The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  A COMPARABLE IMAGE is Holbein’s The Ambassadors (illus. 52). Here too, on a table, are accumulated artefacts representing science, art, endeavour: a globe (two globes), a polyhedron, a geometer’s devices, a closed book – and a sundial, to set beside Dürer’s hourglass. We do not find a tradesman’s tools, nor would we, since the two figures shown are (most probably) a French seigneur and a French bishop. Rather, for leisured but active fingers, there is a lute – but a string is broken, cancelling the soundtrack of this image, like the un-rung bell in the Dürer. And all these images of discovery, progress and prosperity, and of worldly and ecclesiastical state, are qualified by the odd big narrow oval that slants not across but above the floor, which, if we study it from an angle which shrivels the picture, shows a clean but perhaps grinning skull.

  The skull here is death. Melancholia need not fasten on the sense of death, and in Dürer’s print the dejection and paralysis have a more elusive source. But also, as Burton noted, melancholia may manifest as a sense of death everywhere, or in the belief that, though alive, one is also dead. The Dance of Death was a popular theme, and Holbein made two series of woodcuts showing a vivacious, almost sinuous skeleton leading a soldier, a child, the Pope to death. One might adapt T. S. Eliot’s lines on Webster, and say that Holbein was much possessed by death, and saw the skull beneath the skin, while breastless creatures underground leaned backwards with a lipless grin. In his painting known as The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb the emaciated, tortured corpse of Jesus lies stretched, as on a rack, in the claustrophobic low box of his coffin, with no hint of resurrection or salvation, while the sharp-nosed, dead-eyed head still has the corners of its mouth drawn back as in total pain and despair (illus. 53). The painting shocked Dostoevsky when he first saw it, and he stood riveted before it for twenty minutes, so his wife feared an epileptic fit; and Prince Myshkin, in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, says this painting could kill religious faith. Christ’s hair is raven-black, the coffin-lid is black and blackness descends from it to graze the figure, while the feet touch, as if standing lightly, the jet-black end-panel which also could be endless space.9

  In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia Julia Kristeva speaks of crypts or tombs within the psyche, within which a distress or its sources are locked away in a kind of ‘black hole’, around which the melancholic organizes a life marked by the absence or avoidance of affect – of natural feeling. It is hard not to see the Dead Christ as such a crypt, in which a disabled self lies imprisoned. Kristeva connects the dark turn in Holbein’s art with his (apparent) embracing cynicism, his (rumoured) fitful dissipations, and the low level of affect in the record of his life: she suggests he met with a perfection of style his depressive inner emptiness, producing in the process an art of unique, austere beauty.10 In The Ambassadors there is much blackness, together with colour, while the skull is both in the picture and in contradiction with it. It does not rest, but hovers at an angle, evidently feeling a different gravity from ours and lit by a different light-source. Considered as a head, it is shorter than the heads of the two standing figures, though as wide as the skull of a dinosaur. Everything about it says both that we all die and that death exists in a different universe, which makes our universe thin as a shred.

  52 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (double portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve), 1533, oil and tempera on oak.

  If we wanted to cite, in literature not art, a figure who unites Holbein’s preoccupation with death with the broader melancholia of Dürer’s image, we could turn to a famous literary creation. Prince Hamlet says:

  53 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1521, oil on wood.

  Alas, poor Yorick! [taking the skull] . . . My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed . . . Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that . . .

  and also:

  I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals – and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.11

  One might wonder if Robert Burton had this speech at the back – or perhaps at the front – of his mind when he began his Anatomy of Melancholy (for he liked plays, wrote them in Latin, and quotes Shakespeare and Ben Jonson). His first paragraph reads:

  Man, the most excellent and noble creature of the world . . . the wonder of Nature . . . the marvel of marvels . . . a little world . . . governor of all the creatures in it . . . far surpassing all the rest, not in body only, but in soul . . . created to God’s own image . . . But this most noble creature . . . O pitiful change! is fallen . . . he is inferior to a beast; . . . How much altered from what he was! before blessed and happy, now miserable and accursed . . .12

  That Hamlet is a melancholic is explicit in the play. Claudius says ‘There’s something in his soul, O’er which his melancholy sits on brood’, and Hamlet himself fears the devil is making fantasies ‘out of my weakness and my melancholy’. Hamlet conforms to the traditional representation of melancholy in his perpetual wearing of black clothes, which, as he says, goes beyond the requirements of mourning:

  ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

  Nor customary suits of solemn black . . .

  That can denote me truly . . .

