In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century’s Most Inquiring Mind
By Hugh Aldersey-Williams, W.W. Norton & Company, 352 pages, $27
The history of English prose can be seen as a dialectical struggle between two tendencies: plain versus grand. The plain style aims at ease and lucidity. It favours simply structured sentences, short words of Saxon origin and a conversational tone. It runs the risk of being flat.
By contrast, the grand style — also called (by Cyril Connolly) “mandarin” — aims at rhetorical luxuriance. It is characterised by rolling periods decked with balanced subordinate clauses, a polysyllabic Latinate vocabulary, elaborate rhythms, stately epithets, sumptuous metaphors, learned allusions and fanciful turns of phrase. It runs the risk of being ridiculous.
Partisans of the plain style include John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, P.B. Shelley (in his letters), William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, E.B. White, Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, Michael Lewis and “The New Yorker”.
Partisans of the mandarin style include — in addition to its begetters, the scribes of the King James Bible — Dr Johnson, Gibbon, Addison, Carlyle, Pater, Ruskin, Nabokov, William F. Buckley Jr, Elizabeth Hardwick, Lewis Lapham and “Time” magazine. (It is an amusing parlour game to extend and modify these lists.)
But the all-time standard-bearer for the mandarin style has to be Sir Thomas Browne. This 17th-century English physician and philosopher, living in provincial isolation from literary London, managed to cultivate the most sonorous organ-voice in the history of English prose. At a time when the prevailing plain style was growing dull and insipid (John Locke is an example), it was Browne who showed the way to new possibilities of Ciceronian splendour.
In doing so, he became a prolific contributor of novel words to the English language. Among his 784 credited neologisms are “electricity”, “hallucination”, “medical”, “ferocious”, “deductive” and “swaggy”. (Other coinages failed to take: such as “retromingent”, for urinating backward.)
Browne’s influence led to a revival of the mandarin tendency in 18th-century prose, culminating in the (sometimes turgid) pomposities of Johnson and Gibbon. Among Browne’s subsequent admirers can be numbered Thoreau, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Borges, Sebald and Virginia Woolf, who saluted his “sublime genius” and called him “the first of the autobiographers”.
Are you feeling guilty yet for not having heard of Sir Thomas Browne? Or, if you have heard of him, for not spending more time savouring his greatest work, an essay on funerary rites alluringly titled “Urne-Buriall” — where, amid much verbiage that is (to my plain taste) cloyingly grandiloquent, lurk gorgeous phrases such as “man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave”? You shouldn’t, really. You are hardly alone. Browne is a “forgotten” man — so concedes what must be his most obsessive contemporary champion, the English science writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams.
“In Search of Sir Thomas Browne” is Aldersey-Williams’s attempt to do something about this sad state of affairs. The book does not merely seek to revive Browne as a pivotal figure in the history of English prose: a minor writer with a major style.
Its author also wants to convince us that Browne, with his intellectual curiosity, his good-humoured scepticism, his civility and spirit of tolerance, stands as a model for us today. From Browne’s example we can learn “how to achieve a reconciliation between science and religion” and “how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs”.
This is a bold claim, but the author faces an obstacle in establishing it. For Browne harboured some foolish beliefs himself, even by the standards of his time. Notably, he believed in witches. Worse, he acted on this belief.
In 1662, the supposed savant offered expert testimony at a trial in which two elderly widows were convicted of practising witchcraft and hanged. The trial at which Browne testified cast a long shadow, serving as an exemplar for the infamous Salem witch trials in America 30 years later.
When Aldersey-Williams gets around to confronting this embarrassment, the apologia he offers for his hero is rather peculiar. But first he tells us the story of Browne’s life. And this presents another problem: that life was fairly uneventful.
Browne was born in London in 1605, the son of a moderately prosperous silk merchant. He attended Oxford, and then studied medicine on the Continent at Montpellier, Padua and Leiden, picking up several languages and much cosmopolitan knowledge in the process.
Returning to England around the age of 30, he married and settled down to practise medicine in the city of Norwich, in remote and marshy Norfolk. There he spent the remaining four-plus decades of his life engrossed in his dilettantish naturalistic and antiquarian investigations.
