[In the following essay, Tillman compares Burton's satiric style in his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy to Horatian and Juvenalian satire, emphasizing the classical origins of the work's rhetorical personae rather than seventeenth-century concerns about the self and the stability of the authorial voice.]

Although most critics of seventeenth-century literature are familiar with the rhetorical personae typical of various genres, such as the self-deprecating speaker of orations or the piping shepherd of pastorals, generic approaches to the character of Democritus Jr. in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy have been neglected. Even two recent studies of prose with a strong emphasis upon personae, Joan Webber's The Eloquent “I” and Stanley E. Fish's Self-Consuming Artifacts, give little attention to Burton's classical and neo-classical models for a voice to meet the rhetorical demands of his Anatomy.¹ Webber's account of Democritus Jr., for instance, is more concerned with how the persona's inconsistent stances reflect the Anglican view of experience than with how they might be indebted to the poses typical of established literary genres. Similarly, Fish analyzes the intriguing interactions between the reader and the self-contradictory poses of Democritus Jr. without considering the rhetorical use of similar relationships in previous literary genres, especially satire. Despite their provocative insights, neither of these approaches provides an adequate account of the norms of characterization that Burton may have considered in creating an appropriate literary voice for the Anatomy. In particular, they ignore the possibility that Democritus Jr.'s many self-contradictions serve much the same purpose as similar displays of fallibility in the tradition of Roman satire.

Recent critics have demonstrated that classical and neoclassical satirists, beginning with Horace and Juvenal, create untrustworthy spokesmen, self-defeating personae who often lapse into the same errors that they elsewhere castigate.² Indeed, a revelation of the satirist's own failings—or satire on the satirist—deserves recognition as a commonplace of the genre, in much the same way as the modesty topos or purposeful self-disparagement has been accepted as a commonplace of orations or prefaces to didactic works.³ Such an assumption is borne out even by a brief survey of Renaissance and neo-classical satire in the Roman tradition. Erasmus's famous spokesman, Folly, for instance, is not only a keen satirist of others, but also an object of Erasmus's own satire on the arrogance of human folly. Similarly, the typical Elizabethan and Jacobean satiric spokesman in poetry and drama is as much an example of the ravages of human vices as he is an outspoken critic of the effect of vices upon others. Hence Volpone and Mosca become the victims of avarice and lust, even though they are extremely adept themselves at satirizing those same vices when they appear in other characters in Jonson's play. In much the same way, Marston's and Webster's malcontent revengers are as adept in spreading courtly corruption to innocent men as they are in satirizing corrupt courtiers. Even Shakespeare's Jacques fits this pattern, since Shakespeare mocks Jacques' own comic vanity and melancholy even while he uses him as a spokesman of his satiric wit. But perhaps the most subtle (and most controversial) example of this traditional satire on the satirist occurs in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, where Gulliver's tirade against human Yahoos is undercut by his own comic retirement to the stable where he lives out his final years as a horse. All of these satiric spokesmen have in common a tendency to reveal their own folly and vanity even in the middle of their verbal blasts against similar faults in other men—sometimes, in fact, falling victim to exactly the same vices that they most enjoy mocking.

Of all the relevant examples of this conventional self-contradiction by satiric spokesmen, however, the inconsistencies displayed by Horace and Juvenal in their influential satires seem most similar to those of Democritus Jr. Like Burton's persona, the figure of Horace in the satiric dialogues often falls into self-contradictions as a result of his comic vanity. Indeed, in one case, Horace's persona undercuts his own apology for satiric remarks about specific individuals by letting his vanity get away from him to the point that the apology itself becomes another satiric jibe at specific individuals.⁴ Similarly, Horace displays comic pride in another satire when he compares his own superior character to that of Tigellius, immediately before he berates those moralists who can see the faults of others more clearly than their own (1.3, 1-27). As Zoja Pavlovskis recently concluded, these comic self-contradictions are Horace's means of improving the “teaching process” in his satires, since he knows that people are more “willing to accept lessons from a humanly fallible man” than from some “aloof teacher of majestic grandeur.”⁵ Much like Burton, then, Horace intentionally reveals the comic inconsistencies of his persona, making a “scapegoat of himself” as Pavlovskis puts it (p. 35), in order to reinforce his satire upon human vanity.

Since Burton's persona is pathetic as well as comic, however, he also has much in common with the personae typical of Juvenalian satire. Like many of the Juvenalian personae of Renaissance satire, for instance, Democritus Jr. indulges in some of the same vices that he claims to scourge, possibly in imitation of Juvenal's pose as a furious Roman whose indignation seems to violate his own plea for self-restraint uttered in the tenth satire. This inconsistency creates a characteristic paradox, as relevant in some ways to Democritus Jr. as it is to Juvenal. For, as Alvin Kernan has argued,⁶ when the satirist himself cannot avoid the very faults he condemns, the frequently used Juvenalian formula, “it is impossible not to write satire,” becomes as much an admission of the spokesman's own pathetic lack of restraint as a commentary upon the unrestrained society that surrounds him. The traditional Juvenalian persona, in other words, much like Democritus Jr., is trapped in a pathetic self-contradiction, for he is so furious about the madness of others that he cannot restrain himself from an equally mad tirade.

