The fairings were welcome to Tom. He finds about the house divers
things that were your brother's (the late Edward's), and Betty
sometimes tells him stories about him, so that he was importunate with
her to write his life in a quarter of a sheet of paper, and read it
unto him, and will have still more added.
Just as I am writing (learnedly about a comet, 7th January 1680-81) Tom
comes and tells me the blazing star is in the yard, and calls me to see
it. It was but dim, and the sky not clear.... I am very sensible of
this sharp weather.+
He seems to have come to no good end, riding forth one stormy night.
Requiescat in pace!
Of this long, leisurely existence the chief events were Browne's rare
literary publications; some of his writings indeed having been left
unprinted till after his death; while in the circumstances of the issue
of every one of them there is something accidental, as if the world
might have missed it altogether. Even the Discourse of Vulgar Errors,
the longest and most elaborate of his works, is entirely discursive and
occasional, coming to an end with no natural conclusion, but only
because the writer chose to leave off just there; and few probably have
been the readers of the book as a consecutive whole. At times indeed we
seem to have in it observations only, or notes, preliminary to some
more orderly composition. Dip into it: read, for [145] instance, the
chapter "Of the Ring-finger," or the chapters "Of the Long Life of the
Deer," and on the "Pictures of Mermaids, Unicorns, and some Others,"
and the part will certainly seem more than the whole. Try to read it
through, and you will soon feel cloyed;--miss very likely, its real
worth to the fancy, the literary fancy (which finds its pleasure in
inventive word and phrase) and become dull to the really vivid beauties
of a book so lengthy, but with no real evolution. Though there are
words, phrases, constructions innumerable, which remind one how much
the work initiated in France by Madame de Rambouillet--work, done for
England, we may think perhaps imperfectly, in the next century by
Johnson and others--was really needed; yet the capacities of Browne's
manner of writing, coming as it did so directly from the man, are felt
even in his treatment of matters of science. As with Buffon, his full,
ardent, sympathetic vocabulary, the poetry of his language, a poetry
inherent in its elementary particles--the word, the epithet--helps to
keep his eye, and the eye of the reader, on the object before it, and
conduces directly to the purpose of the naturalist, the observer. But,
only one half observation, its other half consisting of very
out-of-the-way book-lore, this work displays Browne still in the
character of the antiquary, as that age understood him. He is a kind
of Elias Ashmole, but dealing with natural objects; which are for him,
in the first [146] place, and apart from the remote religious hints and
intimations they carry with them, curiosities. He seems to have no
true sense of natural law, as Bacon understood it; nor even of that
immanent reason in the natural world, which the Platonic tradition
supposes. "Things are really true," he says, "as they correspond unto
God's conception; and have so much verity as they hold of conformity
unto that intellect, in whose idea they had their first
determinations." But, actually, what he is busy in the record of, are
matters more or less of the nature of caprices; as if things, after
all, were significant of their higher verity only at random, and in a
sort of surprises, like music in old instruments suddenly touched into
sound by a wandering finger, among the lumber of people's houses.
Nature, "the art of God," as he says, varying a little a phrase used
also by Hobbes, in a work printed later--Nature, he seems to protest,
is only a little less magical, its processes only a little less in the
way of alchemy, than you had supposed. We feel that, as with that
disturbed age in England generally (and it is here that he, with it, is
so interesting, curious, old-world, and unlike ourselves) his supposed
experience might at any moment be broken in upon by a hundred forms of
a natural magic, only not quite so marvellous as that older sort of
magic, or alchemy, he is at so much pains to expose; and the large
promises of which, its large words too, he still regretfully enjoys.
[147] And yet the Discourse of Vulgar Errors, seeming, as it often
does, to be a serious refutation of fairy tales--arguing, for instance,
against the literal truth of the poetic statement that "The pigeon hath
no gall," and such questions as "Whether men weigh heavier dead than
alive?" being characteristic questions--is designed, with much
ambition, under its pedantic Greek title Pseudodoxia Epidemica, as a
criticism, a cathartic, an instrument for the clarifying of the
intellect. He begins from "that first error in Paradise," wondering
much at "man's deceivability in his perfection,"--"at such gross
deceit." He enters in this connexion, with a kind of poetry of
scholasticism which may interest the student of Paradise Lost, into
what we may call the intellectual and moral by-play of the situation of
the first man and woman in Paradise, with strange queries about it.
