[124] ENGLISH prose literature towards the end of the seventeenth
century, in the hands of Dryden and Locke, was becoming, as that of
France had become at an earlier date, a matter of design and skilled
practice, highly conscious of itself as an art, and, above all,
correct. Up to that time it had been, on the whole, singularly
informal and unprofessional, and by no means the literature of the "man
of letters," as we understand him. Certain great instances there had
been of literary structure or architecture--The Ecclesiastical Polity,
The Leviathan--but for the most part that earlier prose literature is
eminently occasional, closely determined by the eager practical aims of
contemporary politics and theology, or else due to a man's own native
instinct to speak because he cannot help speaking. Hardly aware of the
habit, he likes talking to himself; and when he writes (still in
undress) he does but take the "friendly reader" into his confidence.
The type of this literature, obviously, is not Locke or Gibbon, but,
above all others, Sir Thomas [125] Browne; as Jean Paul is a good
instance of it in German literature, always in its developments so much
later than the English; and as the best instance of it in French
literature, in the century preceding Browne, is Montaigne, from whom
indeed, in a great measure, all those tentative writers, or essayists,
derive.
It was a result, perhaps, of the individualism and liberty of personal
development, which, even for a Roman Catholic, were effects of the
Reformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the "subjective,"
as people say, of the singularities of personal character. Browne,
too, bookish as he really is claims to give his readers a matter, "not
picked from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst the weeds and
tares" of his own brain. The faults of such literature are what we all
recognise in it: unevenness, alike in thought and style; lack of
design; and caprice--the lack of authority; after the full play of
which, there is so much to refresh one in the reasonable transparency
of Hooker, representing thus early the tradition of a classical
clearness in English literature, anticipated by Latimer and More, and
to be fulfilled afterwards in Butler and Hume. But then, in recompense
for that looseness and whim, in Sir Thomas Browne for instance, we have
in those "quaint" writers, as they themselves understood the term
(coint, adorned, but adorned with all the curious ornaments of their
own predilection, provincial [126] or archaic, certainly unfamiliar,
and selected without reference to the taste or usages of other people)
the charm of an absolute sincerity, with all the ingenuous and racy
effect of what is circumstantial and peculiar in their growth.
The whole creation is a mystery and particularly that of man. At the
blast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at His bare
word they started out of nothing. But in the frame of man He played
the sensible operator, and seemed not so much to create as to make him.
When He had separated the materials of other creatures, there
consequently resulted a form and soul: but having raised the walls of
man, He was driven to a second and harder creation--of a substance like
Himself, an incorruptible and immortal soul.
There, we have the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, in exact expression of
his mind!--minute and curious in its thinking; but with an effect, on
the sudden, of a real sublimity or depth. His style is certainly an
unequal one. It has the monumental aim which charmed, and perhaps
influenced, Johnson--a dignity that can be attained only in such mental
calm as follows long and learned pondering on the high subjects Browne
loves to deal with. It has its garrulity, its various levels of
painstaking, its mannerism, pleasant of its kind or tolerable, together
with much, to us intolerable, but of which he was capable on a lazy
summer afternoon down at Norwich. And all is so oddly mixed, showing,
in its entire ignorance of self, how much he, and the sort of
literature he represents, really stood in need of technique, [127] of a
formed taste in literature, of a literary architecture.
And yet perhaps we could hardly wish the result different, in him, any
more than in the books of Burton and Fuller, or some other similar
writers of that age--mental abodes, we might liken, after their own
manner, to the little old private houses of some historic town grouped
about its grand public structures, which, when they have survived at
all, posterity is loth to part with. For, in their absolute sincerity,
not only do these authors clearly exhibit themselves ("the unique
peculiarity of the writer's mind," being, as Johnson says of Browne,
"faithfully reflected in the form and matter of his work") but, even
more than mere professionally instructed writers, they belong to, and
reflect, the age they lived in. In essentials, of course, even Browne
is by no means so unique among his contemporaries, and so singular, as
he looks. And then, as the very condition of their work, there is an
entire absence of personal restraint in dealing with the public, whose
humours they come at last in a great measure to reproduce. To speak
more properly, they have no sense of a "public" to deal with, at
all--only a full confidence in the "friendly reader," as they love to
call him. Hence their amazing pleasantry, their indulgence in their
own conceits; but hence also those unpremeditated wildflowers of speech
we should [128] never have the good luck to find in any more formal
kind of literature.
