The problem of melancholy is the problem of its appropriateness and expression. This is not the same as the problem of sadness or unhappiness within a specific context or situation: there are, after all, circumstances which universally and objectively call for the absence of happiness or satisfaction. Indeed, the absence of that absence may be regarded as evidence of insanity or moral decay, as when a loved one dies. The Homeric age knew that proper mourning was beloved of the gods — which is why there was such outrage at Achilles’ violation of Hector’s corpse before the walls of Troy — and even today, we see that the lack of proper grieving inflicts a moral wound on modern warriors. (On this subject, First Things’ Joseph Bottum will have an extended piece on the place of death in civilization shortly.) Whether or not one subscribes to the necessity of a thing’s opposite for the existence of that thing — and I do not — it remains true that sadness and delight are both part of the human condition, and both as necessary.

But sadness is not melancholy: it is not the state of pensive depression that descends, often enough without apparent cause, or out of proportion to its cause. Melancholy endures; melancholy tints experience; melancholy feels profound and meaningful. It feels that way, but it is not necessarily so. Winston Churchill had his “black dog” that afflicted him throughout his life, and Abraham Lincoln pronounced himself “the most miserable man alive,” and they were men of profound genius and action, whose melancholy produced sound moral judgment and proportion. Yet how many more teenagers in suburban plenty feel the same, and introduce the world to their bad poetry in consequence? Melancholy used to be a sort of gift to the Romantics, producing in its inner storms the flashes of lightning that illuminated the world. “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Would-be poets sought misery and suffering in order to be. Now, MySpace and blogging lay bare the tedious quality of most melancholy: its profundity and gift reduced to mere perception, and wrong perception at that, it now afflicts the diligent reader and correspondent more than the sufferer.

Worse than the melancholy that is trite is the melancholy that is aggrandizing. In Dostoevsky’s Demons, the writer Karamazinov — a parody of Turgenev — is said to exemplify this sort of terrible banality: in describing a fatal shipwreck, he introduces his reader to human suffering as many drown, scream for rescue, or slowly freeze; and he does so with an eye toward emphasizing to the reader his reaction to these horrors. Look, he feels badly; look, he turns away; look, he cannot take any more; look how it all affects him. There is a place for this, of course, but as the moral focus of a work, it loses sight of the objective tragedy, which is not that the author feels awful, but that people die. Here we may judge that melancholy goes too far, or worse, elides into ego. This is melancholy’s paradox, in that it elevates as it depresses — and that both are matters of perception, and not reality.

I know of a small boy who shut himself in his room and wept. “What’s wrong?” asked his parents. “I’m very sad,” he said. “Why?” asked his parents. “I don’t know,” he replied. So it goes. All things in the human sphere are caused, but the caused and the knowable are not the same. The impetus in our scientific age is to resort to medicine and pharmacology: implicit in the lack of known cause is the assumed lack of meaning. There is utility in this, but not necessarily wisdom. As we look to melancholy, we see the genius in history; but in the democratization of communication we see much more the platitudinous, the self-absorbed, and the ordinary. This suggests melancholy-as-irritant, with its sufferers to be avoided and its occurrence to be forestalled. But even the base and the commonplace can lie on the path to wisdom. Sometime three millenia past, a man calling himself Qoholeth declared, “Vanity of vanities … The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” In his melancholy he perceived pointlessness in the material. Today we look to that lack of purpose and discern lack of moral content; but the author of Ecclesiastes did not, for in melancholy there was significance and direction: “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” If the problem of melancholy is the problem of its appropriateness and expression, then to solve that problem we must abandon it as a thing-in-itself, as a means to self-promotion, and especially as a discrete element in the human condition. This is the difference between its sufferers who are great — Qoholeth, Lincoln, Churchill — and those who are small: that the great ones learned little about themselves in it, and much about the world and its appointed order.