“Time which antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor monuments.” Thus physician and essayist Sir Thomas Browne, in his Urne-Buriall of 1658. Seventeenth-century literature is a cabinet of prose wonders, rich and strange. From the doom-crack sermons of Donne to the monstrous erudition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, it was an era of super-tooled syntax and complexly geared, smoothly rolling periods.
Even in this virtuosic company, Browne’s prose stands out. His sentences advance like baroque processions: stately and sinuous, composed of extravagant, sometimes unwieldy, parts. In tone, they often slalom uphill to a bracing O altitudo! Coleridge called him “a quiet and sublime enthusiast, with a strong tinge of the fantast”. Melville was snappier: “a crack’d Archangel”. In recent years, many readers have probably come to Browne via WG Sebald – The Rings of Saturn celebrates his vagrant mind and hymns the “sense of levitation” in his language.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams’s version of Browne is somewhat different, his book dedicated less to the lofty phrase-maker than the scientific curioso and collector. The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century shuttles playfully between its subject’s Wunderkammer mind – well stocked with natural freaks, historical enigmas, theological niceties – and contemporary predicaments on which Browne’s tolerant intellect seems to offer some wisdom.
Aldersey-Williams aims to mimic the engaging variety of Browne’s own writings, so gives us chapters on such themes as physic or medicine, animals, melancholy, objects and religious faith. His approach mostly works. The book is a clever and at times testy, almost crankish, updating of some of Browne’s main concerns. In places it is simply chatty, at the expense of Browne’s thought itself and especially his extraordinary style, which is the motor of that thought and not its container.
Browne was born in London in 1605. After medical studies at Padua, Leiden and Montpellier, he settled in Norwich and doctored to the Norfolk gentry – he was, it seems, much liked and admired. His major works include Religio Medici, in which he professes a rational faith that got the book banned by the Vatican, and Pseudodoxia Epidemica: a compendium of “vulgar errors” then widely credited. Early on, Aldersey-Williams declares that he has been “haunted” by Browne, and it is now time to haunt him back.
He follows him through his adopted city, to the countryside prospecting for fragments of ancient pottery, into gardens where he may discover the quincunx or five-pointed figure Browne spotted everywhere in nature. Aldersey-Williams half-heartedly cultivates a garden in homage to Browne’s learned patch of land and lore, but in the end he is more interested in knowledge than its medium. And more engaged when tracking Browne to Bury St Edmunds, where in 1662 he was an expert witness at a witch trial, and may well (to the dismay of his modern readers) have hastened the end of the accused.
Browne believed in witches, though he credited aspects of the case to “the Mother”: that is, hysteria. The contradiction leads Aldersey-Williams to ask: “If he is a scientist, why is he sometimes so infuriatingly unscientific? If he is a man of faith, why does he plainly doubt so much?” The answer to both questions is that Browne was writing on the cusp of the new science – he likely conducted more experiments than Francis Bacon – while still accepting many fragments of inherited wisdom. Do moles have eyes? Do ostriches eat iron? “That some elephants have not only written whole sentences … but have also spoken … we do not conceive impossible.” Browne often dithers about the veracity of the beliefs he considers, or at least affects to waver; a certain civility towards others’ beliefs is one of his mind’s most impressive attributes.
Aldersey-Williams mounts a lively argument for the same tolerance today: a generosity notably lacking, he thinks, in some mainstream defenders of scientific method. “Impatience with the world’s foolishness quickly becomes intolerance.” The predictable culprit here is Richard Dawkins, with his peculiar Twitter outbursts and (much earlier) ill-judged campaign against The X-Files. (Dawkins is avowedly not among Browne’s contemporary admirers, having taken against the essayist’s taste for mystery and ambiguity.) Aldersey-Williams is an unemphatic atheist, in the way that Browne was an unassertive believer: “I’m not committed in the way that Richard Dawkins is committed.” He takes a similar line with contemporary witch-hunts – Amanda Knox; alleged satanic abuse – but at times it seems he is casting about a touch too liberally and has lost sight of Browne, let alone his works themselves.
This may be because Aldersey-Williams is disappointingly uninterested in the writing as writing. Not that he fails to admire the prose: “The sentences are often long, and appear at first to be broken up with many subordinate clauses and much punctuation, but these are aids and not impediments, put there to enhance the metre for the greater pleasure and better comprehension of the reader.” This is fine as far as it goes, but not much of an insight into how these sentences actually work on mind and ear. At the heart of Browne’s ambiguous worldview, for example, is an almost caricatural addiction to parallelism: “basis and pillar”, “ubiquitary and omnipresent”, and so on. Aldersey-Williams says of Urne-Buriall: “The essay is prized for its baroque prose, but it is also a disciplined report of a scientific investigation” – as if prose were not a discipline but a sort of decoration, as if Browne’s archaeological rigour did not depend exactly on its translation to the page.
This caveat regarding language aside, The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century is an engaging and curious introduction to a writer who was once widely considered an eccentric paragon of English prose but is now thought a mere curio, even when he is admired. Aldersey-Williams restores a good deal of Browne’s intellectual context and offers good reasons for thinking of him as our contemporary, or at least our time-travelling interlocutor. “A halo of wonder encircles everything he sees,” Virginia Woolf wrote about Browne. This book is a lucid reminder of his scintillating thought, and a partial glimpse of the style from which it is inseparable.
Brian Dillon’s The Great Explosion, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, is published by Penguin. He teaches at the Royal College of Art, London
