‘’Tis too late to be ambitious’
Urne-Buriall
WE KNOW WHAT Browne looked like. A few pictures were made of him during his lifetime, paintings as well as engravings to appear in his published works. The best of them is a small double portrait of him with his wife, Dorothy, attributed to Joan Carlile, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. A grimy portrait of Thomas alone, possibly copied from it, hangs in St Peter Mancroft, the parish church in Norwich where Browne worshipped. When it came up for sale in the twentieth century, it was optimistically billed as a ‘Picture of Charles I and his Queen by Vandyck’, but it is all the more striking for its true authorship. Carlile was one of the first women in England to paint professionally. It is not known whether her sex was a reason in itself for the Brownes to award the commission; the artist was probably found via a mutual friend.
She shows the Brownes looking at us, but turned three quarters towards each other. They seem a little uncomfortable, as if they have been asked to stand unnaturally close together by the artist. The painting was done when Browne was perhaps forty years old and Dorothy was in her mid-twenties. We see a happily married couple in the prime of life. It is the only evidence of Dorothy’s appearance: she looks like a china doll. A fringe of fair hair under her lace cap, and a curl of amusement on her lips. She is wearing a blue dress (over time, it has faded almost to white) with a lace collar and dark jewels pendant at her breast. Thomas’s head seems likewise large in proportion to a body that is further diminished by its disappearance into the black oil background. His cheeks have a healthy blush. Thin hair covers his scalp and hangs in lank, loose curls. His boldly arced eyebrows, his moustache and beard have a reddish tinge. His gaze, from vast limpid eyes, is direct and a little sorrowful. He is dressed according to his usual fashion in plain but well-made dark clothes with only the tassels and turn-down collar of a white shirt showing at the neck.
One other item can provide solid evidence of Browne’s likeness: his skull, which also resides at St Peter Mancroft in the form of a plaster cast. Browne’s original burial place in this church was under the chancel where there is a plaque commemorating him. But the lid of his coffin was broken during a later interment in 1840. ‘The accidental circumstance afforded an opportunity of inspecting the remains,’ the Norwich Chronicle reported with barely hidden glee.
The bones of the skeleton were found to be in good preservation, particularly those of the skull. The brain was considerable in quantity but changed to a state of adipocere – resembling ointment of a dark brown hue. The hair of the beard remained profuse and perfect, though the flesh of the face, as well as of every other part, was totally gone. With respect to the conformation of the head, we are informed that the forehead was remarkably low, but the back of the cranium exhibited an unusual degree of depth and capaciousness.
In order to appreciate this story properly, it is necessary to know that adipocere, or ‘grave wax’, a soap-like substance formed by the decomposition of fat tissue, was first described by Browne himself upon observing a body that had lain buried in damp ground for some ten years. It can provide useful evidence in the forensic investigation of corpses today.
Following the disturbance, Browne’s bones were to be reburied. However, a local surgeon, Edward Lubbock, took the skull – as a memento of an illustrious forebear rather than as a teaching specimen, one hopes – and it duly passed into the exhibition collection of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital when he died.
In 1893, the vicar of St Peter Mancroft, prompted by an embarrassing mention of its disappearance in the London newspapers, wrote to ask for the skull back. ‘We should any of us be shocked if the grave of our parents were rifled, and any part of their trusted remains exhibited in a museum. I cannot say the lapse of time in this case makes any difference.’ The vicar deployed the full emotional armoury, referring darkly to the ‘sacrilegious act’ of the theft, and suggesting that Browne himself had been ‘extremely anxious that his body should after death be treated with due reverence’. The hospital stonewalled. Privately, the churchmen began to doubt the authenticity of the object they were claiming. ‘We don’t know whether it really is his or somebody’s else, or indeed where it came from,’ the vicar wrote to his canon. The relic was only returned nearly thirty years later following the appointment of a more conciliatory secretary of the hospital.
Browne would have been resigned to the indignities his remains have undergone. In the dedication of Urne-Buriall to an old college friend, he wrote blithely: ‘who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whether they are to be scattered?’ The returned skull was reinterred with due ceremony and to the satisfaction of all parties in July 1922. The parish register records the occasion: in the column provided for the age of the deceased is written the number 317.
Before this was done, however, the cast was made by the Royal College of Surgeons of England. I make an arrangement to see it. The cranium is remarkably smooth and of even convexity, without bumps or indentations. The mandible is separate, sans teeth and broken in three pieces. Both parts are weathered, though whether the cast has aged or the damage is faithfully imprinted from the original skull I cannot tell. I’d like to think of it as something more, but it seems to me just the cast of an average skull; it is, as one nineteenth-century church official argued to the hospital, ‘an ordinary one, of no scientific merit’. For the record, I ask the sacristan if I may measure it. It seems a Brownean thing to do. According to my makeshift calipers, Browne’s head was 14.7 centimetres wide measured to the full extent of the parietal bones. From the crown of the head to the bottom of the lug below the rear of the cheekbone, known to physicians as the mastoid process, is 14.0 centimetres, and from the back of the head to the tip of the nasal bone is 22.2 centimetres. Since, as Browne wrote, ‘the dimensions of the head measure the whole body’, my measurements confirm that he was not a large man.
