George Eliot on melancholy
Some of the things you might find here on this blog are quotes and excerpts for my own storage's sake. (I used to have a journal for such things, and am still inclined to think the journal was nicer.) This being one of them. I have a good streak of the melancholic temperament (and I think you could safely say George Eliot did too), but I think it often comes with a persevering fortitude of action, if not always of aspect, and I'd hesitate to draw too straight a line between any form of melancholy and an "idle suffering" (perhaps either Eliot of I are confusing the distinction between temperament and the state of depression) in the absence of "beneficent activity". That said, this is a good medicine against a kind of moaning inactivity.
'Here we are!' said Felix, when they had crossed the wooden bridge, and were treading on the slanting shadows made by the elm trunks. 'I think this is delicious. I never feel less unhappy than in these late autumn afternoons when they are sunny.'
'Less unhappy! There now!' said Esther, smiling at him with some of her habitual sauciness, 'I have caught you in self-contradiction. I have heard you quite furious against puling, melancholy people. If I had said what you have just said, you would have given me a long lecture, and told me to go home and interest myself in the reason of the rule of three.'
'Very likely,' said Felix, beating the weeds, according to the foible of our common humanity when it has a stick in its hand. 'But I don't think myself a fine fellow because I'm melancholy. I don't measure my force by the negations in me, and think my soul must be a mighty one because it is more given to idle suffering than to beneficent activity. That's what your favourite gentlemen do, of the Byronic-bilious style.'
'I don't admit that those are my favourite gentlemen.'
I've heard you defend them - gentlemen like your Renes, who have no particular talent for the finite, but a general sense that the infinite is the right thing for them. They might as well boast of nausea as a proof of a strong inside.'
'Stop, stop! You run on in that way to get out of my reach. I convicted you of confessing that you are melancholy.'
'Yes!' said Felix, thrusting his left hand into his pocket, with a shrug; 'as I could confess to a great many other things I'm not proud of. The fact is, there are not many easy lots to be drawn in the world at present; and such as they are I am not envious of them. I don't say life is not worth having: it is worth having to a man who has some sparks of sense and feeling and bravery in him. And the finest fellow of all would be the one who could be glad to have lived because the world was chiefly miserable, and his life had come to help some one who needed it. He would be the man who had the most powers and the fewest selfish wants. But I'm not up to the level of what I see to be best. I'm often a hungry discontented fellow.'