Admittedly, since Burton's Anatomy is not only a satire, but also a medical treatise and variety of other things as well, Democritus Jr. appears as more than simply an Horatian or Juvenalian satiric spokesman. Yet in the preface to the Anatomy, at least, where Democritus Jr.'s self-contradictions are most often displayed, satire does take up so much of the text that Burton's own title page labels his introduction a “satyricall preface.”⁷ And surely in such a satirical preface it makes sense for Burton to use the self-contradictory stance of the Horatian and Juvenalian satiric spokesmen as a means of conciliating his reader. Perhaps he realized that the mere admission of faults in the modesty topos could not possibly conciliate a reader of a preface that is so satirical that it even tries to prove the reader himself mad. Playing the role of a man who cannot restrain his own melancholy even as he tries to cure the melancholy of others becomes Burton's means of ingratiating himself with a reader who is already somewhat alienated by the harsh satire. Even occasionally lapsing into self-contradictions, whether comic, like those of Horace, or pathetic, like those of Juvenal, could work effectively as a demonstration that the satirist, no less than the reader, is subject to folly and vanity.

An example of just this kind of purposeful self-contradiction occurs before Burton's preface is hardly more than one paragraph long. For Democritus Jr. insists upon opening his work with a denial that he is writing satire, buttressed, ironically, with proof lifted from the writings of two fellow satirists. This blatant self-contradiction begins with Democritus Jr.'s claim that those who expect a “pasquil, a satire, some ridiculous treatise” (p. 11) merely because he has adopted the name of Democritus have deceived themselves. Actually what he promises them is far from such an “absurd and insolent” fiction since his true subject is nothing else than man himself. “Thou thyself,” he proclaims to his reader, “art the subject of my discourse” (p. 12). Yet this famous announcement of his true subject is supported on both sides with quotations from satirists, first Martial and then Juvenal, both of whom had also advertised their works as merely honest reports about man. Hence an argument that begins with Democritus's emphatic denial that he is a satirist ends with his appropriation of the words of satirists to describe the subject matter of his work.⁸

Such a comic self-contradiction could occur for a variety of reasons, including some of the historical or stylistic causes suggested by Webber and Fish, yet it is significant that a precedent for Burton's comic incongruity appears in one of Horace's self-defenses. Horace argues at length in the fourth satire of his first book that it is unfair to criticize his satirical poetry because a writer of satires is not actually a poet anyway and should not be held to standards applied to poets.⁹ At the end of his defense, however, Horace undermines much of this elaborate argument when he turns on his accusers with the threat that, if they do not leave him alone, a host of his fellow poets will come to his aid (138-42). Of course, it is possible that both Horace and Burton are unaware of how their choice of supporters undercut their previous arguments, but it seems more likely that both are following a similar strategy of satirizing the satirist.

This Roman strategy of satirizing one's own persona may also account for the inconsistencies that occur later in the preface when Democritus Jr. tries, somewhat ineffectively, to disparage his scurrilous style in the manner of the modesty topos common in most Renaissance prefaces. This well-known passage is comparable to Horace's comic self-contradiction in the apologia mentioned earlier (l. 4), for both authors allow their vain defenses of their satiric manner to get so out of hand that their apologies become simply another name-calling satire. Consider, for example, Democritus's opening catalogue of his faults:

And for those other faults of barbarism, Dorick dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dunghills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgement, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, phantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull and dry, I confess all ('tis partly affected) thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.

(p. 24)

Not only is this catalogue an unrepentant indulgence in the very things that Democritus is supposedly disparaging, but the parenthetical aside that the whole apology is “partly affected” anyway thoroughly undermines his gesture of humility. A few sentences later, Democritus completes this burlesque of the modesty topos when he satirizes the numerous “precedents” (p. 24) for his absurd style, including those prepetuated by his own readers. Much as Horace uses his apology for satire as a spring-board for more satire, so Burton exploits Democritus's apology for his scurrilous style as a showcase for more scurrility.

