Note 68 — THE MONIST.
Reading edition
The term melancholy meant in Dürer’s time, as it did also in Shakespeare’s and Milton’s, “thought or thoughtfulness.” Says Milton in Il Penseroso:
“Hail, thou Goddess, sage and holy, Hail divinest melancholy Whose saintly visage is too bright To hit the sense of human sight, And therefore to our weaker view O’erlaid with black, staid Wisdom’s hue.”—I, 12.
Thought that does not lead to action produces a gloomy state of mind. Thoughtfulness which cannot find a way out of itself is that melancholy which engenders weakness,—a truth which is illustrated in Hamlet. Shakespeare still uses the words thought and melancholy as synonyms, saying:
“The native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
Dürer’s melancholy does not represent the gloominess of thought, but the power of invention. Soberness and even a certain sadness are considered only as an element of this melancholy, but on the whole the genius of thought appears bright, self-possessed, and strong.
Dürer represents the Science of Mechanical Invention as a winged female figure musing over some problem. Scattered on the floor around her lie some of the simple tools used in the sixteenth century. A ladder leans against the house, that assists in climbing otherwise inaccessible heights. A scale, an hour-glass, a bell, and the magic square are hanging on the wall behind her.
At a distance a bat-like creature, being the gloom of melancholy, hovers in the air like a dark cloud, but the sun rises above the horizon, and at the happy middle between these two extremes stands the rainbow of serene hope and cheerful confidence.