Did Adam, for instance, already know of the fall of the Angels? Did he
really believe in death, till Abel died? It is from Julius Scaliger
that he takes his motto, to the effect that the true knowledge of
things must be had from things themselves, not from books; and he seems
as seriously concerned as Bacon to dissipate the crude impressions of a
false "common sense," of false science, and a fictitious authority.
Inverting, oddly, Plato's theory that all learning is but reminiscence,
he reflects with a sigh how much of oblivion must needs be involved in
the getting of any true knowledge. "Men that [148] adore times past,
consider not that those times were once present (that is, as our own
are) and ourselves unto those to come, as they unto us at present."
That, surely, coming from one both by temperament and habit so great an
antiquary, has the touch of something like an influence in the
atmosphere of the time. That there was any actual connexion between
Browne's work and Bacon's is but a surmise. Yet we almost seem to hear
Bacon when Browne discourses on the "use of doubts, and the advantages
which might be derived from drawing up a calendar of doubts,
falsehoods, and popular errors;" and, as from Bacon, one gets the
impression that men really have been very much the prisoners of their
own crude or pedantic terms, notions, associations; that they have been
very indolent in testing very simple matters--with a wonderful kind of
"supinity," as he calls it. In Browne's chapter on the "Sources of
Error," again, we may trace much resemblance to Bacon's striking
doctrine of the Idola, the "shams" men fall down and worship. Taking
source respectively, from the "common infirmity of human nature," from
the "erroneous disposition of the people," from "confident adherence to
authority," the errors which Browne chooses to deal with may be
registered as identical with Bacon's Idola Tribus, Fori, Theatri; the
idols of our common human nature; of the vulgar, when they get
together; and of the learned, when they get together.
[149] But of the fourth species of error noted by Bacon, the Idola
Specus, the Idols of the Cave, that whole tribe of illusions, which are
"bred amongst the weeds and tares of one's own brain," Browne tells us
nothing by way of criticism; was himself, rather, a lively example of
their operation. Throw those illusions, those "idols," into concrete
or personal form, suppose them introduced among the other forces of an
active intellect, and you have Sir Thomas Browne himself. The
sceptical inquirer who rises from his cathartic, his purging of error,
a believer in the supernatural character of pagan oracles, and a cruel
judge of supposed witches, must still need as much as ever that
elementary conception of the right method and the just limitations of
knowledge, by power of which he should not just strain out a single
error here or there, but make a final precipitate of fallacy.
And yet if the temperament had been deducted from Browne's work--that
inherent and strongly marked way of deciding things, which has guided
with so surprising effect the musings of the Letter to a Friend, and
the Urn-Burial--we should probably have remembered him little. Pity!
some may think, for himself at least, that he had not lived earlier,
and still believed in the mandrake, for instance; its fondness for
places of execution, and its human cries "on eradication, with hazard
of life to them that pull it up." "In philosophy," he observes,
meaning to contrast [150] his free-thinking in that department with his
orthodoxy in religion--in philosophy, "where truth seems double-faced,
there is no man more paradoxical than myself:" which is true, we may
think, in a further sense than he meant, and that it was the
"paradoxical" that he actually preferred. Happy, at all events, he
still remained--undisturbed and happy--in a hundred native
prepossessions, some certainly valueless, some of them perhaps
invaluable. And while one feels that no real logic of fallacies has
been achieved by him, one feels still more how little the construction
of that branch of logical inquiry really helps men's minds; fallacy,
like truth itself, being a matter so dependent on innate gift of
apprehension, so extra-logical and personal; the original perception
counting for almost everything, the mere inference for so little! Yes!
"A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be
forced to surrender," even in controversies not necessarily maladroit.
