Pater’s ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ begins by observing the lawlessness and lack of classical balance in early modern English prose. While ‘English prose literature towards the end of the seventeenth century’, Pater writes, ‘was becoming … a matter of design and skilled practice, highly conscious of itself as an art, and, above all, correct’, the earlier literature was ‘singularly informal’ and ‘eminently occasional’, marred by ‘unevenness, alike in thought and style; lack of design; and caprice’. A few early exceptions, like Hooker, Latimer, and More, instituted a ‘reasonable transparency’, ‘classical clearness’. Otherwise, before Dryden and Locke, English prose was wayward. Of such writers, Browne was, Pater tells us, ‘[t]he type’ (App., 124–5).

And yet. Despite these faults, there are compensations to be found. Pater writes:

Pater’s inverted commas abstract ‘quaint’ from the flow of his prose and distance him from its use, an effect compounded by the parenthesis stalling the sentence’s progress in mimicry of the distractible prose of the seventeenth century, with its habits of self-annotation and erudite display.¹ Reluctantly, Pater finds a charm in quaintness. Something in Browne beguiles.

This chapter aims to expose what ‘quaint’ means for Pater, and the work it does in his criticism. Despite the inverted commas, it is a word which appears frequently – a tic of Pater’s critical prose. Its meaning, however, is never directly addressed: the closest Pater gets to a definition is his parenthesis on ‘coint’. It is nonetheless, as I hope to show, a keyword, marking a simultaneous discomfort with and interest in the lingering appeal of outmoded aesthetic objects which connects it to Pater’s broader theoretical statements on style, and on the relationship between classicism and romanticism. Pater’s use of ‘quaint’ is idiosyncratic, but connected to a wider pattern in criticism: on the one hand, the attempt of his predecessors and contemporaries to account for Browne’s peculiarity, what Coleridge called his ‘Sir-Thomas-Browne-ness’; on the other, a vogue for the word as a critical term which, as we will see, has strong and ambivalent associations. The later part of this chapter shows how Pater’s quaintness fits in the longer history of the reception of Browne, a history which traces changing attitudes to difficulty, Latinity, and ‘metaphysical’ style. These qualities were associated with forms of religion and philosophical education which were rejected in the later seventeenth century, just as ‘classical clearness’ became the ideal of prose, and they have remained variously embarrassing, threatening, or appealing ever since: a complex of aesthetic effects which ‘quaint’ works both to name and conceal.

Quaintness of Mind

What does ‘quaint’ mean? Derived ultimately from Latin ‘cognitus’ – a person or thing known, acknowledged, approved – it comes into English in the thirteenth century from the Anglo-Norman cointe: astute, clever, fashionable, devious, ingenious. Its earliest appearances in English fall under this rubric; over the centuries, it slips from associations with cunning, craftiness, and ingeniousness to ornament and elaboration, and thence into affectation, daintiness, fastidiousness, whether applied to persons, speech, or style.² Of the nine main definitions offered by the OED, only three are not now marked as obsolete. The last citation for the sense most relevant to writing – ‘carefully or ingeniously elaborated; highly elegant or refined; clever, smart; (in later use also) affected’ – is from 1841. What survives is what the dictionary now deems to be the ‘usual sense’: ‘attractively or agreeably unusual in character or appearance; esp. pleasingly old-fashioned’, first registered in 1762.³

The word ‘quaint’ is thus now itself quaint. That its senses related to ingeniousness, cunning, and ornament should obsolesce, leaving only today’s faint residue as a mark of the quirkily old-fashioned, is ironic. In ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, Pater foregrounds both the obsolescence and the irony. His account is deliberately archaic: the ‘quaint’ writers are quaint not only in a contemporary sense, but ‘as they themselves understood the term’. Pater’s gloss supplies not quite a definition of ‘quaint’, but a characterisation: adorned, but strangely or excessively so, with ‘curious ornaments’ idiosyncratic to the writer, pursued with a kind of blind determination which ignores the taste of the generality. Pater’s italics and inverted commas present the words ‘quaint’ and ‘coint’ as specimens. ‘Coint’ offers the Anglo-Norman spelling; it is an archaic fossil in Pater’s own prose. Whether Pater knew it or not, it also had an air of the antique for Browne: in the seventeenth century, the French form appears only in editions of Chaucer, etymological notes on Milton, and dictionaries of French or older English. Coint was marked as either foreign or archaic. This doubleness, in which ‘quaint’ and ‘coint’ at once characterise obsolete styles of language and exemplify them, is typical of the word’s ambivalence.

‘Quaintness’ recurs in the Browne essay particularly in connection with Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall (1658): a treatise in five chapters which takes as a prompt the discovery of urns buried in a field near Walsingham, Norfolk. Browne’s initial displays of antiquarian erudition on the sepulchral and funereal practices of the ancients transform into arias of ornate prose on the inevitability of oblivion, the futility of monuments, and the necessity of trust in the Resurrection. That the work’s subject is the more literal resurrection of the artefacts of antiquity and the relics of long-dead people keys it closely to Pater’s double quaintness, and the antiquarian revivification of the obsolete.

