'His Discreet Irony'

An old friend tells me he’s reading Sir Thomas Browne for the first time – Religio Medici (1643) – and having a wonderful time. If you like your first taste of Browne, you’re likely to stick around for the full banquet. His prose is rich and nutritious. I’m pleased that another writer I admire agrees. Rose Macaulay is best known, if known at all, for her novels but in 1931 she published an excellent little book, Some Religious Elements in English Literature (Hogarth Press). She writes of Browne: 

“This charming doctor, distinguished among writers of the day by not being a clergyman, produced, in the most exquisite and splendid prose of the century, the best and most agreeable confession of the Anglican religion ever, before or since, published.”

 

Browne is not writing a straightforward tract in Religio Medici, so don’t be frightened. He perfected the digression in English. There’s something almost childlike about his sense of curiosity. Everything seems to interest him. As Guy Davenport put it, “Curiosity, I’m convinced, is intelligence.” Macaulay celebrates “the delicate, amused, philosophically ironic mind of the most charming writer of his time.” Here is a passage from Religio Medici, an extended analogy, I found quoted recently in a non-literary, musical context:

 

“[T]here is a musick where ever there is a harmony, order, or proportion: and thus far we may maintain the music of the Sphears; for those well-ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all Church-Musick. For my self, not only for 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.”

 

Though Browne was a scientist, according to the learning of his day, no one reads Browne looking for information about astronomy or the biosciences. As Macaulay writes:

 

“Sir Thomas is an odd mixture of the wild beliefs of his age, in astrology, witches, demoniacal possession, and so on (and though as to all these things we can never take him at his face value, for his discreet irony lies sometimes very deeply hid in the suave turn of a phrase, he is by no means playing at witch-belief), and of a sane and advanced modernism as regards, for instance, the nature of dreams, and hell.”

 

In other words, Browne must be judged as a writer, not as a theologian or scientist. He not only loved words, he invented many of them for English speakers. Among the writers most often cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, Browne ranks seventieth. He is cited 775 times for the first usage of words, and not all are obscure or strictly medical or scientific. Browne gave us, among other things: approximate, carnivorous, coma, computer, electricity, exhaustion, generator, gymnastic, hallucination, holocaust, jocularity, literary, locomotion, prairie, precocious, pubescent, therapeutic, suicide, ulterior, ultimate and veterinarian.