SOURCE: Warnke, Frank J. “A Hook for Amphibium: Some Reflections on Fish.” In Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays, edited by C. A. Patrides, pp. 49-59. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1982.

[In the following essay, Warnke refutes Stanley Fish's critique of Browne's work, stressing that a common religious background is not a necessity when trying to appreciate the artistic or religious ideas in a work of prose.]

It was in some ways refreshing when, in his Self-Consuming Artifacts of 1972, Stanley Fish attacked Sir Thomas Browne as being “the bad physician.”¹ Not since Sir Kenelm Digby's contemporaneous Observations had the worthy doctor been really strenuously condemned, and, after some three centuries of laudatory appreciations and respectful analyses, the bristling rejection was stimulating. It gave one the warm feeling one gets on hearing motherhood maligned, or patriotism, or apple pie. Yet, unless one is relentlessly frivolous (as I may yet prove to be), Fish's attack must, I think, be refuted—not by rejecting his aesthetic and methods (which I think have much to recommend them) but by applying that aesthetic and those methods more rigorously, more radically, than Professor Fish himself has done, though assuming, be it admitted, a rather different set of beliefs concerning the nature and function of art.

Although Fish grants a grudging admiration to Browne's skill, to the superb mastery with which he pulls rugs from under the reader, he is finally compelled to condemn him on the grounds that the author is not honest, is misleading, is either unwilling or incapable of conveying a sound moral experience. That last phrase is important: Fish is by no means naive, and he surely does not expect simple didactic messages from the great masters of baroque prose (on the contrary, his entire method would deny the separability of texture and “message”). He does, however, expect the experience of the work to be a moral experience, the kind he receives from other seventeenth-century authors. But let us have his own words on the subject:

What sets Browne apart from those with whom he shares so much is the absence in his work of their intentions, which are rhetorical in a very special sense. They seek to change the minds of their readers; they have designs on us; they are out to do us good; and they require our participation in what is, more often than not, the painful and exhausting process of self-examination and self-criticism. Bacon's style of presentation provokes the reader to question the adequacy of his received opinions and the completeness of his received systems of knowledge; the “present satisfaction” of a coherent literary experience is deliberately sacrificed for an uneasiness that is a stimulus to “further inquiry”; in Herbert's poetry the reader is required to give up, one by one, his claims to an independent existence, even to the extent (in some poems) of surrendering his powers of interpretation; when Bunyan promises “This book will make a traveller of thee,” he keeps his promise by forcing the reader to claim a share in the errors and sins of Christian and his companions; at least half of Milton's readers are alienated and discomforted when he insists that each of us measure himself against an unyielding standard of righteousness and illumination; in Death's Duell, the reader is teased into asking questions that only point up his inability to answer them, and in the end he is brought literally to his knees; and if the reader is the subject of the Anatomy of Melancholy, he is in his preeminence the object of taunts, laughter, rebukes, and scorn. In all of these works, an uncomfortable and unsettling experience is offered as the way to self-knowledge, in the hope that self-knowledge will be preliminary to the emergence of a better self, with a better (or at least more self-aware) mind. And by offering that experience rather than another, these works shift the focus of attention from themselves and from what is happening in their formal confines to the reader and what is happening in the confines of his mind and heart.²

I have quoted at some length, and absolutely without omissions, because I want to make certain that I allow Professor Fish to speak for himself, with full clarity. And I haven't finished yet; I shall be quoting the continuation of this passage below. But I do want to pause briefly to consider some of the implications of what I have already quoted. When Fish affirms that the reader of Death's Duell is brought literally to his knees, I pay him the respect of assuming that he means what he says: literally. Surely this can only mean that a proper experience of Donne's great sermon can only be an experience at least in part religious, an experience that enforces the full personal acceptance of Donne's religious position, complete with the repellent and vicious theology that that position has in common with those of other seventeenth-century religious writers. In this case I am personally obliged to say that, though I yield to no reader in my love for Donne, I experience him differently. Death's Duell brings tears to my eyes, but it has never brought me to my knees, even metaphorically.

