The life of Sir Thomas Browne does not afford much scope for the
biographer. Everyone knows that Browne was a physician who lived at
Norwich in the seventeenth century; and, so far as regards what one must
call, for want of a better term, his 'life,' that is a sufficient
summary of all there is to know. It is obvious that, with such scanty
and unexciting materials, no biographer can say very much about what Sir
Thomas Browne did; it is quite easy, however, to expatiate about what he
wrote. He dug deeply into so many subjects, he touched lightly upon so
many more, that his works offer innumerable openings for those
half-conversational digressions and excursions of which perhaps the
pleasantest kind of criticism is composed.
Mr. Gosse, in his volume on Sir Thomas Browne in the 'English Men of
Letters' Series, has evidently taken this view of his subject. He has
not attempted to treat it with any great profundity or elaboration; he
has simply gone 'about it and about.' The result is a book so full of
entertainment, of discrimination, of quiet humour, and of literary tact,
that no reader could have the heart to bring up against it the
obvious--though surely irrelevant--truth, that the general impression
which it leaves upon the mind is in the nature of a composite
presentment, in which the features of Sir Thomas have become somehow
indissolubly blended with those of his biographer. It would be rash
indeed to attempt to improve upon Mr. Gosse's example; after his
luminous and suggestive chapters on Browne's life at Norwich, on the
_Vulgar Errors_, and on the self-revelations in the _Religio Medici_,
there seems to be no room for further comment. One can only admire in
silence, and hand on the volume to one's neighbour.
There is, however, one side of Browne's work upon which it may be worth
while to dwell at somewhat greater length. Mr. Gosse, who has so much to
say on such a variety of topics, has unfortunately limited to a very
small number of pages his considerations upon what is, after all, the
most important thing about the author of _Urn Burial_ and _The Garden of
Cyrus_--his style. Mr. Gosse himself confesses that it is chiefly as a
master of literary form that Browne deserves to be remembered. Why then
does he tell us so little about his literary form, and so much about his
family, and his religion, and his scientific opinions, and his porridge,
and who fished up the _murex_?
Nor is it only owing to its inadequacy that Mr. Gosse's treatment of
Browne as an artist in language is the least satisfactory part of his
book: for it is difficult not to think that upon this crucial point Mr.
Gosse has for once been deserted by his sympathy and his acumen. In
spite of what appears to be a genuine delight in Browne's most splendid
and characteristic passages, Mr. Gosse cannot help protesting somewhat
acrimoniously against that very method of writing whose effects he is so
ready to admire. In practice, he approves; in theory, he condemns. He
ranks the _Hydriotaphia_ among the gems of English literature; and the
prose style of which it is the consummate expression he denounces as
fundamentally wrong. The contradiction is obvious; but there can be
little doubt that, though Browne has, as it were, extorted a personal
homage, Mr. Gosse's real sympathies lie on the other side. His remarks
upon Browne's effect upon eighteenth-century prose show clearly enough
the true bent of his opinions; and they show, too, how completely
misleading a preconceived theory may be.
The study of Sir Thomas Browne, Mr. Gosse says, 'encouraged Johnson, and
with him a whole school of rhetorical writers in the eighteenth century,
to avoid circumlocution by the invention of superfluous words, learned
but pedantic, in which darkness was concentrated without being
dispelled.' Such is Mr. Gosse's account of the influence of Browne and
Johnson upon the later eighteenth-century writers of prose. But to
dismiss Johnson's influence as something altogether deplorable, is
surely to misunderstand the whole drift of the great revolution which he
brought about in English letters. The characteristics of the
pre-Johnsonian prose style--the style which Dryden first established and
Swift brought to perfection--are obvious enough. Its advantages are
those of clarity and force; but its faults, which, of course, are
unimportant in the work of a great master, become glaring in that of the
second-rate practitioner. The prose of Locke, for instance, or of Bishop
Butler, suffers, in spite of its clarity and vigour, from grave defects.
It is very flat and very loose; it has no formal beauty, no elegance, no
balance, no trace of the deliberation of art. Johnson, there can be no
doubt, determined to remedy these evils by giving a new mould to the
texture of English prose; and he went back for a model to Sir Thomas
Browne. Now, as Mr. Gosse himself observes, Browne stands out in a
remarkable way from among the great mass of his contemporaries and
predecessors, by virtue of his highly developed artistic consciousness.
