for it is probable that phoenix-fanciers are becoming rare. It is enough
to say briefly, that if anyone wishes to understand the natural history
of the basilisk, the griffin, the salamander, the cockatrice, or the
amphisboena--if he wishes to know whether a chameleon lives on air, and
an ostrich on horseshoes--whether a carbuncle gives light in the dark,
whether the Glastonbury thorn bore flowers on Christmas-day, whether the
mandrake 'naturally groweth under gallowses,' and shrieks 'upon
eradication,'--on these and many other such points he may find grave
discussions in Sir Thomas Browne's pages. He lived in the period when it
was still held to be a sufficient proof of a story that it was written
in a book, especially if the book were Latin; and some persons, such as
Alexander Ross, whose memory is preserved only by the rhyme in
'Hudibras,' argued gravely against his scepticism.[5] For Sir Thomas, in
spite of his strange excursions into the marvellous, inclines for the
most part to the sceptical side of the question. He was not insensible
to the growing influence of the scientific spirit, though he believed
implicitly in witchcraft, spoke with high respect of alchemy and
astrology, and refused to believe that the earth went round the sun. He
feels that his favourite creatures are doomed to extinction, and though
dealing lovingly with them, speaks rather like an attached mourner at
their funerals than a physician endeavouring to maintain their
flickering vitality. He tries experiments and has a taste for
dissection. He proves by the evidence of his senses, and believes them
in spite of the general report, that a dead kingfisher will not turn its
breast to the wind. He convinced himself that if two magnetic needles
were placed in the centre of rings marked with the alphabet (an odd
anticipation of the electric telegraph, _minus_ the wires), they would
not point to the same letter by an occult sympathy. His arguments are
often to the point, though overlaid with a strange accretion of the
fabulous. In discussing the question of the blackness of negroes, he
may remind benevolent readers of some of Mr. Darwin's recent
speculations. He rejects, and on the same grounds which Mr. Darwin
declares to be conclusive, the hypothesis that the blackness is the
immediate effect of the climate; and he points out, what is important in
regard to 'sexual selection,' that a negro may admire a flat nose as we
admire an aquiline; though, of course, he diverges into extra-scientific
questions when discussing the probable effects of the curse of Ham, and
rather loses himself in a 'digression concerning blackness.' We may
fancy that this problem pleased Sir Thomas rather because it appeared to
be totally insoluble than for any other reason; and in spite of his
occasional gleams of scientific observation, he is always most at home
when on the border-land which divides the purely marvellous from the
region of ascertainable fact. In the last half of his book, indeed,
having exhausted natural history, he plunges with intense delight into
questions which bear the same relation to genuine antiquarianism that
his phoenixes and salamanders bear to scientific inquiry: whether the
sun was created in Libra; what was the season of the year in Paradise;
whether the forbidden fruit was an apple; whether Methuselah was the
longest-lived of all men (a main argument on the other side being that
Adam was created at the perfect age of man, which in those days was
fifty or sixty, and thus had a right to add sixty to his natural years);
what was the nature of St. John the Baptist's camel's-hair garment; what
were the secret motives of the builders of the Tower of Babel; whether
the three kings really lived at Cologne,--these and many other profound
inquiries are detailed with all imaginable gravity, and the interest of
the inquirer is not the less because he generally comes to the
satisfactory and sensible conclusion that we cannot possibly know
anything whatever about it.
The 'Inquiry into Vulgar Errors' was published in 1646, and Sir Thomas's
next publication appeared in 1658. The dates are significant. Whilst all
England was in the throes of the first civil war, Sir Thomas had been
calmly finishing his catalogue of intellectual oddities. This book was
published soon after the crushing victory of Naseby. King, Parliament,
and army, illustrating a very different kind of vulgar error, continued
to fight out their quarrel to the death. Whilst Milton, whose genius was
in some way most nearly akin to his own, was raising his voice in favour
of the liberty of the press, good Sir Thomas was meditating profoundly
on quincunxes. Milton hurled fierce attacks at Salmasius, and meanwhile
Sir Thomas, in his quiet country town, was discoursing on 'certain
sepulchral urns lately found in Norfolk.' In the year of Cromwell's
death, the result of his labours appeared in a volume containing 'The
Garden of Cyrus' and the 'Hydriotaphia.'
The first of these essays illustrates Sir Thomas's peculiar mysticism.
