The Major Works (English Library)

by Sir Thomas Browne

  What a melodious ascent as of a prelude to some impassioned requiem breathing from the pomps of earth, and from the sanctities of the grave! What a fluctus decumanus of rhetoric! Time expounded, not by generations or centuries, but by the vast periods of conquests and dynasties; by cycles of Pharaohs and Ptolemies, Antiochi and Arsacides! And these vast successions of time distinguished and figured by the uproars which revolve at their inaugurations; by the drums and tramplings rolling overhead upon the chambers of forgotten dead – the trepidation of time and mortality vexing, at secular intervals, the everlasting sabbaths of the grave!32

  Modern critics are less effusive but not necessarily more pertinent. One attempt to account for Browne’s superbly modulated rhythms in Hydriotaphia terminates in the suggestion that its final paragraphs may have been composed in a trance (‘Did Browne possibly take laudanum? It seems very likely’).33 But potential lotos-eaters should not take this advice to heart, lest they should write like De Quincey.

  Hydriotaphia according to Emerson ‘smells in every word of the sepulchre’.34 So it does; but not exclusively. Occasioned by the discovery in a field at Old Walsingham in Norfolk of some forty or fifty urns, Hydriotaphia is a meditation immediately on death, and mediately on immortality. It becomes in consequence ‘a trial of faith’, as has been said, ‘an ultimate submission to an experience beyond the power of reason to embrace – a final acceptance of a faith not too easily received’.35 The work poses the problem of evil – the incomprehensible physical evil of death – to resolve it at last through ‘the concord of well-tuned sounds’ which, as in Milton’s Lycidas, subsume death within the larger vision of immortality. The prospect of death did not alarm Browne unduly, partly because his profession made death a familiar companion, but especially because he discerned in the created order evidence – ‘Abbreviatures, Hieroglyphicks or short Characters’ – neither of death nor immortality but of both at once. In this sense faith and reason are not distinct entities since they are merged in Hydriotaphia as in Religio Medici, and even in the casual ‘Notes on Natural History’, e.g.:

  In bay leaves commonly used at funeralls wee unknowingly hold in our hands a singular emblem of the resurrection, for the leaves that seeme dead and drie will revive into a perfect green if theire roote bee not withered, as is observable in bay trees after hard winters, in many leaves half, in some almost wholy, withered, wherein though the alimentall & aqueous juice bee exhausted, the radicall & bal-samicall humor remaining, though in a slender quantitie, is able to resurrect itself agayne: the like wee have observed in dead & withered furze. (K, III, 385)

  Would it perhaps suffice to describe Hydriotaphia as a sullen dirge and a solemn hymn? But at times it is neither one nor the other but unexpectedly humorous. Communal cremations, for instance, prompt Browne drily to remark whether it were advisable ‘unto eight or ten bodies of men to adde one of a woman, as being more inflammable’! (p. 302). Or again, with equal gravity: ‘Christians dispute how their bodies should lye in the grave. In urnall enterrment they clearly escaped this Controversie’ (p. 294). The humour of Hydriotaphia is intended to qualify the sombre reflections within the work but also, I believe, to anticipate the tone of its companion piece, The Garden of Cyrus.

  The Garden of Cyrus is the ultimate test of one’s response to Browne. Walter Pater among others failed it; for unable to perceive in what sense the elaborate arabesques woven about the five-sided quincunx look beyond themselves, he reprimanded Browne with untoward sententiousness: ‘His chimeric fancy carries him here into a kind of frivolousness’. Coleridge, on the other hand, having unerringly remarked on ‘the Humorist mingling with & flashing across the Philosopher’, was positively ecstatic: ‘O to write a character of this man’! But the most surprising endorsement was Dr Johnson’s, his admiration as vast as Browne’s nominal subject is inconsequential. It is, he declared, ‘a perpetual triumph of fancy to expand a scanty theme’.36 Yet Pater’s difficulties are understandable. It taxes our resources, and certainly our patience, to discern the purpose of a work which reduces the entire created order to a rhomb in order to declare it quincuncial; which twice denies that it will indulge in questionable speculations, yet on both occasions does just that, at length (pp. 329 ff., 379 ff.); and which discovers with rising enthusiasm that the number five is ‘the Conjugall or wedding number’, not to mention that it encompasses inter alia the evidently cosmic import of ‘five golden mice’ (pp. 380, 383). What price ingenuity?