It is therefore no surprise that ‘quaintness’ is important in Pater’s discussion of Hydriotaphia. It is a composition, he writes, which ‘with all its quaintness we may well pronounce classical’ (154). Pater expands:

This is a tonally and rhythmically sympathetic sentence, working out its sense with the echo of Browne in the ear. The period style steals out from the quotation to render Pater’s ‘hath’ archaic; the interjection of ‘nay!’ has just the touch of simultaneous oddity and amplitude which he diagnoses, poised between quaint and grand. As a review of Appreciations claimed, ‘Pater really renders [Browne] for us, conveying to us the finest inflexions of his voice as if by some eclectic telephone’.⁴ If Pater’s essay is a technology which revives Browne’s long-dead voice, then his sympathetic and emulative criticism performs its own quaint archaisms.

The passage also registers Browne’s mixture of grandeur and bathos: his ability to generate multum ex parvo, to take the negligible or minute and derive from it sublimity, to spin from the uncovered urns both reams of erudite lore, and splendid passages of elegant writing on oblivion. Samuel Johnson wrote of Browne that ‘it is a perpetual triumph of fancy to expand a scanty theme, to raise glittering ideas from obscure properties, and to produce to the world an object of wonder to which nature had contributed little’.⁵ The Garden of Cyrus, the companion piece to Hydriotaphia, takes the quincunx (a pattern of five dots arrayed as a square with one in the middle), and makes it the leitmotif of God’s creative energy discovered in nature. ‘Quaintness’ here marks the oxymoron of something at once triflingly oblique and monumental.

In the opening of ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, Pater makes it sound as if ‘quaint’ is a strange word, a foreign and archaic fossil lodged in the purer classical throat of the language. But this is the only place where he holds ‘quaint’ gingerly in the prophylactic tweezers of inverted commas; elsewhere, the word is unostentatiously a feature of his own critical vocabulary. Though Browne is the type of the quaint writer, it is a word which peppers Appreciations, The Renaissance, Greek Studies, and Imaginary Portraits, as well as the novels. Across Pater’s work, it becomes possible to discern contours of the quaint and its siblings. It is collocated with antiquity and antiquarianism, oddity, heterogeneity, curiosity, conceits, the grotesque, remoteness, foreignness, barbarity, and the medieval. It appears differently in different media. In literature, in regard to content, it is antiquarianism, an interest in minute discriminations, and an erudite assembly of disparate material; in style, elaborate, recondite, or archaic vocabulary and syntax. In art, it is attention, or over-attention, to ornament and decoration, varying the texture of fabric or pavement or sward with repetitive patterns or floral motifs. It fetishises archaism. We hear, for example, that Sir Thomas More wrote a life of Pico della Mirandola in ‘quaint, antiquated English’ (‘Pico della Mirandola’, Ren., 27). That near-anagram of ‘quaint’ and ‘antiquated’ stresses the sense the word always carries, in Pater, of historicity.

‘Nothing’, writes Grace Lavery in her recent study of fin-de-siècle japonisme, ‘is quaint from the get-go; an object, text, body, or event acquires the quality of quaintness as it becomes historical—or, more precisely, as it fails to become historical’. The oddity of quaintness, for Lavery, is of something which has persisted beyond its time, which comes trailing its history into the present.⁶ Pater shares this sense of quaintness as marking a temporal residue, but with a subtle difference. Pater’s quaint is not a measure of how far a work differs in its aesthetic protocols and canons from his present, but a detection of a work’s internal anachronisms and incongruities. Some things, contra Lavery, are quaint from the get-go, carrying within themselves a temporal differentiation of surplus historicity even before they have retreated into the past. This is obvious in Pater’s comments on the archaisms of Coleridge’s ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’. It is not just overt pastiche, however, which Pater calls ‘quaint’. As Uttara Natarajan remarks of the Lamb essay, ‘Pater declares that Lamb endows the present itself with the quality of past-ness’.⁷ Pater finds in Lamb an ability to see a future-perfect quaintness – what will have become quaint – in the present. Lamb, as Pater puts it, ‘anticipates the enchantment of distance’. He preserves ‘[t]he quaint remarks of children which another would scarcely have heard’ like ‘little flies in the priceless amber of his Attic wit’ (‘Charles Lamb’, App., 115, 110). Like the urns of Hydriotaphia, Lamb’s essays are a medium preserving quaint ephemera.

Modern discussions of quaintness account differently for this fossilised persistence of a previous era in the art of the present. Daniel Harris suggests that quaintness is what happens to the tools of work and forms of labour of prior periods when they have been technologically superseded, and are used aesthetically or ironically in the present: a typewriter deployed as an ornament; artificially distressed furniture; fashions for artisanally produced food and clothing.⁸ This is not what Pater registers, however. While the opposite of Harris’s quaintness is the modern, the consumerist, the new, the opposite of Pater’s is the classical, the regular, the orderly: the timeless. In Pater’s quaintness, it is not that the aesthetic object is appealing because obsolete, but that its appeal is troubling because it manifests historical inconcinnity, a persistence of superseded styles.

This is closer to Lavery, for whom ‘quaint temporality’ is ‘an aesthetic and elliptical feeling of historicalness’ which at the same time refuses to conform to the ‘more muscular historical explanations’ of historicism; ‘what finally defines the quaint’, she writes, is ‘its irretrievability by any major history’.⁹ It is historical while refusing to be typical, maintaining its minor irrelevance. That Pater, too, is interested in the relation of the quaint to historicism is explicit in ‘Two Early French Stories’, where he addresses the appeal of the antique, and its relation to aesthetic anachronism. ‘To say of an ancient literary composition that it has an antiquarian interest’, he writes, ‘often means that it has no distinct aesthetic interest for the reader of today’. This is not to say that it does not have its pleasures, but the appeal involves an anachronistic posture: ‘Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by putting its subject in perspective, and setting the reader in a certain point of view, from which what gave pleasure to the past is pleasurable for him also, may often add greatly to the charm we receive from ancient literature.’ There is no point, however, unless there is ‘real, direct, aesthetic charm in the thing itself’: ‘no merely antiquarian effort can ever give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper subject of aesthetic criticism’. The critic takes pleasure in the attempt to ‘define, and discriminate’ this real charm from the ‘borrowed interest’ of antiquarianism (Ren., 14–15).