He would say that his physical body was the least of him. He would direct us to his written works: Religio Medici, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, The Garden of Cyrus, Urne-Buriall and others. Their titles seem wilfully obscure, and they have been for a long time little read. But their contents need not be found obscure at all.
Religio Medici, his first published work, is a confession, the highly personal exploration of a professional man in his thirties as he struggles to reconcile his devout but conventional Christian faith with his profession as a modern physician and natural philosopher. It was difficult material at a difficult time. He wrote it shortly before the outbreak of the English Civil War, and not long after publication it was placed on the papal index of prohibited books. The way in which he resolves for himself the counter-forces of religion and science has a poise that eludes many of those still seeking to square the two today.
His major work is Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a catalogue of ‘vulgar errors’, of the kind of things that uneducated people commonly believed in seventeenth-century England. If an orthodoxy is something that we correctly believe, then a pseudodoxy is something incorrectly held as fact. And an ‘epidemic pseudodoxy’ is something incorrectly held as fact by many. Browne debunks these foolish beliefs – that chameleons live only on air, that a diamond will dissolve in goat’s blood – one by one, sub-dividing them into vast categories, errors mineral, vegetable and animal, errors to do with man, errors seen in pictures, errors in geography and history, and errors in scripture. Or, sometimes he doesn’t. On the question of whether gold imbibed is a useful medicine, he equivocates; he cannot see what medical effect it might have, but he cannot be sure it has none. On the popular practice among pregnant women of holding a stone to the belly to ease labour pains, Browne doubts the purported source of these stones – they were said to come from eagles’ nests – but can see no medical harm in the custom. If it works for you, he says in effect, then I won’t stop you.
His method is rhetorical and scientific by turns. Often, he appeals to classical authority – you may think it is this, but Aristotle, or Pliny, or Galen, long ago said it was that. Other times, he persuades us by logical argument. Occasionally, he illuminates the truth of some mysterious natural phenomenon with reference to scientific knowledge that he has acquired during his studies on the continent, information almost sure to be new to his English readers. Most appealing of all, he now and then seeks to convince us that some widely held opinion is an error by describing the results of his own little experiment. He knows a dead kingfisher does not make a good weathervane; he has tried it.
The Garden of Cyrus and Urne-Buriall might seem on first sight to be less considerable works. The former deals with aspects of form and geometry in nature, while the latter is an essay prompted by the unearthing of some Romano-British funerary relics. They make a literary diptych of the natural environment – what grows above the ground, and what decays beneath it – and man’s place in its mysterious cycles. They display Browne’s mature style as a writer. His long, rolling sentences compel admiration like complex natural phenomena, shells or orchids, say, or waves breaking languorously on a beach. But they also demonstrate the emergent methods of the botanist and the archaeologist.
In Pseudodoxia Epidemica he is a supreme sceptic. He is sceptical about everything, and he teaches us to how to be so too. Today, it might seem that his work is done. At every turn, there is a sceptic, loudly doubting the efficacy of alternative medicine, or denying the existence of God. Nor are the sceptics all on the ‘side’ of science. There are also sceptics who doubt the validity of scientific evidence for climate change or the truth of pharmaceutical manufacturers’ claims for their products. But Browne’s scepticism is different; he is sceptical but also humane. Even when he wishes to give an exceptionally loopy idea short shrift, his patience and good humour shine through. He agrees that various minerals have an effect on the body, for example, but ‘that an Amethyst prevents inebriation . . . we are yet, I confess, to believe, and in that infidelity are likely to end our days’. If his humour is occasionally sardonic – the notion that every plant should be named after the disease it cures he reckons as ‘A way more likely to multiply Empericks [medical charlatans] then Herbalists’ – it is at no person’s direct expense. Not only that, he is able to empathize with proponent and opponent alike.
It is not the substance of the topics that Browne deals with but the way he deals with them that we need to recapture today: his civility, his tolerance, his good humour, his wit, and his sheer style. He is almost unfailingly forgiving of those with whom he disagrees, whether they follow religions or creeds other than his own, whether they disagree with him on matters of science and medicine, or whether they are simply ignorant (and we are almost all ignorant alongside Sir Thomas). He handles his imagined readers with kindness and generosity, treating them to little jokes and beautiful turns of phrase, and if these fall on deaf ears, it is no matter, for the thrust of his argument will not have been made to depend upon these niceties.
Because he belongs so resolutely to his time, and because, for some, his subject matter is arcane and occasionally even distasteful, he has been labelled for his pains as cheerless, melancholy and quaint. But he is genuinely entertaining in all these works. He is constantly stimulating, perceptive, unexpected. He is often prescient – often, but not always; sometimes he is happy to remain well behind the times. And he is occasionally downright funny – which is quite a trick given the seriousness of his times and the prodigality of his topics.
These are the works of a man finding time to write about whatever curious thing he has seen in between a doctor’s rounds. He does not lose sight of the fact, and nor should we, that his day job was, as he quips in the introduction to Urne-Buriall, ‘to keep men out of their Urnes’.
