mithridate
(n.) [ˈmɪθrəˌdeɪt] — any of various medicinal preparations, usually in the form of an electuary1 compounded of many ingredients, believed to be a universal antidote to poison or a panacea; in extended use: any healing or restoring agency or influence (OED)
It seems very likely that this word comes from a king’s name, specifically, from “Mithridates VI, king of Pontus (died ca. 63 B.C.), who was said to have rendered himself proof against poisons by the constant use of antidotes.” (OED) It is also more than likely that Robert Southey, English Romantic poet, biographer, critic and writer of other distinguished prose works, considered Love (with a capital L) to be most often a dangerous, calamitous emotion or state or rather affliction, the perennial scourge of the human heart. In a chapter or two in his multi-volume “novel,” titled The Doctor, he tells us that Love is most often a remarkably dangerous and destructive but nonetheless a necessary “thing,”—without it life wouldn’t have evolved beyond Planarians—but—or really “and so”—humans throughout recorded history have gone to great lengths to suppress and contain it, most often without success, especially with poets and other such emotional profligates. He notes, to support his point, that Ben Jonson has Lady Frampul, a principal character in his comedy The New Inn, or The Light Heart, express her feelings of being in Love as both freezing and burning, alternatively and excruciatingly:2
Thou doest not know my suffrings, what I feele, My fires, and feares, are met: I burne, and freeze, My liver’s one great coale, my heart shrunke up With all the fivers, and the masse of blood Within me, is a standing lake of fire, Curl’d with the cold wind of my gelid sighs, That drive a drift of sleete through all my body. And shoot a February through my veine Until I see him, I am drunke with thirst. And surfeted with hunger of his presence. I know not wher I am, or no, or speake, Or whether thou doest heare me.
And yet, as already noted, Love is necessary; it can’t nor should it be gotten rid of. Southey goes on to make a bit clearer where Love can more successfully set up shop, so to speak, and do the least or no damage as well as identifies those places where it won’t produce such happy results:
In a diseased heart it [love] loses its nature, and combining with the morbid affection which it finds, produces a new disease.
When it gets into an empty heart, it works there like quicksilver in an apple dumpling, while the astonished cook, ignorant of the roguery which has been played her, thinks that there is not Death, but the Devil in the pot.
[But] In a full heart, which is tantamount to saying a virtuous one, (for in every other, conscience [it] keeps a void place for itself, and the hollow is always felt,) it is sedative, sanative, and preservative: a drop of the true elixir, no mithridate so effectual against the infection of vice.3
That is to say, Love has pleasant, beneficial effects in “full=virtuous” hearts where, in contrast to its action on “diseased” or “empty” hearts, it serves as something calming and heathful that insures both the hearts’ preservation and serves as their “true elixir,” a substance more effective in enhancing these salubrious effects than any “mithridate” could be in countering “the infection of vice.” In every other heart not “full=virtuous,” its absence is “always felt” as an emptiness, and few people, I think it’s fair to say, would consider a feeling only as “pleasurable” as the absence of pain to be something to recommend Love. “Don’t get me wrong,” as they say; the absence of pain is nothing to be sneezed at, though it’s hardly the same as pleasure. As they also say, “It could be worse.” But for Southey, an elixir as a restorative and enhancer trumps, if only slightly, a mithridate as a curative and sedative.
Skipping ahead just about three quarters of a century, one might peruse the works of another English writer and poet employing mithridate to a similar but not identical effect in the first poem titled “the Intellectual Ecstasy” in the first section, “Lyrics in the Mood of Reflection,” in his last volume of poetry published in 1909 when he was 60 years old. Edmund Gosse, the poet, but also a biographer and literary critic, writes in the first two stanzas of that poem,4
Of Epicurus it is told That growing weak, and faint, and cold, And falling towards that torpid state By doctors held as desperate, He drowned his senses in a flood Of th’ ancient vine’s ebullient blood, Ingurgitating draughts of fire To lull his fear and his desire. But was he sober when he died?— Whereto an epigram replied: “He was too mad to taste or care How bitter Stygian waters were; Blest was he therefore.” Can we draw A sweetness from this cynic saw, Or of this mithridate distil An antidote for life’s long ill?
What Gosse seems to say in these lines is that the man who gave us the eponymous name for an attitude and a “life-style” got very drunk when he sensed he was getting old and “falling towards that torpid state.” Later, after he had died, someone wondered if, when he was actually dying, he was still drunk, to which wonderment an “epigram” replied, that, no, at death he was instead “mad,” but not completely unhinged—just mad enough not to know or care how “bitter” dying and death would be. I guess you could say that by dying in such a condition, not only was he “blest” but also that he therefore died as happy as a man could wish or ever expect. And from this epigrammatic piece of wisdom, from this mithridate, the poet wonders if it might be possible to “distill an antidote” to the poison(?) of the long sickness that is life. I too wonder about this, but only recently and only from time to time and usually after reading some Schopenhauer.
But these are only two interpretations of two examples of this word in action. The dictionary lists at least 19 more writers who have used mithridate and at least 3 derivative usages—and in which publications those usages appear—from the earliest occurring in 1528 to the latest in 1990, though I’d bet that there’ve been not a few recorded since then which haven’t come to the attention of the lexicographers and been deemed worth adding to the list. Of course, you are encouraged to consult the dictionary yourselves and to use this and any other word you may see among the couple hundred and counting entries here at WOTD in any way, consistent with their established senses, literal as well as figurative, that you choose.
“A medicinal conserve or paste, consisting of a powder or other ingredient mixed with honey, preserve, or syrup of some kind.” (OED)
Yale Studies in English XXXIV, Albert S. Cook, Editor. The New Inn or The Light Heart, by Ben Jonson. Edited with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary by George Bremner Tennant, Ph.D. A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of The Graduate School of Yale University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1908), V, ii, ll. 45-56, p. 104. See The New inn; or, The light heart : Jonson, Ben, 1573?-1637 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive for the complete text, including the complete play.
The Doctor, &c. By the Late Robert Southey. Edited by his Son-in-Law, John Wood Warter, B.D. [New Edition.] Volumes I to III. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1865), p. 162. See The doctor, &c : Southey, Robert, 1774-1843 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive for this text in full.
By the bye, I don’t know (1) how “quicksilver in an apple dumpling” “works” when some “rogue” has put mercury in that dumpling and then a cook cooks the dumpling cum mercury in a pot [How? Boils it?], and then, if all that were to have happened, (2) why the cook might think “not Death, but the Devil [was] in the pot.” And THEN, (3) I’m not sure I get what all that, and especially what the cook might think, conveys about Love’s effect on an empty heart. But maybe you do and can let me know.
“The Intellectual Ecstasy,” in Edmund Gosse, The Autumn Garden (London: Wiliam Heinemann. 1909), p. 3. See The autumn garden : Gosse, Edmund, 1849-1928 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive for the rest of this and the other poems in this volume.