Hours in a Library, Volume 1 / New Edition, with Additions

by Leslie Stephen

Very characteristic, from this point of view, are the heresies into which he confesses that he has sometimes fallen. Setting aside one purely fantastical theory, they all imply a desire for toleration even in the next world. He doubted whether the damned would not ultimately be released from torture. He felt great difficulty in giving up prayers for the dead, and thought that to be the object of such prayers, was 'a good way to be remembered by posterity, and far more noble than a history.' These heresies, he says, as he never tried to propagate them, or to dispute over them, 'without additions of new fuel, went out insensibly of themselves.' Yet he still retained, in spite of its supposed heterodoxy, some hope for the fate of virtuous heathens. 'Amongst so many subdivisions of hell,' he says, 'there might have been one limbo left for these.' With a most characteristic turn, he softens the horror of the reflection by giving it an almost humorous aspect. 'What a strange vision will it be,' he exclaims, 'to see their poetical fictions converted into verities, and their imagined and fancied furies into real devils! How strange to them will sound the history of Adam, when they shall suffer for him they never heard of!'

The words may remind us of an often-quoted passage from Tertullian; but the Father seems to gloat over the appalling doctrines from which the philosophical humorist shrinks, even though their very horror has a certain strange fascination for his fancy. Heresies such as these will not be harshly condemned at the present day. From others of a different kind, Sir Thomas is shielded by his natural love of the marvellous. He loves to abandon his thoughts to mysterious contemplations; he even considers it a subject for complaint that there are 'not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith.' 'I love,' he says, 'to lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O altitudo! 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, incarnation, and resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learnt of Tertullian, certum est quia impossibile est.' He rejoices that he was not an Israelite at the passage of the Red Sea, or an early Christian in the days of miracles; for then his faith, supported by his senses, would have had less merit. He loves to puzzle and confound his understanding with the thoughts that pass the limits of our intellectual powers: he rejoices in contemplating eternity, because nobody can 'speak of it without a solecism,' and to plunge his imagination into the abysses of the infinite. 'When I cannot satisfy my reason,' he says, 'I love to recreate my fancy.' He recreates it by soaring into the regions where the most daring metaphysical logic breaks down beneath us, and delights in exposing his reason to the rude test of believing both sides of a contradiction. Here, as everywhere, the strangest freaks of fancy intrude themselves into his sublime contemplations. A mystic, when abasing reason in the presence of faith, may lose sight of earthly objects in the splendour of the beatific vision. But Sir Thomas, even when he enters the holiest shrine, never quite loses his grasp of the grotesque. Wonder, whether produced by the sublime or the simply curious, has equal attraction for him. His mind is distracted between the loftiest mysteries of Christianity and the strangest conceits of Talmudists or schoolmen. Thus, for example, whilst eloquently descanting on the submissiveness of his reason, he informs us (obviously claiming credit for the sacrifice of his curiosity) that he can read of the raising of Lazarus, and yet refrain from raising a 'law case whether his heir might lawfully detain his inheritance bequeathed unto him by his death, and he, though restored to life, have no plea or title unto his former possessions.' Or we might take the inverse transition from the absurd to the sublime, in his meditations upon hell. He begins by inquiring whether the everlasting fire is the same with that of our earth. 'Some of our chymicks,' it appears, 'facetiously affirm that, at the last fire, all shall be crystallised and reverberated into glass,' but, after playing for some time with this and other strange fancies, he says in a loftier strain, though still with his odd touch of humour, 'Men speak too popularly who place it in those flaming mountains, which, to grosser apprehensions, represent hell. The heart of men is the place the devils dwell in. I feel sometimes a hell within myself; Lucifer keeps his courts in my breast; Legion is revived in me. There was more than one hell in Magdalene, when there were seven devils; for every devil is a hell unto himself; he holds enough of torture in his own ubi, and needs not the misery of circumference to afflict him; and thus a distracted conscience here is a shadow or introduction into hell hereafter.'

Sir Thomas's witticisms are like the grotesque carvings in a Gothic cathedral. It is plain that in his mind they have not the slightest tinge of conscious irreverence. They are simply his natural mode of expression; forbid him to be humorous, and you might as well forbid him to speak at all. If the severity of our modern taste is shocked at an intermixture which seemed natural enough to his contemporaries, we may find an unconscious apology in a singularly fine passage of the 'Religio Medici.' Justifying his love of church music, he says, 'Even that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first composer.' That power of extracting deep devotion from 'vulgar tavern music' is the great secret of Browne's eloquence. It is not wonderful, perhaps, that, with our associations, the performance seems of questionable taste; and that some strains of tavern music mix unpleasantly in the grander harmonies which they suggest. Few people find their religious emotions stimulated by the performance of a nigger melody, and they have some difficulty in keeping pace with a mind which springs in happy unconsciousness, or rather in keen enjoyment, of the contrast from the queer or commonplace to the most exalted objects of human thought.