His wife bore him 11 children, six of whom he saw perish. Otherwise his life was happy, although tinged with the “melancholy” that was fashionable at the time. He joined no faction in the English Civil War, and he seems not to have met any of his great coevals, such as Milton, Boyle, Hobbes, Newton or Locke. He died in 1682.
Furnished with such unpromising biographical materials, Aldersey-Williams ends up working the “In Search of” angle pretty hard, to give the book extra narrative shape. He goes to the site of Browne’s house, and finds that it has been torn down and replaced by a Pret a Manger sandwich shop.
He pedals his bicycle from the village where the witch trial took place to Browne’s home city of Norwich, wondering what Browne himself must have been thinking as he made the same trip after testifying at the trial 350 years earlier. He gazes at a plaster cast of Browne’s skull. He hangs out in a graveyard near a Norwich shopping centre, hoping it will be “a good place to observe the reaction of passers-by confronted by reminders of mortality” — only to find that the shoppers are “unfazed by the headstones, entirely focused on their mission of retail therapy.”
And, letting his fancy run free, he imagines the statue of Thomas Browne in the old Norwich town square coming to life, stepping down from the plinth, and having a strolling chat with the author about faith and scepticism in modern life. The pastiche of the Brownean style in this dialogue is sometimes jarring — as, for instance, when the make-believe Browne asks his besotted fan, “So, is this some kind of bromance?”
Happily, Browne’s own writings afford a rich record of his inward preoccupations, both intellectual and psychological. And here Aldersey-Williams proves to be a sure guide, piecing together a delightful portrait of a man who “stands at the gates of modern science and yet remains happily in thrall to the ancient world and its mysteries”.
Take his love of the fabulous, which encompassed talking elephants: “That some Elephants have not only written whole sentences ... but have also spoken ... we do not conceive impossible”; or his obsession with the medicinal properties and allegorical associations of plants, lovingly detailed in a chapter on Browne’s garden; or his pioneering determination to test hypotheses by the experimental method, which led him to study the effects of substances such as vinegar and saltpetre on frog eggs — the earliest experiments in chemical embryology.
Browne’s curiosity was desultory; it drew him towards isolated marvels rather than general laws. He was not a thinker of the first rank (such as Newton), or even of the second rank (such as Hobbes). But this does not diminish his appeal, at least to Aldersey-Williams: “He is open-minded and at the same time resolutely wrongheaded. He is a contradiction, as we all are.” And he wrote symphonic prose.
But that might be letting him off too easy. There is still the matter of the witch trial. Browne’s belief in witches was, the author says, a “theological necessity”. It was entailed by his belief in the devil, which in turn was entailed by his belief in god. And Browne’s sceptical spirit did not extend to religion. Quite the opposite: the very fallibility of human knowledge was, for him, a strong reason to cling to the faith of his fathers.
This kind of sceptically based faith, known as fideism, was shared by Montaigne (in a perhaps more ironic vein), and also by John Updike (ditto).
So Browne, called by the prosecution as “a Person of great knowledge” in the 1662 witch trial, rendered his opinion that the two accused women had indeed enlisted the devil’s aid to afflict the village children, causing them to swoon, vomit up pins and so forth.
How could Browne have let down the cause of science, of reason, in this way? The author, clearly disappointed, tries to lighten the blame by arguing that even today we have the equivalent of witch hunts and by suggesting that reliance on scientific evidence can sometimes be “anti-democratic”.
But Browne looks particularly bad by contrast with another figure at the witch trial, albeit one whose name is lost to history. This figure — referred to only as an “ingenious person” in the trial record — objected that the allegedly bewitched children might be counterfeiting their symptoms.
The objection led the court to perform a sort of proto-scientific experiment, the outcome of which strongly pointed to the innocence of the defendants. Yet owing to the superstitious atmosphere of the trial — an atmosphere that Browne had done his bit to establish — the two disagreeable but otherwise harmless old crones were sent to the gallows anyway.
Fascinating though Browne may be, I think the anonymous “ingenious person” is the moral hero of this book.
–New York Times News Service
Jim Holt is the author of “Why Does the World Exist?”
