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 1

V'
 SALZBURG STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
UNDER THE DIRECTION OF PROFESSOR
ERWIN A. STORZL

ROMANTIC REASSESSMENT
EDITOR: DR. JAMES HOGG

62

\ ^
BROWNING’S CLERICAL CHARACTERS

by

CHARLES THOMAS PHIPPS, s.j.

1976

INSTITUT FUR ENGLISCHE SPRACHE

UND LITERATUR
UNIVERSITAT SALZBURG
A-5020 SALZBURG
AUSTRIA
Copyright by

CHARLES THOMAS PHIPPS, S.J.

1966
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express my gratitude to my director, Dr.

James 0. Bailey for his always available counsel
and encouragement, and for the unstinting devotion
of his time and labor; to my readers. Dr. Lyman
A. Gotten and Dr. Earl H. Hartsell; to my patient
typist, Mrs. George H. Cocolas, who produced the
dissertation script; and to Miss D. Moseley for
her pertinent advice and careful proofreading.
Mrs. Marjorie Neureiter prepared the present script.

PREFATORY NOTE

After its 1965 presentation in dissertation form to

the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
revised portions of this study appeared in the fol¬
lowing journals: Studies in Philology^ 65 (July,
1968), 102-22', ELHj 36 (December, 1969), 696-718;
and Victorian Poetry^ 1 (Spring and Summer, 1969),
66-70 and 158-59, and 8 (Autumn, 1970), 199-208.

307668
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION 1

Chapter
I. THE DISSENTER AND THE PAPISTS: A BIOGRAPHICAL
SURVEY 7

II. THE "PHILOSOPHER OF THE IMPERFECT" AND HIS CLERICS:

A CAREER SURVEY 55

III. MINOR CLERICAL CHARACTERS AND MINOR CLERICAL POEMS,

EARLY AND LATE 82

IV. THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB AT ST. PRAXED'S CHURCH 138

V. FRA LIPPO LIPPI 167

VI. BISHOP BLOUGRAM'S APOLOGY 200

VII. GIUSEPPE CAPONSACCHI 240

VIII. THE POPE 276

CONCLUSION 312

LIST OF WORKS CITED 318

 INTRODUCTION

Robert Browning's clerical characters make up a formidable

col 1ection--an important if not the primary group of characters in
his collected works. Recent studies have tended to focus more
and more interest on the creation of character as a uniquely sig¬
nificant aspect of Browning's poetic genius. Robert Langbaum in
The Poetry of Expertenoe^ frequently treats Browning's characters
in substantiating his theory of the dramatic monologue and its
crucial function in a reading of the history of Romanticism.
Roma A. King, Jr., presents a close analysis of five of the poet's
most famous poems with a special and often perceptive emphasis on
both characterization and poetic structure. The study of
Browning's characters by Park Honan examines the characterization
in twenty of Browning's monologues, including ten from The Ring
and the Book.^ Other studies, early and recent, have been made
of various classes of Browning's characters--his heroines, his
lovers, his casuists, and his artists and musicians.^ But so far

^New York, 1957.

^The Bow and the Lyre (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1957).
'^Browning's Characters (New Haven, Conn., 1961).
^For a study of Browning's heroines, see Ethel C. Mayne,
Browning's Heroines (London, 1913). For Browning's lovers, see,
for example: William 0. Raymond, "Browning's Conception of Love
as Represented in Paracelsusin The Infinite Moment and Other
Essays in Robert Browning (Toronto, 1950), pp. 156-75; and William
Whitla, "Physical Unity: Poetry and Love," in The Central Truth:
The Incarnation in Robert Browning's Poetry (Toronto, 1963), pp.
89-101. For Browning's casuists, see, for example: Hoxie N.
Fairchild, "Browning the Simple-Hearted Casuist," VTQ^ XVII (1949),
234-40; William 0. Raymond, "Browning's Casuists," in The Infinite
Moment, pp. 129-55; and Norton B. Crowell, "Browning's Casuists,"