One other peculiarity shows itself chiefly in the last pages of the 'Religio Medici.' His worthy commentators have laboured to defend Sir Thomas from the charge of vanity. He expatiates upon his own universal charity; upon his inability to regard even vice as a fitting object for satire; upon his warm affection to his friend, whom he already loves better than himself, and whom yet in a few months he will regard with a love which will make his present feelings seem indifference; upon his absolute want of avarice or any kind of meanness; and, which certainly seems a little odd in the midst of these self-laudations, upon his freedom from the 'first and father sin, not only of man, but of the devil, pride.' Good Dr. Watts was shocked at this 'arrogant temerity,' and Dr. Johnson appears rather to concur in the charge. And certainly, if we are to interpret his language in a matter-of-fact spirit, it must be admitted that a gentleman who openly claims for himself the virtues of charity, generosity, courage, and modesty, might be not unfairly accused of vanity. To no one, as we have already remarked, is such a matter-of-fact criticism less applicable. If a humorist was to be denied the right of saying with a serious face what he does not quite think, we should make strange work of some of the most charming books in the world. The Sir Thomas Browne of the 'Religio Medici' is by no means to be identified with the everyday flesh-and-blood physician of Norwich. He is the ideal and glorified Sir Thomas, and represents rather what ought to have been than what was. We all have such doubles who visit us in our day-dreams and sometimes cheat us into the belief that they are our real selves, but most of us luckily hide the very existence of such phantoms; for few of us, indeed, could make them agreeable to our neighbours. And yet the apology is scarcely needed. Bating some few touches, Sir Thomas seems to have claimed little that he did not really possess. And if he was a little vain, why should we be angry? Vanity is only offensive when it is sullen or exacting. When it merely amounts to an unaffected pleasure in dwelling on the peculiarities of a man's own character, it is rather an agreeable literary ingredient. Sir Thomas defines his point of view with his usual felicity. 'The world that I regard,' he says in the spirit of the imprisoned Richard II., 'is myself: it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.' That whimsical inversion of the natural order is the key to the 'Religio Medici.' We, for the nonce, are to regard Sir Thomas Browne as a world, and to study the marvels of his microcosm instead of the outside wonders. And no one can deny that it is a good and kindly world—a world full of the strangest combinations, where even the most sacred are allied with the oddest objects. Yet his imagination everywhere diffuses a solemn light such as that which falls through painted windows, and which somehow harmonises the whole quaint assemblage of images. The sacred is made more interesting instead of being degraded by its association with the quaint; and on the whole, after a stay in this microcosm, we feel better, calmer, more tolerant, and a good deal more amused than when we entered it.