There is one thing that connects Browne with his texts, his corporeal body with his body of work, and that is his handwriting. The Norfolk Record Office holds a little of Browne’s correspondence (much more is in the British Library) and a rare autograph manuscript copy of Relligio Medici [sic]. The little book is bound in calfskin and is about twelve by seventeen centimetres. It comprises 186 pages with about twenty-five neatly hand-ruled lines to a page. There are red rules top and bottom and fainter ones making left and right margins. The text is inscribed neatly inside these boxes, each line justified by eye. Faint underlinings and marginal marks as well as page numbers have been added at a later date. The script is bold, tidy, elegant and legible. Every straight stroke of the pen has a slight ogee and a subtle modulation of line thickness, so that it looks like a natural organism trapped on the page rather than an artificial mark. The slight italic tells me that he was right-handed. The ascenders of his d’s loop back spirally; y’s slice emphatically below the line; th’s sometimes finish with a scimitar flourish. Capital letters have looping ornaments. It is possible to tell where his writing gathers speed because the e’s break up into two small curls so that after a while the page begins to look exotically foreign.
In ordinary letters, although the prose is less burnished, his hand keeps the same pleasing regularity. A majuscule J (in ‘Inigo Jones’) is finely formed with two passes of the nib. The inking – now appearing a dark coffee-brown in colour – is so even that it is often impossible to tell when he dips his pen. There are no blots and only a few short crossings-out. Even in old age, his writing remains fluent. The manuscript of Repertorium, written around 1680, an inventory of tombs at Norwich Cathedral, a building which he had seen ransacked during the Commonwealth, is less controlled and more rapid, but still quite legible.
It is writers more than scientists who have tended to champion Browne. His delirious style sees to that. But not all the literary greats line up to praise him; not even very many do so. Those who do are a particular selection, and it is a particular Browne that they admire.
It is no surprise that Samuel Johnson should have chosen Browne as a subject for literary biography – in an essay prefacing some of Browne’s late works published in 1756 – long before he put together his compendious Lives of the English Poets. Though not alike in appearance or behaviour – Browne fastidious, Johnson famously a man of appetites – they had been at the same Oxford college, and shared at a century’s distance a philosophy of life in which it wasn’t Browne who was ahead of his time so much as Johnson who found himself out of tune with the Enlightenment, longing for days of certain religion and a human soul unchallenged by science.
Then there was the business of words. Browne must have caused him many a headache when Johnson was at work on the dictionary that would bring him lasting fame.
There had been dictionaries before. Thomas Blount’s dictionary, published in 1656, was the best available in Browne’s day. Blount’s title – Glossographia; or, a Dictionary Interpreting the Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, Now Used in Our English Tongue – tells you all you need to know about what was happening to the language. It contained some 11,000 ‘hard’ words, most of them added to the language during the preceding century, and was the largest dictionary of English at that time, until it was extensively plagiarized and enlarged two years later. (A more radical approach to the lexical chaos of the day was to start again with language altogether. In 1647, a Dutch-born London merchant, Francis Lodwick, published a manifesto for a utopian language that would permit people of different tongues to understand one another.)
Johnson’s dictionary increased the number of words four-fold and improved the quality of the definitions with often pungent accuracy. Words came, as Blount had found already, from everywhere. Well travelled, multilingual and all curious, Browne was able to find enough raw material to make him one of the chief inventors of words in the seventeenth century. Words such as electricity, as well as hallucination, coined by Browne, had found their place in the language by Johnson’s time and went into the dictionary. So did others now mostly obscure to us – the fabulous retromingent, for example, which means urinating rearwards. Other coinages – the superfluous tollutation, meaning simply ambling, the overly specific axungious, meaning lard-like – were rejected. Even the splendid deuteroscopy, meaning the business of taking a second look (always a Brownean urge), did not make it. Though Browne had a taste for Latinate car crashes – something later critics found a problem with Johnson too – his words were at least purposeful. As Johnson was forced to admit: ‘in defence of his uncommon words and expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express in many words that idea for which any language could supply a single term’.
The compilers of the modern Oxford English Dictionary have computers to help them in their work, and are able to monitor the creation and usage of words. Browne ranks twenty-fifth among all sources responsible for providing first evidence of a word in English. He comes behind Shakespeare, Chaucer and King Alfred the Great, but well ahead of Spenser, Milton and Sir Francis Bacon. Scientific journals from all eras score highly; the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published continuously since 1665, turns out to be the second most fertile source of new words in the English language. The only individuals who outrank Browne among his contemporaries and near contemporaries are the handful of early lexicographers, Blount among them, and translators whose very business it was to pilot foreign words into English.
Science demanded names for things newly discovered or for the first time properly described – plants and animals, microorganisms visible through new microscopes, heavenly bodies visible through new telescopes. Bacon, the leading natural philosopher of the Elizabethan period, hoped that new words would define things with precision, a noun for each unique object in creation. Browne instinctively knew that words are slipperier than that. Science needs words that name but also words that describe. He favoured adjectives and adverbs, words that would do this job, but words also of polysemous possibility and ambiguity. For him, a good word was one that was more sayable, more poetic, more elaborately amusing, or more clearly bespeaking its classical origin as much as one that was blunt and clear.