The really stirring poetry of science is not in guesses, or facile
divinations about it, but in its larger ascertained truths--the order
of infinite space, the slow method and vast results of infinite time.
For Browne, however, the sense of poetry which so overmasters his
scientific procedure, depends chiefly on its vaguer possibilities; the
empirical philosophy, even after Bacon, being still dominated by a
temper, resultant from the general unsettlement of men's [151] minds at
the Reformation, which may be summed up in the famous question of
Montaigne--Que sçais-je? The cold-blooded method of observation and
experiment was creeping but slowly over the domain of science; and such
unreclaimed portions of it as the phenomena of magnetism had an immense
fascination for men like Browne and Digby. Here, in those parts of
natural philosophy "but yet in discovery," "the America and untravelled
parts of truth," lay for them the true prospect of science, like the
new world itself to a geographical discoverer such as Raleigh. And
welcome as one of the minute hints of that country far ahead of them,
the strange bird, or floating fragment of unfamiliar vegetation, which
met those early navigators, there was a certain fantastic experiment,
in which, as was alleged, Paracelsus had been lucky. For Browne and
others it became the crucial type of the kind of agency in nature
which, as they conceived, it was the proper function of science to
reveal in larger operation. "The subject of my last letter," says Dr.
Henry Power, then a student, writing to Browne in 1648, the last year
of Charles the First, "being so high and noble a piece of chemistry,
invites me once more to request an experimental eviction of it from
yourself; and I hope you will not chide my importunity in this
petition, or be angry at my so frequent knockings at your door to
obtain a grant of so great and admirable a [152] mystery." What the
enthusiastic young student expected from Browne, so high and noble a
piece of chemistry, was the "re-individualling of an incinerated
plant"--a violet, turning to freshness, and smelling sweet again, out
of its ashes, under some genially fitted conditions of the chemic art.
Palingenesis, resurrection, effected by orderly prescription--the
"re-individualling" of an "incinerated organism"--is a subject which
affords us a natural transition to the little book of the Hydriotaphia,
or Treatise of Urn-Burial--about fifty or sixty pages--which, together
with a very singular letter not printed till after Browne's death, is
perhaps, after all, the best justification of Browne's literary
reputation, as it were his own curiously figured urn, and
treasure-place of immortal memory.
In its first presentation to the public this letter was connected with
Browne's Christian Morals; but its proper and sympathetic collocation
would be rather with the Urn-Burial, of which it is a kind of prelude,
or strikes the keynote. He is writing in a very complex situation--to
a friend, upon occasion of the death of a common friend. The deceased
apparently had been little known to Browne himself till his recent
visits, while the intimate friend to whom he is writing had been absent
at the time; and the leading motive of Browne's letter is the deep
impression he has received during those visits, of a sort of [153]
physical beauty in the coming of death, with which he still surprises
and moves his reader. There had been, in this case, a tardiness and
reluctancy in the circumstances of dissolution, which had permitted
him, in the character of a physician, as it were to assist at the
spiritualising of the bodily frame by natural process; a wonderful new
type of a kind of mortified grace being evolved by the way. The
spiritual body had anticipated the formal moment of death; the alert
soul, in that tardy decay, changing its vesture gradually, and as if
piece by piece. The infinite future had invaded this life perceptibly
to the senses, like the ocean felt far inland up a tidal river.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the attitude of questioning awe on the threshold
of another life displayed with the expressiveness of this unique morsel
of literature; though there is something of the same kind, in another
than the literary medium, in the delicate monumental sculpture of the
early Tuscan School, as also in many of the designs of William Blake,
often, though unconsciously, much in sympathy with those
unsophisticated Italian workmen. With him, as with them, and with the
writer of the Letter to a Friend upon the occasion of the death of his
intimate Friend,--so strangely! the visible function of death is but to
refine, to detach from aught that is vulgar. And this elfin letter,
really an impromptu epistle to a friend, affords the best possible
light on the general temper of the man [154] who could be moved by the
accidental discovery of those old urns at Walsingham--funeral relics of
"Romans, or Britons Romanised which had learned Roman customs"--to the
composition of that wonderful book the Hydriotaphia. He had drawn up a
short account of the circumstance at the moment; but it was after ten
years' brooding that he put forth the finished treatise, dedicated to
an eminent collector of ancient coins and other rarities, with
congratulations that he "can daily command the view of so many imperial
faces," and (by way of frontispiece) with one of the urns, "drawn with
a coal taken out of it and found among the burnt bones." The discovery
had resuscitated for him a whole world of latent observation, from
life, from out-of-the-way reading, from the natural world, and fused
into a composition, which with all its quaintness we may well pronounce
classical, all the heterogeneous elements of that singular mind. The
desire to "record these risen ashes and not to let them be buried twice
among us," had set free, in his manner of conceiving things, something
not wholly analysable, something that may be properly called genius,
which shapes his use of common words to stronger and deeper senses, in
a way unusual in prose writing. Let the reader, for instance, trace
his peculiarly sensitive use of the epithets thin and dark, both here
and in the Letter to a Friend.