Passing from the portrait to the original, we may recognise, or fancy that we recognise, the same general features. Sir Thomas assures us that his life, up to the period of the 'Religio Medici,' was a 'miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable.' Johnson, with his usual sense, observes that it is rather difficult to detect the miraculous element in any part of the story open to our observation. 'Surely,' he says, 'a man may visit France and Italy, reside at Montpelier and Padua, and at last take his degree at Leyden, without anything miraculous.' And although Southey endeavours to maintain that the miracle consisted in Browne's preservation from infidelity, it must be admitted that to the ordinary mind that result seems explicable by natural causes. We must be content with Johnson's explanation, that, in some sense, 'all life is miraculous;' and, in short, that the strangeness consists rather in Browne's view of his own history, than in any unusual phenomena. Certainly, no man seems on the whole to have slipped down the stream of life more smoothly. After his travels he settled quietly at Norwich, and there passed forty-five years of scarcely interrupted prosperity. In the 'Religio Medici' he indulges in some disparaging remarks upon marriage. 'The whole world,' he says, 'was made for man; but the twelfth part of man for woman. Man is the whole world and the breath of God; woman the rib and crooked part of man.' He wishes, after the fashion of Montaigne, that we might grow like the trees, and avoid this foolish and trivial ceremony; and therefore—for such inferences are perfectly legitimate in the history of a humorist—he married a lady, of whom it is said that she was so perfect that 'they seemed to come together by a kind of natural magnetism,' had ten children, and lived very happily ever afterwards. It is not difficult, from the fragmentary notices that have been left to us, to put together some picture of his personal appearance. He was a man of dignified appearance, with a striking resemblance, as Southey has remarked, to Charles I., 'always cheerful, but never merry,' given to unseasonable blushing, little inclined to talk, but strikingly original when once launched in conversation; sedate in his dress, and obeying some queer medical crotchets as to its proper arrangement; always at work in the intervals of his 'drudging practice;' and generally a sober and dignified physician. From some letters which have been preserved we catch a view of his social demeanour. He was evidently an affectionate and liberal father, with good old orthodox views of the wide extent of the paternal prerogative. One of his sons was a promising naval officer, and sends home from beyond the seas accounts of such curiosities as were likely to please the insatiable curiosity of his parent. In his answers, the good Sir Thomas quotes Aristotle's definition of fortitude for the benefit of his gallant lieutenant, and argues elaborately to dissuade him from a practice which he believes to prevail in 'the king's shipps, when, in desperate cases, they blow up the same.' He proves by most excellent reasons, and by the authority of Plutarch, that such self-immolation is an unnecessary strain of gallantry; yet somehow we feel rather glad that Sir Thomas could not be a witness to the reception of this sensible, but perhaps rather superfluous, advice, in the messroom of the 'Marie Rose.' It is more pleasant to observe the carefulness with which he has treasured up and repeats all the compliments to the lieutenant's valour and wisdom which have reached him from trustworthy sources. This son appears to have died at a comparatively early age; but with the elder son, Edward—who, like his father, travelled in various parts of Europe, and then became a distinguished physician—he maintained a long correspondence, full of those curious details in which his soul delighted. His son, for example, writes from Prague that 'in the mines at Brunswick is reported to be a spirit; and another at the tin mine at Stackenwald, in the shape of a monke, which strikes the miners, playeth on the bagpipe, and many such tricks.' They correspond, however, on more legitimate inquiries, and especially on the points to be noticed in the son's medical lectures. Sir Thomas takes a keen interest in the fate of an unlucky 'oestridge' which found its way to London in 1681, and was doomed to illustrate some of the vulgar errors. The poor bird was induced to swallow a piece of iron weighing two and a-half ounces, which, strange to say, it could not digest. It soon afterwards died 'of a soden,' either from the severity of the weather or from the peculiar nature of its diet.

In one well-known case Sir Thomas's peculiar theories received a more unfortunate application; he contributed by his evidence to the death of the witches tried by Hale in 1664; and one could wish that in this case his love of the wonderful had been more checked by his sense of humour.

The fact that he was knighted by Charles II. in 1671 is now memorable only for Johnson's characteristic remark. The lexicographer's love of truth and loyalty to his pet monarch struggle with each other in the equivocal compliment to Charles's virtue in rewarding excellence 'with such honorary distinctions at least as cost him nothing.' The good doctor died in 1682, in the seventy-seventh year of age, and met his end, as we are assured, in the spirit of his own writings. 'There is,' he admirably says, 'but one comfort left, that, though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.' Most men, for one reason or another, have at times been 'half in love with easeful death.' Sir Thomas gives his view more fully in another passage, in which he says, with his usual quaint and eloquent melancholy, 'When I take a full view and circle of myself, without this reasonable moderator and equal piece of justice, death, I do conceive myself the miserablest person extant. Were there not another life that I hope for, all the vanities of this world should not entreat a moment's breath from me. Could the devil work my belief to imagine I could never die, I could not outlive that very thought. I have so abject a conceit of this common way of existence, this retaining to the sun and elements, I cannot think this to be a man, or to have according to the dignity of humanity. In expectation of a better, I can with patience embrace this life, yet, in my best meditations, do often defy death.'