‘Quaint’ then sits for Pater at a point of crisis, in that word’s etymological sense. It marks a point of decision, where the critic determines between what is purely antiquarian, and what is of enduring and transcending aesthetic value. Sometimes, ‘quaint’ names the first pole of that opposition: those things which have historical charm but not beauty, which are merely curious. This critical sifting is clear in the Browne essay, which repeatedly attempts to separate Browne’s beauties from ‘what is circumstantial and peculiar’ (126), the classical from the quaint. But Pater finds them perplexingly inextricable. Peculiarity and strangeness are not burned off in the flame of aesthetic criticism. When Pater writes that, in Hydriotaphia, ‘a work really ample and grand’ arises ‘[o]ut of an atmosphere of all-pervading oddity and quaintness’, or that ‘with all its quaintness we may well pronounce [it] classical’, the initial sense is surprise and concession (156, 154). But the suspicion that oddity and quaintness are the materials out of which the grandeur emerges, that it is classic not despite but with quaintness, still lurks.

The essay on Botticelli in the Renaissance addresses this problem directly. For Pater, Botticelli’s Venus typified his strange combination of ‘classical subjects’ with realism in depiction of the Italian landscape and its people. Pater is again attuned to stylistic anachronism: in the painting, ‘the grotesque emblems of the middle age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude studies of Ingres’. Pater strikes nearly every adjective in his repertoire of quaint collocations: grotesque, medieval, peculiar, strange, Gothic, conceited. What makes the quaintness remarkable is its anachronism: the jarring effect of its yoking with something classical, something recognisably of a different aesthetic order. Pater harps on the word. ‘At first, perhaps’, he writes, ‘you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, … afterwards you may think that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject’. Quaintness is attractive but inappropriate, and a mature aesthetic sense must surely reject it. But eventually, when ‘you come to understand what imaginative colouring really is, … you will find that quaint design of Botticelli’s a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of the Greeks themselves’ (‘Sandro Botticelli’, Ren., 45–6). If ‘quaint’ registers anachronism, here the usual temporal relation is reversed: rather than the uncanny or unexpected survival of the antique into the present, Botticelli manifests the spirit of Greek style more vividly than it was realised in the place or period for which it was named.

Pater’s insistence on Botticelli’s quaintness reflects one of the main resonances of the term in the late nineteenth century: its association with the Pre-Raphaelites, for whom Botticelli was a particular model. In David Masson’s early critical assessment, published in the British Quarterly Review in 1852, a ‘studied quaintness of thought, most frequently bearing the character of archaism, or an attempt after the antique’ is the ‘third peculiarity of the Pre-Raphaelite painters’, after their disregard for established aesthetic canons and ‘fondness for detail, and careful finish’.¹⁰ The Pre-Raphaelites were thereafter so persistently linked with quaintness that Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in a letter of 2 August 1871 to fellow artist and poet William Bell Scott, bewailed the revival of ‘that infernal word “quaint”’. ‘I cannot see the faintest trace of this adjective in either of your etchings … nor in the design of your mantelpiece’, Rossetti consoled Scott, ‘though I suppose … it might be described as peculiar, if that is one meaning of the hellish “quaint”’.¹¹ Rossetti’s oxymoron, applying the sulphuric terms ‘infernal’ and ‘hellish’ to the belittling ‘quaint’, indicates both his frustration with a term which does not seem to take its subject seriously, and quaintness’s own typical incongruity.

Masson’s ‘attempt after’ suggests that quaintness is an unsuccessful pastiche of the antique – the opposite of what Pater finds in Botticelli. This is not the only distinction in their use of the term. Although Masson introduces it as a ‘peculiarity’ of painters, he turns to the writing of the Pre-Raphaelites for examples. The desire to be true to nature, he argues, results in ‘a kind of baldness of thought and expression, a return to the most primitive style of thinking and speaking; a preference … for words of one syllable’. Masson’s immediate example is Wordsworth – whom Pater only once, and glancingly, designates ‘quaint’, for his use of ‘a certain quaint gaiety of metre’ (‘Wordsworth’, App., 58). Quaintness for Masson leads away from ‘artificiality and rhodomontade’, towards ‘an affected simplicity often offensive to a manly taste’.¹² Neutral description tips into implicit critique: there is something juvenile and artificial about the quaint.

Though Pater frequently uses the phrase ‘quaint simplicity’, this is not what he finds in Browne, whom no one could accuse of being simple. Browne’s quaintness is complexity, overwroughtness, involution. Nonetheless, Masson’s discussion of the Pre-Raphaelites links with the roots of the vogue for quaint in nineteenth-century criticism. To object to ‘quaint’ as infernal and hellish seems an escalation of register. But it fits with what I will argue, later in this chapter, is the apotropaic role that ‘quaint’ has for some of Pater’s contemporaries.

