The Major Works (English Library) Read Free

birthday.
    [Browne’s posthumously published works include
Certain Miscellany
Tracts
, ed. Thomas Tenison (1684);
A Letter to a Friend
(1690);
Posthumous Works
(with John Whitefoot’s
Some Minutes for the Life of Sir Thomas Browne
, 1712); and
Christian Morals
, ed. John Jeffery (1716; with Samuel Johnson’s
Life
, 1756).]

‘ABOVE ATLAS HIS SHOULDERS’:
    AN INTRODUCTION
TO SIR THOMAS BROWNE
    be is a quiet and sublime Enthusiast with a strong tinge of the Fantast, the Humorist constantly mingling with & flashing across the Philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, be has brains in his Head, which is all the more interesting for a
little Twist
in the Brains
.
    Coleridge
    I
    I T was a remarkably uneventful life. Even the knighthood was gained by default: for when Charles II on his visit to Norwich in 1671 decided with his usual magnanimity to bestow a knighthood on the city’s mayor, the latter declined, Browne was proposed as a substitute, and found himself a knight. Yet half-way to that unlikely episode, Browne had already described his life as ‘a miracle of thirty yeares’ – a claim dismissed by one critic as a ‘typically grandiose assertion’. 1
    But it may be that we have misread the ‘miracle of thirty yeares’ as a statement of fact when it was intended in the way Browne expressly delineates in the preface to
Religio Medici
:
    There are many things delivered Rhetorically, many expressions therein meerely Tropicall [i.e. figurative], and as they best illustrate my intention; and therefore also there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason. (
below,
p. 60 )
    Within
Religio Medici
the principle is reiterated in accordance with the time-honoured theory that God has in the Bible ‘so far tempered the language of his utterance as to enable the weaknessof our nature to grasp and understand it’. 2 In Browne’s words,
    unspeakable mysteries in the Scriptures are often delivered in a vulgar and illustrative way, and being written unto man, are delivered, not as they truely are, but as they may bee understood. (
below,
p. 117 )
    This approach is by no means characteristic of every sentence penned by Browne. But to the extent that it is present in
Religio Medici
in the first instance, it encompasses several implications of fundamental importance. It suggests capitally that it is an error readily to identify the narrative voice of
Religio Medici
with its author, in that the thoughts and experiences recounted are drawn less from any palpable ‘fact’ than from the equally palpable life of Browne’s imagination. In consequence, to eschew the ‘soft and flexible sense’ might lead us – as it has led us – to decline into reflections in diametric opposition to Browne’s actual intent.
    The palpable life of Browne’s imagination, I am suggesting, deserves the same response we are habitually prepared to extend to Marvell. Like Marvell, Browne refuses to be contained within the narrow circumference we impose on him, ‘the Humorist constantly mingling with & flashing across the Philosopher’ as Coleridge sagely observed. The infinite undulations of Browne’s fertile mind dictate conclusions beyond mere appearances, calling attention to issues further afield. As he himself reminds us, ‘Men that look upon my outside perusing only my condition, and fortunes, do erre in my altitude; for I am above
Atlas
his shoulders’ (below, p. 153). To ascend to Browne’s level is to sympathise with that over-enthusiastic nineteenth-century critic who described him, with understandable hyperbole, as ‘our most imaginative mind since Shakespeare’. 3
    II
    Religio Medici
– ‘The Religion of a Physician’ – was composed in the mid-1630s, and circulated for a time in several manuscripts before the publisher Andrew Crooke issued it in 1642 without Browne’s permission. Less than distressed, Browne revised the