Upon what a grand note he can begin and end [155] chapter or paragraph!
"When the funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction over:" "And a
large part of the earth is still in the urn unto us." Dealing with a
very vague range of feelings, it is his skill to associate them to very
definite objects. Like the Soul, in Blake's design, "exploring the
recesses of the tomb," he carries a light, the light of the poetic
faith which he cannot put off him, into those dark places, "the abode
of worms and pismires," peering round with a boundless curiosity and no
fear; noting the various casuistical considerations of men's last form
of self-love; all those whims of humanity as a "student of perpetuity,"
the mortuary customs of all nations, which, from their very closeness
to our human nature, arouse in most minds only a strong feeling of
distaste. There is something congruous with the impassive piety of the
man in his waiting on accident from without to take start for the work,
which, of all his work, is most truly touched by the "divine spark."
Delightsome as its eloquence is actually found to be, that eloquence is
attained out of a certain difficulty and halting crabbedness of
expression; the wretched punctuation of the piece being not the only
cause of its impressing the reader with the notion that he is but
dealing with a collection of notes for a more finished composition, and
of a different kind; perhaps a purely erudite treatise on its subject,
with detachment of all personal colour now adhering [156] to it. Out
of an atmosphere of all-pervading oddity and quaintness--the quaintness
of mind which reflects that this disclosing of the urns of the ancients
hath "left unto our view some parts which they never beheld
themselves"--arises a work really ample and grand, nay! classical, as I
said, by virtue of the effectiveness with which it fixes a type in
literature; as, indeed, at its best, romantic literature (and Browne is
genuinely romantic) in every period attains classical quality, giving
true measure of the very limited value of those well-worn critical
distinctions. And though the Urn-Burial certainly has much of the
character of a poem, yet one is never allowed to forget that it was
designed, candidly, as a scientific treatise on one department of
ancient "culture" (as much so as Guichard's curious old French book on
Divers Manners of Burial) and was the fruit of much labour, in the way
especially of industrious selection from remote and difficult writers;
there being then few or no handbooks, or anything like our modern
shortcuts to varied knowledge. Quite unaffectedly, a curious learning
saturates, with a kind of grey and aged colour most apt and congruous
with the subject-matter, all the thoughts that arise in him. His great
store of reading, so freely displayed, he uses almost as poetically as
Milton; like him, profiting often by the mere sonorous effect of some
heroic or ancient name, which he can adapt to that same sort of learned
sweetness of [157] cadence with which so many of his single sentences
are made to fall upon the ear.