The Quaintness of Sir-Thomas-Browneness

Opening a review of a new edition of Thomas Browne in 1923, Virginia Woolf lamented its limited scope and its high price, despite the editors’ claim of ‘a great revival of interest in the work of Sir Thomas Browne’. ‘But why fly in the face of facts?’ she went on: ‘Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are of the salt of the earth.’¹³ Woolf’s suggestion of coterie connoisseurship sits with Pater’s remarks on historicism in ‘Two Early French Stories’. A passion for Browne, Woolf implies, is at once a minority interest, and a litmus of cultivated taste.

Though feted and fashionable in his lifetime, and much imitated, by Browne’s death in 1682 he had already been consigned to an earlier age. As Pater suggests, the emergence of the classical formalities of Dryden, and the plain style of Locke, Hobbes, and the Royal Society, rendered Browne’s orotundities characteristic of the religious and political strife of the earlier part of the century, cancelled and made obsolete by the Restoration. During the eighteenth century, with one notable exception, he was neglected.

The first revival of Browne’s reputation came with the enthusiasm of Coleridge and Lamb. In William Hazlitt’s essay ‘Of Persons One Would Wish to have Seen’ (1826), Lamb names Browne and Fulke Greville as ‘the two worthies whom he should feel the greatest pleasure to encounter on the floor of his apartment in their nightgowns and slippers’. Lamb chose Browne and Greville because, as Hazlitt records, ‘their writings are riddles, and they themselves the most mysterious of personages’; reading the ‘obscure but gorgeous’ Urne-Buriall is like looking into ‘a deep abyss, at the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure; or it is like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation’.¹⁴ Coleridge’s response to Browne emerges in entertaining marginalia and in a letter written to Sara Hutchinson in a fly-leaf of Browne’s Works on 10 March 1804, later printed in Blackwood’s Magazine, which begins ‘Sir Thomas Brown is among my first Favorites’. Browne is, Coleridge writes,

Both Lamb and Coleridge found in Browne not only anachronistic appeal, but a model for prose which could embrace at once curiosity and metaphysics: an endorsement for the involutions of Biographia Literaria, or for the essays of Elia, steeped in the humours of Jacobean and Caroline literature. For Hazlitt, Lamb was ‘the only imitator of old English style [he] can read with pleasure’, because his ‘inward unction, a marrowy vein, both in the thought and feeling … carries off any quaintness or awkwardness arising from an antiquated style and dress’.¹⁶ If others pastiche the ‘old English style’, Hazlitt suggests, Lamb revivifies it in his person; like Botticelli’s ‘inlet’ into the ‘Greek temper’, this is not anachronistic reiteration, but reanimation.

That the sequence of essays in Appreciations runs ‘Style’, ‘Wordsworth’, ‘Coleridge’, ‘Charles Lamb’, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ shows that Pater recognises and pursues this affinity. He depicts Coleridge and Lamb both as interested in the quaint, and as practitioners of it. Pater notes Coleridge’s reading in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature – ‘the old-fashioned literature of the marvellous’ – and points to his own ‘quaint conceits’ (‘Coleridge’, App., 96, 95; see also 99); similarly, Lamb is described relishing the ‘quaint, dimmed’ literature of the Jacobean period, while exhibiting his own ‘quiet, … quaintness, … humour’ (‘Charles Lamb’, App., 115, 121). Pater remarks on Lamb’s ‘fine mimicry’ of Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica in the late Elia essays on ‘Popular Fallacies’. Such imitation, he writes, shows Lamb’s ‘mastery … of those elements of [Browne] which were the real source of style in that great, solemn master of old English, who, ready to say what he has to say with fearless homeliness, yet continually overawes one with touches of a strange utterance from worlds afar’ (113). The incongruous mingling of the strange and familiar is legible in Hazlitt’s image of Browne in his slippers, admitting Lamb to labyrinths and abysses. This is characteristic of the uncanny: the jarring effect of incompatible frames presented simultaneously, ‘all … so oddly mixed’ (‘Sir Thomas Browne’, App., 126).

In 1835–6, Simon Wilkin published a four-volume edition of Browne’s works, which laid the foundation for subsequent nineteenth-century encounters with Browne and was reprinted in 1852 and 1884. It was read in America, and influenced Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau, as well as Melville, who called Browne a ‘crack’d Archangel’ and wrote, in Mardi, ‘Be Sir Thomas Brown our ensample’.¹⁷ Wilkin’s edition – titled Sir Thomas Browne’s Works: Including His Life and Correspondence – provides compendious supporting material, including Coleridge’s remarks on Browne and Johnson’s ‘Life of Sir Thomas Browne’. The lending records at Brasenose College Library show that Pater borrowed a copy of Religio Medici from 27 August to 16 October 1871; and, from 28 February to 20 May 1883, the first volume of Wilkin’s Works. In the same period, he began reading more widely in criticism on Browne, resulting, in 1886, in the first publication of the Browne essay.¹⁸

Pater’s initial reading of Religio Medici in 1871 may have been prompted by the first publication of Leslie Stephen’s essay ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ in that year in the Cornhill Magazine. Stephen’s long assessment is a cabinet of curiosities, curating the oddest of Browne’s many oddities. Stephen takes it upon himself to exhibit ‘the strange furniture of [Browne’s] mind’, providing a guide to his ‘queer museum’ – a space in which Pater too locates Browne, to whom, he claims, ‘the whole world is a museum’ (134).¹⁹ Stephen describes Browne compulsively as ‘quaint’: he remarks his ‘quaint pages’, ‘quaint apologue’, ‘his usual quaint and eloquent melancholy’, his ‘quaint train of reflections’. Browne ‘asks, not whether a dogma is true, but whether it is imposing or quaint’. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne is interested only in the ‘quaintness of the objects unearthed’. His wide-ranging erudition reflects an ‘omnivorous appetite for every quaint or significant symbol to be discovered in the whole field of learning’.²⁰