He was, says Mr. Gosse, 'never carried away. His effects are closely
studied, they are the result of forethought and anxious contrivance';
and no one can doubt the truth or the significance of this dictum who
compares, let us say, the last paragraphs of _The Garden of Cyrus_ with
any page in _The Anatomy of Melancholy_. The peculiarities of Browne's
style--the studied pomp of its latinisms, its wealth of allusion, its
tendency towards sonorous antithesis--culminated in his last, though not
his best, work, the _Christian Morals_, which almost reads like an
elaborate and magnificent parody of the Book of Proverbs. With the
_Christian Morals_ to guide him, Dr. Johnson set about the
transformation of the prose of his time. He decorated, he pruned, he
balanced; he hung garlands, he draped robes; and he ended by converting
the Doric order of Swift into the Corinthian order of Gibbon. Is it
quite just to describe this process as one by which 'a whole school of
rhetorical writers' was encouraged 'to avoid circumlocution' by the
invention 'of superfluous words,' when it was this very process that
gave us the peculiar savour of polished ease which characterises nearly
all the important prose of the last half of the eighteenth century--that
of Johnson himself, of Hume, of Reynolds, of Horace Walpole--which can
be traced even in Burke, and which fills the pages of Gibbon? It is,
indeed, a curious reflection, but one which is amply justified by the
facts, that the _Decline and Fall_ could not have been precisely what it
is, had Sir Thomas Browne never written the _Christian Morals_.
That Johnson and his disciples had no inkling of the inner spirit of the
writer to whose outward form they owed so much, has been pointed out by
Mr. Gosse, who adds that Browne's 'genuine merits were rediscovered and
asserted by Coleridge and Lamb.' But we have already observed that Mr.
Gosse's own assertion of these merits lies a little open to question.
His view seems to be, in fact, the precise antithesis of Dr. Johnson's;
he swallows the spirit of Browne's writing, and strains at the form.
Browne, he says, was 'seduced by a certain obscure romance in the
terminology of late Latin writers,' he used 'adjectives of classical
extraction, which are neither necessary nor natural,' he forgot that it
is better for a writer 'to consult women and people who have not
studied, than those who are too learnedly oppressed by a knowledge of
Latin and Greek.' He should not have said 'oneiro-criticism,' when he
meant the interpretation of dreams, nor 'omneity' instead of 'oneness';
and he had 'no excuse for writing about the "pensile" gardens of
Babylon, when all that is required is expressed by "hanging."' Attacks
of this kind--attacks upon the elaboration and classicism of Browne's
style--are difficult to reply to, because they must seem, to anyone who
holds a contrary opinion, to betray such a total lack of sympathy with
the subject as to make argument all but impossible. To the true Browne
enthusiast, indeed, there is something almost shocking about the state
of mind which would exchange 'pensile' for 'hanging,' and 'asperous'
for 'rough,' and would do away with 'digladiation' and 'quodlibetically'
altogether. The truth is, that there is a great gulf fixed between those
who naturally dislike the ornate, and those who naturally love it. There
is no remedy; and to attempt to ignore this fact only emphasises it the
more. Anyone who is jarred by the expression 'prodigal blazes' had
better immediately shut up Sir Thomas Browne. The critic who admits the
jar, but continues to appreciate, must present, to the true enthusiast,
a spectacle of curious self-contradiction.