This digression anticipates a little of what I shall have to say in attempted refutation of Fish's position. But, for the moment, let me return to the text of Self-Consuming Artifacts and to the paragraph following the one just quoted. Here we find the core of Fish's rejection of Browne:

These, then, are the characteristics of what I have called the aesthetic of the good physician (actually an anti-aesthetic), and on every point Browne stands on the opposite side. He draws attention not away from, but to, himself; his words are not seeds, spending their lives in salutary and self-consuming effects, but objects, frozen into rhetorical patterns which reflect on the virtuosity of their author; the experience of his prose has its climaxes not in moments of insight and self-knowledge, but in moments of wonder and admiration for the art that has produced it; rather than provoking us to a distrust of its procedures and conclusions, the Religio Medici solicits and wins our confidence. It is therefore not self-consuming, but self-indulgent, and in two directions: for the confidence it wins is reflected in the confidence it leaves us, a self-confidence, which is the result of never having been really pained or challenged; Browne does not say to us, “awake, remember, change,” but “take it easy, don't let it bother you, let it be.”

(p. 372)

This characterization strikes me as partly right, partly wrong. I shall attempt to demonstrate the wrongness of some parts, and I shall attempt to maintain that the accurate parts of the characterization refer to things more deserving of praise than censure, but first I should like to draw attention to one aspect of Fish's own phrasing. In the earlier paragraph certain artists are singled out for praise: those who “have designs on us … are out to do us good … and … require our participation in … [a] painful and exhausting process,” those who leave us “alienated and discomforted,” those who offer us “an uncomfortable and unsettling experience.” In the latter paragraph Browne is condemned for not leaving us “pained or challenged.” One wonders if it is not so much the good physician whom Fish seeks as the good dentist—and one who is conservative in the use of Novocain.

The last remark is facetious, of course, and probably tasteless, but it suggests, I think, what is wrong with Fish's approach to Browne. Fish is a puritan—not an uppercase Puritan, like Milton and Bunyan (as contrasted with Burton, Donne, and Herbert), but a lowercase puritan, like a distressingly large number of other American literary intellectuals. Some of the assumptions of the lowercase puritan literary intellectual are: if the literary work doesn't give you a sound moral experience, there's something wrong with it; if it doesn't hurt, it's not good for you; if it's frankly and cheerfully “aesthetic,” it's corrupt. Browne, in contrast, is the least puritan of authors, with the possible exception of Shakespeare.

Browne, we are told, fails to participate in the “anti-aesthetic” of some other baroque authors. I agree. In what does Browne's aesthetic exist? It exists, I believe, in freeing us—an accomplishment that is not, I submit, without value. Professor Fish himself knows this: he draws attention frequently to the manner in which Browne's stylistic effects and syntactic constructions produce in us a feeling of release, as distinctions and definitions are established only to be annihilated, leaving us with only a vertiginous “O altitudo!” Let us consider one passage from the Religio Medici that Fish chooses for comment:

The earth is a point not onely in respect of the heavens above us, but of that heavenly and celestiall part within us: that masse of flesh that circumscribes me, limits not my mind: that surface that tells the heavens it hath an end, cannot perswade me I have any; I take my circle to be above three hundred and sixty; though the number of the Arke do measure my body, it comprehendeth not my minde: whilst I study to finde how I am a Microcosme or little world, I finde my selfe something more than the great.

(P, 153)

As the critic notes, the first part of the quoted sentence “seems to confirm our everyday sense of a world where objects occupy discrete places at measurable distances from one another” (p. 362), but, with the appearance of the word within, “the objects that had been fixed in their respective positions become interpenetrable, and the largest of them is discovered to reside ‘within’ the smallest” (p. 362). Fish continues: “The language of spatial configuration has been retained, but in a context—of inner space—that makes nonsense of it, and of the proportional statement we have half formulated: as we are to the earth, so is the earth to the heavens. Once again the demonstration (the syntax is itself a form of demonstrative argument) falls to the ground along with the superstructure of assumptions it implies” (pp. 362-63).

Fish's concern, as we know, is with “literature in the reader,” with what texts do to us. But what does the quoted passage do to the reader? More, I think, than simply sending him skidding on an intellectual pratfall, as Fish implies. It subjects the reader to an experience that liberates him/her from the rational world of spatial configurations and consistent relations; only through such an experience (frequent in Browne) can the reader be liberated into that larger, sublimely paradoxical world in which his/her immortal and eternal being is confirmed—confirmed, let me stress, not by assertion or demonstration but by the experience of the sentence. One might object that we are in fact not possessed of an immortal and eternal being, that Sir Thomas is thus misleading us, however innocently, and that the passage is therefore without moral value for us. To approach the text thus would surely be to grab it by the wrong end, as I'm sure Fish would agree. If we start judging texts by their verifiability, we're going to have to throw out an awful lot, starting with the Bible. As it happens, I don't share Browne's optimistic belief in the immortality of the soul, though I rather wish I did. I don't even want to believe certain other propositions—innate depravity, predestination, eternal punishment, the sole efficacy of faith as an agency of justification—that are conveyed with feverish enthusiasm by a number of the seventeenth-century worthies whom Fish finds to be purveyors of wholesome moral experience. Clearly, a noble and humanly worthy belief, even if mistaken, is, when clothed in fine invention and appropriate rhetoric, something deserving of our admiration.