The external world was not to him the embodiment of invariable forces,
and therefore capable of revealing a general law in a special instance;
but rather a system of symbols, signatures of the Plastic Nature, to
which mysterious truths were arbitrarily annexed. A Pythagorean doctrine
of numbers was therefore congenial to his mind. He ransacks heaven and
earth, he turns over all his stores of botanical knowledge, he searches
all sacred and profane literature to discover anything that is in the
form of an X, or that reminds him in any way of the number five. From
the garden of Cyrus, where the trees were arranged in this order, he
rambles through the universe, stumbling over quincunxes at every step.
To take, for example, his final, and, of course, his fifth chapter, we
find him modestly disavowing an 'inexcusable Pythagorism,' and yet
unable to refrain from telling us that five was anciently called the
number of justice: that it was also called the divisive number; that
most flowers have five leaves; that feet have five toes; that the cone
has a 'quintuple division;' that there were five wise and five foolish
virgins; that the 'most generative animals' were created on the fifth
day; that the cabalists discovered strange meanings in the number five;
that there were five golden mice; that five thousand persons were fed
with five barley-loaves; that the ancients mixed five parts of water
with wine; that plays have five acts; that starfish have five points;
and that if anyone inquire into the causes of this strange repetition,
'he shall not pass his hours in vulgar speculations.' We, however, must
decline the task, and will content ourselves with a few characteristic
phrases from his peroration. 'The quincunx of heaven,' he says,
referring to the _Hyades_, 'runs low, and 'tis time to close the five
parts of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts
into the phantasms of sleep, which often continueth precogitations,
making cables of cobwebs, and wildernesses of handsome groves.... Night,
which Pagan theology could make the daughter of chaos, affords no
advantage to the description of order; although no lower than that mass
can we derive its genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they
end, and so shall they begin again; according to the admirer of order
and mystical mathematics of the City of Heaven. Although Somnus, in
Homer, be sent to rouse up Agamemnon, I find no such effects in these
drowsy approaches of night. To keep our eyes open longer were but to
act with our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are
already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsy at that
hour, which roused us from everlasting sleep? Or have slumbering
thoughts at that hour, when sleep itself must end, and, as some
conjecture, all shall wake again?'
'Think you,' asks Coleridge, commenting upon this passage, 'that there
ever was such a reason given for going to bed at midnight, to wit, that
if we did not, we should be acting the part of our Antipodes?' In truth,
Sir Thomas finishes his most whimsical work whimsically enough. The
passage is a good specimen of the quaint and humorous eloquence in which
he most delights--snatching fine thought from sheer absurdities, and
putting the homeliest truth into a dress of amusing oddity. It may
remind us that it is time to touch upon those higher qualities, which
have led one of the acutest of recent critics[6] to call him 'our most
imaginative mind since Shakspeare.' Everywhere, indeed, his imaginative
writing is, if we may so speak, shot with his peculiar humour. It is
difficult to select any eloquent, passage which does not show this
characteristic interweaving of the two elements. Throw the light from
one side, and it shows nothing but quaint conceits; from the other, and
we have a rich glow of poetic colouring. His humour and his melancholy
are inextricably blended; and his melancholy itself is described to a
nicety in the words of Jaques:--'It is a melancholy of his own,
compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and, indeed,
the sundry contemplation of his travels, in which his often rumination
wraps him in a most humorous sadness.' That most marvellous Jaques,
indeed, is rather too much of a cynic, and shows none of the religious
sentiment of Sir Thomas Browne; but if they could have talked together
in the forest, poor Jaques would have excited a far closer sympathy than
he receives from his very unappreciative companions. The book in which
this 'humorous sadness' finds the fullest expression is the 'Religio
Medici.' The conception of the book apparently resulted from the 'sundry
contemplation of his travels,' and it is written throughout in his
characteristic strain of thought. From his travels he had learnt the
best lesson of a lofty toleration. The furious controversies of that
age, in which the stake, the prison, and the pillory were the popular
theological arguments, produced a characteristic effect on his
sympathies. He did not give in to the established belief, like his
kindly natured contemporary Fuller, who remarks, in a book published
about the same time with the 'Religio Medici,' that even 'the mildest
authors' agree in the propriety of putting certain heretics to death.