Stephen’s quaint blizzard – these examples are not exhaustive – makes clear that Pater was not alone. Indeed, it suggests that Pater’s inverted commas around ‘quaint’ might register not unease with the word, but an ironic recognition of its predictability. Certainly ‘quaint’ was in fashion: the admittedly fallible guide of Google n-grams shows a significant peak in usage around 1900, and the 1890s show a rash of books with the word in the title: to take examples from 1895 and 1896 only, Quaint Epitaphs; Quaint Korea; Quick Truths in Quaint Texts; Dundee: Its Quaint and Historic Buildings (all 1895); Quaint Nantucket; Quaint Crippen (both 1896) – et cetera. ‘Quaint’ was also used to describe ornamented Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau objects.²¹ But while Stephen’s use is an unstudied reaction to Browne’s curiosity, there is something more complex at work in Pater: something which sees in ‘quaint’ not just old-fashionedness, but a register of anachronicity, a residue of historical style out of its time, or temporal differentiation within a work of art.

It may have been the sense that ‘quaint’ was a period term of the 1890s which led to a rejection of it in twentieth-century discussions of Browne. In The Seventeenth-Century Background, Basil Willey claimed that it was ‘a romantic falsification to “relish” Browne for his “quaintness”’. Instead, he wrote, ‘[i]t is more valuable … to try to recover something of his own inclusiveness, in virtue of which his juxtapositions are not quaint, but symbols of his complex vision’.²² Joan Bennett, meanwhile, taking Stephen and Pater to task, asserted that ‘[i]n his own time [Browne’s] style was not in any sense quaint although it was from the first individual’.²³ But while Willey and Bennett had work to do to recuperate Browne’s reputation from the belittling implications of the ‘infernal word’, their rejection misses Pater’s grasp of the power in quaintness. In most other critical usages, ‘quaint’ attempts to diminish the power with which things come back from the past and to relegate them safely to it. It wards off strangeness and peculiarity, and defangs and belittles what it identifies. Lavery notes that quaintness can be read as ‘an emptied out remnant of what once might have been “charm”—quaintness as a low-intensity aesthetic fondness, enabled and finally marred by its reassuring historical irrelevance’.²⁴ It is striking how frequently Pater uses the word ‘charm’ in close proximity to ‘quaint’, since ‘charm’, too, has undergone a semantic diminution: a slip from bewitchery and enchantment to mere appeal.²⁵ ‘Charm’ and ‘quaint’ work along the same axis from potentially destabilising power to mere fancy. To apply them to a literary work usually suggests they take the frightening power of the uncanny and render it safe. But Pater’s sense of quaintness retains the power.

Heterogeneous Composition

One of the works which Wilkin printed alongside Browne was Johnson’s ‘Life’, first published in 1756 as a preface to an edition of Christian Morals. Johnson interspersed a chronological account of Browne’s life and works with acute criticism of his style, on which he writes: ‘it is vigorous, but rugged: it is learned, but pedantick; it is deep, but obscure; it strikes, but does not please; it commands, but does not allure: his tropes are harsh, and his combinations uncouth’.²⁶ Johnson’s rhythmically repetitive phrases of qualification, praising only to retract, are typical of criticism of Browne in its ambivalence and mistrust – the sense that Browne’s powers cannot be wholeheartedly assented to. Johnson, predictably, finds Browne ‘curious’; ‘quaint’, however, appears nowhere.

Pater evidently read Johnson’s life, possibly in the Wilkin edition, and referred to it repeatedly in ‘Sir Thomas Browne’. Pater writes of Browne’s Norwich home, which ‘must have grown, through long years of acquisition, into an odd cabinet of antiquities’. This is analogous to his books, Pater suggests: ‘The very faults of his literary work, its desultoriness, the time it costs his readers, that slow Latinity which Johnson imitated from him, those lengthy leisurely terminations which busy posterity will abbreviate, all breathe of the long quiet of the place’ (133–4). It is not only Johnson who is imitative here. Pater’s sentence enacts the slumberous dilation of which he convicts Browne’s prose: the four parenthetical examples of fault interpose before the verb ‘breathe’ to suspend the sentence’s sense; despite the ostensible lack of patience for the sesquipedal polysyllables that are Browne’s medium and forte, Latinity suffuses the subsequent clause in the terminations which posterity will abbreviate. Again, Pater detects a ‘fault’ in Browne which turns out to give pleasure.

There is another telling Johnsonian influence in Pater’s essay. Johnson characterised Browne’s style as ‘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’.²⁷ In his life of Abraham Cowley, Johnson reworked the terms he used for Browne, and made them stand for a whole seventeenth-century mode. Johnson’s account of Cowley’s style again rests on ambivalence: acknowledging its wit, eloquence, and intellectual power, but also discomfort at oddity and incongruity. This inconcinnity of force of thought and naturalness of expression Johnson took as characteristic of the age. The famous passage begins ‘About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets’. Such writers are characterised by their tendency to

Pater almost certainly knew this passage: he knew Johnson well, and wrote an unfinished study on him which has been lost.²⁹ Its traces are detectable in Pater’s remarks that the Walsingham urns, for Browne, ‘resuscitated … a whole world of latent observation, from life, from out-of-the-way reading, from the natural world, and fused into a composition, which with all its quaintness we may well pronounce classical, all the heterogeneous elements of that singular mind’ (154). Cowley’s ransacking of nature and art is reiterated in Pater’s observation of Browne’s disparate sources. That Johnsonian word ‘heterogeneous’ draws Browne, and quaintness, into the ambit of the metaphysical.

