The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 4. Sorrow as a cause of melancholy.

In this catalogue of passions that so greatly torment the human soul and cause this illness—for I shall speak briefly of them all, in order—sorrow may justly claim first place within the irascible appetite. An inseparable companion, it is melancholy’s mother and daughter, its epitome, symptom and principal cause, as Hippocrates puts it. They beget one another and move in a circle, for sorrow is both a cause and a symptom of this disease. How it is a symptom will be shown in its proper place.

That it is a cause, everyone acknowledges. “Grief has caused madness in some people, and other incurable diseases,” says Plutarch to Apollonius. A cause of madness, a cause of many other diseases, and a cause sufficient by itself to produce this affliction: so Lemnius calls it. So do Rhazes in the Continens, book 1, treatise 9, and Guianerius in treatise 15, chapter 5. Once it takes root, it ends in despair, as Felix Platter observes, and may well be coupled with despair, as in the Tablet of Cebes.

Chrysostom, in his seventeenth letter to Olympias, describes it as a cruel torture of the soul, a grief beyond expression, a poisonous worm consuming body and soul and gnawing the very heart; a perpetual executioner, unending night, profound darkness, a whirlwind, a tempest, an unseen fever burning more fiercely than any fire, and a battle without end. It tortures more cruelly than any tyrant: no torment, no strappado, no bodily punishment compares with it.

It is unquestionably the eagle that the poets imagined gnawing Prometheus’s heart; and no heaviness compares with heaviness of heart, Ecclesiasticus 25:15–16. Every disturbance is a misery, but grief is a cruel torment, a domineering passion. Just as in ancient Rome all lesser magistracies ceased when a dictator was appointed, so when grief appears all other passions vanish. It dries up the bones, says Solomon in Proverbs 17. It makes its sufferers hollow-eyed, pale and thin, furrows their faces, gives them lifeless looks, wrinkled brows, shrivelled cheeks and dried-out bodies, and utterly disorders their constitution.

As Eleanor, that sorrowful exiled duchess, laments to her noble husband Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in the work of our English Ovid:

If you saw those eyes whose sweet and cheerful look Once gave you, Duke Humphrey, such joy and pleasure, Grief has stripped me of all beauty so completely You could not say, “This was my Eleanor’s face.” Like a hideous Gorgon, and so on.