Browne coined 784 new words and provided the first evidence for the true sense of another 1,616. The vast majority of them are found in the work of his that is most neglected by scholars of English literature, Pseudodoxia Epidemica. From his time in France, Italy and the Spanish Netherlands, Browne was well placed to make his contribution. The high jinks of his student days often shows through in these adoptions. He thought it worth importing bouffage, the French for a blowout or feast, and saltimbanco, a word heard in Italy that he clearly liked, used to describe a quack, literally a man who jumps up on a bench to make his sale.
Unlike Shakespeare, he seldom buds a new word from English roots, although he does come up with the delightful swaggy to describe the ‘swaggy and prominent belly’ of the beaver, and brings stingy out of Norfolk dialect into national usage. Most of Browne’s neologisms come from Latin or Greek. Many are medical terms, and indeed Browne is the first to employ the word medical. He is responsible for our adoption of the Latin incisor to describe our cutting teeth. Terms such as follicle and expectoration, a word still used chiefly by doctors to mean coughing that produces phlegm, have been more thoroughly anglicized.
Admittedly, many of Browne’s words are on the long side. Bored with the tedious phrase ‘before the flood’ in essays where he considers the veracity of biblical assertions about the significance of rainbows, the nature of the animals taken aboard the Ark and Methuselah’s great age, he invents antediluvian to do the job. We still use it, though. He is guilty, too, of creating Latinisms where a more natural English alternative exists. Why invent cecutiency to mean near-blindness, out of the Latin caecus for blind, when purblindness exists already? Often, the answer lies in literary effect. In refuting the belief that moles are completely blind, he needed a balancing alliteration to make the sentence trip along that could not have been supplied by the obvious words: ‘There is in them [moles] no Cecity, yet more then a Cecutiency.’ In other words, they are not completely blind, but very nearly so, more than purblind.
It would not be fair to characterize such moments as mere verbal display. For Browne has in this passage not only already raised the topic of blindness or near-blindness in moles more plainly, but he also follows this abstruse sentence with the clearest possible amplification: ‘they have sight enough to discern the light, though not perhaps to distinguish objects or colours; so they are not exactly blind, for light is one object of vision’. This oscillation between enthusiastic loquaciousness – his unfamiliar words almost always have a compensatory tongue-rolling sensuousness about them – and scientific lucidity is a chief identifying feature of Browne’s unique style. Many of the words Browne devised in order to meet his exacting needs for description are with us still today, especially his new adverbial forms of words already in use as adjectives (circumstantially, considerably, improbably, invariably, presumably, traditionally, horizontally and vertically). Like Shakespeare and Milton, he also created many novel negatives by putting in- or un- in front of established words. They include inactivity, inconsistent, indisputably and uncultivated, though also unridiculous and unquarrellable, which over time have demonstrated their unnecessity.
A great many of Thomas Browne’s neologisms are now even commoner words that we would not be without today: append, aquiline, biped, both carnal and carnivorous, coexistence, compensate, equitable, exhaustion, ferocious, indigenous, insecurity, invigorate, locomotion, migrant (as both noun and adjective), misconception, prefix, pubescent, temperamental, ulterior, variegation and veterinarian. He coined the terms typographer and cryptography. His need to describe geometrical arrangements caused him to invent cylindrical and rhomboidal. His discussion of the properties of magnets led him to coin the word polarity. Electricity sprang from his observations of the effects of static charges.
A word such as deleterious perfectly illustrates where Browne’s inventions find their place. That it is a polysyllabic confection with a whiff of pedantry is not unusual for him. Nevertheless, deleterious has become a word we often see and use. Obviously, it means ‘bad’. In fact, in many uses, bad would be a better word simply for being four syllables shorter. But we also know that its meaning is more nuanced than this, and it is generally used in this proper way that reflects its Greek root meaning noxious or hurtful, with the implication of working ill effects over a period of time. Browne used deleterious in relation to the action of poisons. As I write, it is chiefly used to describe the effects of domestic violence and environmental pollution and the side effects of drugs.
Denny Hilton, one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, tells me: ‘Browne is one of the most brilliant and prolific wordsmiths in the English language.’ Hilton came across Pseudodoxia Epidemica by accident while at university, and was hooked by Browne’s ‘mix of scientific scrutiny and baroque style’. ‘Most lexicographers have a soft spot for Browne,’ he says, ‘I think because of the quality as much as the quantity of his many coinages. It’s not just neologistic showmanship – his words are complicated, minutely detailed, and lovingly created.’
The invention of new words continues today, of course, and the sources and processes involved are not dissimilar to those of Browne’s time. The need to describe new scientific phenomena, as well as new technologies, is a driving force. Cross-cultural connections fertilize new words as they have always done, but at a greater rate owing to the speed of travel and communication. The words themselves may serve more vulgar needs, but they come about by the same processes that Browne used to create his neologisms: the collision of different Latin roots (celebutante, for example, or edutainment, a word that might have been invented to describe Browne’s own prose), or the expedient addition of standard endings to convert one part of speech into another (braggadocious).
