The Noonday Demon (57 page)

Among the mentally ill, the depressed had the advantage of being relatively docile and were therefore abused in just slightly less atrocious ways than were the maniacal and the schizophrenic. Filth, squalor, torture, and misery were the lot of the melancholic through the Age of Reason and the Regency. Society squashed the notion that those with severe psychological complaints might recover from them; once you had shown yourself to be barmy, you went into the mental hospital and you stayed there, for you were no more likely to emerge into human reason than was a captive rhinoceros. The chief physician of Bedlam, Dr. John Monro, said that melancholy was intractable and that “the cure of the disorder depends on
management
as much as on medicine.” Those who suffered from the most severe forms of melancholy were often subjected to the most horrifying treatments. Boerhaave himself had proposed causing great physical pain in patients to distract them from the pain within their minds. Virtually drowning depressives was not uncommon, and mechanical devices of Boschian complexity were produced to make melancholiacs swoon and vomit by turns.

Those with milder (but still severe) depression often found themselves living nearly clandestine lives in consequence of that complaint. James Boswell wrote at length, to his friends, about his experiences with depression; and so, after him, did the poet William Cowper. Their accounts give a feeling for the grievous suffering attached to depression throughout this period. In 1763, Boswell wrote: “Expect not in this letter to hear of anything but the misery of your poor friend. I have been melancholy to the most shocking and most tormenting degree. I sunk altogether. My mind was filled with the blackest ideas, and all my powers
of reason forsook me. Would you believe it? I ran frantic up and down the streets, crying out, bursting into tears, and groaning from my innermost heart. O good GOD! what have I endured! O my friend, how much was I to be pitied! What could I do? I had no inclination for anything. All things appeared good for nothing, all dreary.” Later that year he added, writing to another friend, “A deep melancholy seized upon me. I thought myself old and wretched and forlorn. All the horrid ideas you can imagine, recurred upon me. I took general speculative views of things; all seemed full of darkness and woe.” Boswell undertook the writing of ten lines a day addressed to himself and found that by describing what he was going through as he went through it, he could keep some measure of sanity, though he filled his lines with ellipses. So we find entries such as “You was direfully melancholy and had the last and most dreadful thoughts. You came home and prayed . . .” and a few days later, “Yesterday you was very bad after dinner, and shuddered with dire ideas. You was incertain and confused and lay, talked of going to bed, and could scarcely read Greek . . .”

Samuel Johnson, whose life Boswell recorded, was also given to severe depression, and indeed, their mutual experience of depression for some time bound the two men. Johnson maintained that Burton’s
The Anatomy of Melancholy
was the only book that got him up “two hours sooner than he wished to rise.” Johnson was always aware of mortality and terrified of wasting time (though in his blackest depressions he lay unproductive for long stretches). “The black Dog,” wrote Johnson, “I hope always to resist, and in time to drive though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me. When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking.” And as Boswell once said to him, playing on Dryden’s line, “Melancholy, like ‘great wit,’ may be near allied to madness; but there is, in my opinion, a distinct separation between them.”

William Cowper poeticized his sorrow, but it was perhaps even more desperate than Boswell’s. To a cousin Cowper wrote in 1772, “I will endeavour not to repay you in notes of sorrow and despondence, though all my sprightly chords seem broken.” The following year he had a severe breakdown and was utterly incapacitated for some time. During that time he wrote a horrifying series of poems, including one that ends, “I, fed with judgement, in a fleshly tomb, am / Buried above ground.” Cowper did not find much salvation in writing; ten lines a day were not likely to mitigate his desperation. Indeed, though he knew himself to be a great poet, he felt that his ability with words was almost irrelevant to his experience with depression. In 1780, he wrote to John Newman, “I am trusted with the terrible Secret Myself but not with the power to Communicate
it to any purpose. I carry a load no Shoulders Could Sustain, unless underpropped as mine are, by a heart Singularly & preternaturally hardened.” Edward Young, writing roughly contemporaneously, spoke of “the stranger within thee” and described the bleakness of the world: “Such is the earth’s melancholy map! But far / More sad! this earth is a true map of man!” And Tobias Smollett wrote, “I have had a hospital these fourteen years within myself and studied my own case with the most painful attention.”

The lot of women was particularly hard. The Marquise du Deffand wrote to a friend in England, “You cannot possibly have any conception of what it is like to think and yet to have no occupation. Add to that a taste that is not easily satisfied and a great love of truth and I maintain that it would be better never to have been born.” In another letter, she wrote in disgust with herself, “Tell me why, detesting life, I still fear death.”

The Protestant ascetics of the later eighteenth century attributed depression to society’s decadence and pointed to high rates of the complaint among an aristocracy nostalgic for its past. What had once been a mark of aristocratic sophistication was now the mark of moral decay and weakness, and the solution was to eviscerate complacency. Samuel Johnson said that hardship prevents spleen and observed that “in
Scotland,
where the inhabitants in general are neither opulent nor luxurious, Insanity, as I am informed, is very rare.” John Brown held that “our effeminate and unmanly Life, working along with our Island-Climate, hath notoriously produced an Increase of
low Spirits
and
nervous Disorders.
” Edmund Burke argued that “melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body. The best remedy for all these evils is exercise or
labour.
” Voltaire’s Candide struggles even after his troubles have come to an end; finally his depressed mistress asks, “I should like to know which is the worst, to be ravished a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet of a Bulgar regiment, to be whipped and hanged at an auto-da-fé, to be dissected, to row in the galleys—in fact to experience all the miseries through which we have passed—or just to stay here with nothing to do?” The problem is solved when she and Candide apply themselves to tending the kitchen garden; tilling the soil has a most propitious effect on mood. And yet the contrarian idea, that a high life might lift the spirits and work weigh them down, was also in circulation; Horace Walpole wrote a friend a prescription, “
Rx CCCLXV days of London,
” to lift the weight of an illness no country cordial had been able to heal.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the spirit of romanticism was starting to stir, and disillusion with the dryness of pure reason set in.
Minds began to turn to the sublime, at once magnificent and heartrending. Depression was let in once more, better loved than it had been since Ficino. Thomas Gray captured the mood of an age that would once more look on depression as the source of knowledge rather than as a folly removed from it. His “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” became a standard text of wisdom achieved through a sadness proximate to truth, through which one learns that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” Looking out at the playing fields of Eton, he saw:

S. T. Coleridge wrote in 1794 that his will was palsied by “The Joy of Grief! A mysterious Pleasure broods with dusky Wing over the tumultuous Mind.” Immanuel Kant held that “melancholy separation from the bustle of the world due to a legitimate weariness is noble” and that “genuine virtue based on principles has something about it which seems to harmonize most with the melancholy frame of mind.” This was the mood in which the nineteenth century was to greet depression.

Before leaving the eighteenth century, it is worth looking at what was happening in the colonies in North America, where the moral force of Protestantism was even stronger than in Europe. The problem of melancholy had much vexed the settlers, and a school of American thought on the subject had evolved shortly after they had arrived in Massachusetts. Of course the settlers tended to be conservative in comparison to their counterparts in Europe; and since they often represented extreme religious views of one kind or another, they favored religious explanations of depression. At the same time, they had a lot of depression to cope with. Their lives were extremely hard; their societies maintained certain formal rigidities; the mortality rates were extremely high; and their feeling of isolation was particularly intense. Horace Walpole’s prescriptions were unavailable to them; there was not much by way of glamour or fun to lift melancholic spirits. The focus on salvation and its mysteries also drove people to the point of distraction, since the sole focus of their lives was something definitionally uncertain.

Melancholiacs in these societies were almost always held to be the
subjects of the devil’s interference, prey through their own weakness or their inattention to the redeeming God. Cotton Mather was the first to comment at length on these problems. Though in his earlier life he was inclined toward extreme moral judgment, his position softened and changed somewhat when his wife, Lydia, developed a depression “little short of a Proper Satanical Possession.” In the years that followed, Mather gave considerable time and attention to the problem of melancholy, and began to hatch a theory in which the divine and the biological, the natural and the supernatural, acted in complex synchrony.

In 1724, Mather published
The Angel of Bethesda,
the first book written in America to address depression. He focused more on treatments than on the diabolical causes of the complaint. “Lett not the Friends of these poor
Melancholicks,
be too soon
Weary
of the
Tiresome Things,
which they must now
Bear with Patience,
Their
Nonsense
and
Folly
must be
born with Patience, We that are Strong must bear the Infirmities of the Weak;
and with a patient, prudent, Manly Generosity, pitty them, and Humour them like
Children
, and give none but
Good Looks
and
Good Words
unto them. And if they utter Speeches that are very
Grievous
(and like
Daggers
) to us, We must not Resent them as uttered by these Persons; tis not
They
that speak; Tis their
Distemper!
They still are
Just what they were before.”
The treatments Mather suggested are an odd mix of the exorcistic, the biologically effective (“the Decoction of Purple-flowered
Pimpernel;
as also the Tops of
St. Johns Wort;
as a Specific for
Madness”
) and the rather dubious (the application of “living swallows, cut in two, and laid hott reeking unto the shaved Head” and “the
Syrup of Steel,
four Ounces, a Spoonful to be taken twice a day in a Convenient Vehicle”).

Henry Rose, publishing in Philadelphia in 1794, attributed to the passions the ability to “increase or diminish the power of the vital and natural functions.” He maintained that as “they exceed their order and limits, the passions become dissolute and ought to be avoided; not because they disturb the tranquility of the mind alone, but as they injure the temperament of the body.” In the best Puritan tradition, he recommended dispassion—the quelling of strong feeling and eros—as the best means to protect oneself from going right over the edge. This Puritanical notion was to keep its hold over the American popular imagination long after it had faded elsewhere. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, America boasted religious revivals closely associated with illness. The United States was the location for “evangelical anorexia nervosa,” in which people who believed themselves unworthy of God deprived themselves of food (and often sleep) until they starved themselves to illness or even death; those who suffered accordingly were called “starving perfectionists” by their contemporaries.

If the Age of Reason was a particularly bad one for depression, the Romantic period, which went from the end of the eighteenth century to the flowering of Victorianism, was a particularly good one. Now melancholy was thought of not as a condition for insight, but as insight itself. The truths of the world were not happy; God was manifest in nature but his precise status was in some doubt; and the stirrings of industry bred the first strains of modernist alienation, distancing man from his own production. Kant held that the sublime was always “accompanied by some terror or melancholia.” In essence, this was the time when an unqualified positivism was denounced as naive rather than holy. Clearly, in the past, the rather distant past at that, man had been closer to nature, and the loss of that immediate relationship to wilderness amounted to the loss of some irretrievable joy. People in this period explicitly mourned the passage of time—not simply growing old, not simply the loss of young energy, but that time could not be held in check. This is the era of Goethe’s Faust, who said to the moment, “Stay! Thou art fair!” and for that sold his soul into eternal damnation. Childhood recapitulated innocence and joy; its passing led into a postlapsarian adulthood of shadows and pain. As Wordsworth said, “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”