Burton: So Soon!

Just a couple of months ago, in late November and early December of 2021, I came up to the entry on my reading list, “Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy.” Now I had encountered references to and quotations from The Anatomy of Melancholy many times in my literary travels. I can’t even tell you where now, although I strongly suspect C. S. Lewis has pointed me to Burton once or twice. And at some point I had read something about this book that got me excited enough to put an exclamation point next to the title in my notes. Especially because I've struggled personally with melancholia (see my comments on this subject elsewhere by clicking on the name Joshua Shenk in the index of labels in the right column of this blog), I had looked with eagerness to this meeting for years.

I won’t say I was disappointed when the anticipated meeting finally occurred, but I was surprised. My first surprise was the length of Burton’s treatise: according to the count of Kindle locations, about one-third again longer than the typical long novel by Dickens. But it’s late November! I don’t have time to read a book that long and still finish my list for the year! (I’m usually not so dramatically wrong about a work’s length when setting out my basic schedule for each year of reading.) The second surprise was Burton’s tendency to ramble through every topic on his long way through, for instance, every possible type of and cause for melancholy, although the rambling shouldn’t have been surprising given the length, for how else does one fill a thousand-page book on one subject but by rambling?

My first decision for how to handle the situation was to choose some selections based on the table of contents. It’s hard for me to leave a book unfinished once started, but if I assign myself to do it in advance, I can usually let myself get away with it. My second decision was to look up Burton on the internet to see what others thought of the book. (I usually don’t want to read what anyone else says about what I’m reading until at least halfway through a book; I like to make up my own half-informed mind first.) As it turns out, Burton’s biggest fans love the book exactly because it meanders through every possible topic in human life as it pertains to melancholy.

A dozen days later, having finished my curtailed plans for the book, I didn’t feel at all sure that I understood what the Anatomy’s admirers saw in it and had to settle for being satisfied that I would have a much better context for the quotations the next time I came across any. Little did I know that I had only one month to wait! Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night begins many chapters with epigraphs from The Anatomy of Melancholy, and they did indeed make more sense after having read (or “read at”) only about a fourth of the whole book.

Poor Sayers! Many of her fans consider Gaudy Night her best book, and I’ve addressed it only by commenting on some quotations it includes. But I’ve decided that if I’m going to keep blogging at any appreciable rate, I have to think less about long(-ish) proclamations of Meaning and Worth and more about short(-ish) reports on my reading experience. So far, the new approach is working.

A Theft

Since I know that I will contribute more to this blog if I write short posts, let me attempt something in fewer than five paragraphs.

As a professor, I kept a sharp eye out for instances of plagiarism in the thousands of expository papers, theses, and dissertations I read. In a student’s writing, offering up the work of another scholar as one’s own is rightly seen as a serious wrong. But is that so true in creative writing? Where would Shakespeare have been without Holinshed’s chronicles or Boccaccio’s tales? Scores of imitations followed the publications of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, and no one was jailed. Dickens wrote a story about a murderer who gave himself away under interrogation when he mistook his own loudly beating heart for that of his victim’s. It is known that a young Poe sent the more established Englishman some stories to review, so it is probable that Poe is the inventor here, Dickens the thief. Yet surely Poe won this encounter by writing the justly more well known version of the story.

But what about one line? One joke? A few days ago, in reading Sheridan’s The Rivals, I came across this line by Captain Absolute: “Though one eye may be very agreeable, yet as the prejudice has always run in favour of two, I would not wish to affect a singularity in that article.” I immediately thought of Dickens’s description of Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby: “He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two.” Dickens certainly knew of Sheridan’s work; whether he remembered reading or hearing the joke in Sheridan or believed he had created it himself is debatable. One thing I know: Dickens’s use of the joke in the description of one of the most entertaining of his loathsome characters vastly improves upon Sheridan’s invocation in the service of a man describing what he looks for in a wife.

Now that I think about it, grading those university papers created another weird habit in reading that, I happily realize now, has disappeared from my private reading, as well. I used to enter every student’s sentence more on the lookout for errors in grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation than I did for content, and I found that my extracurricular reading slowed down from this cautious habit. It occurs to me now that I no longer waste time internally scolding published authors for lack of an Oxfordian comma or idiomatic use of pronoun case.