. . Oh, it can no more be questioned,
That beauties best, proportion, is dead,
Since even griefe it selfe, which now alone
Is left us, is without proportion.
(“The first Anniversary,” ll. 305–8)
Those lines are also by John Donne. But what could be more natural than that the human gaze should try, despite everything, to condense an alien world into a unity, devoid of all human scale. The
eternal human desire to create a home challenges the world, which renders such an attempt hopeless from the outset. The more peremptory and desperate the desire, however, the more conspicuously fractured the world appears. Man becomes immersed in sensuality; this, however, is not mere dissipation but also a futile endeavor to create harmony — how else can one explain the deep sadness that lurks behind Baroque proliferation and stiffens every movement into numb immobility? It is as if by stuffy pageantry and a breathtaking cavalcade of bodies, those artists sought at any cost to hide something from us — the riddle of Baroque tension was not
compositional
but
existential
in origin (even though habit transposed all that to a technical level). Renaissance melancholics, like a light source, exuded a sadness that in portraits emanates toward us only from the human face. From the seventeenth century onward, gloominess no longer arose (at least not primarily) from man — he was the captive of an all-engulfing and all-pervading mournfulness: in the pictures of Ruisdael, Poussin, or Lorrain, the world itself is secretive, sad, and melancholic. The background becomes truly important; indeed, in more than a few of Lorrain’s pictures (for example,
Landscape with the Nymph Egeria
), even the foreground paradoxically gives an impression of being background. Melancholia imbues everything,
4
and even though it was Caspar David Friedrich who made the assertion, nevertheless it was true from the seventeenth century on that melancholia was not the action of an external force, demon, or star, but a state of the soul, and since the soul interacts closely with nature, it can be discovered first of all in nature.
5
The mystery and the gloom that radiates toward us from those pictures reminds us of our homelessness like a distant light
in a dark forest. What the most sensual and exuberant Baroque works of art tried to conceal tenaciously, Lorrain or Poussin attempted to reveal. Everything exudes sadness; after all, resigned mournfulness was the only weapon that remained for the onlooker to make bearable a world that had fallen to pieces and had lost all its proportions.
There is no tension that, in the final analysis, does not involve the questioning of the sense and appropriateness of existence. The most humdrum embarrassment, one that does not even come with a faint blush, makes existence — which is not unambiguous in any way and ostensively natural at most — just as mysterious as does the doubt veiled in the so-called ultimate questions. The tension that from the seventeenth century onward animates the petrified representatives of Renaissance melancholia stems from the aforementioned contradiction: man lost himself without ever having possessed himself. From Renaissance melancholia, the path leads unbroken down to the present day — if it gained new features, those were hidden in embryonic form in Renaissance melancholia. The individual seated at the center of the universe was soon toppled from his throne, and while being inhibited from creating his own world, he was forced into one that he had not created and was unable to feel comfortably at home in. That world has visibly nothing to do with either man or God — it lacks moderation and proportion. The most characteristic symptoms of this modern melancholia were resigned dolefulness and dread: there is no way of knowing who stipulated those provisions, or who is feared. In Claude Lorrain’s pictures, even the foreground looks like a background: everything is mysterious, and he can barely be bothered to paint human faces, so little do the features give anything away. God still existed, of course, but that certitude was not the same as knowing the divine essence and will. The Deus absconditus was responsible for the despondency — God had left man to his own devices — and that was the reason for the dread as welclass="underline" earthly solitude makes not just God but also the sense of human existence doubtful. “The first thing with which God inspires the soul that he designs to touch truly,” writes Pascal, “is a knowledge and most extraordinary insight, by which the soul considers things and herself in a manner wholly new. This new light gives her fear” (“On the Conversion of the Sinner,” in Minor Works, 388). The extraordinary knowledge and sight is a realization of the unfathomable mysteriousness of existence. How little is given away by the very word “mysteriousness.” “If God discovered himself continually to men,” Pascal writes elsewhere in a letter, “there would be no merit in believing him. . He remained concealed under the veil of the nature that covers him till the Incarnation” (Letters, 2nd letter to Mlle. Roannez, 354). Faith and melancholia are not mutually exclusive; in that respect, the melancholia of the Middle Ages and that of modern times adopt vastly different stances. Faith in a hidden God is permeated by despondency; without that, it would be pointless to hide. The true breeding ground of exasperation and despondency is not God’s withdrawal into the background, but — it comes to the same thing — man’s concealment from God. Faith and sin are intertwined.
The world is sinful from inception, so profess melancholics; sin, however, does not correspond to original sin as it was thought of in the Middle Ages. The discernment of the absurdity of existence plunges the world into sin; that discernment, however, is not a factor independent of man, like evil or original sin, which, in the judgment of the Middle Ages, extends to everyone, singling out no one. Sin derives from attitude and judgment; if melancholics call sin a state of the world, then that is not passing judgment on the world, but on their own existence. It is not the world that interprets the sin; the world is interpreted through the sinner’s mindset — sin springs from the innermost part of the soul. The soul’s tension, naturally, is identical with the tension of a creature that has been left to itself; the individual, like the world, has been shaken, its mainsprings lost sight of, and everything is veiled in mystery. God has hidden himself away, therefore he is the true sinner, according to melancholics, the ultimate reason for that pronouncement being that they themselves have become unintelligible: they have donned the mask of mysterious sorrow. One of the most melancholy figures of the seventeenth century, the physician Sir Thomas Browne,6 writes as follows in his vexed treatise Religio Medici: “No man can justly censure or condemn another, because indeed no man truly knows another. This I perceive in my self; for I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends beheld me but in a cloud. Those that know me but superficially, think less of me than I do of my self; those of my neer acquaintance think more; God, Who truly knows me, knows that I am nothing; for He only beholds me and all the world, Who. . beholds the substance without the helps of accidents” (Religio Medici, pt. 2, sec. 4). Man is left to himself; he will be his own companion, and he judges the world also as his fellow companion: “There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole World about him. . There is no such thing as solitude, nor any thing that can be said to be alone and by itself, but God” (pt. 2, sec. 10). The notion of a rounded world is a characteristic Baroque trope; melancholics, however, have dismantled precisely that roundedness. We see the same here as in the case of the Renaissance melancholics, who felt, more than others, that man was condemned to failure, precisely because he believed, more than others, in his omnipotence. The melancholic of the modern age (and here one has difficulty distinguishing Baroque, Romantic, or modern melancholia) like Thomas Browne believes more than anyone that a person is a microcosm and is not alone, yet it is exactly on that account that he also experiences most painfully the opposite. If he draws the sinful world into his own microcosm-like ego, then he will be the chief sinner, that is, the most solitary, since he tries most desperately to hide away from everything and would like to avoid everything. He sees himself as a microcosm, which means at one and the same time happiness and fateful futility: he revels in the rapture with which the spectacle of the depth of his own soul fills him, though he also shrinks back from this depth. Of course, there is nowhere to step back; he cannot get rid of himself, and is obliged to put up with the duality, even if he is unable to acquiesce in it. Robert Burton, who bequeathed us the most voluminous monograph on melancholy not just of the seventeenth century but of all time, describes at some length, in the versified abstract of the opening of his work, the double flavor that melancholia offers. The refrain of stanzas evoking the happier moments end with the couplet: