The Anatomy of Melancholy

Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they passed quickly because he loved her. No one is so happy: if he is fortunate enough to enjoy her company, he is in heaven for a while. If he cannot, he is instantly cast down, solitary and silent; he leaves weeping, lamenting, sighing and complaining.

But lovers’ mental symptoms are almost endless, and so varied that no discipline can encompass them. Though they are sometimes cheerful and carried beyond themselves with joy, love is for the most part a plague, a torture, a hell, a bittersweet passion in the end. “Love abounds in honey and gall; it gives a taste both sweet and bitter.” It is “sweet bitterness, delightful pain, cheerful torment”:

Sweeter than honey, these things delight me; More bitter than gall, they kill me.

Like a summer fly, or a sphinx’s wings, or a rainbow of every colour:

Turned towards the sun’s rays they were golden, Against the clouds blue, like the radiance of a rainbow.

Beautiful, ugly and endlessly changing, though mostly distressing and bad. In a word, the Spanish Inquisition cannot compare with it. It is “torment and execution,” as the character in the poet calls it, an unquenchable fire—and what is it not? From it, says Augustine, arise gnawing cares, disturbances, passions, sorrows, fears, suspicions, discontents, disputes, discord, wars, treachery, enmity, flattery, fraud, excess, lust, shamelessness, cruelty and villainy.

Pain, complaints, Lamentation, ceaseless tears, Languor, anxiety, bitterness, Or anything sadder still, if such can be: These, Neaera, are the companions you give my life.

These are lovers’ companions, their usual symptoms, as the poet lists them.

Love contains these faults: Suspicions, enmities, acts of boldness, War, then peace again.

Sleeplessness, hardship, wandering, terror and flight, Scheming, witless lack of restraint, Wantonness, desire and ill will; Also clinging to it are greed, idleness, injury, Poverty, insult and loss.

These faults are found in love: suspicions, Peace, war, shamelessness and slander, Dreams, cares and errors, terrors and alarms, Indecent pranks, plots, tricks and flights, Resentments, needs, neglect, the wish to injure, Continual loss, expense and harm among them.

Every poet is full of such catalogues of love’s symptoms; but fear and sorrow may rightly claim the foremost place. Although Hercules de Saxonia, in chapter 3 of his Treatise on Melancholy, would exclude fear from love melancholy, I am persuaded otherwise: “Love is a thing full of anxious fear.”

It is full of fear, anxiety, doubt, care, irritability and suspicion. It turns a man into a woman—which presumably made Hesiod call Fear and Paleness daughters of Venus:

To Mars, who cleaves shields and armour, Gracious Venus bore Paleness, and Fear with him.

For fear and love are always joined. Moreover, lovers are prone to misunderstand and exaggerate: sometimes too credulous, too hopeful and confident, then again intensely suspicious and unwilling to believe or welcome any good news.