Nor, on the other hand, does he share the glowing indignation which
prompted the great protests of Chillingworth and Taylor against the
cruelties practised in the name of religion. Browne has a method of his
own in view of such questions. He shrinks from the hard, practical world
into spiritual meditation. He regards all opinions less as a philosopher
than as a poet. He asks, not whether a dogma is true, but whether it is
amusing or quaint. If his imagination or his fancy can take pleasure in
contemplating it, he is not curious to investigate its scientific
accuracy. And therefore he catches the poetical side of creeds which
differ from his own, and cannot even understand why anybody should grow
savage over their shortcomings. He never could be angry with a man's
judgment 'for not agreeing with me in that from which, perhaps, within
a few days, I should dissent myself.' Travelling in this spirit through
countries where the old faith still prevailed, he felt a lively sympathy
for the Catholic modes of worship. Holy water and crucifixes do not
offend him. He is willing to enter the churches and to pray with the
worshippers of other persuasions. He is naturally inclined, he says, 'to
that which misguided zeal terms superstition,' and would show his
respect rather than his unbelief. In an eloquent passage, which might
teach a lesson to some modern tourists, he remarks:--'At the sight of a
cross or crucifix I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the
thought and memory of my Saviour. I cannot laugh at, but rather pity,
the fruitless journeys of pilgrims, or contemn the miserable condition
of friars; for though misplaced in circumstances, there is something in
it of devotion. I could never hear the Ave Mary bell without an
elevation; or think it a sufficient warrant, because they erred in one
circumstance, for me to err in all--that is, in silence and dumb
contempt. Whilst, therefore, they directed their devotions to her, I
offered mine to God, and rectified the errors of their prayers by
rightly ordering my own. At a solemn procession I have wept abundantly,
while my consorts, blind with opposition and prejudice, have fallen into
an excess of laughter and scorn.'
Very characteristic, from this point of view, are the heresies into
which he confesses that he has sometimes fallen. Setting aside one
purely fantastical theory, they all imply a desire for toleration even
in the next world. He doubted whether the damned would not ultimately be
released from torture. He felt great difficulty in giving up prayers for
the dead, and thought that to be the object of such prayers, was 'a good
way to be remembered by posterity, and far more noble than a history.'
These heresies, he says, as he never tried to propagate them, or to
dispute over them, 'without additions of new fuel, went out insensibly
of themselves.' Yet he still retained, in spite of its supposed
heterodoxy, some hope for the fate of virtuous heathens. 'Amongst so
many subdivisions of hell,' he says, 'there might have been one limbo
left for these.' With a most characteristic turn, he softens the horror
of the reflection by giving it an almost humorous aspect. 'What a
strange vision will it be,' he exclaims, 'to see their poetical fictions
converted into verities, and their imagined and fancied furies into real
devils! How strange to them will sound the history of Adam, when they
shall suffer for him they never heard of!'
The words may remind us of an often-quoted passage from Tertullian; but
the Father seems to gloat over the appalling doctrines from which the
philosophical humorist shrinks, even though their very horror has a
certain strange fascination for his fancy. Heresies such as these will
not be harshly condemned at the present day. From others of a different
kind, Sir Thomas is shielded by his natural love of the marvellous. He
loves to abandon his thoughts to mysterious contemplations; he even
considers it a subject for complaint that there are 'not impossibilities
enough in religion for an active faith.' 'I love,' he says, 'to lose
myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an _O altitudo_! 'Tis my
solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas
and riddles of the Trinity, incarnation, and resurrection. I can answer
all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd
resolution I learnt of Tertullian, _certum est quia impossibile est_.'
He rejoices that he was not an Israelite at the passage of the Red Sea,
or an early Christian in the days of miracles; for then his faith,
supported by his senses, would have had less merit. He loves to puzzle
and confound his understanding with the thoughts that pass the limits of
our intellectual powers: he rejoices in contemplating eternity, because
nobody can 'speak of it without a solecism,' and to plunge his
imagination into the abysses of the infinite. 'When I cannot satisfy my
reason,' he says, 'I love to recreate my fancy.' He recreates it by
soaring into the regions where the most daring metaphysical logic breaks
down beneath us, and delights in exposing his reason to the rude test of
believing both sides of a contradiction. Here, as everywhere, the
strangest freaks of fancy intrude themselves into his sublime
contemplations. A mystic, when abasing reason in the presence of faith,
may lose sight of earthly objects in the splendour of the beatific
vision. But Sir Thomas, even when he enters the holiest shrine, never
quite loses his grasp of the grotesque. Wonder, whether produced by the
sublime or the simply curious, has equal attraction for him. His mind is
distracted between the loftiest mysteries of Christianity and the
strangest conceits of Talmudists or schoolmen. Thus, for example, whilst
eloquently descanting on the submissiveness of his reason, he informs us
(obviously claiming credit for the sacrifice of his curiosity) that he
can read of the raising of Lazarus, and yet refrain from raising a 'law
case whether his heir might lawfully detain his inheritance bequeathed
unto him by his death, and he, though restored to life, have no plea or
title unto his former possessions.' Or we might take the inverse
transition from the absurd to the sublime, in his meditations upon hell.