In Democritus's case, however, such blatant self-contradiction is more than simply an indication of a comic vanity similar to that of Horace. It is also part of a larger insinuation in the apology that Democritus suffers from a despair inspired by the absurdity he attributes to all authors, indeed to all men. For, more like the Juvenalian than the Horatian persona in this regard, Burton's Democritus Jr. is a pathetic figure here, a melancholy man who is so obsessed with the absurdity of his many “precedents” that he cannot help but lapse into a similar behavior himself, even in the middle of his apology for his scurrilous style. Democritus first sounds this note of pathos in the conclusion of his catalogue of faults, with his partly serious statement: “thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.” This melancholy self-contempt is then reinforced when he places himself at the head of his list of absurd authors, all of whom insist upon vainly strutting upon the stage, even though not one of them is without faults. More important than these signs of self-contempt, though, is the impression conveyed by the entire apology that no man can control his vanity long enough to change something as representative of himself as his own style. If Democritus is somewhat unapologetic about his style—indeed even a bit haughty about it occasionally—it is less because he does not deplore it, than because he is helpless to change it. Like the Juvenalian spokesmen, Democritus Jr. is, paradoxically, indulging in similar absurdities as those that he deplores in others. Hence he finds it impossible not to write his apology in a scurrilous style when he sees men, including himself, who so richly deserve scurrility.

Whether one emphasizes this Juvenalian pathos or the earlier Horatian comedy in Democritus's apology for his style, the use of the satirist's self-contradictory personality remains the essential element of Burton's rhetorical stance. Burton's spokesman is a helpless figure, trying unsuccessfully to disparage his style when the only scourge he has at hand is that style itself. By drawing our attention to this pathetic and humorous situation, Burton creates the impression that Democritus is a man trapped in his own fallibility, lashing out at himself and others in a tragi-comic rage, even though he can never defeat the absurdity that provokes him. Although appearing in such a role is obviously an effective proof of Burton's modesty, the role is, of course, much more than simply a modesty topos. Rather, Burton has used his persona as a scapegoat to reinforce his satiric point that all men must be humble in the face of the comic and pathetic fallibility that infects them. We identify with the voice of Burton's “satyricall preface,” then, less because he openly confesses his faults in the manner of the orator's modesty topos, than because he is a dramatic embodiment of the human limitations that Burton's satire has taught us to recognize in ourselves and others.

Burton's reliance on this ancient satire on the satirist is even more apparent in the remarkable apology that concludes the preface to the Anatomy. The self-contradictions in this apology immediately become apparent when one summarizes the positions taken by Democritus Jr. in what Stanley E. Fish has called a “bewildering succession of poses and reversals.”¹⁰ The poses begin when Democritus Jr. opens his apology with the admission that he is himself as mad as the men he has just satirized at length (p. 137). Yet, a paragraph later, Burton seems to retract this confession to a certain extent when he says that if he has overshot himself in his satirical proof of human madness, we should attribute the error to his role as Democritus Jr., rather than to his own views (p. 138). Moreover, he asks us why we should take offense anyway, when he has merely indulged in that “liberty those old Satirists have had” by attacking vices, not individuals, and by indulging in a Saturnalian holiday of ridicule (pp. 138-8). Pushing his defense of himself even farther, he begins, ironically, to sound as haughty as the vain madmen he has just been mocking. “If any man take exceptions,” he claims (p. 140), “let him turn the buckle of his girdle, I care not. I owe thee nothing (Reader), I look for no favour at thy hands, I am independent, I fear not.” Finally, though, he seems to realize his error of assuming that he is really independent of the folly that he has just insisted infects everyone, for suddenly he retreats into abject humility: “No, I recant, I will not, I care, I fear, I confess my fault, acknowledge a great offense … I have overshot myself, I have spoken foolishly, rashly, unadvisedly, absurdly, I have anatomized my own folly” (p. 140).

As much as this extraordinary passage conforms to the inconsistencies typical of Webber's “Anglican I” or to the interaction between reader and persona in Fish's “self-consuming artifact,” it also follows in the much older tradition of Horatian satire. In one poem (2.3), for instance, Horace's persona poses as an exception to the general rule of folly that the satire has just revealed, immediately before he, too, learns quite suddenly that he is actually just as foolish as the men he has previously mocked. Although Horace's satire consists of a dialogue and makes use of another character to expose Horace's comic vanity, the rhetorical use of Horace's own persona to display the very folly satirized is close enough to the strategy in Burton's final apology to suggest that it could be Burton's rhetorical model. In both cases, in fact, their personae appear as smug figures who are willing to acknowledge that a general folly infects all men, including themselves, without ever being honest with themselves about their own faults. However, after both of them have a dramatic lapse into a vanity similar to that they generally deplore, the satiric point that vanity and folly are universal is reinforced for the personae as well as for the reader. By means of a display of self-contradiction, therefore, both writers reassert the general thesis of their satire with vivid dramatic examples, while at the same time encouraging their readers to sympathize with authors objective enough to mock their own satirical spokesmen.

