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Title: The Major Works
Penguin Publishing Group
Item Number: 9780140431094
Number: 1
Product Description: The Major Works
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780140431094
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780140431094
Rating: 4.5/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/10/94/9780140431094.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 5.180 cm (2.04 inches)
Heigh : 7.760 cm (3.06 inches)
Depth: 1.070 cm (0.42 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9295 total ratings) |
ITUMELENG Tshabalala
reviewed The Major Works on October 08, 2013Don't listen to me, listen to Virginia Woolf:
From Woolf's Essay "Sir Thomas Browne", a review of the Golden Cockerel edition of the Works of Sir Thomas Browne, published in Times Literary Supplement (1923)
The 'great revival of interest in the work of Sir Thomas Browne' which the publishers discover would, one might have hoped, have justified a less limited edition and a lower price. But why fly in the face of facts? Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are of the salt of the Earth.
For the desire to read, like all the other desires which distract our unhappy souls, is capable of analysis. It may be for good books, for bad books, or for indifferent books. But it is always despotic in its demands, and when it appears, at whatever hour of day or night, we must rise and slink off at its heels, only allowing ourselves to ask, as we desert the responsibilities and privileges of active life, one very important question — Why? Why, that is, this sudden passion for Pepys or Rimbaud? Why turn the house upside down to discover Macaulay's Life and Letters? Why will nothing do except Beckford's Thoughts on Hunting? Why demand first Disraeli's novels and then Dr Bentley's biography? The answer to all these questions, were they forthcoming, would be valuable, for it is when we are thus beckoned and compelled by the force of a book's character as a whole that the reader is most capable of speaking the truth about it if he has the mind. What then is the desire that makes us turn instinctively to Sir Thomas Browne? It is the desire to be steeped in imagination. But that is only a snapshot outline of a state of mind which , even as we stand fumbling at the bookcase, can be developed a little more clearly. Locked up in Urn Burial there is a quality of imagination which distinguishes it completely from its companions — as chance has it — The Old Wives' Tale and A Man of Property. In them the imagination is always occupying itself with particular facts; in him with universal ideas. Their turn will come when we want to look a little more sharply at the passing moment; his when the passing moment is a vanity and a weariness. Then while most fiction, the nine volumes of M. Proust for example, makes us more aware of ourselves as individuals, Urn Burial is a temple which we can only enter by leaving our muddy boots on the threshold. Here it is all a question not of you and me, or him and her, but of human fate and death, of the immensity of the past, of the strangeness which surrounds us on every side. Here, as in no other English prose except the Bible the reader is not left to read alone in his armchair but is made one of a congregation. But here, too, there is a difference; for while the Bible has a gospel to impart, who can be quite sure what Sir Thomas Browne himself believed? The last chapters of Urn Burial beat up on wings of extraordinary sweep and power, yet towards what goal?
But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. ... Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion snares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us.... The Ægyptian Mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummie is become Merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsoms.
Decidedly that is the voice of a strange preacher, of a man filled with doubts and subtleties and suddenly swept away by surprising imaginations. But it is not for the asperities of dogma that we go to Sir Thomas Browne. The words quoted above will revive the old amazement. It 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. The sound booms and quivers and dies away. But splendour of sound is only one of his attributes. There is, too, his power of bringing the remote and incongruous astonishingly together. A piece of an old boat is cheek by jowl with the funeral pyre of Patroclus. Vast inquiries sweeping in immense circles of ambiguity and doubt are clenched by short sentences rapped out with solemn authority. "Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us." The great names of antiquity march in astonishing procession; flowers and trees, spices and gems load the pages with all kinds of colour and substance. The whole is kept fresh by a perpetual movement of rhythm which gives each sentence its relation to the next and yet is of huge and cumulative effect. A bold and prodigious appetite for the drums and tramplings of language is balanced by the most exquisite sense of mysterious affinities between ghosts and roses. But these dissections are futile enough, and indeed by drawing attention to the technical side of Sir Thomas's art do him some disservice. In books as in people, graces and charms are delightful for the moment but become insipid unless they are felt to be part of some general energy or quality of character. To grasp that is to know them well, but to dally with charms and graces, to appraise them more and more exquisitely, is to be always at the first stage of acquaintance, superficial, polite, and ultimately bored. It is easy to detach the fine passages from their context, but in Urn Burial this character, this quality of the whole, though it expresses itself with all the charm of all the Muses, is yet of a very exalted kind. It is a difficult book to read, it is a book not always to be read with pleasure, and those who get most from it are the well-born souls.
But then, unfortunately, we are not all made entirely of salt. We cannot breathe in these exalted regions for long. We have to admit that we have bodies as well as minds, and the books which cater for both and let one relieve the fatigues of the other are the books that have the longest lease of life. The soul may be exalted in Urn Burial; the body is refreshed in Religio Medici. There we can take our ease and trifle and laugh. There we can indulge in the delicious amusement of feeling, like some psychological spider, from phrase to phrase over the mind and person of Sir Thomas Browne. For the first to talk of himself broaches the subject with immense gusto. I am charitable; I am brave; I am averse from nothing; I am full of feeling for others; I am merciless upon myself; I know six languages, the names of all the constellations, and most of the plants of my country. "For my conversation, it is like the sun's, with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and bad." ... We smile in the midst of the solemnities of Urn Burial when he remarks, "Afflictions induce callosities". The smile broadens to laughter as we mouth out the splendid pomposities, the astonishing conjectures, of Religio Medici. Yet it is from the crest of some grotesque flight of fancy that he launches himself upon one of those sentences which yawn like a chasm cut in the earth at our feet. "We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us." For the imagination which has gone such strange journeys among the dead is still exalted when it swings its lantern over the obscurities of the soul. He is in the dark to all the world; he has longed for death; there is a hell within him; who knows whether we may not be asleep in this world, and the conceits of life be but dreams? Steeped in such glooms, his imagination falls with a peculiar tenderness upon the common facts of human life. He turns it gradually upon the flowers and insects and grasses at his feet, so as to disturb nothing in the mysterious processes of their existence. There is a halo of wonder round everything that he sees. He that considers the thicket in the head of a teazle "in the house of the solitary maggot may find the Seraglio of Solomon". The tavern music, the Ave Mary bell, the broken urn that the workman has dug out of the field plunge him into the depths of wonder and lead him, as he stands fixed in amazement, to extraordinary flights of speculation as to what we are, where we go, and the meaning of all things. To read Sir Thomas Browne again is always to be filled with astonishment, to remember the surprises, the despondencies, the unlimited curiosities of youth.
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