Descriptions of Browne as a writer tend to be backwards, in that they present his private face before his public face. The reason is that his private face seems unusually accessible. His greatest work is a kind of personal confession or stylised journal that he never intended to publish. People read Browne for Browne, simply because in an idle hour Browne thought to write a few notes about Browne. He eclipsed himself.
The order must be reversed. His published works must be considered before his pirated works. His published works say what he what he wanted to say – what he said when he was successful in expressing himself. The reader interested in the man, when turning from his published tracts to his religious confession, doubtless feels that they are unmasking him. And, sure, it is the nosy business of a biographer to unmask a man; but it is wrong to assume that when someone says things in private that they would not say in public, the things they say in public must be a mask. Further, it is wrong to assume that the things they say in private are not a mask. We are not more honest and perceptive when we speak to ourselves than when we speak to others; what we say to ourselves may be every bit as full of presumption, flattery, and deceit. Nor are we always more honest when we speak to individuals than when we speak to the public.
Browne’s opinions on religion are perhaps the most enduringly important of the things he has to say, but he would never have pretended to be an authority on religion. Hence he did not publish them, but showed them to his friends. What he published was the fruit of his expertise, and it is therefore far more telling. These books are the products of his ideals. The personal confession fills out our picture of his mind, but it does not add outlines. The contours of his mind are found in all his works. Now, it is certain that the Religio Medici, the masterpiece, tells us more about him, and we shall certainly never blame his shrewd and malicious friends for publishing it for him. But if we are to understand the most important aspects of the writer, we must start with the aspects that carry over into his published works. They are more difficult, but they are rewarding. Their very titles announce their peculiarity: Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors; Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial; and The Garden of Cyrus.
Two qualities strike us when we start reading these books, which are primarily scientific in nature. The first is that at times it seems as though he has mistaken English for another language, something continental like Spanish or Italian; and the second, that he seems to have mistaken science for another discipline, something speculative like history or metaphysics. They are both sound observations, except that he was not mistaken in either case.
For in the first place, English is another language. Whatever it is, it is not English, for wherever it is from, it is not from England. Whether or not it be an insular innovation, it is of continental composition. They say, for instance, that Browne’s English is Latinate, in that it relies largely on words of Latin origin. And English itself is Latinate, in that it relies largely on words of Latin origin. In a kinder mood they say that he blends this Latinate with the Germanic; and English itself is a blend of the Latinate and the Germanic. I do not mean to suggest that Browne’s prose is not peculiar, but the reason is not that it is unenglish. What is really peculiar and striking about Browne’s English is that it is pure and essential English, such as only our older authors could write; the English one would produce if one was given a recipe and the ingredients and left to make it oneself. I am happy to take an extreme example. Critics laugh (or scowl) when Browne, in the innocence of old age, ventures to suggest that ‘assuetude minorates iniquity’. Whether or not they understand his point, which is sound, they think that his prose is unjustifiably Latinate (and will not allow anything to minorate this iniquity, though it was assuetude that occasioned it). But they do not say the same about more familiar linguistic equivalents – which can be found by slapping together any three Latin-based words you like, such as ‘circumstances create complexity’ or ‘altitude affects pressure’.
Of course, the real difficulty is that the words are unfamiliar. There are a number of words that have become by tradition part of the English language, and it is true that Browne, who operated in eight European languages, is not always careful to confine himself to these; and it is true that this occasionally makes Browne’s points a bit unclear. That is natural. Browne is not in the end writing English, he is writing European – for him any word between Greece and the Getae is fair game. But then, English is not English, in the sense of being British – an experiment in reading Briton will confirm this. It too is European. And by this happy accident it comes about that Browne is usually quite comprehensible, whatever admixture of German and English he uses. In other words, English is already a random assortment of foreign words, and therefore it is by nature happy to incorporate more. Even Browne’s simplest prose bears this out, and his most complicated prose simply investigates the boundaries of the language. For we are apt to forget that a simple sentence like this – that ‘Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as religion’ – is a garbling of a foreign conglomeration like this, ‘die Men’ hab’ gelöst ihre ratione in nein dinge so mik’ als religione.’
