Content. Introduction

The Melancholy Genius

The eighteenth-century upper classes in England prided themselves on their refined tastes and artistic sensibility. It was to refine and educate such taste that they undertook “The Grand Tour” of Italy and other European nations deemed to possess a greater degree of artistic outlooks and achievement that dull, old, foggy England. There was also the possibility of indulging in life-styles and practices abroad that would cause scandal at home.Horace Walpole is perhaps a good example of this type of melancholy. He was intensely self-centred and more than a little conceited about the refinement of his taste. He was also given to periods of ‘nervous disorder’. Were these brought on by his exquisite artistic sensibility? Were they due to being a secresly homosexual man who could not exercise his sexual preference openly in the high society of the time? Or were they yet more examples of his self-absorption and the lack of any significant outlet for his prodigious talents? Maybe it was all of these — or none of them. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Dr Samuel Johnson suffered from melancholy for almost all of his life and believed he had inherited the condition. In 1773, on their tour of Scotland, Boswell reports Johnson saying:
I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober.
Dr Johnson often described his melancholy as madness, even when he associated it with aspects of his body rather than his mind. In his diary for 30th March, 1777, he wrote, “I discover nothing but a barren waste of time with some disorders of body, and disturbances of the mind very near to madness.” We can see he was describing depression, but no distinction was made at the time between a general sense of artistic ennui and full-blown clinical depression.Boswell preferred to call melancholy “hypochondria”, applying it both to himself and to Johnson. “Spleen” would have been used by some to describe the same condition. In his Dictionary, Dr Johnson defined “hypochondriacal” as “Melancholy; disordered in the imagination”.To consider just some of those well-known people who suffered from “melancholy” under one or more of the labels of the time is to produce a listing of 18th-century artistic and philosophical achievement: John Bunyan, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Thomas Gray, Robert Burns, George Romney, Oliver Goldsmith, David Hume, and Joseph Wright – and so on.Depressive states seem to hold a fascination for the creative imagination, with melancholy exerting a particular appeal in the eighteenth century. Perhaps Aristotle explains it best. He claimed that showing a tragic view of the human condition on stage had a cathartic effect, as well as revealing just how little separated us from those arbitrarily chosen by fate to experience suffering. To produce a strong emotional response inspire in your audience thus came to be seen as the principal measure of artistic success.There is also the element of reflection common amongst melancholics: that contemplation of their past which might, amongst the religious, result in repentance and renewal, but amongst those with a more scientific and rational outlook tended to lead to disillusionment with life in general. Several poets of the 18th century produced works characterised by gloomy meditations on death. Examples include Thomas Gray, writer of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, Thomas Parnell, who wrote “Night-Piece on Death”, Robert Blair and Edward Young. The religious culture of the eighteenth century produced an emphasis on private devotion and reflection. That too could encourage melancholy ideas about the pointlessness of life in the face of inevitable death and dissolution.The final instalment in this series will look at the notion, proposed at the time, that melancholy was especially associated with the rich; rather like the various multiply initialled ‘syndromes’ linked to today’s top media personalities.