Pope Gregory, that great religious poet, requested by certain eminent
persons to send them some of those relics he sought for so devoutly in
all the lurking-places of old Rome, took up, it is said, a portion of
common earth, and delivered it to the messengers; and, on their
expressing surprise at such a gift, pressed the earth together in his
hand, whereupon the sacred blood of the Martyrs was beheld flowing out
between his fingers. The veneration of relics became a part of
Christian (as some may think it a part of natural) religion. All over
Rome we may count how much devotion in fine art is owing to it; and,
through all ugliness or superstition, its intention still speaks
clearly to serious minds. The poor dead bones, ghastly and
forbidding:--we know what Shakespeare would have felt about
them.--"Beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a
man!" And it is with something of a similar feeling that Browne is
full, on the common and general ground of humanity; an awe-stricken
sympathy with those, whose bones "lie at the mercies of the living,"
strong enough to unite all his various chords of feeling into a single
strain of impressive and genuine poetry. His real interest is in what
may be called the curiosities of our common humanity. As another might
be moved at the sight of Alexander's bones, or Saint Edmund's, or Saint
Cecilia's, [158] so he is full of a fine poetical excitement at such
lowly relics as the earth hides almost everywhere beneath our feet.
But it is hardly fair to take our leave amid these grievous images of
so happy a writer as Sir Thomas Browne; so great a lover of the open
air, under which much of his life was passed. His work, late one
night, draws to a natural close:--"To keep our eyes open longer," he
bethinks himself suddenly, "were but to act our Antipodes. The
huntsmen are up in America!"
What a fund of open-air cheerfulness, there! in turning to sleep.
Still, even when we are dealing with a writer in whom mere style counts
for so much as with Browne, it is impossible to ignore his matter; and
it is with religion he is really occupied from first to last, hardly
less than Richard Hooker. And his religion, too, after all, was a
religion of cheerfulness: he has no great consciousness of evil in
things, and is no fighter. His religion, if one may say so, was all
profit to him; among other ways, in securing an absolute staidness and
placidity of temper, for the intellectual work which was the proper
business of his life. His contributions to "evidence," in the Religio
Medici, for instance, hardly tell, because he writes out of view of a
really philosophical criticism. What does tell in him, in this
direction, is the witness he brings to men's instinct of survival--the
"intimations of immortality," as Wordsworth terms them, which [159]
were natural with him in surprising force. As was said of Jean Paul,
his special subject was the immortality of the soul; with an assurance
as personal, as fresh and original, as it was, on the one hand, in
those old half-civilised people who had deposited the urns; on the
other hand, in the cynical French poet of the nineteenth century, who
did not think, but knew, that his soul was imperishable. He lived in
an age in which that philosophy made a great stride which ends with
Hume; and his lesson, if we may be pardoned for taking away a "lesson"
from so ethical a writer, is the force of men's temperaments in the
management of opinion, their own or that of others;--that it is not
merely different degrees of bare intellectual power which cause men to
approach in different degrees to this or that intellectual programme.
Could he have foreseen the mature result of that mechanical analysis
which Bacon had applied to nature, and Hobbes to the mind of man, there
is no reason to think that he would have surrendered his own chosen
hypothesis concerning them. He represents, in an age, the intellectual
powers of which tend strongly to agnosticism, that class of minds to
which the supernatural view of things is still credible. The
non-mechanical theory of nature has had its grave adherents since: to
the non-mechanical theory of man--that he is in contact with a moral
order on a different plane from the [160] mechanical order--thousands,
of the most various types and degrees of intellectual power, always
adhere; a fact worth the consideration of all ingenuous thinkers, if
(as is certainly the case with colour, music, number, for instance)
there may be whole regions of fact, the recognition of which belongs to
one and not to another, which people may possess in various degrees;
for the knowledge of which, therefore, one person is dependent upon
another; and in relation to which the appropriate means of cognition
must lie among the elements of what we call individual temperament, so
that what looks like a pre-judgment may be really a legitimate
apprehension. "Men are what they are," and are not wholly at the mercy
of formal conclusions from their formally limited premises. Browne
passes his whole life in observation and inquiry: he is a genuine
investigator, with every opportunity: the mind of the age all around
him seems passively yielding to an almost foregone intellectual result,
to a philosophy of disillusion. But he thinks all that a prejudice;
and not from any want of intellectual power certainly, but from some
inward consideration, some afterthought, from the antecedent
gravitation of his own general character--or, will you say? from that
unprecipitated infusion of fallacy in him--he fails to draw, unlike
almost all the rest of the world, the conclusion ready to hand.
1886.