The Anatomy of Melancholy

'This melancholy extends beyond human beings to plants and creatures with senses. I do not mean those things that belong to Saturn and are melancholy by nature—lead and similar minerals; plants such as rue, cypress, and hellebore itself, of which Agrippa writes; fishes, birds, and beasts, hares, rabbits, dormice, owls, bats, and night birds. I mean the melancholy brought about by circumstances, which is observable in them all. Move a plant and it will waste away. This is particularly noticeable in date palms, as you can read at length in Constantine’s book on husbandry; so too is the antagonism between vine and cabbage, or vine and oil.

'Put a bird in a cage and it will die of despondency; put a beast in a pen, or take away its young or companions, and see what effect this has. Who does not observe these common passions in creatures with senses: fear, sorrow, and so forth? Dogs are more subject to this malady than any others, so much so that some maintain they dream as people do and go mad through the violence of melancholy. I could tell many stories of dogs that have died of grief or wasted away after losing their masters, but such stories are common in every author.

Kingdoms, provinces, and political bodies likewise have feeling and are subject to this disease, as Botero has argued at length in his political writings. “Just as various changes arise from humours in human bodies,” he says, “so a commonwealth has many diseases, arising in different ways from various disorders.” You can readily recognise them by their particular symptoms.

For wherever you see people civil, obedient to God and their rulers, sensible, peaceable and quiet, rich, fortunate, and flourishing; living in peace, unity, and harmony; a country well cultivated, with many handsomely built and populous cities, “where the inhabitants thrive,” as old Cato said—the people neat, polished, and well kept—“where they live well and happily,” which our political writers make the chief end of a commonwealth;

and which Aristotle, in his Politics, book 3, chapter 4, calls “the common good,” and Polybius, book 6, “a desirable and choice condition”: that country is free from melancholy. So it was in Italy under Augustus; so it is now in China and in many other flourishing kingdoms of Europe.

But wherever you see widespread discontent, public grievances, complaints, poverty, barbarism, begging, plagues, wars, rebellions, sedition, mutinies, disputes, idleness, excess, and self-indulgence; land lying untilled and waste, full of bogs, fens, deserts, and so on; decaying cities, mean and impoverished towns, depopulated villages, and people dirty, ugly, and uncivilised: that kingdom, that country, must be discontented and melancholy. Its body is sick and needs reform.

This cannot properly be achieved until the causes of these maladies are removed. They commonly arise from the inhabitants’ own failings or from some disadvantage of circumstance: being situated in an unfavourable climate, too far north, infertile, in a barren region such as the desert of Libya or the deserts of Arabia; in places without water, such as those of Lop and Belgian in Asia; or in unhealthy air, as at Alexandretta, Bantam, Pisa, Durazzo, San Juan de Ulúa, and elsewhere.

Or they are in danger of repeated flooding by the sea, as in many parts of the Low Countries and elsewhere; or they lie near hostile neighbours, as the Hungarians do beside the Turks, or the Podolians beside the Tatars. Almost any countries sharing such borders live in constant fear and are often left desolate by hostile raids.