By themselves these comments would leave a false impression of Browne’s prose. By far more often than not, it is the fact that he uses familiar words in an unfamiliar way that surprises us. For every one minoration of iniquity you will find half a dozen phrases like ‘no slender antiquity’, or ‘we behold him but asquint, upon reflex or shadow’, or ‘they counterfeit some more real substance in that invisible fabric.’ It usually does not take us long to realise what he means, but it leaves the impression of astonishment on us. It is often the case, though not always, that the words have taken a trip back to their roots and returned in different trim.
Hence Browne’s prose is not unremarkable. But the foreign quality is really one of its most English qualities. Its outstanding quality is not the proportion of foreign words, which is impossible in a language entirely composed of foreign words; not the blend of northern and southern elements, Teutonic and Romance; it is not the length of his sentences, though they are usually long, nor the length of his words, though they too are often long; its outstanding quality is creativity. He speaks the English of the England that exists on the moon, as if the language had developed in a different direction. Only, to a large extent, he developed his dialect himself. Needless to say, we owe a lot of our words to him. Now, if one is willing to assay the difficulty of tracing his difficult words through footnotes or endnotes, then there is no reason to react with approval to the words Browne succeeded in giving us, and disapproval to the words he failed to give us. They are all respectable; only the recklessness of Browne’s invention gives a sense of adventure and surprise to his prose.
The same alien quality strikes us in the style of his science. The is not the science we know. It is not a 20th century science. It is not even the naturalism of Darwin or of Huxley. It is barely even the naturalism of Galileo or Newton, who probably knew better than to speculate that a plant could be restored from its ashes.
One tenet may serve as a sample for the quality of it: the tenet that ‘life is an invisible flame’ that runs below the surface of the skin. As it happens, the tenet is not correct. It is not unscientific to be wrong, and doubtless our own scientists are wrong about a number of things, and are no less scientific because of it.
Now in the first place you must note that this fancy of the invisible flame is a modern idea. It is one of the many dead-end doctrines that litter the wake of the history of progress, like Descartes’ vortices, ousted by atoms, and the sufficiency of Newton’s laws, upturned by Einstein. And like any modern scientific theory, the theory of the life-flame provides a physical explanation for the phenomena surrounding organic life, such as body warmth and digestion, without appeal to an immaterial spirit, though Browne, like many scientists greater than himself, believes in the human spirit.
On the other hand, the fancy of the invisible flame has a simplicity and poetry that the reality lacks. It is not of a piece with the scientific doctrines that have survived into the 21st century. Whatever the truth of the matter, it doesn’t sound modern. For there is a lively sense of nature spiritualised in it. Of all the elements to identify with life, fire is the most fitting. Fire is a restless breath, a dancing heat, a vital light; and life surely reminds us of light, warmth, and energy. To say that life is a fire validates our feeling that fire is alive. And in general, in the old philosophy, the elements seems more themselves, and play the parts we would expect of them. There are no inconceivable atoms to explain the solid, tangible realities we daily meet; the reality is what the senses tell us: earth is earthy, and made of earth, just as all liquid springs from the primal water. These old men of science discovered things that other people had not seen, not because they looked where other people could not look, but because they looked where other people did not look. There was not the same sense that science explains what we daily see in a way that we who daily see it would never guess on our own. To give another extreme example, Browne scarcely seems aware that the earth goes around the sun.
Some of the alluring strangeness of Browne’s science arises from mere age and outdatedness. Like everything that is relatively new to the world, his modern 17th-century beliefs leap out at us with the illusion of antiquity. But there is in it a natural fascination; its very character is to be an eternally poetic science. For it is the science of an age of marvels, the imaginative science of an imaginative age, and the science of an ignorant age, though not an ignorant science. It is the kind of science that treats of the Griffin and the Phoenix, even if just to confirm that they do not exist, and therefore it is a science that has a category to contain the elephant and the lamprey, beasts no less outrageous, though as it happens they do exist.
It is furthermore a science predicated on the rule of reason, a Platonic science, and in that regard also not a fully modern science. One of the most significant effects of the scientific revolution was the destruction of reason. The scientists of today believe in logic and law, but only in mathematical logic and arbitrary law. They do not believe in reason, as these antiquated scientists do. They do not believe that the universe is arranged in a reasonable way, they believe it is a chaos of flames and flecks. They do not believe that the planets revolve in reasonable order, they believe that they are irregularly spaced and irregularly revolving due to the conflict of various laws and forces. They do not believe it is reasonable for earth to be inhabited; most believe we have evolved, and none believe it is reasonable that we have; it is what they call a coincidence, even an unbelievable coincidence, and perhaps an unutterably far-fetched coincidence. They believe there are reasons for everything, in the sense that there are explanations for everything, but they do not believe that the endless irregularity that results is reasonable or orderly. They believe there are reasons why things do happen, but they do not think there are reasons why the things that do happen should happen.