It is, in truth, to the literary purpose of the humourist, in the
old-fashioned sense of the term, that this method of writing naturally
allies itself--of the humourist to whom all the world is but a
spectacle in which nothing is really alien from himself, who has hardly
a sense of the distinction between great and little among things that
are at all, and whose half-pitying, half-amused sympathy is called out
especially by the seemingly small interests and traits of character in
the things or the people around him. Certainly, in an age stirred by
great causes, like the age of Browne in England, of Montaigne in
France, that is not a type to which one would wish to reduce all men of
letters. Still, in an age apt also to become severe, or even cruel
(its eager interest in those great causes turning sour on occasion) the
character of the humourist may well find its proper influence, through
that serene power, and the leisure it has for conceiving second
thoughts, on the tendencies, conscious or unconscious, of the fierce
wills around it. Something of such a humourist was Browne--not callous
to men and their fortunes; certainly not without opinions of his own
about them; and yet, undisturbed by the civil war, by the fall, and
then the restoration, of the monarchy, through that long quiet life
(ending at last on the day [129] himself had predicted, as if at the
moment he had willed) in which "all existence," as he says, "had been
but food for contemplation."
Johnson, in beginning his Life of Browne, remarks that Browne "seems to
have had the fortune, common among men of letters, of raising little
curiosity after their private life." Whether or not, with the example
of Johnson himself before us, we can think just that, it is certain
that Browne's works are of a kind to directly stimulate curiosity about
himself--about himself, as being manifestly so large a part of those
works; and as a matter of fact we know a great deal about his life,
uneventful as in truth it was. To himself, indeed, his life at
Norwich, as he gives us to understand, seemed wonderful enough. "Of
these wonders," says Johnson, "the view that can now be taken of his
life offers no appearance." But "we carry with us," as Browne writes,
"the wonders we seek without us," and we may note on the other hand, a
circumstance which his daughter, Mrs. Lyttleton, tells us of his
childhood: "His father used to open his breast when he was asleep, and
kiss it in prayers over him, as 'tis said of Origen's father, that the
Holy Ghost would take possession there." It was perhaps because the son
inherited an aptitude for a like profound kindling of sentiment in the
taking of his life, that, uneventful as it was, [130] commonplace as it
seemed to Johnson, to Browne himself it was so full of wonders, and so
stimulates the curiosity of his more careful reader of to-day. "What
influence," says Johnson again, "learning has had on its possessors may
be doubtful." Well! the influence of his great learning, of his
constant research on Browne, was its imaginative influence--that it
completed his outfit as a poetic visionary, stirring all the strange
"conceit" of his nature to its depths.
