The Anatomy of Melancholy

Friends, people on neither side, enemies: all are alike to them. Turning a fool into a madman is their sport, and they have no greater happiness than mocking and ridiculing others. Like the people in Apuleius, they must sacrifice to the god of laughter once a day, or become melancholy themselves. They do not care how they torment and mistreat others, provided they can cheer themselves up.

Indeed, their intelligence serves only this purpose: to provide amusement and crack a coarse joke, which is “the lightest fruit of talent,” the froth of wit, as Cicero holds. For this they are often applauded. In all other conversation they are dry, barren, straw-like, dull and heavy. Here lies their talent; in this alone they excel and please themselves and others.

Leo X, that mocking pope, took extraordinary pleasure in playing upon simple people and making fools of them, as Giovio records in book 4 of his life. By praising some and persuading others to do this or that, he made “the dull into utter fools and objects of the greatest ridicule, and fools into madmen”: simple fellows became complete idiots, and foolish people quite mad before he had finished with them.

He gives one memorable example: Tarascomus of Parma, a musician, was so manipulated by Leo X and his accomplice Bibbiena that he thought himself a man of exceptional skill, though he was really a ninny. They induced him to compose foolish songs and invent ridiculous new rules, which they praised highly: tying up the arm with which he played the lute to make his stroke sweeter, and taking down the tapestries because the voice would be clearer when it reverberated from the wall.

In the same way, they persuaded a certain Baraballius of Gaeta that he was as good a poet as Petrarch. They wanted him crowned poet laureate and to invite all his friends to the ceremony. They so filled the poor man with the idea of his poetic excellence that, when some of his wiser friends told him how foolish he was being, he became very angry and said they envied his honour and prosperity. It was strange, says Giovio, to see an old man of sixty, venerable and dignified, so thoroughly deceived.

But what can such mockers not do, especially if they find a pliable person to work upon? Indeed, who is so wise or judicious that he cannot be manipulated like this, especially if some exceptionally clever people set upon him? The man who drives others mad, if treated in the same way, would be just as mad himself, just as distressed and tormented. He might cry out with the character in the comedy: “By Jupiter, are you, a mere man, to drive me mad?”

For in these matters everything depends on how they are taken. If he is a simple soul and does not notice it, all is well: he may happen to amuse others without being troubled himself. But if he recognizes his foolishness and takes it to heart, it torments him worse than any whipping. A bitter joke, slander or calumny pierces deeper than any loss, danger, bodily pain or injury whatever: “it flies lightly,” as Bernard says of an arrow, “but wounds gravely.” Especially when it comes from a venomous tongue, it cuts, as David says, like a two-edged sword. “They shoot bitter words as arrows,” Psalm 64:3; and “they struck with their tongues,” Jeremiah 18:18, so hard that they leave an incurable wound.