Yet the universe of Browne is run on rational principles. Here is the first: ‘“nature does nothing in vain” is the only indisputable axiom in philosophy.’ Which is to say, ‘every essence, created or uncreated, has its final cause,’ i.e. a purpose. And that the world is in some manner neat and orderly: ‘It is a riddle to me… how so many learned heads should so far forget their metaphysics, and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures, as to question the existence of spirits;’ for if there are no spirits, there is a gap between man and God, and nature is left looking irregular.
This kind of science is, by the standards of our day, wonderful, and misguided. For that very reason it is very valuable to us. We are hardly likely to be misled in matters of fact by such books as his, because we are inclined to be skeptical when we read them. And we are hardly likely to be misled in matters of philosophy, because we look on his worldview at a remove, and it is incompatible with our own. It will certainly not mislead us, but it can awaken us. It is easy in a culture that has absorbed science and naturalism so much as our own has to forget what science and naturalism are, and why we took an interest in them in the first place. Enlightenment, when it has revealed many things, makes us forget what it is to be unenlightened, and when we can no longer remember that, we can no longer remember what it is to become enlightened. Here is enlightenment in its glory – enlightenment amidst marvels, which it does not disdain to speak of, though it is sometimes compelled to disbelieve. It reminds us what the world is, how ingenious, how beautiful and how grievous, how spiritual, how divinely fascinating: and it helps, not hinders, that this is done through slogans that now seem unbelievable, and projects that seem over the top; for nature herself, as we are coming to relearn, is unbelievable and over the top.
Today there is still a sense that the science of the world is marvellous and wonderful, but we mean something quite different when we say that. It is wonderful, not because it is full of mysteries and the surprises that lurk behind blind corners or under the earth, but because it is complicated and yet coordinated beyond our wildest expectations. There is a great reversal: Browne believes firmly in the orderliness and rationality of the universe, and sustains his awe fresh by constant discoveries of new marvels and mysteries. He believes that ‘there are no grotesques in nature’ but is constantly discovering new grotesques that he knows must fit in some ingenious way. We, by contrast, believe that all nature is grotesque, that the universe is aimless and luxuriant, like an overgrown garden of galaxies, but we are constantly marvelling at how clever and ingenious nature is in achieving its accidental goals. For Browne beauty is the assumption and mystery is the marvel: for us mystery is the assumption and beauty is the marvel. ‘Wonder’ means something much more tame for us. It is easier for us to patronise the universe even while proclaiming how far beyond us it is.
This sense of mystery is essential to the poetry of Browne’s writings. His science is a dark faculty, an unevenly focused eye flitting through the darkness of the boundless world. What we would tell as facts he tells as hints. There is an enormous difference between hearing on the one hand that the beanstalk, when it splits the seed, uses the nutrients stored therein to feed its first growth, and hearing, on the other, Browne’s curious and inconclusive observation, that ‘In beans the leaf and root sprout from the germen, the main sides split, and lie bye, and in some pulled up near the time of blooming we have found the pulpous sides entire, or little wasted.’ The very uncertainty of the observation makes the content more arresting. And in much of Browne’s work there is the murkiness of time mixed in. We do not always think of scientific botany as rooted in wild gardens, and we never think of it as seated in the gardens of the savage bureaucracy of a bygone age: but Browne’s botany finds a resource in primeval Persia. This is the basis of the essay The Garden of Cyrus, which like much of Browne’s work strikes us as an unusual mixture of antiquarianism and empiricism. It is permeated by a dark logic. A logic whereby, since even the cylinder does not exclude the square, it may be found that the limbs of animals bear out in their form the wisdom of Cyrus. The logic is to us no logic – the link is so tenuous that I will not explain it here – but it is the logic of a man threading a deep maze, the maze of all human knowledge. The result is a constant air of mystery and a constant air of discovery.
theparsnipoftime 