If once the ornate style be allowed as a legitimate form of art, no
attack such as Mr. Gosse makes on Browne's latinisms can possibly be
valid. For it is surely an error to judge and to condemn the latinisms
without reference to the whole style of which they form a necessary
part. Mr. Gosse, it is true, inclines to treat them as if they were a
mere excrescence which could be cut off without difficulty, and might
never have existed if Browne's views upon the English language had been
a little different. Browne, he says, 'had come to the conclusion that
classic words were the only legitimate ones, the only ones which
interpreted with elegance the thoughts of a sensitive and cultivated
man, and that the rest were barbarous.' We are to suppose, then, that if
he had happened to hold the opinion that Saxon words were the only
legitimate ones, the _Hydriotaphia_ would have been as free from words
of classical derivation as the sermons of Latimer. A very little
reflection and inquiry will suffice to show how completely mistaken this
view really is. In the first place, the theory that Browne considered
all unclassical words 'barbarous' and unfit to interpret his thoughts,
is clearly untenable, owing to the obvious fact that his writings are
full of instances of the deliberate use of such words. So much is this
the case, that Pater declares that a dissertation upon style might be
written to illustrate Browne's use of the words 'thin' and 'dark.' A
striking phrase from the _Christian Morals_ will suffice to show the
deliberation with which Browne sometimes employed the latter word:--'the
areopagy and dark tribunal of our hearts.' If Browne had thought the
Saxon epithet 'barbarous,' why should he have gone out of his way to use
it, when 'mysterious' or 'secret' would have expressed his meaning? The
truth is clear enough. Browne saw that 'dark' was the one word which
would give, better than any other, the precise impression of mystery and
secrecy which he intended to produce; and so he used it. He did not
choose his words according to rule, but according to the effect which he
wished them to have. Thus, when he wished to suggest an extreme contrast
between simplicity and pomp, we find him using Saxon words in direct
antithesis to classical ones. In the last sentence of _Urn Burial_, we
are told that the true believer, when he is to be buried, is 'as content
with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus.' How could Browne have produced
the remarkable sense of contrast which this short phrase conveys, if his
vocabulary had been limited, in accordance with a linguistic theory, to
words of a single stock?
There is, of course, no doubt that Browne's vocabulary is
extraordinarily classical. Why is this? The reason is not far to seek.
In his most characteristic moments he was almost entirely occupied with
thoughts and emotions which can, owing to their very nature, only be
expressed in Latinistic language. The state of mind which he wished to
produce in his readers was nearly always a complicated one: they were to
be impressed and elevated by a multiplicity of suggestions and a sense
of mystery and awe. 'Let thy thoughts,' he says himself, 'be of things
which have not entered into the hearts of beasts: think of things long
past, and long to come: acquaint thyself with the choragium of the
stars, and consider the vast expanse beyond them. Let intellectual tubes
give thee a glance of things which visive organs reach not. Have a
glimpse of incomprehensibles; and thoughts of things, which thoughts but
tenderly touch.' Browne had, in fact, as Dr. Johnson puts it, 'uncommon
sentiments'; and how was he to express them unless by a language of
pomp, of allusion, and of elaborate rhythm? Not only is the Saxon form
of speech devoid of splendour and suggestiveness; its simplicity is
still further emphasised by a spondaic rhythm which seems to produce (by
some mysterious rhythmic law) an atmosphere of ordinary life, where,
though the pathetic may be present, there is no place for the complex or
the remote. To understand how unsuitable such conditions would be for
the highly subtle and rarefied art of Sir Thomas Browne, it is only
necessary to compare one of his periods with a typical passage of Saxon
prose.
Then they brought a faggot, kindled with fire, and laid the same
down at Doctor Ridley's feet. To whom Master Latimer spake in this
manner: 'Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We
shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as
I trust shall never be put out.'
Nothing could be better adapted to the meaning and sentiment of this
passage than the limpid, even flow of its rhythm. But who could conceive
of such a rhythm being ever applicable to the meaning and sentiment of
these sentences from the _Hydriotaphia_?
To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for,
and whose duration we cannot hope without injury to our
expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to
our beliefs. We, whose generations are ordained in this setting
part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations;
and, being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity,
are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and
cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which
maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment.
Here the long, rolling, almost turgid clauses, with their enormous Latin
substantives, seem to carry the reader forward through an immense
succession of ages, until at last, with a sudden change of the rhythm,
the whole of recorded time crumbles and vanishes before his eyes. The
entire effect depends upon the employment of a rhythmical complexity and
subtlety which is utterly alien to Saxon prose. It would be foolish to
claim a superiority for either of the two styles; it would be still
more foolish to suppose that the effects of one might be produced by
means of the other.