1
 2

no detailed study of his clerical characters has appeared, despite

their great number and prominence in his total work.
Scholars have also investigated Browning's theology, philos-
r

ophy, and ethics, his mysticism, and his use of the Bible. There
is a recent monograph on Browning and the Catholic Church by Boyd

in The Tv'ipte Soul: Brown-ing's Theory of Knowledge

(Albuquerque, N.M., 1963), pp. 194-224. For Browning's artists
and musicians, see, for example: Pearl Hogrefe, Browning and
Italian Art and Artists ("Bulletin of the University of Kansas:
Humanistic Studies," Vol. 1, No. 3; Lawrence, Kans., 1914);
George M. Ridenour, "Browning's Music-Poems: Fancy and Fact," in
The Triple Soul, pp. 52-88. And see also: Adela Goodrich-Freer,
"Robert Browning the Musician," Nineteenth Century, XLIX (1901),
648-58, and Herbert E. Greene, "Browning's Knowledge of Music,"
PMLA, LXII (1947), 1095-99.
5
See, for example: Henry Jones, Browning as a Philosophical
and Religious Teacher (New York, 1891); A. C. Pigou, Browning as
a Religious Teacher (London, 1901); Ethel M. Naish, Browning and
Dogma (London, 1906); William 0. Raymond, "Browning and Higher
Criticism," in The Infinite Moment, pp. 590-621; C. R. Tracy,
"Browning's Heresies," SP, XXXIII (1936), 610-25; H. B. Charlton,
"Browning's Ethical Poetry," BJRL, XXVII (1942-43), 36-69, and
"Browning as a Poet of Religion," ibid., 271-307; Henry M. Bat-
tenhouse, "Browning," in Poets of Christian Thought (New York,
1947), pp. 108-33; Joseph E. Baker, "Religious Implications in
Browning's Poetry," PQ, xmi (1957), 436-52; J. Hillis Miller,
The Disappeaj‘ance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cam¬
bridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 81-156; and studies by Crowell and
Whitla already cited in note 4, above. For a partial list of
typical items from the prolific pens of Browning's "inspirational"
commentators, see Roma A. King's The Bow and the Lyre, p. 152, n.
1. And see also: William R. Inge, "The Mysticism of Robert
Browning," in Studies of English Mystics (London, 1921), pp. 207-
39; Rufus M. Jones, Mysticism in Robert Browning (New York, 1924);
Duckworth, Broyming, Background and Conflict (London,
1931), pp. 162-82. For a study of Browning's use of the Bible,
see Minnie Machen, The Bible in Browning (New York, 1903).
 3

Litzinger,^ and an earlier unpublished doctoral dissertation on

the same subject.^ I have found both studies to be over-simplified
and extreme in their conclusions that Browning was consistently
hostile and often bigoted in his attitude toward the Catholic
Church. Another dissertation on Browning and contemporary reli-
O

gious controversies is comprehensive and valuable, but concerned

almost entirely with nineteenth-century religious history. A
published dissertation on Browning and the rabbinic tradition in¬
vestigates Browning's knowledge and use of medieval Hebrew litera¬
ture and legend, but it does not deal specifically with Browning's
rabbis as significant poetic character-creations.
None of these studies, however, discusses ex professo
Browning's clerical or religious characters as unique artistic
creations precisely because they are members of the clergy or their
equivalents; none focuses on this one group in an attempt to dis¬
cover the genesis of Browning's interests in and his attitude to¬
ward these characters; none attempts to compare and contrast the
various characters themselves in order to arrive at some conclusions
regarding the poet's artistic intentions and achievement, as well
as some explanation for this Victorian Dissenter's fascination with
the character of the clergyman and his evidently near-instinctive
recognition of its suitability for his poetic purposes.

^"Robert Browning and the Babylonian Woman," Baylor Browning

Interests (Waco, Texas, 1962), No. 19.
^Bernardin D. McCarthy, O.P., "Browning and theRoman Catholic
Church" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1940).
^Richard Weinberg Goldsmith, "The Relation of Browning's
- Poetry to Religious Controversy 1833-1868" (unpublished Ph.D. dis¬
sertation, University of North Carolina, 1958).
' ^Judith Berlin-Lieberman. Robert Browning and Hebraism: A
Study of the Poems of Browning Which Are Based on Rabbinical
Writings (Jerusalem, 1934).
 4

This dissertation, therefore, will attempt to arrive at an

explanation for and an evaluation of the rather striking phenome¬
non of Browning's frequent preoccupation with clerical characters,
themes, and situations, and the obvious congeniality he discovered
in their exploitation — to the extent that they make up perhaps the
most artistically successful and significant group of characters
in his collected works.
De Faoto this study will be concerned almost exclusively with
Roman Catholic clerics, since they make up an overwhelming majority
of Browning's clerical characters. But I shall also touch on such
Protestant clerics as Johannes Agricola and the preachers in
Christmas Eve and The Inn-Album^ and the Jewish rabbis Ben Ezra
and Jochanan Hakkadosh.
I shall first discuss Browning's clerical preoccupations in
relation to the poet's life, with a special concern for indicating
possible sources of Browning's remarkable interest in, and growth
of competency in dealing with, the Catholic cleric and his situa¬
tion. To this end. Chapter I will gather up the information
available regarding the sources of Browning's interests and
knowledge of clerical matters as they can be observed in his edu¬
cation, reading, family, friends, acquaintances, and places he
visited, in the influences of his wife and her acquaintances and
correspondents; and in all other elements which tended to in¬
crease his interest in or his knowledge of religion (especially
Catholicism) in general and of clerics in particular.
A second chapter will consider the Browning clerical phenome¬
non in Browning's career and poetry in general, especially with
reference to his dominant attitude or "philosophy of the imperfect,"
with illustrative examples cited from poems at various stages of
his career.
 5

Chapters III to VIII will discuss the clerical character in

Browning's poems by examining in detail how, by his exploitation
of the clerical situation. Browning was able to give depth and a
many-levelled richness to his portrayal of striking characters in
critical situations. Chapter III will treat minor clerical char¬
acters and minor clerical poems, early and late, in which Browning's
often rather superficial and conventional use of the clerical char¬
acter throughout the various stages of his career will be pointed
out, commented upon, and evaluated. Five chapters will then
present a detailed reading and discussion of Browning's five prin¬
cipal clerical characters and poems: "The Bishop Orders his Tomb
at St. Praxed's Church," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Bishop Blougram's
Apology," "Giuseppe Caponsacchi," and "The Pope."
A word should be said about the terms "clerical character."
By "clerical character" I mean, in accordance with the common ac¬
ceptance of the term, those men in general who officially or
professionally hold office, perform religious functions, or live
a life which is to some extent sanctioned and regulated by a re¬
ligious group. I include, therefore. Fra Lippo Lippi, although
at the time of his career narrated in the poem he was most proba¬
bly not a cleric in the strictly legal sense of the word.^^ I
shall also, albeit briefly, discuss Guido Franceschini who, having
received tonsure, was technically a cleric,and Browning's Jew-

^^See below, p. 170, n. 10, and p. 176, n. 21.

^Hhe present Code of Canon Lead (1917) defines a cleric as
one who is dedicated to the divine ministry at least by first
tonsure: "Qui divinis ministeriis per primam saltern tonsuram
mancipati sunt, clerici dicuntur" (Canon 108, par. 1). John A.
Abbo and Jerome D. Hannan, however, in The Saored Canons^ 2nd ed.
(London, 1960), I, 160, observe that in pre-Code Legislation (i.e.,
before 1917) the word devious was a generic term often applied to
 6

ish "clerics," though this is admittedly a popular and not a

technical designation.
Needless to say, no dissertation-size study of Browning can
be absolutely complete and thorough in its consideration or cita¬
tion of secondary materials, especially if the study touches on
such frequently discussed items as Browning's biography, his reli¬
gious and philosophical thought, and his characters, and is con¬
cerned with a number of his individual poems. I shall attempt,
therefore, to give attention to adequate but selected materials
which directly pertain to the subjects under discussion, with most
emphasis upon works of the last few decades.

11 (cont'd) , £ 1 . .
'members of religious orders and congregations.
And the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-14), states: "While cleric
in its strict sense means one who has received the ecclesiastical
tonsure, yet in a general sense it is also employed in canon law
for all to whom clerical privileges have been extended. Such are
the members of religious orders: monks and nuns, and even lay
brothers and novices."
 !

CHAPTER I

THE DISSENTER AND THE PAPISTS:

A BIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY

This chapter presents a survey of Browning's life from the

single aspect of his contact, both certain and reasonably con¬
jectured, with Catholic and clerical persons, places, things, and
sources of information.
Even a superficial examination of Browning's poetry shows
that he possessed an extraordinary interest and knowledge concern¬
ing Catholic matters--all the more extraordinary when we realize
•that Browning was by no means ever in contact with or in sympathy
with any "catholicizing" group in the English Church, but rather
was, to the end of his days, a singularly staunch non-Conformist.
Yet, as we shall see in later chapters, his knowledge continually
increased in scope and mastery, until in The Ring and the Book
his technical vocabulary and erudite historical allusions are
often beyond the normal ken of an educated Catholic.
Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, Southwark, on May 7,
1812, the son of Robert Browning and Sarah Anna Wiedemann Browning.
His father, by profession a clerk in the Bank of England, was by
inclination and full-time avocation "an artist, a scholar, and a
collector of books and pictures."^ The young poet began at an
early age to emulate his father's interests, for as he later wrote
in a letter to Elizabeth Barrett: "I was unluckily precocious
verses at six years old, and drawings still earlier." And

^William C. DeVane, A Browning Handbook^ 2nd ed. (New York,

1955), p. 3. Hereafter cited as DeVane, Handbook.
“^The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett 1845-
1846 (New York, 1899), I, 400; see also p. 403. Hereafter cited
as RB-EBB.
7
 8

his sister Sarianna, recalled that "among his father's books he

read voraciously. It was in this way that Robert became very
3
early familiar with subjects generally unknown to boys." The
instruction provided at local schools was too easy for him, and
by the age of fourteen attempts at his formal education had come
to an end, save for an inconspicuous half-year at the new London
University (1828-29). The most educating early influence in his
life came not from schools or tutors, but rather from the six
4
thousand books in his father's extraordinary library. The nos¬
talgic young man in Vauline fondly recalls their magic power:
[those] wisest ancient books
All halo-girt with fancies of my own;
And I myself went with the tale—a god
Wandering after beauty, or a giant
Standing vast in the sunset—an old hunter
Talking with gods, or a high-crested chief
Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.
I tell you, naught has ever been so clear

3
Quoted in W. Hall Griffin and Harry C. Minchin, The Life of
Robert Browning^ rev. ed. (New York, 1938), p. 9. Hereafter cited
as Griffin, Life.
4
According to his younger half-brother, Reuben, the elder
Browning's collection numbered roughly a thousand volumes (see
Griffin, Life^ p. 8). Mrs. Sutherland Orr, The Life and Letters
of Robert Browning, rev. ed. (Boston, 1908), p. 73, states that the
library included 6000 volumes at the time the Browning family moved
from Camberwell to Hatcham. Griffin, p. 122, dates this move in
December 1840. When the poet moved from Warwick Crescent to
DeVere Gardens in June, 1887, Mrs. Orr recalls that the library's
6000 volumes were still intact (p. 377). After Browning's death
in 1889, they were housed in the Palazzo Rezzonico at Venice, and
were greatly depleted by the time the poet's son died in 1912.
The catalogue announcing the sale of the library lists slightly
fewer than 2000 items. See Catalogue of Pictures, drawings and
Engravings; Autograph Letters and Manuscripts: Books and Works of
Art, the Property of R. W. Barrett Browning, Esq. (Deceased), pub¬
lished by Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge, auctioneers, London, 1913.
Hereafter cited as Catalogue.
 9

As the place, the time, the fashion of those lives.

(319-27)5
Included among these "wisest ancient books" were hundreds
of volumes in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish,
treatises on theological and philosophical subjects, on art and
science, as well as histories, romances, and poetry--all replete
with passing references to obscure and forgotten personages and
events from the religious milieu of southern Europe.
Among the specifically Catholic items was a 1761 Missale
Romanumj a collection of prayers and scripture readings to be
recited at Mass on every day of the year.^ An interesting
feature of this Missal was a collection of prefatory letters of
Popes Pius V, Clement VIII, and Urban VIII, approving and setting
down rules for its use. These letters, in addition to their
naturally curious interest for young Browning, would have been im¬
pressive for their coercive tone and full-blown neo-Ciceronic
curial style. Strong disapproval is expressed for any liturgical
"mavericking," and Clement's letter goes so far as to delegate the
Roman Inquisition to investigate any departures from the assigned
rubrics. The Missal and the Roman Breviary are the vade meaum of
every priest, and this Missal of 1761 and its prefaces, with their
unpleasant note of compulsion and conformity, probably were
Browning's first taste of anything officially Catholic.

^Because of the convenience of its system of line-numbering,

all citations to Browning's poetry in this dissertation will be to
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, eds. Charlotte Porter and
Helen A. Clarke (New York, 1898). Of all the authoritative edi¬
tions, this is the only one which numbers the lines of each poem
consecutively. Other editions either have no line-numbering, or
begin their numbering anew at the top of each page.
^Catalogue, p. 118, no. 932.
 10

Another curious item was a collection of the Latin letters

of the fascinating late Renaissance prelate, stylist, and art-
patron, Pietro Cardinal Bembo (1470-1547), who began his career as
a courtier of Lucrezia Borgia and later became a secretary to Pope
Leo X, and finally bishop of Gubbio and Bergamo.^ Though Bembo
became a much admired bishop, his biographers agree in describing
his early life as "more pagan than Christian." In addition to
his many amorous affairs both at Ferrara and at Rome, he seems to
have maintained a genuine Platonic friendship with Lucrezia, and
his letters to her are among the most interesting in the collec¬
tion.®
More directly concerning the Renaissance papacy was ll
Nipot-ismo di Roma^ or The H-istovy of the Popes Nephews (1669), by
g
Gregorio Leti. DeVane traces the details of Browning's "The
Pope and the Net" to Leti's "most untrustworthy" life of Sixtus V,
which Browning may have read for its many anecdotes—though there
is no proof that it ever was a part of the Browning library.^®
The Browning Catalogue also mentions sets of Milton's poetic

Epistolarum lihvi XVI^ Lugduni, 1540. I have been unable

to locate a copy of this work. It is listed in the Sotheby
Cata.logue, p. 72, no. 379. For details of Bembo's life, see John
Addington Symonds, The Revival of Learning (Part II of The Renais¬
sance in Italy, London, 1900), pp. 297-300.
O

See Epistolarum, pp. 30-33, 134-35, and 423-24. For the

description and citation of these letters, see Bernardin McCarthy,
O.P., "Browning and the Roman Catholic Church," op. cit. (above,
p. 3, n.7), pp. 14-16.
9
Catalogue, p. 105, no. 784.

'^^Vita di Papa Sisto V, 1669. In his Handbook, p. 526, no.

20, DeVane refers to The Life of Pope Sixtus the Fifth, Translated
from the Italian of Gregorio Leti . . . by Ellis Farneworth
(London, 1754), p. 150.
 11

and prose works.We can presume that Browning at an early age

was familiar not only with the anti-clerical passage of "Lycidas,"
but also with Milton's anti-episcopal pamphlets, whose arguments
apply to Catholic as well as Anglican church polity, and the
Aveoyagitioa with its condemnations of authoritarianism of all
kinds. That in later life Browning greatly esteemed Milton, who
was never far from either his or his wife's consciousness, seems
evident from the life-long references to Milton in the Brownings'
12
letters and conversation, and from Robert Browning's keeping a
lock of Milton's hair, a gift from Leigh Hunt, in a glass-topped
13
cabinet near his desk, "along with other precious keepsakes,"
as well as a portrait of Milton in the room at Warwick Crescent
"wherein I write.

Catalogue, pp. 117-18, nos. 920-29.

17
'^See, for example: Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, ed.
Betty Miller (New Haven, Conn., 1954), p. 169; RB-EBB, I, 194;
and Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as
Revealed by Their Letters, ed. Richard Curie (New York, 1937), p.
76. In this letter to Miss Wedgwood, Browning quotes a line from
Paradise Lost, 1.586: "Where Charlemagne and all his peerage
fell." Browning had earlier used Charlemagne in Bordello (Bk. V)
as a symbol of the strength that must perish when it tries to
separate itself from knowledge and become self-sufficient. In a
letter to Richard Hengist Horne, Browning quotes, inaccurately, 9
lines from Samson Agonistes (see New Letters of Robert Browning,
eds. William C. DeVane and Kenneth L. Knickerbocker, New Haven,
Conn., 1950, p. 31).
'^'^Letters of Robert Browning Collected by Thomas J. Wise, ed
Thurman L. Hood (London, 1933), pp. 76 and 347. The Sotheby
Catalogue, p. 167, no. 1370, describes "a silver shell-shaped
Reliquary . . . Lock of J. Milton's Hair and Lock of Hair of Eliza
beth Barrett Browning." According to Griffin, Life, p. 77, the
same lock of Milton's hair had earlier belonged to Dr. Johnson and
to Joseph Addison.
"^^New Letters, p. 252.
 12

A book in which all members of the Browning family were

interested, and which they undoubtedly read and discussed even
before it was published in 1829, was The History of the Huguenots
in the Sixteenth Century by the poet's uncle, William Shergold
15
Browning. One item mentioned in this story of Catholic in-
trigues and slaughters concerns the reported use of the confessional
by the Jesuits to agitate against the French king and the Protes¬
tants (see p. 40), In addition to a possible echo in Browning's
poem, "The Confessional," which I shall discuss in Chapter III,
Browning's youthful awareness of religio-political abuses in the
oppressive French state of the sixteenth century would tend to
condition him to see parallels in the nineteenth-century Italian
religious and political situations.
Although the Biographie Universelle is not listed in the
Catalogue^ Griffin surmises that Browning had read "its fifty
volumes through," basing his assumption on the prefatory quotation -I'J
in Pautine^ the concluding note in Paracelsus^ and parallel charac¬
ters and plots in other early poems and dramas.Unmentioned by
Griffin or any other biographer is a brief but detailed article in
the Biographie on the Abbe Georg Joseph Vogler ("Abt Vogler"), and
a more lengthy article on Innocent XII ("The Pope" of The Ring and "
the Book) which concludes with the suggestive encomium, "Sa vie
fait son eloge.^
I
15
Catalogue p. 84, no. 526.
j See New Letters p. 39, n. 2,
^

for information concerning subsequent publication of the History.

See Life„ p. 25. DeVane, Handbook, p. 3, states that it
was the 1822 edition, 50 vols., which the young poet seems to have
read in toto; and adds that there were a considerable number of
other biographical dictionaries in the Browning library.
Joseph Fran9ois Michaud, Biographie universelle anaienne
et modeme, XLIV, 37 (Vogler); XX, 354 (Innocent XII). I have
consulted the 2nd ed., 1858, 45 vols.
 13

Griffin seems to have been the first biographer to point

out the great influence on young Browning of Nathaniel Wanley's
The Wondevs of the Lt-ttle hlovtd:
Perhaps no single volume in his father's collection
played such an important part in stimulating his early
love for the odds and ends of learning as that fascinat¬
ing storehouse of facts and fancy. . . . This book, with
its thousands of anecdotes illustrating the prodigies of
human nature, shows omnivorous reading, and upon its
treasures the father of the poet often drew for the
amusement of his children. . . . The influence of Nathaniel
Wanley can be traced from the Pauline of 1833 to the
Asolando volume of 1889.18
Apropos to our investigation of Browning's Catholic and
clerical sources, Griffin cites Wanley's account of the grotesgue
behavior of Pope Stephen and his three successors which the poet
incorporated as the theme of the first part of the Pope s speech
in The Ring and the Book, and the tale of Cardinal Crescentio s
black dog which appeared in Browning's last volume as "The Cardi¬
nal and the Dog."^^ Griffin does not mention scores of other
items in Wanley which are likely to have influenced Browning's
later portrayal of the clergy. A random sampling includes anec¬
dotes concerning the extraordinary fasting of the Counter-Reforma¬
tion Cardinal Charles Borromeo (p. 226); the refusal of Cardinal

^^Griffin, Life, pp. 20-21 and 22.

Griffin, Life, Griffin, p. 20, n. 3,
quotes
quotes an unpublished letter of the poet to Frederick Lehmann in
1873
1873.-.in which, with his notoriously bad memory for dates. Browni ng
cinpaks of a 1677 edition of Wanley. DeVane, however, in his HanHand-
speaks Wanley
book, p. 3, correctly cites the first 1678 edition, "from which the
poet gleaned much." Parenthetical -references in the following
paragraph are to the 1788 edition.
^^DeVane, Handbook, p. 536, cites the Crescentius anecdote
However, I have not
as occurring on p. 611 of the 1678 edition,
been abl e to find it in the 1788 edition.
 14

Reginald Pole to accept his election to the papacy, with Wanley's

pithy comment: I have read of many that would have been Popes,
but could not; I mention this man as one who could have been
Pope, but would not" (p. 229); and the appealing confession of
Pius V: "Cum essem religiosus, sperabam bene de salute animae
meae. Cardinal is factus extimui, Pontifex creatus pene despero"
(p. 425). Wanley included a complete list of all the popes,
from Peter to Pius VI (pp. 478ff.), often with biographical vi¬
gnettes containing such reputed aberrations as Paul Ill's incest
with his daughter (p. 489). In another place he has a similar
note about Alexander VI and his daughter Lucrezia Borgia (p. 450).
In a long and detailed section which recounts the beginnings of
the great libraries of the world, and which certainly caught the
attention of the young book-loving Browning, mention is made of
the growth of the Vatican Library (p. 584), of Charles Borromeo's
founding of the Ambrosian Library in Milan, and of Cardinal Jules
Mazarin's great library in Paris (p. 585). Mazarin's Machiavel¬
lian rise to power, first at Rome, and then at Paris, is also re¬
counted (p. 586).^^ Mention is made of the pride and pettiness
of the Jesuits (p. 416); and there is Luther's story of the just
punishment of the priest who had violated the seal of the confes¬
sional (p. 444). These and dozens of similar anecdotes concern¬
ing Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, priests, and monks, in this amazing
collection, while not likely to enhance the Catholic clergy's
reputation in the eyes of the impressionable young poet, would

0 save my
now having

iee the brief reference to Mazarin's unscrupulosity in

RB-EBBj I, 66.
 15

certainly have increased his fascination and sparked his curiosity

about the inhabitants of this apparently serio-comic religious
22
world across the English Channel.
Browning's early religious habits and attitudes were pre¬
dominantly derived from his mother. Without necessarily agreeing
23
with all of Betty Miller's psycho-analytical conclusions, we
can readily concede that Sarah Wiedemann Browning exerted a con¬
sistently strong and perhaps sometimes oppressive influence on
her son. She was a lifelong member of the Congregational Church,
York Street, Walworth, where "her children attended regularly, but
not always eagerly.From the instincts of her "distinctly
evangelical Christianity,"^^ the poet never entirely broke free,
even during his youthful rebellion under the aegis of Shelley and
Voltaire.^^ In a letter to her sister in 1849, shortly after

^^Another collection of foreign oddities in the Browning li¬

brary {Catalogue, p. 90, no. 594) was Thomas Coryate's Coryat’s
[sic] Crudities, 3 vols. (London, 1776). See especially Vol. I
for Coryate's amusing account of his visits to churches in France
and northern Italy, his genuine appreciation of the beauties of the
cathedrals, while regretting the "Romish" excesses perpetrated
therein, his wary attendance at "papistical masses," and his hilar¬
ious first-in-his-life encounters with nuns, monks, and priests.
Coryate later walked from Aleppo to India. Michael Strachen in
The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate (London, 1962), p. 1, de¬
scribes him as "writer, eccentric, wit, and one of the most tire¬
less, inquisitive, and courageous of all English travellers."
^^See Robert Browning: A Portrait (London, 1952).
^^DeVane, Handbook, p. 4.
^^Orr, Life, p. 18.
^^With the slight reservation suggested above, Betty Miller's
Robert Browning presents a reliable conjecture based on extant ^
evidence of the religious and moral tensions aroused by Browning s
early attraction to Shelley, and his friendship with Eliza Flowers.
See especially pp. 10-11, 28-29, and 32-33. See also Lionel
 16

Sarah Browning's death, Elizabeth Barrett Browning made it clear

that, except for his "fit of scepticism . . . twenty years ago,"
Robert comforted himself that he and his mother, to the moment of
her death, had shared the same religious convictions. During
their epistolary courtship Elizabeth and Robert assured each other
that they both were regular frequenters of "Independent Dissenting
Chapels" because of the appeal of "the simplicity of that praying
and speaking without books--and a little too from disliking the
28
theory of state churches."
Neither from his mother nor from the "Independent Dissenting"
preachers would Browning have learned much about the Catholic
Church or its clergy; and what little he did hear would not have
29
been complimentary.
The Reverend George Clayton was the pastor of York Chapel
when Robert Browning was baptized on June 14, 1812, and he was
still officiating at the same pulpit in 1845.^^ Though he is
reported once to have reprimanded young Browning for his inattention

^Stevenson, "Tennyson, Browning, and a Romantic

Fallacy," UTQ^ XIII (1943-44), 175-95, for an account of the re¬
markable similarity in influence of and reaction to Shelley on the
part of both Tennyson and Browning.
27
See the uncollected letter, quoted in Miller, Robert
Browning, p. 149; see also C. R. Tracy, "Browning's Heresies,"
SP, XXXIII (1936), p. 612.
28
RB—EBBj I, 145. See also I, 147, and The Letters of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon (New York,
1897), I, 390. Hereafter cited as Letters, ed. Kenyon.
Alfred Domett, a lifelong friend of Browning, recalls over¬
hearing the following sentence from the Rev. Joseph Irons, of
Camberwell Grove: "I am very sorry to say it, beloved brethren,
but it is an undoubted fact that Roman Catholic and midnight assas¬
sin are synonymous terms" (quoted in Griffin, Life, p. 50, n.3).
See Frederick Rogers, The Early Environment of Robert
Browning (privately printed, 1904), p. 8.
'^'^RB-EBB, I, 147.
 17

