Thomas Browne - Literary Influence

Literary Influence

Browne is widely considered one of the most original writers in the English language. Though by no means free from credulity, the freshness and ingenuity of his mind invested everything he touched with interest; while on more important subjects his style, if frequently rugged and pedantic, often rises to the highest pitch of stately eloquence. His paradoxical place in the history of ideas, as both a promoter of the new inductive science, as an adherent of ancient esoteric learning as well as a devout Christian have greatly contributed to his ambiguity in the history of ideas. For these reasons, the literary critic Robert Sencourt succinctly assessed him as "an instance of scientific reason lit up by mysticism in the Church of England".

Added to this are the complexity of his labyrinthine thought and his ornate language, along with his many allusions to the Bible, Classical learning and to a variety of esoteric authors. These factors combine to account for why Browne remains obscure, little-read and much-misunderstood. However, the influence of his literary style spans four centuries.

• In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson, who shared Browne's love of the Latinate, wrote a brief Life in which he praised Browne as a faithful Christian, but gave a mixed reception to his prose:

His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another. He must, however, be confessed to have augmented our philosophical diction; and, in defence of his uncommon words and expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express, in many words, that idea for which any language could supply a single term.

• In the nineteenth century Browne's reputation was revived by the Romantics. Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Lamb (who considered himself the rediscoverer of Browne) were all admirers. Carlyle was also influenced by him.

• The seminal American novelist Herman Melville, heavily influenced by his style, deemed him "a cracked archangel."

• The epigraph of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) is from Browne's Hydriotaphia,(Chap.5): "What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture".

• The English author Virginia Woolf wrote essays upon him and observed in 1923, "Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those that do are the salt of the earth." (Sir Thomas Browne, a review by Woolf of the Golden Cockerel edition of the Works of Sir Thomas Browne, published in Times Literary Supplement (1923)

In the twentieth century those who have admired the English man of letters include:

• The American natural historian and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.
• The theosophist Madame Blavatsky.
• The Scottish psychologist R. D. Laing, who opens his work The Politics of Experience with a quotation by him : "...that great and true Amphibian whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds."
• The composer William Alwyn wrote a symphony in 1973 based upon the rhythmical cadences of Browne's literary work Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial.
• The American author Armistead Maupin includes a quote from Religio Medici in the preface to the third in his Tales of the City novels, Further Tales of the City, first published in 1982.
• The American author Tony Kushner in 1987 wrote a play upon Browne whose title is Hydriotaphia.
• The Canadian physician William Osler (1849–1919), the "founding father of modern medicine", was a well-read admirer of Browne.
• The German author W.G. Sebald wrote of Browne in his semi-autobiographical novel The Rings of Saturn (1995).
• The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges alluded to Browne throughout his literary writings, from his first publication, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) until his last years. He described Browne as "the best prose writer in the English language". Such was his admiration of Browne as a literary stylist and thinker that late in his life (Interview 25 April 1980) he stated of himself, alluding to his self-portrait in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940):

“

I am merely a word for Chesterton, for Kafka, and Sir Thomas Browne — I love him. I translated him into seventeenth century Spanish and it worked very well. We took a chapter out of Urne Buriall and we did that into Quevedo's Spanish and it went very well.

”

• In his short story "The Celestial Omnibus", published in 1911, E. M. Forster makes Browne the first "driver" that the young protagonist encounters on the magical omnibus line that transports its passengers to a place of direct experience of the aesthetic sublime reserved for those who internalize the experience of poetry, as opposed to those who merely acquire familiarity with literary works for snobbish prestige. The story is an allegory about true appreciation of poetry and literature versus pedantry.

• In North Towards Home, Willie Morris quotes Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial from memory as he walks up Park Avenue with William Styron: "'And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes…' At that instant I was almost clipped by a taxicab, and the driver stuck his head out and yelled, 'Aincha got eyes in that head, ya bum?'"

• William Styron prefaced his 1951 novel Lie Down In Darkness with the same quotation as noted above in the remarks about Willie Morris's memoir. The title of Styron's novel itself comes from that quotation.

• Spanish writer Javier Marías translated two works of Browne, Religio Medici and Hydriotaphia.