Reading John Carey: Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

pirated edition from 1642 of Religio Medici
(published by Andrew Crooke)
frontispiece engraved by William Marshall
source: Houghton Library at Harvard University
(wikimedia)
no copyright infringement intended

If a proof is needed to demonstrate a pompous character and a ridiculous mind, here it is:

I would be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpet6uate  the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition. It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cool imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.

It belongs to Sir Thomas Browne: a fragment from his Religio Medici, and it is quoted everytime the name of Browne comes into picture. I found it in NY Times, also in a book of John Carey. I tried to upload the whole opus, without success (you can give a shot: it is on a site of Chicago University).

Well, John Carey gives an interesting explanation: it is not necessarily about pompous character (or ridiculous mind).

... he (Browne) is simply being rational, and comparing, in a spirit of scientific detachment, the human species and its curious means of reproduction, with other forms of life.

(John Carey, The Unexpected Professor - An Oxford Life in Books, Faber and Faber, 2015, ISBN 978-0-571-31093-7, page 211)

To understand Browne one should keep in mind that he belongs to a special epoch: watching him, his curious sentences, means watching the moment when modern world comes into being (John Carey), the epoch of two simultaneous revolutions, the Protestantism and the modern science. Simultaneous and maybe contradictory, anyway with ups and downs, with pushes forward and backward, and with an amazing mix of old and new, of superstition and free mind.


(Sir Thomas Browne)

(John Carey)

Sir Thomas Browne

Lady Dorothy Browne (née Mileham) and Sir Thomas Browne
by Joan Carlile, c. 1641 – 1650
National Portrait Gallery, London
(source: wikipedia)
no copyright infringement intended

To say that Sir Thomas Browne was a minor writer with a major style (as Hugh Aldersey-Williams puts it) wouldn't probably be so nice. To say that he was not a thinker of the first rank (like Newton), or even of the second rank (like Hobbes) (you gotcha, the same Hugh Aldersey-Williams) wouldn't be elegant either. To say that he was inclined rather toward isolated marvels than to the general laws - well, that begins to be fair (and it is said by Hugh Aldersey-Williams, to make things straight). Let's say this: he created symphonic prose (ditto), transforming English into an elegant Mandarin tongue. And he coined throughout his grandiose sentences lots of new words (electricity, hallucination, medical, ferocious, deductive - just a few examples).

Wow! English getting a Mandarin dimension! You'd ask what's all this galimatias. Here's how Jim Holt (the author of Why Does World Exists?) puts it: the history of English prose can be seen as a dialectical struggle between two tendencies: plain versus grand; the plain style (Dryden, Swift, Hemingway, The New Yorker) aims at ease and lucidity; it favors simply structured sentences, short words of Saxon origin and a conversational tone; it runs the risk of being flat; by contrast, the grand style (Gibbon, Nabokov, the Time magazine, and of course Sir Thomas Browne) — also called (by Cyril ­Connolly) “mandarin” — aims at rhetorical luxuriance; it is characterized 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.

A book dedicated to Browne (In Search of Sir Thomas Browne, and authored by - you betcha - Hugh Aldersey-Williams -  it seems to be a fascinating opus) has a review (written by who else than Jim Holt - if not small our world is definitely circular) in NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/books/review/in-search-of-sir-thomas-browne-by-hugh-aldersey-williams.html

• Reading John Carey: Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

(A Life in Books)