Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

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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 scais-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.

NOTES

144. +In the original, this quotation, like several above it, is not
indented; it is in smaller type. Return.

"LOVE'S LABOURS LOST"

[161] Love's Labours Lost is one of the earliest of Shakespeare's
dramas, and has many of the peculiarities of his poems, which are
also the work of his earlier life. The opening speech of the king on
the immortality of fame--on the triumph of fame over death--and the
nobler parts of Biron, display something of the monumental style of
Shakespeare's Sonnets, and are not without their concerts of thought
and expression. This connexion of Love's Labours Lost with
Shakespeare's poems is further enforced by the actual insertion in it
of three sonnets and a faultless song; which, in accordance with his
practice in other plays, are inwoven into the argument of the piece
and, like the golden ornaments of a fair woman, give it a peculiar
air of distinction. There is merriment in it also, with choice
illustrations of both wit and humour; a laughter, often exquisite,
ringing, if faintly, yet as genuine laughter still, though sometimes
sinking into mere burlesque, which has not lasted quite so well. And
Shakespeare [162] brings a serious effect out of the trifling of his
characters. A dainty love-making is interchanged with the more
cumbrous play: below the many artifices of Biron's amorous speeches
we may trace sometimes the "unutterable longing;" and the lines in
which Katherine describes the blighting through love of her younger
sister are one of the most touching things in older literature.*
Again, how many echoes seem awakened by those strange words, actually
said in jest! "The sweet war-man (Hector of Troy) is dead and
rotten; sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the buried: when he
breathed, he was a man!"--words which may remind us of Shakespeare's
own epitaph. In the last scene, an ingenious turn is given to the
action, so that the piece does not conclude after the manner of other
comedies.--

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