‘Quaint’ and ‘metaphysical’ both mark the appeal and discomfort of heterogeneous fusion. Stephen finds in Browne ‘a strangely vivid humour that is always detecting the quaintest analogies; and, as it were, striking light from the most unexpected collocations of uncompromising materials’ – making ‘quaint’ the measure of the distance between the terms of an analogy, the width of the hinge of the metaphysical conceit – while his daughter Virginia Woolf, recalling Johnson, notes Browne’s ‘power of bringing the remote and incongruous astonishingly together’.³⁰ All of this associates Browne with what has been called the ‘metaphysical revival’ of the late nineteenth century, and allies his changing reputation to that of John Donne.³¹ Like Browne, Donne was much read and imitated in the seventeenth century, until taste turned against him at the Restoration. Dryden chided him in 1693 for ‘affect[ing] the Metaphysicks … in his amorous verses, where nature only shou’d reign; and perplex[ing] the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy’.³² The sin is metaphysical incongruity. The rescue of Donne’s reputation from eclipse was, like Browne’s, begun by Coleridge, and, with his ‘metaphysical’ contemporaries, accelerated between 1880 and 1910.³³ The first anthology of metaphysical poetry, Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, was published in 1921; a review by T.S. Eliot in the Times Literary Supplement canonised the term.

In the Winckelmann essay, Pater suggests, with reluctance, that ‘a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection’ (Ren., 183). But everywhere the yen for metaphysics persists. Pater recognises it in Coleridge, who encountered a living metaphysical tradition in Germany – ‘What an opportunity for one reared on the colourless analytic English philosophies of the last century, but who feels an irresistible attraction towards bold metaphysical synthesis!’ (‘Coleridge’, App., 74). In his review of Grierson, Eliot lamented that ‘metaphysical’ had for too long been ‘the label of a quaint and pleasant taste’: that sense of a coterie historicism and antiquarianism which Woolf saw typified in lovers of Browne, and Pater criticised as lacking aesthetic value. Eliot’s review, and the general ‘metaphysical revival’, invites us to consider quaint and metaphysical style under a different rubric – as the last exemplification of a poetic sensibility which is ‘constantly amalgamating disparate experience’, fusing heterogeneity ‘into a composition’. ‘In the seventeenth century’, Eliot famously wrote in his review, ‘a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered’; an effect produced in poetry by the baleful influence of Milton and Dryden. Before 1660 it was still possible to fuse sensuousness and metaphysics. Grierson’s anthology offers Eliot the opportunity to rescue the quaintness of metaphysics from belittling critics, and to make the metaphysical poets forebears of the difficult poetry he champions – and writes. They have, he writes, ‘been enough praised in terms which are implicit limitations because they are “metaphysical” or “witty,” “quaint” or “obscure”’; it is time, instead, to take them seriously.³⁴ Like Willey and Bennett, Eliot feels the faint praise of ‘quaint’, and reasserts the style’s intellectual claims.

Metaphysical Browne

Browne’s fortunes in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century are implicated in this ‘metaphysical revival’: a revaluation of the ‘difficult’ and conceited literature of the seventeenth century, ‘the Stuart age revenant in the present’.³⁵ Browne himself is referred to as ‘metaphysical’, and associated with the conceits which are the badge of the style – Pater refers to ‘the strange “conceit” of his nature’ (130). Though Eliot demotes the period’s prose below his praise for the poetry (from which he would later exempt the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes), the same claims may be made on its behalf. Pater’s ambivalent quaintness is the prehistory of this recuperation.

I want to suggest that there is more here; that there is a particular uncomfortable anachronism and style which ‘quaint’, like ‘metaphysical’, works to name without summoning it directly, and which is for historical reasons difficult to assimilate or metabolise within English canons of taste. The connection is clear in Masson’s essay on the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. His discussion of the quaint simplicity of Rossetti’s poetry slips to ‘the same tendency to quaintness and archaism’ in those Pre-Raphaelites who were ‘guiltless of the use of the pen’, who exhibit quaintness in their sympathy with ‘the peculiarities of mediæval ecclesiastical art’. This Masson exemplifies by quoting at length from Ruskin, who judges that if the Pre-Raphaelites paint with ‘the earnestness of the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’, they will succeed; if, however, ‘their sympathies with the early artists lead them into mediævalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing’. ‘There may be some weak ones’, Ruskin continues, ‘whom the Tractarian heresies may touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong stem’. Masson takes up this worry, noting that ‘Mr. Collins’ is the only one of the brotherhood ‘in whom this tendency takes so pronounced a form as to indicate what would be called a leaning to Puseyism’; worse: ‘one or two of the original Pre-Raphaelites have gone farther in this direction than he, and actually fulfilled Mr. Ruskin’s prediction, by laying their Pre-Raphaelitism at the feet of the ancient mother-church’.³⁶ Quaintness, in other words, is a gateway to Rome.