  . . . I have that within which passeth show,

  These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

  The first illustration ever made for Hamlet, engraved by Elisha Kirkall for Rowe’s edition of 1709, shows what we might call a ‘modern dress’ production (illus. 54). This was standard practice at the time, but also Prince Hamlet, in his melancholy disorder, could easily seem a contemporary figure – in his black coat and breeches and his periwig, which is shaded to look at least dark. Unusually for a gentleman he wears black hose, one of which, as Shakespeare indicated, has been allowed to fall down.13

  The origin of Hamlet’s melancholy is not made fully clear – it was perhaps not fully clear to Shakespeare, though we can see he knew melancholy, perhaps in someone close to him. Following Freud, who surely had Hamlet in mind when writing his great essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, we may speculate as to how the death of a parent, for whom one has hatred as well as love, may confound the psyche, disable ‘affect’ and spread malaise and destruction, especially when perceived betrayal by the other parent fosters sexual disgust. Then life may seem not so different from death – a sleep with bad dreams, as Hamlet says, saying also that it is only the fear of such dreams that stops us from killing ourselves at once.14 It is ludicrous to think like this – except that this is how melancholia thinks.

  54 Elisha Kirkall after a drawing by F. Boitard, frontispiece to Hamlet in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of the works of Shakespeare (1709).

  Not that Hamlet, the creation, can be reduced to a psychosis: of all the creations in anglophone literature, he is the one who comes nearest to seeming – as few literary figures really do – alive in the way actual people are alive. This is partly because his character, his motives, and his pathology too, are as complex and elusive as such things are in life. He is known best of all for his melancholy, and for being dressed – for all time – in black.

  THE FIGURE – AND the mental image – of Hamlet assisted in what became a fashion of melancholy. When severed from its dependence on black bodily fluids, melancholy becomes
entirely a thing of mood, disposition and mental state. Melancholy could then vary between a condition of inexplicable misery and a solitary, sad reflectiveness which might also be enjoyed.

  Burton had recognized the attraction of melancholy: ‘melancholy . . . is most pleasant at first . . . a most delightsome humour, to be alone, dwell alone, walk alone, meditate, lie in bed whole days’. It is this note which dominates John Milton’s poem, ‘Il Penseroso’, which concludes:

  These pleasures Melancholy give

  And I with thee will choose to live.15

  But still Milton’s Melancholy has a black face. She is dark from excess of brightness, and in order to protect our sight: explicitly he says she is black and beautiful, to be compared with the loveliest princess of Africa:

  But hail thou Goddes, sage and holy,

  Hail divinest Melancholy,

  Whose Saintly visage is too bright

  To hit the Sense of human sight;

  And therfore to our weaker view,

  O’re laid with black staid Wisdoms hue.

  Black, but such as in esteem,

  Prince Memnons sister might beseem,

  Or that Starr’d Ethiope Queen that strove

  To set her beauties praise above

  The Sea Nymphs, and their powers offended.

  Milton is referring to Queen Cassiopeia (the mother of Andromeda, whom Perseus rescued, who must also have been black though often she is not in paintings). Cassiopeia was ‘starr’d’ when she was transformed into a constellation in the black night sky. Milton’s Melancholy, who is now a goddess, is however of still nobler parentage, for she is the incestuous daughter of ‘solitary Saturn’ by his daughter Vesta – not that we should think her blackened by incest, since ‘in Saturn’s reign / Such mixture was not held a stain’. Saturn, as a god, was identified with melancholy, and melancholy with blackness: astrologically, melancholics were born under Saturn, and Robert Burton places the sign of Saturn, ђ, at the centre-top of his title page. Confirming thoughts of darkness and night-time, Milton pictures Saturn ‘oft’ meeting with his daughter ‘in glimmering bowers and glades . . . and in secret shades / Of woody Ida’s inmost grove’.

  Milton has been daring, so far, for a young Christian scholar. Evidently needing to restore respectability, he now covers her native blackness with the black habit of a nun.

  Come pensive Nun, devout and pure,

  Sober, steadfast, and demure,

  All in robe of darkest grain.

  Gazing now to the skies in holy passion, she ‘forgets [herself] to marble’. This could mean that Milton now forgets her black skin, as William Blake did when he chose this moment for his illustration to the poem (illus. 55). She does however still wear a gown which, Blake palely suggests, should be thought of as black. Milton himself does not imagine an austere cast of nun, since he says her robe of darkest grain is ‘flowing with majestick train’. He also gives her a ‘sable stole of cypress lawn / Over her decent shoulders drawn’, and this stole again is lightly suggested by Blake, though we could hardly call it ‘sable’. ‘Cypress lawn’ was the very best black linen, so Melancholy may seem to be still in transition between the nun and the royal personage she had been before. Her appearance, however, which has proved so unstable, is fading. Blake could be said to catch her last visual moment, before her metamorphosis into music – into the sweet, sad song of the nightingale, the darkness-loving bird. In moving to Philomel’s ravishing song, ‘most musicall, most melancholy’, Milton comes to that concrete suffering of which melancholy is the distorted shadow. For, on hearing the name of Philomel, the reader must remember rapes, killings, cannibalistic revenge, cruel mutilation – all of which are distant now, within ‘her sweetest, saddest plight’.