Wealth of rhythmical elaboration was not the only benefit which a highly
Latinised vocabulary conferred on Browne. Without it, he would never
have been able to achieve those splendid strokes of stylistic _bravura_,
which were evidently so dear to his nature, and occur so constantly in
his finest passages. The precise quality cannot be easily described, but
is impossible to mistake; and the pleasure which it produces seems to be
curiously analogous to that given by a piece of magnificent brushwork in
a Rubens or a Velasquez. Browne's 'brushwork' is certainly unequalled in
English literature, except by the very greatest masters of sophisticated
art, such as Pope and Shakespeare; it is the inspiration of sheer
technique. Such expressions as: 'to subsist in bones and be but
pyramidally extant'--'sad and sepulchral pitchers which have no joyful
voices'--'predicament of chimaeras'--'the irregularities of vain glory,
and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity'--are examples of this
consummate mastery of language, examples which, with a multitude of
others, singly deserve whole hours of delicious gustation, whole days of
absorbed and exquisite worship. It is pleasant to start out for a long
walk with such a splendid phrase upon one's lips as: 'According to the
ordainer of order and mystical mathematicks of the City of Heaven,' to
go for miles and miles with the marvellous syllables still rich upon the
inward ear, and to return home with them in triumph. It is then that one
begins to understand how mistaken it was of Sir Thomas Browne not to
have written in simple, short, straightforward Saxon English.
One other function performed by Browne's latinisms must be mentioned,
because it is closely connected with the most essential and peculiar of
the qualities which distinguish his method of writing. Certain classical
words, partly owing to their allusiveness, partly owing to their sound,
possess a remarkable flavour which is totally absent from those of Saxon
derivation. Such a word, for instance, as 'pyramidally,' gives one at
once an immediate sense of something mysterious, something
extraordinary, and, at the same time, something almost grotesque. And
this subtle blending of mystery and queerness characterises not only
Browne's choice of words, but his choice of feelings and of thoughts.
The grotesque side of his art, indeed, was apparently all that was
visible to the critics of a few generations back, who admired him simply
and solely for what they called his 'quaintness'; while Mr. Gosse has
flown to the opposite extreme, and will not allow Browne any sense of
humour at all. The confusion no doubt arises merely from a difference in
the point of view. Mr. Gosse, regarding Browne's most important and
general effects, rightly fails to detect anything funny in them. The
Early Victorians, however, missed the broad outlines, and were
altogether taken up with the obvious grotesqueness of the details. When
they found Browne asserting that 'Cato seemed to dote upon Cabbage,' or
embroidering an entire paragraph upon the subject of 'Pyrrhus his Toe,'
they could not help smiling; and surely they were quite right. Browne,
like an impressionist painter, produced his pictures by means of a
multitude of details which, if one looks at them in themselves, are
discordant, and extraordinary, and even absurd.
There can be little doubt that this strongly marked taste for curious
details was one of the symptoms of the scientific bent of his mind. For
Browne was scientific just up to the point where the examination of
detail ends, and its coordination begins. He knew little or nothing of
general laws; but his interest in isolated phenomena was intense. And
the more singular the phenomena, the more he was attracted. He was
always ready to begin some strange inquiry. He cannot help wondering:
'Whether great-ear'd persons have short necks, long feet, and loose
bellies?' 'Marcus Antoninus Philosophus,' he notes in his commonplace
book, 'wanted not the advice of the best physicians; yet how warrantable
his practice was, to take his repast in the night, and scarce anything
but treacle in the day, may admit of great doubt.' To inquire thus is,
perhaps, to inquire too curiously; yet such inquiries are the stuff of
which great scientific theories are made. Browne, however, used his love
of details for another purpose: he co-ordinated them, not into a
scientific theory, but into a work of art. His method was one which, to
be successful, demanded a self-confidence, an imagination, and a
technical power, possessed by only the very greatest artists. Everyone
knows Pascal's overwhelming sentence:--'Le silence éternel de ces
espaces infinis m'effraie.' It is overwhelming, obviously and
immediately; it, so to speak, knocks one down. Browne's ultimate object
was to create some such tremendous effect as that, by no knock-down
blow, but by a multitude of delicate, subtle, and suggestive touches, by
an elaborate evocation of memories and half-hidden things, by a
mysterious combination of pompous images and odd unexpected trifles
drawn together from the ends of the earth and the four quarters of
heaven. His success gives him a place beside Webster and Blake, on one
of the very highest peaks of Parnassus. And, if not the highest of all,
Browne's peak is--or so at least it seems from the plains below--more
difficult of access than some which are no less exalted. The road skirts
the precipice the whole way. If one fails in the style of Pascal, one is
merely flat; if one fails in the style of Browne, one is ridiculous. He
who plays with the void, who dallies with eternity, who leaps from star
to star, is in danger at every moment of being swept into utter limbo,
and tossed forever in the Paradise of Fools.