Browne himself dwells, in connexion with the first publication
(extorted by circumstance) of the Religio Medici, on the natural
"inactivity of his disposition"; and he does, as I have said, pass very
quietly through an exciting time. Born in the year of the Gunpowder
Plot, he was not, in truth, one of those clear and clarifying souls
which, in an age alike of practical and mental confusion, can
anticipate and lay down the bases of reconstruction, like Bacon or
Hooker. His mind has much of the perplexity which was part of the
atmosphere of the time. Not that he is without his own definite
opinions on events. For him, Cromwell is a usurper, the death of
Charles an abominable murder. In spite of what is but an affectation,
perhaps, of the sceptical mood, he is a Churchman too; one of those who
entered fully into the Anglican position, so full of sympathy with
those ceremonies and observances [131] which "misguided zeal terms
superstition," that there were some Roman Catholics who thought that
nothing but custom and education kept him from their communion. At the
Restoration he rejoices to see the return of the comely Anglican order
in old episcopal Norwich, with its ancient churches; the antiquity, in
particular, of the English Church being, characteristically, one of the
things he most valued in it, vindicating it, when occasion came,
against the "unjust scandal" of those who made that Church a creation
of Henry the Eighth. As to Romanists--he makes no scruple to "enter
their churches in defect of ours." He cannot laugh at, but rather
pities, "the fruitless journeys of pilgrims--for there is something in
it of devotion." He could never "hear the Ave Mary! bell without an
oraison." At a solemn procession he has "wept abundantly." How
English, in truth, all this really is! It reminds one how some of the
most popular of English writers, in many a half-conscious expression,
have witnessed to a susceptibility in the English mind itself, in spite
of the Reformation, to what is affecting in religious ceremony. Only,
in religion as in politics, Browne had no turn for disputes; was
suspicious of them, indeed; knowing, as he says with true acumen, that
"a man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be
forced to surrender," even in controversies not [132] necessarily
maladroit--an image in which we may trace a little contemporary
colouring.
The Enquiries into Vulgar Errors appeared in the year 1646; a year
which found him very hard on "the vulgar." His suspicion, in the
abstract, of what Bacon calls Idola Fori, the Idols of the
Market-place, takes a special emphasis from the course of events about
him: "being erroneous in their single numbers, once huddled together,
they will be error itself." And yet, congruously with a dreamy
sweetness of character we may find expressed in his very features, he
seems not greatly concerned at the temporary suppression of the
institutions he values so much. He seems to possess some inward
Platonic reality of them--church or monarchy--to hold by in idea, quite
beyond the reach of Roundhead or unworthy Cavalier. In the power of
what is inward and inviolable in his religion, he can still take note:
"In my solitary and retired imagination (neque enim cum porticus aut me
lectulus accepit, desum mihi) I remember I am not alone, and therefore
forget not to contemplate Him and His attributes who is ever with me."
His father, a merchant of London, with some claims to ancient descent,
left him early in possession of ample means. Educated at Winchester
and Oxford, he visited Ireland, France, and Italy; and in the year
1633, at the age of twenty-eight, became Doctor of Medicine at Leyden.
Three years later he established himself as a physician [133] at
Norwich for the remainder of his life, having married a lady, described
as beautiful and attractive, and affectionate also, as we may judge
from her letters and postscripts to those of her husband, in an
orthography of a homeliness amazing even for that age. Dorothy Browne
bore him ten children, six of whom he survived.
Their house at Norwich, even then an old one it would seem, must have
grown, through long years of acquisition, into an odd cabinet of
antiquities--antiquities properly so called; his old Roman, or
Romanised British urns, from Walsingham or Brampton, for instance, and
those natural objects which he studied somewhat in the temper of a
curiosity-hunter or antiquary. In one of the old churchyards of
Norwich he makes the first discovery of adipocere, of which grim
substance "a portion still remains with him." For his multifarious
experiments he must have had his laboratory. The old window-stanchions
had become magnetic, proving, as he thinks, that iron "acquires
verticity" from long lying in one position. Once we find him re-tiling
the place. It was then, perhaps, that he made the observation that
bricks and tiles also acquire "magnetic alliciency"--one's whole house,
one might fancy; as indeed, he holds the earth itself to be a vast
lodestone.
The very faults of his literary work, its desultoriness, the time it
costs his readers, that [134] slow Latinity which Johnson imitated from
him, those lengthy leisurely terminations which busy posterity will
abbreviate, all breathe of the long quiet of the place. Yet he is by
no means indolent. Besides wide book-learning, experimental research
at home, and indefatigable observation in the open air, he prosecutes
the ordinary duties of a physician; contrasting himself indeed with
other students, "whose quiet and unmolested doors afford no such
distractions." To most persons of mind sensitive as his, his chosen
studies would have seemed full of melancholy, turning always, as they
did, upon death and decay. It is well, perhaps, that life should be
something of a "meditation upon death": but to many, certainly,
Browne's would have seemed too like a lifelong following of one's own
funeral. A museum is seldom a cheerful place--oftenest induces the
feeling that nothing could ever have been young; and to Browne the
whole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of a
somewhat mortified kind. Only, for him (poetic dream, or philosophic
apprehension, it was this which never failed to evoke his wonderful
genius for exquisitely impassioned speech) over all those ugly
anatomical preparations, as though over miraculous saintly relics,
there was the perpetual flicker of a surviving spiritual ardency, one
day to reassert itself--stranger far than any fancied odylic
gravelights!