  Upon consideration, however, The Garden of Cyrus will be observed to demand constant awareness of the ‘soft and flexible sense’ commended in the preface to Religio Medici. For here more than anywhere else, Browne the creative artist ‘plays’ in the elevated sense that God the creative Word was often said to play with the order he brought into being. The well-defined tradition was summarily stated by a major scientist we encountered before. Wrote Kepler:

  as the Creator played, so he also taught nature, as his image, to play; and to play the very same game that he played for her first.37

  The divine ‘play’ testifies to joy, the joy of the Creator as of the created order which in Browne’s vocabulary is equivalent to ‘recreation’, a word he invariably deploys in its twofold meaning of creation anew, and of pleasure. Accordingly The Garden of Cyrus opens with a revelation of the quincunx,38 adapted from one or two excruciatingly dull treatises on agriculture (see below, p. 328, note 28). Browne’s predecessors, in other words, provided the formless matter out of which he – the creator – built a remarkable edifice. The quincunx itself carries the symbolic burden which Donne, much more conservatively, discerned in crosses:

  Look downe, thou spiest out Crosses in small things;

  Looke up, thou seest birds rais’d on crossed wings;

  All the globes frame, and spheares, is nothing else

  But the Meridians crossing Parallels.

  (‘Cross’, ll. 21–4)

  But while Donne’s crosses are merely clever, and in any case predictable, Browne’s quincunx is not only ingenious but replete with surprises, all as unlikely as the joy they intimate is unmistakable. In tone and therefore in its implications, The Garden of Cyrus belongs with ‘The Garden’ of Marvell. Each waves in its plumes the various light, playfully concerned with the created order in such a way that the whimsicality sustains the gravity, much as the unexpected levity of the last stanza of Upon Appleton House does not undermine the sombre issues raised but confirms them. Browne’s approach, like Marvell’s, is ultimately Shakespearean.

  The capital concern of The Garden of Cyrus is to establish, as already noted, ‘how nature Geometrizeth, and observeth order in all things’ (above, p. 37). Ostensibly, therefore, the work focuses on ‘the orderly book of nature’ (below, p. 360). At the same time, mindful that ‘this visible world is but a picture of the invisible’ (as before, p. 31), it strains to ascend beyond the world of appearances to the realm of ideal forms. The ascent is by way of the improbable quincunx, its actual existence maintained in such an outrageous fashion that eventually it suggests another reality altogether. Numerology also intrudes, not because Browne was among the ‘ancient Numerists’ he invokes but because he discerned in their efforts a substantial way to confirm order in general, and the Scale of Nature in particular. As Browne’s numerological absurdities mount, we are obliged to abandon the tawdry details to seek the symbolic import of ‘numbryng’ which John Dee had commended in 1570 as essential to the structure of the universe. Such ‘numbryng’ unfolds, Dee had written,

  by degrees, by litle and litle, stretchyng forth, and applying some likenes of it, as first, to things Spirituall; and then, bryngyng it lower, to thynges, sensibly perceived…: then to the least thynges that may be seen, numerable: And at length, (most grossely), to a multitude of any corporall thynges seen, or felt.39

  Zeal for particular numbers – including the number five which Browne pursues to extinction – should be suppressed. Particular numbers confine; but where numbers generally are regard
ed spiritually, they assist us to perceive the cardinal meaning of the ‘mysticall Mathematicks of the City of Heaven’ (above, p. 27).