In addition to this traditional use of his persona as a comic example of the vanity he is satirizing, Burton's allusions in this final apology also suggest that he is indebted to the conventions of satire. As Rosalie Colie recognized, the playful disclaimer of any responsibility for the satirical exaggerations of Democritus Jr. is an appropriation of the ironic stance of Erasmus in the preface to his Praise of Folly.¹¹ In addition, Burton also draws upon the protestations of innocence used by classical satirists in the defenses of their satire, or satiric apologia, that became traditional very early in the development of satire.¹² Burton's naive pose as an innocent collector of satirical jibes who is merely exercising the ancient “liberty of Old Satirists” is supported, for instance, by a quote from an Horatian apology for satire (p. 138). Later, when Democritus concludes his apology by urging us not to be offended if he sometimes lapses into satire again in the treatise that follows, he adopts the stance of Juvenal in the well-known apologia that prefaces his satires. Quoting Juvenal's formula, “it is impossible not to write satire,” Burton goes on to frame his own version for the Anatomy: “it is impossible not in so much to overshoot” (p. 141). Such allusions to the satirist's typical defensive postures, both in classical and later works, makes it seem all the more likely that Burton is using his persona as a dramatic scapegoat in the manner of previous satirists.

Of course, recognizing the similarities of Burton's Democritus Jr. with the Horatian and Juvenalian personae and even noting the allusions to the Roman satirists that I have just been exploring should not detract from our appreciation of the originality of Burton's literary personality. Neither the Horatian nor the Juvenalian persona matches Democritus Jr.'s speed in changing his pose, his gall in outfacing all opposition, or his innocent surprise when he catches his own errors and changes direction again. Neverthless, these parallels between Burton's persona and those of previous satirists remind us that the self-contradictory nature of Democritus Jr.'s character may owe as much to the rhetorical requirements of satire in the Roman tradition as it does to any special circumstances unique to seventeenth-century Anglicans or to “self-consuming artifacts.”

Notes

1. See Webber's The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1968), pp. 4-5, 80-114; and Fish's Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), pp. 1-4, 303-344.

2. The best study of this paradoxical behavior is in The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 29-30, 74-8, 132-35, 139-40, and 148-49. See also Eugene M. Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 56-59, where the fallible role of the satirist in both verse and drama is discussed. The “satirist satirized” is a phrase used most often in analyzing dramatic satirists; see Robert C. Elliot, “The Satirist Satirized: Timon of Athens,” in Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Ronald Paulson (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1971), pp. 278-304.

3. The seminal modern study of the modesty topos is in E. R. Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1948; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1953), pp. 83-85. See also Joseph A. Wittreich, “‘The Crown of Eloquence’: The Figure of the Orator in Milton's Prose Works,” in Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Amherst: The Univ. of Massachussets Press, 1974), pp. 29-30, 39-42, and 48 and my article, “Bacon's Ethos: The Modest Philosopher,” Renaissance Papers (1976), 11-19.

4. Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (New York: G. P. Putnam Sons, 1929), Satires, 1:4, 79-131. Future page references to this text will be found in parentheses within the text of the paper.

5. “Aristotle, Horace, and the Ironic Man,” Classical Philology, 63 (1968), p. 25. See also George Converse Fiske, “The Plain Style in the Scipionic Circle,” in Classical Studies in Honor of Charles Forster Smith, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 3 (1919), 62-106.

6. Kernan, pp. 29-30.

7. The quotation is from the frontispiece of the sixth edition, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. A. R. Shilleto, in 3 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1893), I, p. 2. Future page references to this volume will be found in parentheses within the text of the paper. The Anatomy, especially the preface, has been analyzed as satire: William R. Mueller emphasizes that the satire of the preface justifies the treatise which follows in “Robert Burton's ‘Satyricall Preface,’” MLQ, 15 (1954), 28-35; David Worcester cites Burton as an example of the “burlesque personality” in The Art of Satire (New York: Russell and Russell, 1940), pp. 40, 51-55; and R. Steve Wilkerson analyzes the preface as a satiric apologia written in the form of a judicial oration in “‘This Playing Labour’: The Preface to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy as a Satiric Apologia,” Diss. Georgia State University 1975.

8. Wilkerson has perceptive remarks on this self-contradiction, pp. 94-96. For a quite different approach, see Fish, pp. 304-6.

9. Horace's argument here, beginning with 11. 101-106, is comically specious as well; see Pavlovskis, pp. 31-32.

10. Fish, pp. 314-315.

11. See Colie's Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 458-60.

12. Although Wilkerson (pp. 188-199) does sporadically touch on resemblances between Burton's final apology and the satirist's apologia, it has not been generally noticed that this final apology is Burton's version of a formal apologia in the tradition described by Lucius Rogers Shero, “The Satirist's Apologia,” in University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 15 (1922), 148-67; by Carter R. Bishop, “Peace is my Dear Delight,” West Virginia University Bulletin, Philological Studies IV (1943), 64-76; and by Maynard Mack, “The Muse of Satire,” Yale Review, 41 (1951), 80-92.