CHAPTER VII LANGUAGE AND INFLUENCE A CURIOUS element in Browne's intellectual situation was its isolated character. Others had London to look to, or at least Oxford or Cambridge; he had only Norwich, and although that city possessed a large population and much comparative dignity, there was no rivalry for him there and little encouragement. For these he was forced to turn to disciples and correspondents; and we form the impression that, as time went by, he got less and less stimulus from the one and from the other. In the later years, Browne's main intellectual solace came from the piety, the zeal, the untiring kindliness of his admirable son Edward, who shared from London with his father in Norwich all that was curious and interesting in the movement of science. But Edward Browne, a true child of the new age, was entirely devoted to the advancement of exact knowledge. He wanted to add to the store of facts, to discover the precise proportions of truth; to lay down the principles of the New Philosophy, as his friends had called it when they met so soberly, so stringently, at those lodgings of Dr. Goddard's, over the optician's shop in Wood Street, out of which the Royal Society had sprung. Edward Browne excluded the imagination altogether from his speculations; the light he worked in was a dry, white light. But the light in which Thomas Browne worked was shot with all the colours of the spectrum, it was flashed out against a firmament of romantic gloom. Edward's ambition was to get at the fact, to fasten it down with the fewest words possible, with a disregard for any quality of style except a lucid brevity. In a generation so given over to parsimony of effect, what comfort was there left for the embroidering visionary who had written the Urn-Burial? But his very provincialism and absence of rivalry brought Browne consolations. He was a very great man at Norwich, whatever might be thought of him in London. He seems to have been little troubled by that oppression of spirits which the vastness of possible attainment breeds in men of really encyclopædic ambition. He became, in the absence of criticism at his side, satisfied with short draughts of that Pierian spring of which Pope, another hasty drinker, speaks so sententiously. The age of book-learning for its own sake was just over; the sixteenth century had carried the pursuit of that kind of learning to the last extremity, in an age when Salmasius had suffered the torments of Tantalus because he was not able to read all books at once. The new age was disregarding books, and was going straight to nature, determined to make new, stiff, half-mathematical treatises that should be mere records of experiment, repertories of hard fact. Sir Thomas Browne, as a scholar, comes between the two epochs. He had not Donne's "hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning," nor was he capable, like Ray, of putting all the beauty of erudition aside and reducing literature to a methodical synopsis of species. He was the greatest and the most intelligent of a little group who handled facts, but delighted to take refuge from them in speculation. Science to him, as we see in his letters to Edward Browne, was still "literature," just as it was to others in whom we now detect a certain taint of quackery, as it was preeminently to that curious person, John Bulwer, the "chirosopher," and author in 1650 of Anthropometamorphosis. The Royal Society could not recognise the erudition of such persons, however talented they might be, and however eloquent, for it had been definitely created for the purpose of sweeping them away. We have, therefore, in considering the position of Sir Thomas Browne, to face the fact that his subjectmatter is not of supreme importance, that it would, even, not be important enough to preserve him—if that were all he had to give-among the foremost literary oddities of his time. If we think of him merely as a physician or surgeon, he has no claim to be remembered by the side of such men as Sydenham or Wallis or Richard Lower. No one can seriously believe that the Vulgar Errors gives him a right to be ranked among biologists. We do not go to the UrnBurial for information about antique ceramic, nor to The Garden of Cyrus for rules of horticulture, nor to Christian Morals for an ethical system. Wherever we lean on the substance of Browne's treatises, it cracks and gives way, it is worm-eaten and hollow. If we go to his books as to compendiums of valuable information, we find them as empty as so many leaking vessels. Browne, therefore, is a pre-eminent example of the class of writer with whom it is form, not substance, that is of the first importance. He is interesting almost exclusively to the student and lover of style. That is to say, to the student of style in its wider acceptation, not in the mere melodious arrangement of beautiful words, but in the manipulation of language with such art as to reveal a personal temperament and to illustrate a human point of view. Among English prose-writers of the highest merit there are few who have more consciously, more successfully aimed at the translation of temperament by style than the physician of Norwich did. His case is very curious, because we find in him little sympathy with the current literature of his country, or of the modern vernaculars at all. In his superb neglect of all contemporary poetry and prose, in his scorn of the poets in particular, he exceeds Jeremy Taylor, whose contempt of modern writing went far. The great English authors from Chaucer down to Milton, from Wycliffe down to Dryden, might never have existed for all the attention they receive from Sir Thomas Browne. Almost the only reference to a living imaginative author which is to be found in the length and breadth of his works is a note written at the time that Hudibras was published. That piece reminds him of "divers examples" of burlesque in Athenæus; "the first inventor hereof was Hipponactes, but Hegemon, Sopater and many more pursued the same vein." The whole note is a mere pellet of sun-dried pedantry, without a single word to show that the author had comprehended or read or perhaps even seen Butler's poem. Where, then, did he find courage to write in the service of beauty? Recognising no dignity in the English language, no importance or vitality in English literature, how was it that he took the trouble to clothe himself in the splendours of the one and con These are questions -sciously to adorn the other? which it is impossible to answer. that such was the odd, the paradoxical case; that Sir Thomas Browne, profoundly indifferent to English prose other than his own, devoted himself to English prose as if it had been the art of his predilection. Unquestionably, he tasted the divine pleasure of writing for its own sake; that breathes out of all his best pages. Moreover, in spite of his unaccountable attitude to contemporary literature and his scorn of its attempts, in his own person he was confident of conquering eternity with the delicious artifice of style. We do not begin to understand Browne, or do justice to him, until we comprehend that we are dealing with a conscious and sensitive artist, We are told that Browne was simple in his manners and attire. Let us not believe that his writing is plain or easy. The examination of his numerous manuscripts is enough to show with what care he ran over the texture of his sentences, weighing them down with precious metal, fusing, elaborating, and implicating them, turning the rough yarn of statement into heavy cloth of gold. De Quincey said that we abuse the attribution "simple"; not everything fine is simple, he says,— Belshazzar's feast was not. The style of Sir Thomas Browne is another splendid thing which, however, is not simple. Browne is distinctly a difficult writer. It is not that his thought is exceedingly profound, but it is often startlingly unexpected, and dazzles us by its flash, while it is almost always clothed in language of a wanton ingenuity. (Browne introduces themes, illustrations, digressions, for their own sakes and because sakes ar |