The black dog, the devil's bath, the mind's canker, the noonday demon—for centuries writers have tried to articulate the experience of sadness and its effect on the soul. While we now generally refer to such oppressive, persistent sadness as depression, for most of western European history this condition was known as melancholy. Like clinical depression, melancholy was understood to have a physiological basis, but debates concerning the condition often stretched beyond the world of medicine. In particular, philosophers, artists, and scholars speculated upon the perceived relation between melancholy and extraordinary achievement. In ancient Greece, a writer long thought to be either Aristotle or one of his followers noted the agony, hardship, and solitude that seemed always to plague the lives of the great. Citing the sorrows of mythical heroes, such as Hercules, Ajax, and Bellerophon, as well as historical figures like Plato and Socrates, he asked a question that would intrigue and trouble writers for many ages: “Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry, or the arts are melancholic?”
Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer
Today we associate melancholy with longing and nostalgia, a semiconscious yearning for something perceived as lost. But nearly two and a half millennia ago, in the time of Aristotle, melancholy was understood as a specific physiological state arising from imbalances in the body's four humours. According to this theory, which would underwrite western medical knowledge and practice for the next 2000 years, the body was made up of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, and fluctuations among these elements determined the health of both the body and the mind. Each humour was linked to a particular emotional temperament, and it was believed that those with a preponderance of black bile were inclined towards melancholy and despondency. For some such melancholic states were the temporary consequence of an occasional imbalance, whereas for others a natural, permanent constitution made them constantly subject to this sullen condition.
In the writings of Aristotle, alongside Hippocrates and Galen, a host of symptoms, largely unpleasant, often accompanied the condition of melancholy. Fits, frenzies, sores, stomach-aches, haemorrhoids, torpor, despondency, and fear—these were the pains a melancholic might expect to endure. According to the Aristotelian tradition, however, the condition was not without its consolations—men who were naturally inclined to melancholy often displayed a touch of brilliance that set them apart from the general public. When Renaissance scholars began retranslating and reinterpreting Greek philosophical and medical texts, this link between genius and melancholy found a special place in their work. Marsilio Ficino, a 15th-century Italian humanist, developed the connection, adding to it the astrologically based claim that all those born under Saturn, a planet commonly associated with the contemplative life, were prone to melancholic brilliance. This idea greatly influenced other Renaissance thinkers, and it was not long before artists like Albrect Dürer began examining the idea of melancholy in their work.
In his engraving, Melencolia I, Dürer explored the relation between melancholy, creativity, and knowledge, emphasising the frustration that inevitably accompanied exceptional talent and ambition. By choosing a quiet, sedentary woman as his focus, Dürer aligned himself with an artistic tradition developed by his medieval predecessors, who often used the image of a spinster sleeping by her distaff to depict the slothful temperament. But by bestowing upon her a leafy crown and bulky wings, Dürer took his depiction of Melancholy in a new direction, highlighting her link with divine inspiration. As the engraving suggests, this possibility of achievement beyond the capacity of most people comes at a cost—Dürer's Melancholy is surrounded by tools and instruments designed to measure, map, and explain the secrets of science and nature, but they all lie disused or discarded. Her gaze focuses neither on her work, nor on the blazing star illuminating the patch of sky in the background. Weighed down by her ponderous frame and earthly trappings, Dürer's Melancholy remains firmly rooted in the mortal world, raising the question of whether this condition should be viewed as a gift or a curse.
English writers in the 16th and 17th centuries similarly explored the existential side of melancholy. Writing in the 1630s, dramatist John Ford claimed that “Melancholy is not, as you conceive, indisposition of body, but the mind's disease”. This emphasis on the psychological experience of melancholy, somewhat separate from the physiological condition, proved very popular. Indeed, the most famous melancholy character in William Shakespeare's canon, Hamlet, explores his situation in philosophical rather than medical terms. The word “melancholy” itself appears only twice in the play, and references to humours or other medical concepts hardly at all. For all Hamlet's morbid talk of “self-slaughter”, the “sterile promontory” that is the earth, and “this quintessence of dust” that is man, the courtiers swarming around him never characterise his condition as particularly pathological.
Although plays from the period might suggest that melancholy was increasingly distancing itself from the medical tradition, doctors' casebooks from the 16th and 17th centuries tell a different story. In the notes of John Hall, a country physician who was also Shakespeare's son-in-law, melancholic patients were regularly treated with strong purgatives, cordials, clysters, and bloodletting. Radishes might be applied to the feet to dispel noxious vapours, or leeches to the patient's “haemorrhoidal veins” in an effort to relieve the black bile medical writers thought accumulated in the viscera. Even into the 18th century, when melancholy was increasingly seen as a disease of the nerves, bloodletting and purgation remained popular therapies.
Still, many scholars have characterised the Renaissance as the “golden age of melancholy”, a time in which questions regarding the condition's links to inspiration, frustration, and greatness abounded. Although debates about melancholy by no means disappeared during the 18th century—Samuel Johnson showed a particular interest in the topic, famously claiming that Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy was the “the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise”—it was in the Romantic era that melancholy enjoyed its second dawn. During this period, artists and writers again glorified the experience of melancholy, weaving it into one of their central aesthetic concepts, that of the sublime. According to Romantic poets, the experience of pleasure was not diminished, but rather intensified, by the knowledge of sorrow. As Charles Baudelaire wrote, “I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy”. In the eyes of the Romantics, beauty characterised by harmony, an ideal of Enlightenment culture, was no longer a sufficient artistic aim. Valuing feeling over reason, tension over balance, these writers indulged in melancholic fantasies, revelling in the insight they believed sorrow could bring. In his Ode on Melancholy, Keats described the condition as falling “Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud”, and he encouraged his readers to “taste the sadness of her might”.
Literary glorification of melancholy persisted through the 19th century, but with the advent of Freudian theory attitudes towards and understandings of melancholy again shifted. In his essay, Mourning and Melancholy, Sigmund Freud described the condition as a narcissistic disorder resulting from the self's sense of loss. No longer a result of humoral pathology, astrological influence, or nervous disease, melancholy according to Freud arose from disjunction in self-identity that occurred as an individual progressed through different stages of life.
In the years after Freud, melancholy began to be seen as an increasingly rare condition, with diagnoses of depression finding favour among doctors instead. While many writers have sought to emphasise the distinctions between historical concepts of melancholy and contemporary understandings of depression—Susan Sontag famously wrote, “Depression is melancholy, minus its charms”—certain similarities cannot perhaps be denied. In the 20th century, psychiatric studies have attempted both to confirm and dispel the perceived connection between genius and madness, with mixed results. Although modern researchers such as Dean Keith Simonton have suggested “that creativity shares certain cognitive and dispositional traits with specific symptoms” of psychopathology, they have also stressed that it is unlikely that such traits are causally linked. Continuing interest in the life and work of troubled artists such as Sylvia Plath, as well as modern attempts to retrospectively diagnose figures like Vincent van Gogh, suggest that, in our own culture, beliefs in links between dejection and brilliance persist, and it seems likely that they will continue to do so for years to come.