`Vulgar and Tavern-Musick'

In the title essay of his 1957 collection, The Fine Art of Reading, Lord David Cecil quotes Sir Thomas Browne:

“Whosoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all Church-Musick. For myself, not only from my obedience, but my particular Genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one man merry another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer. There is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World, and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear, as the whole World well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony, which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.”

Cecil draws the passage from Browne’s Religio Medici (1643). I remember reading it in the steamy summer of 1975 as I rode the bus to the bookstore where I worked in downtown Cleveland. Browne’s prose is filigreed and incantatory; his mind, fanciful and attracted, magpie-fashion, to queer details. He was beloved by Johnson, Coleridge, Lamb, Melville (who called him “a cracked archangel”) and, rather unexpectedly, Virginia Woolf: “Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those that do are the salt of the earth.” Such as W.G. Sebald, another admirer. But I quote the Browne passage to get to Cecil’s gloss:

“For me, this is the most illuminating statement ever made about art. In it, as by a flash of unearthly divination, Browne reveals art’s function in the scheme of creation, and also the mode in which it is performed. The artist, he suggests, converts the imperfect into an image of perfection, not by softening or omitting ugly facts – if he did, he would shake our confidence in his work as a true picture of the reality we know – but rather by presenting these ugly facts as the component parts of a perfect order and harmony. Further, the passage illustrates how any work of art does this, whatever its substance. Not some celestial strain of Byrd or Orlando Gibbons is it, but `vulgar and Tavern-Musick’ that strikes in Browne his deep fit of devotion.”

I, too, love the phrase “vulgar and Tavern-Musick.” On Tuesday I was listening to Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys in the car. When John C. Reilly’s version of the traditional English song “My Son John” ended, my 7-year-old asked to hear it again, and again, until we got home. Here’s the first verse:

“My son John was tall and slim
And he had a leg for every limb
Now he's got no legs at all
For he ran a race with a cannonball.”

It’s an appalling, black-humored and all-too-timely song, and probably qualifies as “vulgar and Tavern-Musick.” It’s also sublime and irresistibly catchy, as drinking songs ought to be. For my son, its appeal started on the Looney Tunes level: “For he ran a race with a cannonball.” He’s seen Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam do that. Because the song has the ring of the Napoleonic Wars about it, I lectured briefly on naval warfare, Nelson, Trafalgar, etc. “So, it’s funny and it’s serious?” Michael asked. Precisely. Here’s where Cecil picks it up again:

“So also with literature. Any phase of human feeling, however, trifling, any point of view, however dismal or perverse, can be transmuted into an image of spiritual perfection – slighter no doubt than that evoked for us by Dante, yet an image of spiritual perfection all the same. The author may not have intended it to be, but he cannot help himself. By a sublime irony, not only pious Herbert and mystical Blake, but mocking Byron and irresponsible Sterne and worldly Congreve and despairing Hardy, are, in Sir Thomas Browne’s sense of the word, devotional authors. For in so far as they have expressed their spirit in the harmony of a true work of art, they have opened the eyes of the soul to a sight of that divine and flawless essence whence she springs and for which, while her unquiet exile on earth endures, she is immedicably homesick [a nice echo of Religio Medici].”

Reading “however dismal or preserve,” I thought immediately of Naked Lunch and American Psycho, and wondered how Browne and Cecil would have judged Burroughs and Ellis.