The Anatomy of Melancholy

My three dinner guests seem almost to disagree, asking for very different things to suit their different palates, and so on. Our writings are so many dishes, our readers the guests. Our books are like beauty: what one admires, another rejects. Approval depends on the direction of each person’s taste. Books have their destinies according to the reader’s capacity. What most pleases one is “marjoram to a pig”—most disagreeable—to another. “As many people, so many opinions”: so many people, so many minds. What you condemn, he praises. What you ask for is certainly hateful and sour to the other two.

He values substance; you care only about words. He likes a loose, free style; you insist on polished composition, striking phrases, exaggerations, and allegories. He wants a fine frontispiece and enticing pictures to draw the reader’s attention, like the engravings in the Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal’s work on the Sunday Gospel readings. You reject these; what one admires, another shouts down as utterly absurd and ridiculous.

If it does not fit his taste, his method, and his ideas exactly—“if perhaps something he had in mind has been left out, if some expression,” and so on—if anything is omitted or added that he likes or dislikes, you are “an ill-read drudge,” an idiot, an ass; “you are nobody,” or “a plagiarist,” a trifler, a truant, an idle fellow. Otherwise it is a work of mere diligence, a collection without intelligence or invention, a mere trifle. “So everyone thinks things easy once they have been done, and no one thinks of the rough places when the road is paved.” This is how people are valued: their labours dismissed as worthless by fellows of no worth themselves. Who could not have done as much? “Everyone abounds in his own opinion.” Everyone has an opinion of his own; and while each person feels this way, how can anyone please them all?

What should I give, and what withhold? You refuse what he demands. How can I hope to express myself to suit everyone’s taste and ideas, or satisfy them all? Some understand too little, some too much. “They rush into reading books just as they rush into greeting people, considering not what they are like but what clothes they wear,” as Augustine observes. They care about who writes, not what is written. “The author’s celebrity gives an appetite.” They value the stamp on the metal rather than the metal itself. “They look at the cup, not at what is in it.”

If he is not rich, highly placed, polished and splendid, a great doctor, or loaded with grand titles, he is a dunce, however well qualified he may be. Yet, as Baronius says of Cardinal Caraffa’s works, anyone who rejects a man for his poverty is a mere hog. Some are too partial: friends think too highly of us; others arrive prejudiced, ready to carp, disparage, belittle, and mock—“who perhaps judge whatever comes from me with contempt beyond all contempt.” Some come like bees for honey, others like spiders to gather poison. What am I to do in such a case?