Admiration: the word may be a key. Some readers may be pardoned for finding in Fish's strictures on Sir Thomas Browne not merely critical disapproval but also downright dislike. If such readers (and I am one) are correct in their suspicion, the grounds may be present in such a passage as the following, from Fish:

What is required of the reader of Religio Medici is … admiration. In the prose of Donne and Milton, and the poetry of Herbert, the stylistic effects—the dislocations, ambiguities, confusions of tenses—are in the service of the commonplaces of Christian belief. In the Religio Medici, the commonplaces of Christian belief are in the service of a succession of stylistic effects, and our attention is continually being diverted from the implications (personal and cosmic) of Browne's statements to the skill he displays in making them.

(p. 365)

Leaving aside the surprisingly crude dichotomy between form and content here implied, we might note that what Fish is really saying here is that Sir Thomas is a smart-ass and a show-off, unlike solid, serious Donne, Milton, and Herbert. Maybe. But it's hard to understand how anyone who can't tolerate show-offs can have much fondness for baroque literature. For “admiration” is at the very core of its aesthetic—even for Donne and Herbert, even for Milton. Not “admiration” in the common sense of the English word, but admiration in the sense of the French word. That is to say, not “admiration” meaning “approval,” with a strong connotation of “moral assent,” but rather admiration meaning “astonished wonder,” with a strong admixture of helpless pleasure. For example, here is Pierre Corneille, in his Discours de l'utilité et des parties du poème dramatique of 1660, speaking of his bloody tragedy Rodogune and then of his great comedy Le Menteur:

Cléopâtre, in Rodogune [she is not, by the way, to be confused with Cleopatra the Queen of Egypt] is very evil … but all her crimes are accompanied by a grandeur of soul which has something so elevated that, at the same time that one detests her actions, one wonders at [in Corneille's phrase, on admire] the source from which they spring. I would dare to say the same of Le Menteur. No doubt lying is a vicious habit; but the hero presents his lies with so much presence of mind and so much vivacity that this flaw assumes a kind of grace in his personality and forces the audience to recognize that the talent of lying is, after all, a vice of which fools are not capable.³

As Georges May observes, “In his comments and critical writing as well as in the plays themselves Corneille so clearly expressed his intentions that we know what fundamental emotion he wished to arouse: he called it admiration, that is, in his terms, the emotion we feel when confronted with extremes in human behavior. Admiration, for Corneille, does not necessarily imply moral approval or disapproval. It is closer to a kind of wonder, of amazement.”⁴

This baroque view is not a doctrine for puritans—uppercase or lowercase. It is the same doctrine that the baroque poet Giambattista Marino expressed in equally memorable terms:

E del poeta il fin la meraviglia,
(Parlo del eccelente, e non del goffo):
Chi non sa far stupir, vada alla striglia!
The purpose of the poet is marvel,
(I speak of the excellent one, not of the hack):
He who does not know how to stupefy, let him curry horses!(5)

And it is Sir Thomas Browne's aesthetic.

What is the aesthetic of stupefaction, and can we justify it morally? Probably not, but let us try. Corneille typically achieves his effects through the representation of “extremes in human behavior.” Marino, like Donne, achieves his through the presentation of extreme phenomena of rhetoric and imagery, those phenomena that we normally label wit and conceit. Mastery of these arts could be depended on, in the baroque age, to earn one a reputation as a wit—not “wit” meaning “smart aleck,” but “wit” meaning “man of perception, insight, wisdom, combined with grace of expression.” The astounding combinations and recombinations proferred us by the baroque artist are not merely, pace Dr. Johnson, the fabrications of perverse human cleverness; they are rather creations of God, the master fabricator, the artist who created the world as a metaphysical poem. This view is supported by the writings of such seventeenth-century theorists as Baltasar Gracián in Spain and Emmanuele Tesauro in Italy, as we are reminded by a number of modern scholars.⁶ The witty poet does not fabricate his astounding effects; he discovers them—ad majorem Dei gloriam.

