

So far above the rest fair Hero shone, And stole the spellbound onlooker’s mind.

When Pietro Aretino’s Lucretia first came to Rome, and the fame of her beauty spread abroad—“it had reached the devotees of the city’s pleasures; everyone came to see her,” and so on—they came, as the saying goes, thick and fast to see her, and hovered around her gates, as people once did around those of Lais of Corinth and Phryne of Thebes.

At whose doors all Greece lay prostrate.

Every man sought to win her love: some with splendid and costly clothes, some with an affected walk, some with music, others with rich gifts, pleasant conversation or crowds of followers; others with letters, vows and promises, to recommend themselves and find favour in her eyes. Happy was the man who could see her; three times happy the one who enjoyed her company.

Charmides in Plato was a handsome young man, far surpassing others in bodily beauty and every good quality. Whenever handsome Charmides appeared in public, everyone seemed to be in love with him—as Critias describes their behaviour—and they were overcome at the very sight of him. Many drew near him; many followed him wherever he went.

So those “spectators of beauty” followed Acontius whenever he walked abroad. The Athenian girls stared at Alcibiades; Sappho and the women of Mytilene at handsome Phaon. Such lovely sights do not merely please and entice: they carry people away and leave them astonished.

Cleonymus, a delicate, tender youth, attended a feast given by his uncle Androcles in the Piraeus at Athens, when he sacrificed to Mercury. The youth so stupefied the guests—Dineas, Aristippus, Agasthenes and the rest, as Charidemus relates in Lucian—that they could not eat their food. Throughout supper they sat gazing and glancing at him, stealing looks and admiring his beauty.

9005.Thame and Isis are personified English rivers, meeting to form the Thames in the literary convention invoked here. Leland is John Leland. The printed pallent means grow pale; its precise sense and the quotation’s wording remain to be collated.

9007.Looking glasses are mirrors. Burton’s joke makes both worshipped images and reflecting objects into worshippers of beauty. Pincus is retained as printed; the river’s identification remains unresolved.

9008.Burton gives an English verse rendering after the Latin; both remain separate. The 1651 line reads this was turn, evidently requiring way for the sense. Only the modern column supplies way. The Latin expresses the mirror’s helpless burning; Burton’s English adds animate and save.

9010.Vapor here is steam from the bath. Angeriano’s conceits literalize the conventional fire of love: a gaze can ignite a spindle, and a beautiful body heat cold water. The exact poems remain to be collated.

9012.Poetical faith asks the reader to accept a story in the spirit of poetry. Burton signals the imaginative status of this extravagant catalogue before turning to human responses.

9015.The marginal reference names Stobaeus without locating the Greek source. This Latin verse describes loss of bodily strength and awareness; its author and original wording remain unresolved.

9018.In Lucian, Portraits 1, Lycinus tells Polystratus that a passing beauty nearly turned him to stone; section 11 says he saw her only once. Burton recasts this as Lucian’s confession about his mistress. The dialogue identifies her as the emperor’s beloved in section 10. Coelius’s allegorical explanation of the Gorgon remains uncollated.

9020.Horace, Odes 1.5.12–13, addresses the beautiful but inconstant Pyrrha. Burton prints intentata; the consulted Latin has intemptata. The phrase means that she seems attractive to those who have not yet experienced her. Burton intensifies it into madness and self-destruction.

9024.Loadstone means magnet. Atalanta is the swift runner of myth. Penia is left as Burton prints it; the intended figure is not securely identified. The Psyche reference is to the crowds drawn by her beauty in Apuleius, book 4.

9025.Virgil, Aeneid 2.340–341. Coroebus has come to Troy in love with Cassandra; Burton quotes the narrator’s description.

9026.Non-percil is Burton’s printed form of nonpareil, without equal. The romantic explanation for King John’s return to England is an assertion in Burton’s catalogue; the Countess’s identity and the historical basis remain to be checked.

9028.Plutus is printed, although the abductor of Proserpina in the familiar myth is Pluto. The modern column retains the name so the substitution is visible. Philo, Dioneus’s daughter, is likewise retained pending collation with Gerbel; no conjectural identification is substituted.

9030.Janus Secundus, Basia 18, ends with this line. The book celebrates kisses and their power; the maxim here crowns Burton’s examples of beauty commanding gods.

9032.Musaeus’s Hero and Leander is a separate Greek treatment of the lovers. Burton’s marginal Latin accompanies his account of the spectators. Came abroad means appeared in public, not travelled overseas.

9034.The margin attributes these Latin lines to Homer. Their precise Homeric passage and Latin translator have not been identified; the attribution remains marked as Burton’s.

9037.Pietro Aretino’s Lucretia belongs to the literary work cited through Caspar Barth’s Latin Pornodidascalus. Thick and threefold means in great numbers. Burton’s Phryne of Thebes is retained; the passage is a catalogue of literary and historical beauties, not a single continuous historical account.

9039.Propertius, Elegies 2.6.2, refers to Lais. The line turns the crowd at her door into all Greece lying in submission.

9042.In the opening of Plato’s Charmides, Socrates narrates the admiration of the men and boys when Charmides enters. Critias identifies the youth as his cousin; the description of the crowd is Socrates’s. Burton’s attribution to Critias is retained. The early Latin intermediary remains uncollated. Proper means handsome; carriage means behaviour.

9045.The body identifies Charidemus, while the margin points to Dialogues of the Courtesans. Both labels are preserved without conflating them. Meat here means food generally; delicate and tender describe the youth’s physical refinement.