He begins by inquiring whether the everlasting fire is the same with
that of our earth. 'Some of our chymicks,' it appears, 'facetiously
affirm that, at the last fire, all shall be crystallised and
reverberated into glass,' but, after playing for some time with this and
other strange fancies, he says in a loftier strain, though still with
his odd touch of humour, 'Men speak too popularly who place it in those
flaming mountains, which, to grosser apprehensions, represent hell. The
heart of men is the place the devils dwell in. I feel sometimes a hell
within myself; Lucifer keeps his courts in my breast; Legion is revived
in me. There was more than one hell in Magdalene, when there were seven
devils; for every devil is a hell unto himself; he holds enough of
torture in his own _ubi_, and needs not the misery of circumference to
afflict him; and thus a distracted conscience here is a shadow or
introduction into hell hereafter.'
Sir Thomas's witticisms are like the grotesque carvings in a Gothic
cathedral. It is plain that in his mind they have not the slightest
tinge of conscious irreverence. They are simply his natural mode of
expression; forbid him to be humorous, and you might as well forbid him
to speak at all. If the severity of our modern taste is shocked at an
intermixture which seemed natural enough to his contemporaries, we may
find an unconscious apology in a singularly fine passage of the 'Religio
Medici.' Justifying his love of church music, he says, 'Even that vulgar
and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me
a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first
composer.' That power of extracting deep devotion from 'vulgar tavern
music' is the great secret of Browne's eloquence. It is not wonderful,
perhaps, that, with our associations, the performance seems of
questionable taste; and that some strains of tavern music mix
unpleasantly in the grander harmonies which they suggest. Few people
find their religious emotions stimulated by the performance of a nigger
melody, and they have some difficulty in keeping pace with a mind which
springs in happy unconsciousness, or rather in keen enjoyment, of the
contrast from the queer or commonplace to the most exalted objects of
human thought.
One other peculiarity shows itself chiefly in the last pages of the
'Religio Medici.' His worthy commentators have laboured to defend Sir
Thomas from the charge of vanity. He expatiates upon his own universal
charity; upon his inability to regard even vice as a fitting object for
satire; upon his warm affection to his friend, whom he already loves
better than himself, and whom yet in a few months he will regard with a
love which will make his present feelings seem indifference; upon his
absolute want of avarice or any kind of meanness; and, which certainly
seems a little odd in the midst of these self-laudations, upon his
freedom from the 'first and father sin, not only of man, but of the
devil, pride.' Good Dr. Watts was shocked at this 'arrogant temerity,'
and Dr. Johnson appears rather to concur in the charge. And certainly,
if we are to interpret his language in a matter-of-fact spirit, it must
be admitted that a gentleman who openly claims for himself the virtues
of charity, generosity, courage, and modesty, might be not unfairly
accused of vanity. To no one, as we have already remarked, is such a
matter-of-fact criticism less applicable. If a humorist was to be denied
the right of saying with a serious face what he does not quite think, we
should make strange work of some of the most charming books in the
world. The Sir Thomas Browne of the 'Religio Medici' is by no means to
be identified with the everyday flesh-and-blood physician of Norwich.
He is the ideal and glorified Sir Thomas, and represents rather what
ought to have been than what was. We all have such doubles who visit us
in our day-dreams and sometimes cheat us into the belief that they are
our real selves, but most of us luckily hide the very existence of such
phantoms; for few of us, indeed, could make them agreeable to our
neighbours. And yet the apology is scarcely needed. Bating some few
touches, Sir Thomas seems to have claimed little that he did not really
possess. And if he was a little vain, why should we be angry? Vanity is
only offensive when it is sullen or exacting. When it merely amounts to
an unaffected pleasure in dwelling on the peculiarities of a man's own
character, it is rather an agreeable literary ingredient. Sir Thomas
defines his point of view with his usual felicity. 'The world that I
regard,' he says in the spirit of the imprisoned Richard II., 'is
myself: it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for
the other, I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for
my recreation.' That whimsical inversion of the natural order is the key
to the 'Religio Medici.' We, for the nonce, are to regard Sir Thomas
Browne as a world, and to study the marvels of his microcosm instead of
the outside wonders. And no one can deny that it is a good and kindly
world--a world full of the strangest combinations, where even the most
sacred are allied with the oddest objects. Yet his imagination
everywhere diffuses a solemn light such as that which falls through
painted windows, and which somehow harmonises the whole quaint
assemblage of images. The sacred is made more interesting instead of
being degraded by its association with the quaint; and on the whole,
after a stay in this microcosm, we feel better, calmer, more tolerant,
and a good deal more amused than when we entered it.