Nevertheless, if all creation is a metaphysical poem, the work of a witty God, then there is something about it that is, despite its seriousness, downright amusing. Perhaps that is why our response to so much baroque literature—even when it is most relentlessly doing us good, even when the author is “holy Mr. Herbert” himself—includes as one component a snort of delighted and astonished laughter. We laugh because the literary text is, however serious, also amusing, and it is amusing because reality—or what we can know of it—is amusing. Cosmic play is what baroque literature is all about, and this cosmic play is what Professor Fish fails to appreciate in the writings of Sir Thomas Browne.

Is this laughter good for us, or is this sense of the universe as cosmic play, reflected in playful artifacts, good for us? I'm not really sure that I care, having not yet been persuaded that it is beneficial to confuse the function of the literary artist (let alone that of the critic) with the function of the preacher. If compelled, I suppose I should say that I feel that it is good for us. The sense of play encourages humility, perhaps; it makes a little less practicable the terrible sense of self-importance that is the besetting vice of our species. Donne, Marino, Herbert, Sir Thomas Browne—all had the sense of play. John Calvin did not have it: if he had, he might not have ordered Servetus burned; he might not even have written the Institutes, and, by not doing so, have given us all cause for gratitude. Milton had some of it, as witness “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” but one could wish he had had a bit more. Oliver Cromwell did not have it, nor did Tomás de Torquemada. The sense of cosmic play might even tend to discourage human beings from the systematic destruction of the enviroment of human and other life.

But, before I get carried away by my claims any further than I already have, perhaps we should return to Sir Thomas Browne and to some specific examples of his art. Here is a typical passage from early in the Religio Medici:

I could never divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps within a few dayes I should dissent my selfe: I have no Genius to disputes in Religion, and have often thought it wisedome to decline them, especially upon a disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the weaknesse of my patronage: where wee desire to be informed, 'tis good to contest with men above our selves; to confirme and establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgements below our own, that the frequent spoyles and victories over their reasons may settle in our selves an esteeme, and confirmed opinion of our owne. Every man is not a proper Champion for Truth, nor fit to take up the Gantlet in the cause of Veritie: Many from the ignorance of these Maximes, and an inconsiderate zeale unto Truth, have too rashly charged the troopes of error, and remaine as Trophees unto the enemies of Truth: a man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet bee forced to surrender; 'tis therefore farre better to enjoy her with peace, then to hazzard her on a battell.

(P, 65-66)

This passage begins with a statement that leads us to expect simply another bit of naive self-commendation of the sort so familiar in the Religio: “I could never divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion.” More precisely, we think we hear Sir Thomas claiming to possess the virtue of charity. More of that later. But the sentence continues, “or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps within a few dayes I should dissent my selfe.” The continuation complicates matters: the speaker claims that he is not moved to anger by a conflicting opinion not merely because he is of a charitable, or perhaps phlegmatic, temperament, but rather (or perhaps also) because he holds all his views in a tentative manner, undogmatically, and with a constant awareness of the possibility of error. But the sentence is not yet over, and in the phrases that follow a new idea is introduced to modify the meanings that we, the readers, have thus far absorbed. This idea is that a person in possession of truth may nevertheless not be equipped with the skills of disputation that would enable him effectively to defend that truth. Such a person Sir Thomas claims himself to be—whether sincerely or not, I would not presume to say.

In developing this point about the incompetent champion of truth, Browne comes up with a recommendation that is bound to amuse us—that we seek the conversation of clever people on only those matters on which we have not yet formed opinions and that we discuss our opinions only with dummies, so that we may bolster our egos in holding those opinions. I used to teach this passage as a charming example of the quaint and faintly dotty way Browne's mind often works, as an example, in short, of his naiveté. It is only more recently that it has occurred to me that the passage may have been intended to be funny, part of the creation of the persona in a work that follows many of the principles of fiction. The comic self-characterization, if that is what it is, leads directly into a significant passage in which Browne humbly affirms his submission to the doctrines of the Church:

If therefore there rise any doubts in my way, I doe forget them, or at least defer them, till my better setled judgement, and more manly reason be able to resolve them … In Philosophy where truth seemes double-faced, there is no man more paradoxicall then my self; But in Divinity I love to keepe the road, and though not in an implicite, yet an humble faith, follow the great wheele of the Church, by which I move, not reserving any proper poles or motion from the epicycle of my own braine.