[135] When Browne settled at Norwich, being then about thirty-six years
old, he had already completed the Religio Medici; a desultory
collection of observations designed for himself only and a few friends,
at all events with no purpose of immediate publication. It had been
lying by him for seven years, circulating privately in his own
extraordinarily perplexed manuscript, or in manuscript copies, when, in
1642, an incorrect printed version from one of those copies, "much
corrupted by transcription at various hands," appeared anonymously.
Browne, decided royalist as he was in spite of seeming indifference,
connects this circumstance with the unscrupulous use of the press for
political purposes, and especially against the king, at that time.
Just here a romantic figure comes on the scene. Son of the unfortunate
young Everard Digby who perished on the scaffold for some half-hearted
participation in the Gunpowder Plot, Kenelm Digby, brought up in the
reformed religion, had returned in manhood to the religion of his
father. In his intellectual composition he had, in common with Browne,
a scientific interest, oddly tinged with both poetry and scepticism: he
had also a strong sympathy with religious reaction, and a more than
sentimental love for a seemingly vanishing age of faith, which he, for
one, would not think of as vanishing. A copy of that surreptitious
edition of the Religio Medici found him a prisoner on suspicion of a
too active [136] royalism, and with much time on his hands.
The Roman Catholic, although, secure in his definite orthodoxy, he
finds himself indifferent on many points (on the reality of witchcraft,
for instance) concerning which Browne's more timid, personally grounded
faith might indulge no scepticism, forced himself, nevertheless, to
detect a vein of rationalism in a book which on the whole much
attracted him, and hastily put forth his "animadversions" upon it.
Browne, with all his distaste for controversy, thus found himself
committed to a dispute, and his reply came with the correct edition of
the Religio Medici published at last with his name. There have been
many efforts to formulate the "religion of the layman," which might be
rightly understood, perhaps, as something more than what is called
"natural," yet less than ecclesiastical, or "professional" religion.
Though its habitual mode of conceiving experience is on a different
plane, yet it would recognise the legitimacy of the traditional
religious interpretation of that experience, generally and by
implication; only, with a marked reserve as to religious particulars,
both of thought and language, out of a real reverence or awe, as proper
only for a special place. Such is the lay religion, as we may find it
in Addison, in Gray, in Thackeray; and there is something of a
concession--a concession, on second thoughts--about it. Browne's
Religio Medici is designed as the expression of a mind [137] more
difficult of belief than that of the mere "layman," as above described;
it is meant for the religion of the man of science. Actually, it is
something less to the point, in any balancing of the religious against
the worldly view of things, than the religion of the layman, as just
now defined. For Browne, in spite of his profession of boisterous
doubt, has no real difficulties, and his religion, certainly, nothing
of the character of a concession. He holds that there has never
existed an atheist. Not that he is credulous; but that his religion is
only the correlative of himself, his peculiar character and education,
a religion of manifold association. For him, the wonders of religion,
its supernatural events or agencies, are almost natural facts or
processes. "Even in this material fabric, the spirits walk as freely
exempt from the affection of time, place and motion, as beyond the
extremest circumference." Had not Divine interference designed to
raise the dead, nature herself is in act to do it--to lead out the
"incinerated soul" from the retreats of her dark laboratory. Certainly
Browne has not, like Pascal, made the "great resolution," by the
apprehension that it is just in the contrast of the moral world to the
world with which science deals that religion finds its proper basis.
