The Anatomy of Melancholy

Second, friendliness, habit and familiarity can often change nature, despite differences of character. People may be fellow countrymen, fellow students, colleagues, former comrades in arms or brothers in adversity—“the bitter fellowship of misfortune unites even people of different temperaments”—or connected by marriage or some such circumstance. Though they cannot agree among themselves, they will stick together like burrs and stand united against a third party.

So enmity ceases after some time apart, or after death; or when people meet in a foreign place.

Envy feeds on the living; after death it rests. Hatred has fallen away, and death has buried bitter anger.

A third cause of love and hatred may be services exchanged, “a kindness received.” Praise him, treat him kindly, take his side in a quarrel, relieve his distress, and you win him for ever. Do the opposite, and be sure of a lifelong enemy.

Praising or disparaging one another has the same effect, even among people who do not know each other, as with Schoppius towards Scaliger and Casaubon: “one mule scratches another.” Who could compare with Scaliger in his eyes? What eulogies, epithets and praises! “High priest of wisdom,” “perpetual dictator,” “ornament of letters,” “wonder of Europe”; noble Scaliger, “of astonishing intellectual excellence,” and so on; “in every respect to be compared with gods rather than men”; “we bow our knees before his writings as golden sacred shields fallen from heaven,” and so on.

But when they began to disagree, no one was so absurd, vile and base as Scaliger, as his books On the Family of the Burdons and other satirical attacks can testify. Ovid in his Ibis, and Archilochus himself, were not so bitter.

Another great bond or cause of love is blood relationship. Parents are dear to their children, children to their parents; brothers, sisters and relatives of every kind are like a hen and her chicks, all in one cluster. Every crow thinks her own chick the fairest. There are many memorable examples, and it is “like a monstrous portent” when such love is absent. “A mother cannot forget her child”: in this way Solomon discovered the true mother. Parental love cannot be hidden; it is natural and passes downwards. Those who are inhuman in this respect are unworthy of the air they breathe and of the four elements.

Yet we have many unnatural examples of this kind: hard-hearted parents, disobedient children, quarrelling brothers—nothing is more common. The love of relatives has grown cold: “many relatives, few friends,” as the saying goes. If your circumstances are good and you can “return like for like,” repaying their kindness, there will be mutual goodwill; otherwise you are a burden, more hateful to them than anyone else.

The last object that binds one person to another is physical attractiveness, beauty alone, as when men look on women with lustful love. This, above all, is called heroic melancholy, or love melancholy. Other kinds of love, says Piccolomini, are called love in a restricted sense, such as the love of wine, gold and so on; but love of women predominates in a higher degree, and the affected part is the liver. This love deserves a fuller explanation and will be discussed separately in the next section.