What, after all, one is inclined to ask, is the secret of the strange charm of Sir Thomas's style? Will you be kind enough to give us the old doctor's literary prescription, that we may produce the same effects at will? In what proportions shall we mingle humour, imagination, and learning? How are we to select the language which will be the fittest vehicle for the thought? or rather, for the metaphor is a little too mechanical, what were the magic spells with which he sways our imaginative moods? Like other spells, we must reply, it is incommunicable: no real answer can be given even by critics who, like Coleridge and De Quincey, show something of the same power. Coarser observers can only point to such external peculiarities as the Latinisms in which he indulges even more freely than most of his contemporaries. To Johnson they seemed 'pedantic;' to most modern readers they have an old-world charm; but in any case we know little more of Sir Thomas when we have observed that he is capable of using for 'hanging' the periphrasis 'illaqueation or pendulous suffocation.' The perusal of a page will make us recognise what could not be explained in a whole volume of analysis. One may, however, hazard a remark upon the special mood which is clothed or incarnated in his stately rhetoric. The imagination of Sir Thomas, of course, shows the generic qualities roughly described as Northern, Gothic, Teutonic, or romantic. He writes about tombs, and all Englishmen, as M. Taine tells us, like to write about tombs. When we try to find the specific differences which distinguish it from other imaginations of similar quality, we should be inclined to define him as belonging to a very rare intellectual family. He is a mystic with a sense of humour, or rather, his habitual mood is determined by an attraction towards the two opposite poles of humour and mysticism. He concludes two of his treatises (the 'Christian Morals' and 'Urn Burial') in words expressive of one of these tendencies: 'If any have been so happy as personally to understand Christian annihilation, ecstacy, exolution, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow according to mystical theology, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the world is in a manner over, and the earth in ashes unto them.' Many of Sir Thomas's reflections, his love in spiritualising external emblems, as, for example, in the reflections on the quincunx, and the almost sensuous delight in the contemplation of a mystery, show the same bent. The fully-developed mystic loses sight of the world and its practical duties in the rapture of formless meditations; facts become shadows, and emotions the only realities. But the presence of a mystical element is the mark of all lofty imaginations. The greatest poet is he who feels most deeply and habitually that our 'little lives are rounded with a sleep;' that we are but atoms in the boundless abysses of space and time; that the phenomenal world is but a transitory veil, to be valued only as its contemplation arouses or disciplines our deepest emotions. Capacity for passing from the finite to the infinite, for interpreting the high instincts before which our mortal nature

'Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised,'

is the greatest endowment of the Shakespeares and Dantes. Mysticism proper is the abuse of this tendency, which prompts to the impossible feat of soaring altogether beyond the necessary base of concrete realities. The mystic temperament is balanced in some great men, as in Shakespeare, by their intense interest in human passion; in others, as in Wordsworth, by their profound sense of the primary importance of the moral law; and in others, as in Jeremy Taylor, by their hold upon the concrete imagery of a traditional theology; whilst to some, the mystic vision is strangely blended with an acceptance of the epicurean precept, Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Sir Thomas Browne seems to be held back from abandoning himself to the ecstasies of abstract meditation, chiefly by his peculiar sense of humour. There is a closer connection than we are always willing to admit between humour and profanity. Humour is the faculty which always keeps us in mind of the absurdity which is the shadow of sublimity. It is naturally allied to intellectual scepticism, as in Rabelais or Montaigne; and Sir Thomas shared the tendency sufficiently to be called atheist by some wiseacres. But his humour was too gentle to suggest scepticism of the aggressive kind. It is almost too free from cynicism. He cannot adopt any dogma unreservedly, but neither does any dogma repel him. He revels in the mental attitude of hopeless perplexity, which is simply unendurable to the commonplace and matter-of-fact intellects. He likes to be balanced between opposing difficulties; to play with any symbol of worship without actually worshipping it; to prostrate himself sincerely at many shrines, and yet with a half smile on his lips. He cannot be a rhetorician in the ordinary sense of the word; he would have been hopelessly out of place on the floor of the senate, stirring men's patriotism or sense of right; for half his sympathy would always be with the Opposition. He could not have moved the tears or the devotional ecstasies of a congregation, for he has too vivid a sense that any and every dogma is but one side of an inevitable antinomy. Strong convictions are needed for the ordinary controversial successes, and his favourite point of view is the centre from which all convictions radiate and all look equally probable. But then, instead of mocking at all, he sympathises with all, and expresses the one sentiment which may be extracted from their collision—the sentiment of reverence blended with scepticism. It is a contradictory sentiment, one may say, in a sense, but the essence of humour is to be contradictory. The language in which he utters himself was determined by his omnivorous appetite for every quaint or significant symbol to be discovered in the whole field of learning. With no prejudices, nothing comes amiss to him; and the signature of some mysterious principle may be found in every object of art or nature. Science in its infancy was still half mystic, and the facts which he gathered were all tinged with the semi-mythical fancies of the earliest explorers of the secrets of nature. In an old relic, recalling 'the drums and tramplings of three conquests,' in a queer annual, or an ancient fragment of history might be the appropriate emblem, or something more than the emblem of a truth equally impressive to the scientific and the poetical imagination. He would have been happy by the midnight lamp in Milton's 'high lonely tower;' but his humour would look at the romances which Milton loved rather with the eyes of Cervantes than of Milton. Their tone of sentiment would be too strained and highflown; and he would prefer to read of the spirits that are found