Words come into being when there is a need for them – when they describe new concepts to communicate to others – and they endure if those concepts continue to be of social importance. Browne’s words inevitably tell us about the man. I cannot devote space to more examples here, but I have scattered a small lexicon of some of Browne’s more successful words in footnotes at appropriate points throughout the remainder of this book.
It is of course not the new and unusual words but Browne’s way with them that draws the praise of writers. They favour the candidly autobiographical Religio Medici and the rich humus of Urne-Buriall. For the most part, they ignore Urne-Buriall ’s counterpart The Garden of Cyrus, which throws them off with its abrupt shifts between nature rhapsody, lists of plants, and odd ideas about their shape. Pseudodoxia Epidemica is also avoided because of its exhaustive length, its earnest mission, and because Browne is there less concerned with creating a literary effect.
So who joins Johnson in praising Browne? In his Marginalia Samuel Taylor Coleridge includes the transcription of a handwritten note he made in an edition of Browne’s works: ‘among my first favourites. Rich in various knowledge; exuberant in conceptions and conceits; contemplative, imaginative; often truly great and magnificent in his style and diction . . . he is a quiet and sublime enthusiast, with a strong tinge of the fantast ; the humorist constantly mingling with, and flashing across the philosopher.’ To Coleridge, Browne doesn’t wander off his topic as other critics have been infuriated to find; he does the inverse of that, ‘he metamorphoses all nature into it’.
In 1848, Herman Melville borrowed a copy of Religio Medici from his friend the publisher Evert Duyckinck. He decided that Browne was ‘a crack’d Archangel’ – a strange label, if presumably a flattering one. The context of the men’s correspondence was a discussion of the American Transcendentalist authors, who were all ‘cracked right across the brow’ in Melville’s view. He believed that his generation of writers owed a great debt to the fantastical imaginations of two centuries earlier. ‘Lay it down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson would not have mystified.’
Melville was at work on Moby-Dick at this time, and was inspired by Browne’s fidelity to nature as much as his fondness for ‘mystification’. Some years after the first publication of Pseudodoxia Epidemica in 1646, a large sperm whale was stranded on the beach at Wells on the north Norfolk coast. Browne went to inspect the animal and was able to add a new chapter, ‘Of Sperma-Ceti, and the Sperma-Ceti Whale’, to the third edition in 1658. He describes the beast’s anatomy and gives details of features sufficient to distinguish it from other whale species. He also takes samples of residues from the carcass, including the precious spermaceti, for experiment and further description of its distillation products.
Much of this material washes up again in Melville’s long, scientifically descriptive chapter ‘Cetology’, and elsewhere in Moby-Dick. But a truly Brownean thread is set running in a later chapter, ‘Jonah Historically Regarded’. Citing Nantucket whalers’ supposed disbelief in the biblical truth of the story of Jonah and the whale, Melville applies his own scepticism through the character of an old whaler known by the name Sag-Harbor. Sag-Harbor doubts the story because he has seen illustrated Bibles that depict whales erroneously with two spouts as well as for other reasons drawn from his direct experience of whales and the sea. He is incredulous, too, that Jonah was swallowed somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea and then regurgitated three days later at Nineveh, which would have required the whale to make an absurdly speedy passage round the Cape of Good Hope. But Melville does not allow Sag-Harbor’s reason to prevail, and gives the last word to a priest who considers the whale’s impossible journey ‘a signal magnification of the general miracle’.
It is the antiquarian in Browne that enthrals Virginia Woolf. ‘We are in the presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the finest lumber rooms in the world – a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses full of emerald lights and blue mystery,’ she writes in 1925 in The Common Reader. The rest of Browne hardly interests her at all, to judge by her review of a new Works of Sir Thomas Browne published a couple of years before this collection. She nods to one other work only, and that is of course Religio Medici. Even though Woolf showed far more interest in science than was generally considered healthy for a novelist, Browne’s works of science do not merit a mention.
Woolf makes this surprising claim for Browne: ‘His immense egotism has paved the way for all psychological novelists, autobiographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades of our private life. He it was who first turned from the contacts of men with men to their lonely life within.’ It is a curious remark not only because Browne is in many ways so unegotistical, but also because his ‘life within’ was surely less lonely than most. Besides it is not true. There is the important precedent of Montaigne, who, as Woolf herself says, has the advantage of a lucidity not yet found in English prose. She might have thought to mention also the visionary Margery Kempe of Bishop’s Lynn (now King’s Lynn) or the anchoress Julian of Norwich, both women writing autobiographically in the late medieval period. (Perhaps Norfolk breeds egotists.) Even so, Woolf does offer a needed counterweight to those who have skimmed Browne and found him melancholy. She sees his ‘gusto’ and love of life. ‘In the midst of the solemnities of the Urn Burial we smile,’ she says.