  By this idiosyncratic route Milton comes to the relationship between melancholy and pain – real hurt, misery, the ‘abyss of suffering’ within a person. For wherever melancholy stands between diffused misery and philosophical pleasure, there is always a distance between melancholy and hurt. If there is a wound, it has been hidden or obscured; and if melancholy is pleasant, there is hurt in the hinterland. So Milton cries, later in the poem,

  55 William Blake, illustration to John Milton, ‘Il Penseroso’, c. 1816–20, pen and watercolour over black chalk.

  . . . let Gorgeous Tragedy

  In sceptred pall come sweeping by,

  Presenting Thebes, or Pelops’ line.

  Presenting, that is, horrifically violent stories involving murder of husbands, fathers, daughters, mothers, as well as incest, insanity and self-blinding. The pain and horror are set back, however, when the tragedy is seen as ‘gorgeous’ and ‘sceptred’ – though the word ‘pall’ means Milton is still thinking of a funeral, and black drapes, however royal.

  Through the poem Milton regulates the distance between off-stage pain and the pleasure of melancholy, above all by reference to music. For pain itself is beautiful and sweet when sung by Orpheus – ‘such notes as . . . / Drew Iron tears down Pluto’s cheek’. One could say Milton’s melancholy is made of music, from the distant clink of the bellman to the crescendo Milton mounts at the close – ‘let the pealing Organ blow, / To the full-voiced choir below’. But it is made of visual imagery too, and paradoxes of light and dark: he somewhat anticipates the ‘darkness visible’ of Paradise Lost when he speaks of a place

  Where glowing Embers through the room

  Teach light to counterfeit a gloom

  or when, near the close, he imagines stained-glass windows ‘Casting a dimm religious light’ – casting, that is, light and dimness at once.

  Though Milton was a classical scholar, there is no explicit reference in ‘Il Penseroso’ to the humoral medicine of the Greeks, and when he does refer to ‘humours black’ elsewhere in his work, it is in the later sense of ‘humour’ as a mood or prepossession. So in Samson Agonistes Manoa, Samson’s father, says (with some echo of humoral diagnosis):

  Believe not these suggestions which proceed

  From anguish of the mind and humours black,

  That mingle with thy fancy. (ll. 663–6)

  More at large, the imagery of black fluids runs through Milton’s work, often likened – in a comparison that harks back to early descriptions of black bile – to the dregs of wine. At the bottom of the universe, when God creates the world in Paradise Lost, are ‘the black tartareous cold infernal dregs / Adverse to life’. The tower of Babel is built where ‘a black bituminous gurge / Boiles out from under ground’ (and becomes one of Nimrod’s raw materials). And when the rebel angels invent gunpowder, they dig in the soil of heaven until they find a ‘sulphurous and nitrous foam’ which they reduce ‘to blackest grain’. It is presumably because gunpowder is black that the rebel-angelic artillery shoots ‘black fire and horror with equal rage’. Black materials are found above all in hell, where they burn with black fire since there is no topsoil beside hell’s river, ‘sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep’.16

  For Milton the prince of hell, Satan, is not black, though traditionally the Devil had been black (Hamlet said, ‘Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables’; III.ii.30). We hear of Satan’s spear, his harness and his shield, so probably we should imagine him – artists usually do – as a cross between a Greek and a Roman soldier, but gigantic. It may seem odd to call the Devil a melancholic – like calling Colonel Custer a paranoiac – since a fallen angel has reason to feel depressed. He is, though, a melancholic by Robert Burton’s definition of religious melancholy: ‘a sickness of the soul without any hope or expectation of amendment’. In that condition, one suffers ‘the sense of . . . God’s anger justly deserved’ while ‘the heart is grieved, the conscience wounded, the mind eclipsed with black fumes arising from those perpetual terrors’. Terror is not Satan’s avocation, but Burton had said of religious melancholy, ‘this desperate humour is not much to be discommended, as in wars it is a cause many times of extraordinary valour’. Milton’s Satan certainly has valour, flying
alone through Chaos, and declaring war on God and Creation. Critics speak of ‘the high melancholy music’ of his speeches, and the phrase is apt:

  Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;

  And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep