The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened, Sir Kenelm Digby [books to read in a lifetime .txt] 📗

many parts incites envy and ridicule; and he laid himself particularly open to both. Fantasy was in the Digby blood; and that agility of mind and nerve that turns now here, now there, to satisfy an unquenchable curiosity, that exuberance of mental spirits that forces to rapid and continuous expression, has ever been suspect of the English mind. He was "highly caressed in France." To Evelyn Sir Kenelm was a "teller of strange things," and again the Diarist called him "an errant mountebank"-though Evelyn sought his society, and was grateful for its stimulus. Lady Fanshawe, who met him at Calais, at the Governor's table, says he "enlarged somewhat more in extraordinary stories than might be averred.... That was his infirmity, though otherwise a person of most excellent parts, and a very fine bred gentleman." "A certain eccentricity and unsteadiness perhaps inseparable from a mind of such vanity," is Lodge's criticism. "The Pliny of our age for lying," quoth Stubbes. But Digby's extraordinary stories were by no means all false. He may have talked sometimes to épater le bourgeois; but his serious statements were often judged as were the wonders of evolution by country audiences in the seventies.

His offence was he must always be talking. His ideas he must share, expound, illustrate, whether or no they were ripe. It is the sign-manual of the sincere amateur. His books are probably but the lees of his conversation. He was not, in the first place, a literary person. His
Memoirs are good reading for those with a touch of the fantastic in themselves; but the average literary critic will dub them rhodomontade. His scientific and controversial treatises, not at all unreadable, and full of strange old lore, survive as curiosities never to be reprinted. Nevertheless, his temper was distinctly scientific, and if his exact discoveries be limited to observing the effect of oxygen on plant-life, and his actual invention to a particular kind of glass bottle, yet he was an eager student and populariser of the work of Bacon, Galileo, and Harvey; and his laboratories were the nursing grounds of the new experimental philosophy.

With a distinctly rationalistic temper, he was yet a faithful, if independent, son of the Roman Church. He speaks sometimes as if he regarded the Church as the great storehouse of necessary authority for the intellectually feeble; but he accepted the main dogmas himself, being satisfied of them by intuition and reason. Protestantism, he held, was not for the ordinary person, considering "the natural imbecility of man's wits and understandings." His piety was a thing apart, a matter of heredity perhaps, and of his poetic temperament. I have heard him called by that abused name, "mystic." He was nothing of the sort, and he said so in memorable words. As an act of devotion he translated the Adhering to God of Albertus Magnus. In the dedication to his mother he compares himself, as the translator of this mystic treatise, to certain travellers who "speak upon hearsay of countries they were never in." "The various course in the world that I have runne myself out of breath in, hath afforded me little means for solid recollection." Yet was he now and then upon the threshold. With streaks of the quack and adventurer in him, he gave out deep notes. Says Lloyd: "His soul [was] one of those few souls that understand themselves."

With an itch to use his pen as well as his tongue, he had none of the patience, the hankering after perfection of form, of the professional man of letters. His account of his Scanderoon exploit, a sea-log, a little written-up later, was perhaps not meant for publication. It did not see the light till 1868. His Memoirs were written, he says, "for my own recreation, and then continued and since preserved only for my own private content-to please myself in looking back upon my past and sweet errors." He even begs those who may come upon the MS. "to convert these blotted sheets into a clear flame." His commentary on the Faëry Queen stanza was thrown off in a hurry. "The same Discourse I made upon it the first half quarter of an hour that I saw it, I send you there, without having reduced it to any better form, or added anything at all to it." And so for the better-known and interesting Observations on 'Religio Medici.' Browne reproached him for his review of a pirated edition. Digby replied he had never authorised its publication, written as it was in twenty-four hours, which included his procuring and reading the book-a truly marvellous tour de force ; for the thing is still worth perusal. He was always the improvisor-ready, brilliant, vivid, imperfect. He must give vent to the ideas that came upon him in gusts. "The impressions which creatures make upon me," he says, "are like boisterous winds." He fully recognised his own limitations. "I pretend not to learning," he declares, with exaggerated modesty. Amateur and improviser of genius, let us praise him as such. The spacious, generous minds that can find room for all the ideas and culture of an epoch are never numerous enough. There is no one like such amateurs for bridging two ages; and Digby, with one hand in Lilly's and the other in Bacon's, joins the mediæval to the modern world. Nor is a universal amateur a genius who has squandered his powers; but a man exercising his many talents in the only way possible to himself, and generally with much entertainment and stimulus to others. It was Ben Jonson, too great a man to be one of his detractors on this score, who wrote of him:

"He is built like some imperial room
For that[1] to dwell in, and be still at home.
His breast is a brave palace, a broad street,
Where all heroic ample thoughts do meet;
Where nature such a large survey hath ta'en
As other souls to his, dwelt in a lane."

[Footnote 1: All virtue.]

There was nothing singular in his interest in astrology and alchemy. Lilly and Booker, both of them among his acquaintances, were ordered to attend the parliamentary army at the siege of Colchester, "to encourage the soldiers with predictions of speedy victory." Still-though he believed in greater absurdities-his attitude towards such matters was that of his chosen motto, Vacate et Videte. "To rely too far upon that vaine art I judge to be rather folly than impiety." As with regard to spirits and witches, he says, "I only reserve my assent." That he was not altogether absorbed in the transmutation of metals in his laboratory practice, and yet that he dabbled in it, makes him historically interesting. In him better than in Newton do we realise the temper of the early members of the Royal Society. In this tale of his other activities I have not forgotten The Closet Opened . Of all Digby's many interests the most constant and permanent was medicine. How to enlarge the span of man's life was a problem much meditated on in his age. We have seen how Descartes's mind ran on it; and in Bacon's Natural History there is reference to a 'book of the prolongation of life.' In spite of what is written on his Janssen hermit portrait- Saber morir la mayor hazanza -Digby loved life. His whole exuberant career is a pæan to life, for itself and its great chances, and because "it giveth the leave to vent and boyle away the unquietnesses and turbulences that follow our passions." To prolong life, fortify it, clarify it, was a noble pursuit, and he set out on it as a youth under the tuition of the 'good parson of Lindford. His Physick and Chirurgery receipts, published by Hartman, are many of them incredible absurdities, not unfrequently repulsive; but when we compare them with other like books of the time, they fit into a natural and not too fantastic place. Sir Thomas Browne was laughing at Digby, but not at Digby alone, in the passage in
Vulgar Errors -"when for our warts we rub our hands before the moon, or commit any maculated part unto the touch of the dead." Sir Kenelm gathered his receipts on all his roads through Europe, noted them down, made them up with his own hands, and administered them to his friends. In Hartman's
Family Physician is given "An experienced Remedy against the Falling Sicknes, wherewith Sir K. Digby cur'd a Minister's Son at Franckfort in Germany, in the year 1659." It begins, "Take the Skull of a Man that died of a Violent Death." (Hartman says he helped to prepare the ghastly concoction.) I have already noted how he doctored his beautiful wife's complexion; and how he was called in to cure Howell's wound. In a poetic tribute he is referred to as:

"Hee, that all med'cines can exactly make,
And freely give them."

Evelyn records how Digby "advised me to try and digest a little better, and gave me a water which he said was only raine water of the autumnal equinox exceedingly rectified, and smelt like aqua fortis ."

Here, at last, we have come to the end of Sir Kenelm the amateur. If he was an empiric, so were all the doctors of his time; and he may be described as a professional unpaid physician who carried on a frequently interrupted practice. That he did not publish his receipts himself does not reflect on his own idea of their importance. They had a wide circulation among his friends. And, as I have pointed out, he never showed great eagerness to publish. Such works as appeared in his lifetime were evidently printed at the request of learned societies, or by friends to whom they were dedicated, or by White.

The distance between the healer and the cook has grown to be immense in recent times. The College of Physicians and Mary Jane in the kitchen are not on nodding terms-though one sees faint signs of an effort to bridge the wide gap. But in the seventeenth century the gap can hardly be said to have existed at all. At the back of the doctor is plainly seen the figure of the herbalist and simpler, who appear again prominently in the still-room and the kitchen, by the side of great ladies and great gentlemen, bent on making the best and the most of the pleasures of the table no doubt, but quite as much on the maintenance of health as of hospitality. Simpler, herbalist, doctor, distiller, cook-Digby was all of them, and all of them with the utmost seriousness; nor in this was he in the least singular. The great Bacon was deeply concerned with such cares, though in certain of his recommendations, such as: "To provide always an apt break-fast," to take this every morning, not to forget to take that twice a month, one may read more of the valetudinarian than in Digby. The Closet Opened is but one of an interesting series of books of the kind, which have been too much neglected by students of seventeenth-century manners and lore and language. Did not W.J. issue the Countess of Kent's
Choice Manual of Physic and Chirurgey , with directions for Preserving and Candying? Patrick, Lord Ruthven's Ladies' Cabinet Opened appeared in 1639 and 1655. Nor was it only the cuisine of the nobles that roused interest. One of the curiosities of the time is The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth, commonly called Joan Cromwell, the Wife of the Late Usurper Truly Described