(P, 66)

Fish speaks much about the experience of the text, about “literature in the reader.” I would submit that what we find in this passage of the Religio is the experience of humility, in which we are forced, by the author's admiration-awakening skill, to participate. The creation and projection of a slightly dotty narrator—with whom we identify—is a part of that skill. We are prepared thus for a passage that occurs only two sections later, one of the most justly famous passages of the entire work:

As for those wingy mysteries in Divinity, and ayery subtilties in Religion, which have unhing'd the braines of better heads, they never stretched the Pia Mater of mine; me thinkes there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith; the deepest mysteries ours containes, have not only been illustrated, but maintained by syllogisme, and the rule of reason: I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an oh altitudo.

(P, 69)

Humility, charity, awe—such emotional attitudes are perhaps good for us, whoever runs the cosmos, and whether or not there is a theology capable of giving us some contact with that force. They are emotional attitudes with immensely serious implications, and Sir Thomas Browne renders them a part of our experience through an artistry that includes among its principal devices comedy and playfulness. Through comedy and playfulness, among other devices, the author liberates us into the aesthetic. And there is nothing trivial about such liberation.

I have stressed frequently the “experience” of reading Sir Thomas Browne, indicating thereby a conception of “literature in the reader” that to some extent agrees with that of Professor Fish. I think, however, that Fish errs in seeming to imply that we read a text only once, or, more accurately, that the first reading possesses somehow a definitive authority. I should think it obvious that, in our experience of literature as in our experience of music, subsequent exposures add new dimensions to our experience. Knowing what is coming, we find new meanings in what was always there. Even the element of surprise, so important in Browne, continues to operate, aesthetically, as surprise, and thus to arouse our admiration, but the flavor of surprise is a bit different when we know we are going to be surprised. An appropriate analogy might be the “magic modulation” near the end of Mozart's Nozze di Figaro, which is as entrancing, aesthetically as “surprising,” the five hundredth time as it was the first, but even richer after continued exposures.

The reader experiences not merely sentences, paragraphs, and pages; he experiences whole texts. And after repeated experiences of the same text he is bound to respond differently and, I would think, more richly to any single passage. On our first reading of the Religio Medici we do not, I suspect, recognize that beneath its apparently aimless and casual surface there is a deeper structure based on an examination of the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity.⁷ The work is divided, with seeming arbitrariness, into “The First Part” and “The Second Part.” Upon examination we note that Part I ambles from casual reflections having to do mostly with the author's faith to casual reflections having to do with the author's hope and that Part II, beginning “Now for that other Vertue of Charity, without which Faith is a meer notion” (P, 133), is devoted entirely to reflections on that virtue. Only Charity receives an entire section of the work to itself—properly so, since, as we know, “the greatest of these is Charity.” Having noted this, we note, on our second or third time through the experience of the text, that even the sections dealing primarily with the virtues of Faith and Hope are saturated with thematic references to Charity. Such a saturation is present, for example, in the passage previously discussed in which Sir Thomas observes that he “could never divide his selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion.” Indeed, many traits of the persona we come to know so well in reading the Religio—including several traits that are cunningly devised to operate as comic or as self-depreciatory—work cumulatively to illustrate the theme of Charity that is central to the work. But we are not likely to be aware of this on our very first experience of the text.

Comparably, in reading the Hydriotaphia for the first time, we are likely to feel that there is a ragged discrepancy between some of the more practical, precise, and (if I may venture the phrase) down-to-earth passages in the earlier chapters and the glorious and transcendent perorations of Chapter V. Let me illustrate, citing first a couple of passages from Chapters II and III:

In a Field of old Walsingham, not many moneths past, were digged up between fourty and fifty Urnes, deposited in a dry and sandy soile, not a yard deep, nor farre from one another: Not all strictly of one figure, but most answering these described: Some containing two pounds of bones, distinguishable in skulls, ribs, jawes, thigh-bones, and teeth, with fresh impressions of their combustion. Besides the extraneous substances like peeces of small boxes, or combes handsomely wrought, handles of small brasse instruments, brazen nippers, and in one some kinde of Opale.

(P, 274)

A little later on:

How the bulk of a man should sink into so few pounds of bones and ashes, may seem strange unto any who considers not its constitution, and how slender a masse will remain upon an open and urging fire of the carnall composition. Even bones themselves reduced into ashes do abate a notable proportion. And consisting much of a volatile salt, when that is fired out, make a light kind of cinders.

(P, 292)

Let us compare these two passages with a passage from Chapter V:

There is nothing strictly immortall, but immortality; whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end. All others have a dependent being, and within the reach of destruction, which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot destroy it self; And the highest strain of omnipotency to be so powerfully constituted, as not to suffer even from the power of it self. But the sufficiency of Christian Immortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of either state after death, makes a folly of posthumous memory.

