Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

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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."

And then one day he stirs old memories--

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.

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