Browne produced his greatest work late in life; for there is nothing in
the _Religio Medici_ which reaches the same level of excellence as the
last paragraphs of _The Garden of Cyrus_ and the last chapter of _Urn
Burial_. A long and calm experience of life seems, indeed, to be the
background from which his most amazing sentences start out into being.
His strangest phantasies are rich with the spoils of the real world. His
art matured with himself; and who but the most expert of artists could
have produced this perfect sentence in _The Garden of Cyrus_, so well
known, and yet so impossible not to quote?
Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in
sleep; wherein the dullness of that sense shakes hands with
delectable odours; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly
with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.
This is Browne in his most exquisite mood. For his most characteristic,
one must go to the concluding pages of _Urn Burial_, where, from the
astonishing sentence beginning--'Meanwhile Epicurus lies deep in Dante's
hell'--to the end of the book, the very quintessence of his work is to
be found. The subject--mortality in its most generalised aspect--has
brought out Browne's highest powers; and all the resources of his
art--elaboration of rhythm, brilliance of phrase, wealth and variety of
suggestion, pomp and splendour of imagination--are accumulated in every
paragraph. To crown all, he has scattered through these few pages a
multitude of proper names, most of them gorgeous in sound, and each of
them carrying its own strange freight of reminiscences and allusions
from the unknown depths of the past. As one reads, an extraordinary
procession of persons seems to pass before one's eyes--Moses,
Archimedes, Achilles, Job, Hector and Charles the Fifth, Cardan and
Alaric, Gordianus, and Pilate, and Homer, and Cambyses, and the
Canaanitish woman. Among them, one visionary figure flits with a
mysterious pre-eminence, flickering over every page, like a familiar and
ghostly flame. It is Methuselah; and, in Browne's scheme, the remote,
almost infinite, and almost ridiculous patriarch is--who can doubt?--the
only possible centre and symbol of all the rest. But it would be vain to
dwell further upon this wonderful and famous chapter, except to note the
extraordinary sublimity and serenity of its general tone. Browne never
states in so many words what his own feelings towards the universe
actually are. He speaks of everything but that; and yet, with triumphant
art, he manages to convey into our minds an indelible impression of the
vast and comprehensive grandeur of his soul.
It is interesting--or at least amusing--to consider what are the most
appropriate places in which different authors should be read. Pope is
doubtless at his best in the midst of a formal garden, Herrick in an
orchard, and Shelley in a boat at sea. Sir Thomas Browne demands,
perhaps, a more exotic atmosphere. One could read him floating down the
Euphrates, or past the shores of Arabia; and it would be pleasant to
open the _Vulgar Errors_ in Constantinople, or to get by heart a chapter
of the _Christian Morals_ between the paws of a Sphinx. In England, the
most fitting background for his strange ornament must surely be some
habitation consecrated to learning, some University which still smells
of antiquity and has learnt the habit of repose. The present writer, at
any rate, can bear witness to the splendid echo of Browne's syllables
amid learned and ancient walls; for he has known, he believes, few
happier moments than those in which he has rolled the periods of the
_Hydriotaphia_ out to the darkness and the nightingales through the
studious cloisters of Trinity.
But, after all, who can doubt that it is at Oxford that Browne himself
would choose to linger? May we not guess that he breathed in there, in
his boyhood, some part of that mysterious and charming spirit which
pervades his words? For one traces something of him, often enough, in
the old gardens, and down the hidden streets; one has heard his footstep
beside the quiet waters of Magdalen; and his smile still hovers amid
that strange company of faces which guard, with such a large passivity,
the circumference of the Sheldonian.
1906.