W. G. Sebald describes the reader’s sensation precisely in his East Anglian meditation The Rings of Saturn: ‘It is true that, because of the immense weight of the impediments he is carrying, Browne’s writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation.’ It is this abundant feeling of the light breaking through the heavy – levitation over gravitation, like the appearance of crepuscular rays of sunlight through dark clouds – that constantly rewards the reader.
More than once, reading through Browne’s oeuvre, I have come away with a vision of Browne’s personal levitation. He seems to have an aerial view at a time when aerial views were impossible. He feels the very orbit of the earth – or rather the constant slippage of the earth beneath the orbit of the sun, for he was not a convinced Copernican. It happens in a celebrated passage as he signs off at the end of The Garden of Cyrus and readies us for bed – or death: ‘The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? Or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, as some conjecture all shall awake again?’
Browne survives largely in quotes such as this. Modern readers may imagine that his writing is all like this, or that there is no argument to link together these rich passages. Is it that he is finally brought down, like his contemporary Cyrano de Bergerac, by his panache? Is it his sheer joy in language that makes us so suspicious of him today?
Edmund Gosse wrote a full biography of Browne on the tercentenary of his birth in 1905. It is workmanlike but unsympathetic, and betrays such a tin ear for the music of Browne’s prose that Lytton Strachey rushed to Browne’s defence. Gosse’s work should perhaps be seen as a tentative approach to the confrontation with his preacher-naturalist father that would come with his famous autobiography, Father and Son, two years later. Gosse warms to his subject occasionally, not least when he appears to be a more sympathetic figure than his own father. Browne ‘deprecated the frown of theology,’ he writes with feeling. ‘But he knew by experience that people love to preserve their mistakes, and are often heartily vexed to be set right.’ That ‘by experience’ is a key to Browne, the practising physician, accustomed to reasoning with patients at the bedside, and to knowing when further reasoning will do no good. Today I feel compelled to add that he would have deprecated also the frown of the overzealous advocate of science.
The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges set out on his career by doing his ‘best to be Sir Thomas Browne’. Browne makes a brief appearance at the very end of Borges’s short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, which centres on the discovery of one volume (Hlaer–Jangr) of a multi-volume encyclopedia that seems to be the key to a vanished civilization, Tlön. It transpires that the civilization itself is a fiction concocted by a secret society in the early seventeenth century – a later member of the society, Borges tells us, was the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, whose theory of immaterialism denied the existence of physical matter. There are shades of Urne-Buriall here and also of a playful late work of Browne’s, Musaeum Clausum, a catalogue of objects that he thought should exist, but which definitely didn’t. After the hoax has been revealed, the narrator of Borges’s story is found in the last sentence endlessly revising his translation of Urne-Buriall, working his passage back to the seventeenth century. ‘The world will be Tlön,’ he announces.
I can find no scholarship explicitly linking Vladimir Nabokov to Browne, but when I see the first sentence of his autobiography Speak, Memory I feel I am reading a Browne updated for the atheistic present: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’
Browne’s most renowned literary champion today is the Spanish novelist Javier Marías. Marías has also confessed to refining his style by translating various English classics, including Tristram Shandy and the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy and W. H. Auden. In a delicious Borgesian twist, Marías’s translations of Browne are now available under the imprint ‘Reino de Redonda’ since Marías is the reigning King of Redonda. It seems as if it must be a fictional title, but Redonda actually exists. Indeed, I have seen it while standing on the Caribbean island of Nevis, a green-lidded chunk of volcanic rock lying a few miles across the glittering sea. The monarchy stretches back to 1880 when the Montserrat-born M. P. Shiel, an Edwardian writer of fantasies, staged an imaginative coup and first claimed the crown. Under King Xavier, as Marías has styled himself, this tropical Rockall has been transformed into a Tlön-like refuge of literary civilization, with the appointment as peers of the realm of A. S. Byatt, Umberto Eco, Philip Pullman and others. The king’s translation of Browne is dedicated to Sebald, ‘Duke of Vertigo and invisible friend, who wrote extraordinary pages on Sir Thomas Browne and met death unwished on a road in Norfolk, not far from the buried and unearthed urns.’
Perhaps Marías himself can tell me why Browne so appeals to some writers. I write to him – my first royal correspondence – and am thrilled a few days later to receive a detailed reply to my questions, personally typewritten, then electronically scanned and forwarded to me by his assistant. Marías discovered Browne when studying English literature in Spain. Finding himself agreeably challenged by the prose, he translated Religio Medici, Urne-Buriall and a note on dreams for a Madrid publisher of classics, although he nearly abandoned the project. ‘I am happy I did not, of course, and certainly I know his style has had an influence in some of my writing. As it were, I feel capable of “introducing” in my own writing what might be called “the Browne pitch”: a certain gravity, a certain nobility of style, as well as a certain serenity.’ Marías was gratified by sales of his translations, but gives the greater credit to Sebald. ‘The funny thing is that some Spanish writers “discovered” Browne with Sebald, not knowing they had a much older translation of some of his works into Spanish. Perhaps, thanks to Sebald (with whom I exchanged a few letters before his death), Browne came to be known a little more here.’ Marías’s letter ends with a sentiment that I know to be true: ‘he has stayed with me during all these years, and I think he shall stay forever’.