(P, 312)

And, finally, the concluding passage of the work:

To subsist in lasting Monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in their names, and praedicament of Chymera's, was large satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one part of their Elyziums. But all this is nothing in the Metaphysicks of true belief. To live indeed is to be again our selves, which being not only an hope but an evidence in noble beleevers; 'Tis all one to lye in St Innocents Church-yard, as in the Sands of Ægypt: Ready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus.

(P, 315)

On our first experience of the text, we are likely to take the two earlier passages as straightforward, workmanlike examples of descriptive prose, in short, as examples of scientific writing. At the same time, however, whether we know it or not, they are doing work of a different sort, driving upon us with terrible force the sense of our pathetic and doomed materiality: “a light kind of cinders.” In the first passage, the initial description of the contents of the urns, the bones juxtaposed to boxes, combs, handles of brass instruments, nippers, and “some kinde of Opale” have the effect not merely of catalog but also of rhetorical zeugma. As I have remarked elsewhere,⁸ such passages ask King Lear's question: “Is man no more than this?” Chapter V gives us Browne's answer, the Christian answer. If we have missed the full force of the question on our first reading of the work, we are not likely to miss it the second time round, with the solemn cadences of Chapter V ringing in our memories.

In summary, Fish's condemnation of Browne seems to me misdirected in a number of important ways. First, he fails to take sufficient account of the fact that readers reread texts, and that subsequent experiences of a text are modified by the memory of previous experiences. In the case of Browne, particularly, the larger and more serious responses to his work are likely to come after repeated experiences of a given text. Second, Fish underrates the seriousness of the playful, both in the sense in which playful techniques may be agencies of serious insights (George Herbert) and in the sense in which the playful itself is serious (Andrew Marvell) in that it enables us to transcend—not “to escape,” but “to transcend”—the mundane and quotidian and, even more importantly, to transcend ourselves, to become more than those small and brief entities. Or it gives us the illusion of such transcendence. But perhaps the selves themselves are illusion. In any case, art itself, the aesthetic itself, exists in the realm of illusion. The art of Sir Thomas Browne, as I have maintained earlier, “liberates us into the aesthetic,” and the third and final weakness of Fish's position is his underrating of the aesthetic itself.

With his emphasis on the moral and the didactic, on the ways in which the experience of literature may “do us good,” Fish inevitably risks both a misleading separation of content and form and a sadly restrictive distrust of what some morally oriented critics have called the “merely aesthetic.” There is, I think, nothing “mere” about the truly aesthetic. It is what remains after the ideas have died. In order to respond fully to the poetic art of George Herbert, must I share his religion? I hope not, and I think not. George Herbert is good for me—not because of his religion or his ideas but because of his art. So is Sir Thomas Browne. This is not to say that ideas and attitudes are irrelevant to aesthetic experience. Great literature cannot be made of ideas and attitudes that are base or ignoble or unworthy of our humanity. But it can surely be made of ideas that are erroneous or inadequate and attitudes that are partial or limited. In Sir Thomas Browne there is much that is quirky or irrelevant or eccentric, but nothing that is ignoble or unworthy of humanity. And, as an artist, he makes few mistakes and achieves an extraordinary number of triumphs. His art survives, and continues to enrich us every time we experience it. As Carducci said of an even greater author, Dante, “Giove muore, ma l'inno del poeta resta”—“Jove dies, but the hymn of the poet remains.”

Notes

1. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley, 1972), chap. 7.

2. Ibid., p. 371. Subsequent references to this study are in the text.

3. My translation, from Corneille's Polyeucte and Le Menteur, Introduction and Notes by Georges May (New York, 1963), pp. 21-22.

4. Ibid., p. 20.

5. My translation, from Marino's Poesie Varie, ed. B. Croce (Bari, 1913), p. 345.

6. See H. M. Priest, Adonis: Selections from “L'Adone” of Giambattista Marino (Ithaca, N.Y., 1967); Joseph A. Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York, 1965); S. L. Bethel, “Gracián, Tesauro, and the Nature of Metaphysical Wit,” Northern Miscellany of Literary Criticism 1 (Autumn 1953): 19-40. The matter is also dealt with by Ann Hurley in an unpublished study entitled “Wit's Re-Creation: A Study of the Poetry of John Donne.”

7. This is also noted by Joan Webber in her The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison, 1968), p. 161.

8. Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 1972), p. 211.