Browne’s earliest readers worried about his closeness to Catholicism. Religio Medici, published in 1642, was a young man’s statement of faith, in which Browne, while asserting his adherence to the English church, also insisted on tolerance, abjuring controversy and expressing his eirenic attraction to various Romanist practices. This instantly raised his contemporaries’ suspicions. A Parisian Latin edition, published in 1645, claimed that Browne was a Roman Catholic, only kept from admitting so by repression in England. The cantankerous Scottish scholar and controversialist Alexander Ross joked that Browne’s religion ‘may be indeed religio Medici, the religion of the House of Medicis, not of the Church of England’.³⁷

What was alarming for some of Browne’s contemporaries, however, made him attractive in the late nineteenth century, as debates over English churchmanship were again in spate. This, Tracy Seeley argues, is the basis of the ‘metaphysical revival’: the topical salience of writers in the thick of Reformation controversy, negotiating inherited styles and their theological implications. W.A. Greenhill, who published a selection of Browne’s works in 1881, just before Pater began working on his essay, was a friend of Newman’s. Seeley argues that the ‘critical language’ of fin-de-siècle converts ‘resonates with the Catholic incarnational world view: the metaphysical conceit conjoins, as the divine incarnation conjoins, spirit and flesh’.³⁸ The fusion of the heterogeneous so threatening to Johnson becomes, in this light, a reassociation of sensibility through conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Though it is rare to see the connection made so directly, the frequent association of the ‘quaint’ with the medieval brings the word into the ambit of Catholicism; more precisely, it reiterates a way of characterising difficulty, ornament, and obscurity as either suspiciously or attractively crypto-Catholic which emerged in the seventeenth century. Pater’s references to quaintness in The Renaissance cluster around traces of superseded medieval religion, liturgy, and architecture. Pater refers to the ‘quaint Latin of the middle age’ (‘Two Early French Stories’, Ren., 4). It is ‘in the Gothic manner’ that Botticelli sprinkles his draperies with ‘a quaint conceit of daisies’ (‘Sandro Botticelli’, Ren., 45). The ‘character of medieval art’ expresses itself ‘as a subdued quaintness or grotesque’ in Michelangelo’s poetry (‘The Poetry of Michelangelo’, Ren., 57). The essay on ‘Joachim du Bellay’ sees ‘the old Gothic manner’ persist even ‘when the spirit of the Renaissance was everywhere, and people had begun to look back with distaste on the works of the middle age’; one example is the ‘quaint, remote learning’ of Ronsard (Ren., 123, 133). The Renaissance is especially interested in the persistence of these Gothic, medieval, grotesque energies beyond their own time.

That Browne’s style evokes earlier religious institutions is clear in critical metaphor. Reading Browne, Woolf suggests, ‘[i]t is as if from the street we stepped into a cathedral where the organ goes plunging and soaring and indulging in vast and elephantine gambols of awful yet grotesque sublimity’.³⁹ This picks up a simile used by her father: for Stephen, ‘Sir Thomas’s witticisms are like the grotesque carvings in a Gothic cathedral’. He suggests that Browne’s ‘imagination everywhere diffuses a solemn light such as that which falls through painted windows’; this light ‘harmonises the whole quaint assemblage of images. The sacred is made more interesting instead of being degraded by its association with the quaint’. This reconciles Reformation breach: ‘painted windows’ restore the stained glass smashed by iconoclasts. More: ‘a page of Sir Thomas seems to revive the echoes as of ancient chants in college chapels, strangely blended with the sonorous perorations of professors in the neighbouring schools, so that the interferences sometimes produce a note of gentle mockery and sometimes heighten solemnity by quaintness’.⁴⁰ Browne, for Stephen, revives the bare ruined choirs where once the sweet birds sang.

Stephen’s reference to the schools takes quaintness into the realm of the pedagogy and philosophy with which ‘metaphysical’ is associated. Metaphysics was identified with scholasticism: with styles of education and philosophy which descended from Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas, and bolstered the sacramental theology of the Roman Catholic church. Such ‘dialectical quaint subtilties’, according to Reformers, mired writing in riddling quibbles.⁴¹ But quaint subtlety has its charms, and despite attempts by later English stylists to reject what Milton called ‘metaphysical gargarisms’, it is for and not despite hyperlatinity and riddling complexities that Browne’s style is relished.⁴² Pater himself observes his ‘difficulty and halting crabbedness of expression’ (155). In ‘Style’, such involutions are suggestively described: great style, he suggests, requires pliancy to ‘the inherent perplexities and recusancy of a certain difficult thought’ (App., 32). ‘Perplex’ was Dryden’s word for Donne’s metaphysical style, and ‘recusancy’ the technical early modern term for the refusal of Catholics to adhere to the English church.

Browne appears explicitly only once in ‘Style’, used in the first paragraph as an example, alongside Plato and Michelet, of ‘mystical and intimate’ style (6). But his influence can be detected elsewhere. Pater famously writes of the ‘literary artist’: ‘Racy Saxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermix readily with those long, savoursome Latin words, rich in “second intention”’ (16). This is, as usual, mimetic, turning from the speedy single-syllable trochaic phrase ‘close to us as touch and sight’ to the long vowels and languor of ‘savoursome’ – a word which itself yokes the ultimately Latinate ‘savour’ with the Germanic ending ‘-some’. It also recalls the tone of Browne’s most recognisably ‘metaphysical’ passages. In Religio Medici, for example, he discusses the nature of God’s existence: ‘he onely is, all others have an existence with dependency and are something but by a distinction; … God being all things is contrary unto nothing out of which were made all things, and so nothing became something, and Omneity informed Nullity into an essence’.⁴³ Stanley Fish called this passage ‘bastard scholasticism’.⁴⁴ Though meant as criticism, this gets at something Pater likewise recognises. Browne alternates between articulating the same idea in simple ‘Saxon’ phrases (‘he onely is’), and Latinate metaphysical terms of art (‘dependency’, ‘distinction’, ‘Omneity’, ‘Nullity’). The monosyllabic phrase ‘out of which were made all things’ has exactly the stress of Pater’s ‘close to us as touch and sight’, and achieves the same effect of contrast between simple rhythmic alternation and the syncopation of the nearby polysyllabic Latinities.