  The Garden of Cyrus raises still other problems. Why was it attached to Hydriotaphia, for instance? What conceivable relationship exists between two works which, though enclosed within one volume, are so patently different in both tone and thematic patterns? Browne himself provides a solitary suggestion. The Garden of Cyrus follows Hydriotaphia, he writes, in the sense that ‘the delightfull World comes after death, and Paradise succeeds the Grave’ (p. 321). Authoritatively explicated, the principle at work has been said to be ‘nexus through contrast’: the two works are related in that

  the obsession with death in one, is balanced by the celebration of life in the other. So, too, accident is opposed to design, body to soul, time to space, ignorance to knowledge, substance to form, darkness to light, mutability to immutability.40

  Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus are like Milton’s twin lyrics ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, save that Milton’s order is reversed with almost mathematical precision. Better still perhaps, Browne’s two works are alike analogous to Lycidas; for if in one sense Hydriotaphia subsumes the problem of death within the larger vision of immortality, as claimed earlier, in another sense the problem is resolved only in The Garden of Cyrus which predicates (much as Lycidas does in its concluding ottava rima) order restored, and assurance regained.

  But so much for parables. It is time to attend to style.

  V

  An expeditious reading of Browne may tempt us to conclude that his style is uniform possibly to the point of dullness. But a careful study of his works should confirm their multiformity, and especially the extent to which the style is invariably suited to the given occasion.

  The quality is not unique with Browne. Several of his contemporaries share it: Milton in particular,41 but also Ralegh, Donne, and even Bacon, who resorts to one mode of articulation in his essays (much amended in successive editions), another in The Advancement of Learning, and a third in his history of Henry VII. The few examples from Browne’s extensive correspondence quoted earlier (p. 35) suffice to alert us to the striking contrast between the informality of his private correspondence and the carefully wrought nature of his published works. As much is evident in the light of his strictly professional advice, for example this prescription ‘for a cough and rhume’:

  Take a frensh barley, and hartshorne, 3 ounces, of China root one ounce, Coltsfoot a good handfull, Eringo roots 4 ounces, one ounce of Liquorish, Rosemary 3 sprigs, Cowslip flowers a handfull, sweet fennell seeds half an ounce, Raysons sliced but not stoned a pound, Currance a quarter of a pound, honey 3 pints: boyle all these in 5 gallons of water and a pint over, boyle it to 4 gallons, then work it up with yeast, like beer, when it’s boyled tunne it and after it’s tenn days old bottle it up.42

  Imagine how this unlikely material would have been shaped for Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or indeed The Garden of Cyrus! For Browne laboured mightily for the desired effect, deploying a tonal range remarkable by any standards. The formal patterns of Religio Medici, for instance, reflect in their variable rhythms the undulations of a mind almost theatrically assertive yet self-deprecating and utterly humble. The encyclopaedic Pseudodoxia Epidemica, on the other hand, sweeps in a sort of staccato rhythm through a multiplicity of commonplaces connected, if at all, by Browne’s daedalian imagination. Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus also divide in tone even as they unite in conceptual thought; for the pensive rhythms of the one are eventually overwhelmed by rhapsodies, while the tonal range of the other tends constantly toward a joyous whimsey, however serious the underlying purpose. So, too, A Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals may share several pages of nearly identical pronouncements (cf. p. 415), yet those of the first are measured and contemplative, while those of the second are aphoristic and even sententious, terse to the point of curtness, and unremittingly didactic. Browne’s prose is not expansively Ciceronian nor laconically Senecan. It is both, and neither.

  The tonal range of Browne’s works depends on ‘parallelism’ as much as on his creative diction. By parallelism I mean generally the construction of sentences in emulation of Biblical precedent, especially through the provision of ‘doublets’ whether involving approximately synonymous words (e.g. ‘ubiquitary and omnipresent’, ‘Basis and Pillar’) or reiterated phrases (e.g. ‘the mysticall way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magicke of numbers’, or ‘the corruption of these times, and the byas of present practise’ – and so on).43 The consequence of Biblical parallelism is ‘rhymed thought’, thus:

  When there were no depths, I was brought forth;

  When there were no fountains abounding with water…

  (Proverbs 8.24)

  What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

  And the son of man, that thou visitest him?

  (Psalm 8.4)

  … I desired mercy, and not sacrifice;

  And the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.