It is from the homelessness of the world which science analyses so
victoriously, its dark unspirituality, wherein the soul he is conscious
of seems such a [138] stranger, that Pascal "turns again to his rest,"
in the conception of a world of wholly reasonable and moral agencies.
For Browne, on the contrary, the light is full, design everywhere
obvious, its conclusion easy to draw, all small and great things marked
clearly with the signature of the "Word." The adhesion, the difficult
adhesion, of men such as Pascal, is an immense contribution to
religious controversy; the concession, again, of a man like Addison, of
great significance there. But in the adhesion of Browne, in spite of
his crusade against "vulgar errors," there is no real significance.
The Religio Medici is a contribution, not to faith, but to piety; a
refinement and correction, such as piety often stands in need of; a
help, not so much to religious belief in a world of doubt, as to the
maintenance of the religious mood amid the interests of a secular
calling.
From about this time Browne's letters afford a pretty clear view of his
life as it passed in the house at Norwich. Many of these letters
represent him in correspondence with the singular men who shared his
own half poetic, half scientific turn of mind, with that impressibility
towards what one might call the thaumaturgic elements in nature which
has often made men dupes, and which is certainly an element in the
somewhat atrabiliar mental complexion of that age in England. He
corresponds seriously with William Lily, the astrologer; is acquainted
[139] with Dr. Dee, who had some connexion with Norwich, and has
"often heard him affirm, sometimes with oaths, that he had seen
transmutation of pewter dishes and flagons into silver (at least) which
the goldsmiths at Prague bought of him." Browne is certainly an honest
investigator; but it is still with a faint hope of something like that
upon fitting occasion, and on the alert always for surprises in nature
(as if nature had a rhetoric, at times, to deliver to us, like those
sudden and surprising flowers of his own poetic style) that he listens
to her everyday talk so attentively. Of strange animals, strange cures,
and the like, his correspondence is full. The very errors he combats
are, of course, the curiosities of error--those fascinating,
irresistible, popular, errors, which various kinds of people have
insisted on gliding into because they like them. Even his heresies
were old ones--the very fossils of capricious opinion.
It is as an industrious local naturalist that Browne comes before us
first, full of the fantastic minute life in the fens and "Broads"
around Norwich, its various sea and marsh birds. He is something of a
vivisectionist also, and we may not be surprised at it, perhaps, in an
age which, for the propagation of truth, was ready to cut off men's
ears. He finds one day "a Scarabaus capricornus odoratus," which he
takes "to be mentioned by Monfetus, folio 150. He saith, 'Nucem
moschatam et cinnamomum vere spirat'--[140] but to me it smelt like
roses, santalum, and ambergris." "Musca tuliparum moschata," again,
"is a small bee-like fly of an excellent fragrant odour, which I have
often found at the bottom of the flowers of tulips." Is this within
the experience of modern entomologists?
The Garden of Cyrus, though it ends indeed with a passage of wonderful
felicity, certainly emphasises (to say the least) the defects of
Browne's literary good qualities. His chimeric fancy carries him here
into a kind of frivolousness, as if he felt almost too safe with his
public, and were himself not quite serious, or dealing fairly with it;
and in a writer such as Browne levity must of necessity be a little
ponderous. Still, like one of those stiff gardens, half-way between
the medieval garden and the true "English" garden of Temple or Walpole,
actually to be seen in the background of some of the conventional
portraits of that day, the fantasies of this indescribable exposition
of the mysteries of the quincunx form part of the complete portrait of
Browne himself; and it is in connexion with it that, once or twice, the
quaintly delightful pen of Evelyn comes into the correspondence--in
connexion with the "hortulane pleasure." "Norwich," he writes to
Browne, "is a place, I understand, much addicted to the flowery part."
Professing himself a believer in the operation "of the air and genius
of gardens upon human spirits, towards virtue and sanctity," he is all
for [141] natural gardens as against "those which appear like gardens
of paste-board and march-pane, and smell more of paint than of flowers
and verdure." Browne is in communication also with Ashmole and
Dugdale, the famous antiquaries; to the latter of whom, who had written
a work on the history of the embanking of fens, he communicates the
discovery of certain coins, on a piece of ground "in the nature of an
island in the fens."