Death looms large in the American playwright Tony Kushner’s ‘epic farce’ Hydriotaphia, in which the action takes place on Browne’s last day on earth. ‘Hydriotaphia’ is Browne’s Hellenic synonym invented as an alternative title for Urne-Buriall. Though I have not seen a production and must reach my judgement off the page, the play presents a Browne I scarcely recognize. It is at least a speculation about mortality, like Browne’s original. But Kushner has conflated death with money in a very unBrownean – though very twentieth-century Brechtian – way, by making Browne the magnate of a local stone quarry (a preposterous idea in Norfolk where the only stone to be extracted from the ground is flint). Reviews of the few productions tend to the view that Kushner has overreached himself. Any drama that includes the line spoken by Browne, ‘You who must live through this, I pity you’, is asking for a rough ride.
I am not sure how I feel about following this company. I love Moby-Dick and have read some Virginia Woolf, respectfully admiring her stylistic innovation. I have wrestled with a few of the teasing, complex tales of Borges. But the fact is these are mostly not my favourite authors, and they are a heterogeneous bunch.* But we share our fandom, and fans are family who can cross boundaries of time and taste. Perhaps it is a hint that I should pick up some Emerson.
However, I have just cause to shoulder my way in among these writers. I have hinted that they have largely ignored the bulk of Browne’s output, and the part that was most successful in his lifetime, the writing about what was not yet called science. This is a forgivable omission on the part of those whose first (or second) interest is not science, but it does a disservice to Browne.
Unfortunately, Browne is just as missing from the literature of science. I search almost in vain for scientists and science writers who feel the need to invoke his name for any reason. I cannot find him in the works of Carl Sagan, who debunked the vulgar errors of his own age in The Demon-Haunted World, while Richard Dawkins is predictably curt on Browne’s apparent love of mystery. I am delighted when I find that Stephen Jay Gould praises him in The Mismeasure of Man, his masterly condemnation of the pseudoscience that aims to sort people by racial and other types. He does so not only because Browne is ‘almost maximally philo-Semitic by the standards of his century’, but because he finds his writing ‘strangely fascinating’. Most of all, though, Gould wishes to draw our attention to the way in which Thomas Browne is able to marshal a rational argument in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which unexpectedly turns up ‘a layer of modern relevance’.
You have to go back another generation or two to find more of Browne’s scientific champions. Charles Mackay mentions him in a detailed scrutiny of the 1662 Bury witch trial in his famous work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds of 1841, but only reports the ‘evidence’ he gave there; it would have been interesting to hear his opinion of Browne’s testimony. William Ramsay, the chemist who added five new elements, the noble gases, to the periodic table, placed an epigraph from Religio Medici at the top of the paper summarizing his achievements: ‘Natura nihil agit frustra, is the only indisputed Axiome in Philosophy. There are no Grotesques in Nature; not anything framed to fill up the empty Canons, and unnecessary Spaces.’ The Canadian physician Sir William Osler, one of the founders of the famous Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and the physician who introduced bedside patient experience into the curriculum for medical students, regarded Browne as a lifelong role model. Toasting the unveiling of Browne’s statue in Norwich in 1905, he identified three lessons from his life, the most astute of these being his overseas education, which led to his being ‘denationalized as far as his intellect and his human sympathies were concerned’. D’Arcy Thompson, the classicist, mathematician and zoologist, author of the brilliant and erudite On Growth and Form, refers his readers to Browne’s ‘quaint and beautiful’ The Garden of Cyrus during the course of a detailed discussion of the symmetries observed in soap bubbles and honeycombs. He is able to explain mathematically why, as Browne noted, the leaves of some plants, such as hazel, grow in an unequal manner. Joseph Needham, the renowned author of the multi-volume Science and Civilisation in China, who began his career as a biochemist, regarded Browne as an unsung pioneer of chemical embryology, the science that aims to identify the stimuli that cause cells to differentiate as they develop into adult organisms.
There may be more such votaries I have not discovered, but the pattern emerges already. Browne is admired most by those who, like him, are great in places they have chosen for themselves on the fringes and in the interstices between conventional disciplines.
Chronicling a new form of carbon in 1992 opened a window for me to a fresh view of science, one of recurrent motifs and patterns that are present in nature at all times and at all scales, and that reveal themselves only when we have the equipment or the preparedness to look in the right direction.
A little later, I moved to Norfolk, and found Browne waiting for me. I felt that if I could understand Browne more deeply – Browne who had left London and Oxford and the best universities on the continent to settle in Norwich – it might help me make sense of my own new life in the remote and strange county of Norfolk. Of course, he had his medical profession – his writing was always done on the side. But did he not feel his disconnection, his remoteness from the hub of the action? His seclusion seems not to have bothered him at all. It is clear that he preferred to organize his thoughts in his own way rather than in the way dictated by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The scientific paper was never going to be his preferred literary form while there was the opportunity of a glorious discursive essay. And if the price he paid for that was a few minor discoveries not made, a few others not properly attributed to him, the odd professional friendship not formed, and being a little out of date here and there, then so be it.