  (Hosea 6.6)

  I will put my law in their inward parts,

  And write it in their hearts…

  (Jeremiah 31.33)

  Browne’s constructive response to the Bible’s literary potential is in line with the conviction he states in one of his minor tracts:

  Rhetoricians and Oratours take singular notice of very many excellent passages, stately metaphors, noble tropes and elegant expressions, not to be found or parallel’d in any other Authour.44

  The claim, in itself suggestive of the ultimate influence on Browne’s prose, is echoed by any number of his contemporaries who were not prepared to dispute Donne’s categorical statement that David, to whose pen the psalms were traditionally ascribed, is ‘a better Poet than Virgil’. However incredible in itself, this persuasion bore impressive fruit not only in Browne’s prose but in Herbert’s poetry.45

  As Biblical parallelism served Browne’s purposes in one respect, his creative diction did in another. Such diction is, nominally at any rate, Latinate in the extreme – witness the following example from his short tract ‘Of Garlands’, which introduces at least two Latin words into English and confirms the use of five more:

  The Crowns and Garlands of the Ancients were either Gestatory, such as they wore about their Heads or Necks; Purgatory, such as they carried at solemn Festivals; Pensile or Suspensory, such as they hanged about the Posts of their Houses in honour of their Gods, as of Jupiter Thyræus or Limeneus; or else they were Depository, such as they laid upon the Graves and Monuments of the dead. And these were made up after all ways of Art, Compactile, Sutile, Plectile; for which Work there were στεφανοπλόκοι, or expert Persons to contrive them after the best grace and property.

  (K, III, 49)

  But we must take care lest we describe Browne’s diction as exclusively or even predominantly Latinate. The extract from ‘Of Garlands’ is not the rule but the exception, since Browne normally tends to balance polysyllabic words from the Latin with monosyllabic or disyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon origin, in the manner commended by Richard Carew in The Excellency of the English Tongue (c. 1595):

  the longe words that wee borrowe, being intermingled with the shorte of our owne store, make up a perfitt harmonye, by culling from out which mixture (with Iudgment) you maye frame your speech according to the matter you must worke on, maiesticall, pleasaunte, delicate, or manly, more or less, in what sorte you please.46

  The ‘perfitt harmonye’ of the confluence of Latin and Anglo-Saxon defines Browne’s aim equally as much as it defines Shakespeare’s, e.g.:

  this my hand will rather

  The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

  Making the green one red.

  (Macbeth, 11, ii, 60–62)

  The harmony produced by Browne’s creative diction, and the modulation promoted by parallelism, are the basic elements of the larger rhythmical animation of his paragraphs, the crucial unit. Logically, it is true, Browne’s paragraphs do not alway
s cohere; and therefore we are entitled to protest that A Letter to a Friend is ‘an ill-coordinated patchwork’, or that the reflections in Religio Medici are arbitrarily disposed, ‘arranged in the haphazard order of rumination’.47 But the logic of Browne’s paragraphs is the logic not so much of any sequential mode of thought as of dramatic literature. Coleridge who had read the annotations on Religio Medici by Sir Kenelm Digby (‘a pedant in his own system & opinion’), correctly observed that Digby ‘ought to have considered the Religio Medici in a dramatic & not in a metaphysical View – as a sweet Exhibition of character & passion, & not as an Expression or Investigation of positive Truth’.48 As with Religio Medici, so with Browne’s other works except the didactic Christian Morals: each encompasses several dramatic voices which are severally ‘true’, just as Shakespeare’s characters persuade immediately in themselves, however different the general impact of their juxtaposition might be. In other words, cognisant though we must be of the single ‘sweet Exhibition of character & passion’, we are also invited to recognise that Browne plays ‘in one person many people’, all equally convincing because they are dramatically so, yet none permitted exclusive or final authority. To deny Browne’s dramatically variable tonal range would inevitably oblige us to conclude that he examines human experience ‘academically and from a safe distance’, that ‘he speaks as an amateur and a spectator, rather than as a participant’.49 Browne is manifestly not Donne. Save that he shares with Donne the tendency surprisingly to juxtapose heterogeneous ideas,50 his fusion of whimsicality and gravity is rather like Marvell’s as noted earlier, while his syntactical complexity is much closer to Milton’s blank verse. At the same time, Browne is like Donne – as Donne is like Milton and Marvell – exceedingly partial to dramatic literature which, they all judged, best externalises not positive truth but truth in its several concurrent manifestations internal to one and the same mind.