Far more interesting certainly than those curious scientific letters is
Browne's "domestic correspondence." Dobson, Charles the First's
"English Tintoret," would seem to have painted a life-sized picture of
Sir Thomas Browne and his family, after the manner of those big,
urbane, family groups, then coming into fashion with the Dutch Masters.
Of such a portrait nothing is now known. But in these old-fashioned,
affectionate letters, transmitted often, in those troublous times, with
so much difficulty, we have what is almost as graphic--a numerous
group, in which, although so many of Browne's children died young, he
was happy; with Dorothy Browne, occasionally adding her charming,
ill-spelt postscripts to her husband's letters; the religious daughter
who goes to daily prayers after the Restoration, which brought Browne
the honour of knighthood; and, above all, two Toms, son and grandson of
Sir Thomas, the latter being the son of Dr. Edward Browne, [142] now
become distinguished as a physician in London (he attended John, Earl
of Rochester, in his last illness at Woodstock) and his childish
existence as he lives away from his proper home in London, in the old
house at Norwich, two hundred years ago, we see like a thing of to-day.
At first the two brothers, Edward and Thomas (the elder) are together
in everything. Then Edward goes abroad for his studies, and Thomas,
quite early, into the navy, where he certainly develops into a
wonderfully gallant figure; passing away, however, from the
correspondence, it is uncertain how, before he was of full age. From
the first he is understood to be a lad of parts. "If you practise to
write, you will have a good pen and style:" and a delightful, boyish
journal of his remains, describing a tour the two brothers made in
September 1662 among the Derbyshire hills. "I received your two last
letters," he writes to his father from aboard the Marie Rose, "and give
you many thanks for the discourse you sent me out of Vossius: De motu
marium et ventorum. It seemed very hard to me at first; but I have now
beaten it, and I wish I had the book." His father is pleased to think
that he is "like to proceed not only a good navigator, but a good
scholar": and he finds the much exacting, old classical prescription
for the character of the brave man fulfilled in him. On 16th July 1666
the young man writes--still from the Marie Rose--
[143] If it were possible to get an opportunity to send as often as I
am desirous to write, you should hear more often from me, being now so
near the grand action, from which I would by no means be absent. I
extremely long for that thundering day: wherein I hope you shall hear
we have behaved ourselves like men, and to the honour of our country.
I thank you for your directions for my ears against the noise of the
guns, but I have found that I could endure it; nor is it so intolerable
as most conceive; especially when men are earnest, and intent upon
their business, unto whom muskets sound but like pop-guns. It is
impossible to express unto another how a smart sea-fight elevates the
spirits of a man, and makes him despise all dangers. In and after all
sea-fights, I have been very thirsty.
He died, as I said, early in life. We only hear of him later in
connexion with a trait of character observed in Tom the grandson, whose
winning ways, and tricks of bodily and mental growth, are duly recorded
in these letters: the reader will, I hope, pardon the following
extracts from them:--
Little Tom is lively.... Frank is fayne sometimes to play him asleep
with a fiddle. When we send away our letters he scribbles a paper and
will have it sent to his sister, and saith she doth not know how many
fine things there are in Norwich.... He delights his grandfather when
he comes home.
Tom gives you many thanks for his clothes (from London). He has
appeared very fine this King's day with them.
Tom presents his duty. A gentleman at our election asked Tom who hee
was for? and he answered, "For all four." The gentleman replied that
he answered like a physician's son.
Tom would have his grandmother, his aunt Betty, and Frank, valentines:
but hee conditioned with them that they should give him nothing of any
kind that hee had ever had or seen before.
[144] "Tom is just now gone to see two bears which are to be shown."
"Tom, his duty. He is begging books and reading of them." "The
players are at the Red Lion hard by; and Tom goes sometimes to see a
play."