In Norfolk, I hatched an idea to put on an exhibition to commemorate the quatercentenary of his birth in 2005. Although by then I knew a little about him, it seemed that the most famous cultural figure ever to have come out of Norwich was unknown to most of its citizens. With no obvious single venue, I conceived of five little exhibitions scattered around the city, each one in a location appropriate to one of Browne’s thematic preoccupations and to one of his books. Browne’s scientific debunking of ‘vulgar errors’ was to be celebrated at a ‘hands on’ children’s science centre, his medical career at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, his observations of pattern and form in plant growth at the John Innes Centre, a world-renowned horticultural research institute. The cathedral would address his still pertinent views on religion expressed in his youthful Religio Medici and the later Christian Morals. Best of all, I had managed to interest the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, where I thought a display of burial urns would resonate perfectly with their superb collection of modern pottery. The five locations would make a quincunx on any map of Norwich. But my plan went nowhere. Later I learnt that the city had chosen to mark the anniversary by commissioning a large public sculpture, which was installed some years late next to the statue erected on the previous centenary. Who Browne really was and what he stood for, what he wrote and the way he wrote, would have to be explained in other ways, or not at all.
And so I dare to follow these illustrious earlier champions of Browne because, like them, I have become enchanted by his prose, but also because there is a job to do. Browne’s genuine contribution to science is under-appreciated. Furthermore, his way of writing for the scientifically ignorant, always tolerant and forgiving, humorous and elegant, is a model for today. It offers an urgently needed alternative to the arrogant and impatient tone of many communicators of science. This tension is especially evident where science impinges on domains, such as religion and politics, where subjective opinions may be valued as much as the ‘objective’ ones of science, and where the debate has sometimes grown excessively shrill. Here Browne can bring wisdom to bear.
I understand that it is not enough for me to point out a few passages of his writing and ask how they apply today. I must show how a modern-day Thomas Browne would approach these problems. How would he tackle the ‘vulgar errors’ of today? What, indeed, are these errors? We might imagine we are so enlightened that we no longer labour under such delusions. But in some ways, the situation may actually be worse than in Browne’s day. His ostensible readers had some justification for holding to their superstitious beliefs because they had little or no education, and certainly none in natural philosophy. (I say ‘ostensible’ because Pseudodoxia Epidemica was of course read chiefly by Browne’s clever peers, just as today’s science polemicists preach largely to the converted.) Today’s ‘vulgar errors’ are perpetrated by people who ought to know better, people who have acquired at least the rudiments of science at school but who nevertheless visit chiropractors, pursue homoeopathic remedies, refuse their children the MMR vaccine, believe that crystals have special powers, and deny the likelihood of climate change. What would he say to them? Would he be as harsh as today’s self-appointed megaphones for science? And what would he have to say about science and religion, the two forces that he sought to reconcile in Religio Medici ? Would he perhaps, like many scientists, be an atheist today? Or does his settlement leave room for both rationalism and faith? And if it does, would he be able to win over both the Archbishop of Canterbury and Richard Dawkins?
If this is not to be a more or less chronological biography – and the scarcity of known facts about Thomas Browne throughout his life means that it cannot be – then it is hard to avoid chapters based on his varied published works. However, as these will be unfamiliar to many readers, I have not taken this path. Instead, following brief sketches of his life and professional milieu, each chapter takes as its theme an idea that was important to Browne, and that I believe is also important to us now. In this way, I range from medicine, medical care and human longevity to natural history, science and human culture. My examination of both scientific and unscientific ways of looking at the world leads me, a one-time scientist, naturally enough to consider the tolerance we show, or do not, towards people who do not think like us. This structural decision allows me to slip more freely between the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries in order to show how Browne’s philosophy bears on our lives and beliefs today. I find that he brings fresh insight into contemporary debate, not only where we might expect it, such as on the relation between science and religion, but also where we might not, such as in relation to our mental health and happiness and the culture of consumerism in which we are so thoroughly immersed.
I must add one more author to my list of Browne’s literary admirers. In a short story, E. M. Forster makes Thomas Browne the driver of ‘The Celestial Omnibus’, in which a suburban boy boards the bus for a day trip to heaven. The driver introduces himself – ‘His face was a surprise, so kind it was and modest’ – accepts no fare, and the boy finds himself rising heavenwards through thunderclouds, pulled by two horses which have feasted on ‘clovers of Latinity’. He might not stick to the advertised route or arrive punctually at his destination, but he can be relied upon to get us to the right place. I can think of nobody better to lead us on such a journey.
* Seeing the closing words of Urne-Buriall, recommending modesty in death, and that any of us should be ‘as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus’ (that is, the grandiose tomb of the Emperor Hadrian in Rome, now crowned by the Castel Sant’Angelo), I became excited by the idea that even the late Sue Townsend was a fan, and had been inspired to name her eponymous teenage diarist Adrian Mole after reading Browne, until I found that her first thought had been to call him Nigel, and the fancy withered.