The term ‘second intention’, as Angela Leighton has pointed out, is used in logic ‘to mean a concept of reason rather than of sense perception’ – precisely the kind of metaphysical abstraction from the ‘touch and sight’ of experience which writers of the later seventeenth century mistrusted, and which led to the obsolescence of the Brownean style. Pater reverses this polarity, as Leighton observes, preferring – or at least relishing – the secondary.⁴⁵ The metaphysical concept and style ends up savoured, favoured.

Pater is explicit about this, identifying ‘a kind of poetry of scholasticism’ in Browne (‘Sir Thomas Browne’, App., 147). When Willey chides early critics for the ‘romantic falsification’ of relishing Browne’s quaintness, it is in order to appreciate something else: he claimed that Donne and Browne shared a fusion of thought, experience, and sensibility, which they ‘owe … to the scholastic tradition’.⁴⁶ Pater’s quaintness, however, recognises precisely this debt; the peculiar qualities of English seventeenth-century writing which are ‘scholastic’, associated with forms of religion and literary education which would later be rejected, and which have remained embarrassing, threatening, or mysteriously beguiling ever since.

Conclusion

Browne makes a brief incognito appearance in Pater’s ‘Sebastian van Storck’. The imaginary portrait, set unspecifically in the Dutch Golden Age, describes an incident in which an unusually low tide on the coast reveals ‘some remarkable relics’: a preserved ‘chariot of state’. To ‘antiquarians’ this is an accident, an ancient chief overwhelmed in a storm; to Sebastian’s temperament, however, ‘this object was sepulchral … the one surviving relic of a grand burial’. Pater then quotes a phrase from Browne, ‘Sunt metis metæ!’, not from Hydriotaphia, but from a shorter essay-letter ‘Of Artificial Hills, Mounts, or Burrows’ (IP, 93–4; CW, iii. 103).⁴⁷ Browne’s fascination with the uncanny preservation of the artefacts of the past, with antiquarian pleasure and the melancholy contemplation of oblivion it bequeaths, is here deployed to characterise Sebastian.

The ambivalent word ‘relics’ imports traces of Roman Catholic practice, secularised into a style and mental attitude – just as ‘recusancy’, ‘metaphysical’, ‘Gothic’, or ‘quaint’ suggest without emphasis associations with modes of religious institution. As Lene Østermark-Johansen remarks, ‘Sebastian von Storck’ is in part a transposed portrait of Browne. It is therefore significant that Sebastian is described as ‘not altogether a Hollander’: ‘His mother, of Spanish descent and Catholic, had given a richness of tone and form to the healthy freshness of the Dutch physiognomy’ (IP, 82; CW, iii. 97). In Sebastian, as in Browne, the influences of the Catholic south and the Reformed north, of hyperlatinity and racy Saxon monosyllable, mingle, the disparate influences of the ‘great theological strife’ fusing in a single figure.

It is important, however, that while Sebastian is ‘[a]live to that theological disturbance in the air all around him’, it is not in itself important:

In associating the ‘quaintness’ that Pater finds in Browne with Catholicism, I have not meant to suggest actual confessional allegiance, either on Browne’s part or Pater’s. Instead, the taste for the quaint and metaphysical expresses that vagrant regret, which salvages the relics of the obsolete, transposed from sacramental efficacy or theological commitment, into style – perplexity and recusancy, the savoursome syllables of latinity, the charm of the strange, grotesque relic revivified in the present.

But it is not only that. If quaintness can subside into nostalgia, the merely curious or charmingly old-fashioned, for Pater, at its best – in Lamb, Browne, Botticelli – it marks heterogeneous fusion, successful composition, unifying the fractured and dissociated inheritances of varied aesthetic impetus, overcoming the anachronisms of periodisation. If Johnson objected to the ‘violence’ with which disparate ideas are yoked together, Pater suggests they can be ‘fused into a composition, which with all its quaintness we may well pronounce classical’ – a fusion which does not dissolve the oddity of quaintness, but instead acknowledges it part of aesthetic success. In the ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations, Pater turns to the ‘old opposition’ between the classical and romantic in European style, and suggests that the best art couples the curious, peculiar energies of romanticism with classical beauty. ‘If there is a great overbalance of curiosity’, he writes, ‘we have the grotesque in art: if the union of strangeness and beauty, under very difficult and complex conditions, be a successful one, if the union be entire, then the resultant beauty is very exquisite, very attractive’ (243, 247). The ‘Postscript’ can seem an incongruous capstone to Appreciations, turning from the largely English concerns of the earlier essays into critical generalisation, and European literature. But in the studies of Lamb and Browne, the large question of the ‘union of strangeness and beauty’ has a peculiarly English expression. How to account for the strain of ‘quaintness’, metaphysicality, oddity of which Browne is the type, and its persistent recurrence in English literature? If some critics tend to reject quaintness as a foreign importation into a clear, unadorned, simple English style, then Pater encourages us to see it as integral to the literature’s history. It is precisely in ambivalent incongruity, its yoking of the verbally and intellectually heterogeneous, that its charm lies.