32 . .
to his sermons, in later life Browning was to speak of him ap¬
provingly as a model of the "simple, good, and sincere" clergy¬
man, and he was at least the partial inspiration for the preacher
of Chri-stmas—Eve.'^^ Further, Clayton is said to have once
remarked: "I cannot for a moment doubt that in the Roman Church,
however lamentably corrupt and depraved, there exists a portion
of the Church of Christ" --a sentiment very much like the poet s
own conclusion at the end of the "St. Peter's" section of Christ¬
mas Eve.
After the modest success of Paracelsus in 1835, Browning
began moving in London's literary society as a conspicuous fre¬
quenter of suppers and soirees. At one of these evenings he met
the great actor William Macready, and began his long intimate
friendship with Joseph Arnould and Alfred Domett, the future prime
35
minister of New Zealand.
DeVane {Handbook^ p. 72) writes that it is probable that
Browning's next poem, Sordello (1840), cost "more time and pains
than any other poem or volume of poems. ... He was occupied

^^See Rogers, p. 10.

^^See Letters, ed. Hood, p. 23, and DeVane, Handbook, p. 199
^^Quoted in Rogers, p. 13.
^^See T. R. Lounsbury, The Early Literary Career of Robert
Browning (London, 1911), pp. 29-44, for a full account of the
reception of Paracelsus. For Browning's swift social success,
see Maurice B. Cramer, "Browning's Friendships and Fame before Mar
riage," PMLA, LV (1940), 207-30. For his friendship with Domett,
see Griffin, Life, pp. 83-88, and The Diary of Alfred Domett 1872-
1885, ed. E. A. Horsman (London, 1953); for a recent study his
correspondence with Arnould, see Donald Smalley, Joseph Arnould^^
and Robert Browning: New Letters (1842-50) and a Verse Epistle,
PMLA, LXXX (1965), 90-101.
 18

seven years in its composition." In 1838 Browning suddenly em¬

barked on his first and briefest trip to Italy, intending to
finish his poem "among the scenes it describes,Sailing to
Trieste, he carried with him his tutor Cerutti's edition of the
Jesuit historian Daniel Bartoli's Dei- S'iwbo'Li, TvaspoTtati. al
Morale^ which he read and admired as a model of Italian style,
while deploring the Jesuit's pedantic moralizings.
Arriving in Venice on June 1, Browning was quickly entranced
by the Italian backgrounds and eagerly set about verifying and
elaborating the complicated historical details of his Sordetlo
which he had been studying with increasing interest during the
early months of 1838. There is no record, however--adverse or
otherwise--of his reactions to his first experiences of Italian
Catholicism. We know he was in Venice on the feast of Corous
Christi, June 9, and he undoubtedly mingled with the gay crowds
and stood fascinated in the Piazza San Marco when they silently
knelt in adoration before the exposed Eucharist as it was carried
in procession around the square by the Venetian Cardinal-Patriarch.
This was Browning's first taste of the "posturings and petti coat¬
ings," as he later lampooned the papal ceremonies in St. Peter's,^^

36
Orr, Life, p. 88.
37,
See William C. DeVane Browning's Parleyings, The Auto-
b^ography of a Mind (New Haven, Conn., 1927), pp. 50-68.

See Griffin, Life, p. 94; DeVane, Handbook, p. 82;

Sources of Browning's Bordello," BP, XXXIV
(1937), 467-96; and Goldsmith, "The Relation of Browning's Poetry
tP^Religious Controversy," op. cit. (above, p. 3, n. 8), pp. 36-
39
See Griffin, Life, p. 98.
40
Christrms-Eve, xxii. 1324-25.
 19

' but which he referred to in Sovdello with no hint of disapproval:

"that feast gone by / God's great day of Corpus Domini" (II1.764-
66).
After two weeks in Venice, Browning traveled north and west
through Bassano to Romano, the ancestral home of the Ecelini--
' great Ghibellines and supporters of the Emperor Frederick in his
quarrels with the Papal Guelfs, and central characters in Sovdello.
There a canon of the cathedral told Browning that five years before
he had seen the skeleton of Alberic, the second son of the Mantuan
41
tyrant, Ecelin II, dug up from its ancient grave. This is the
single recorded instance of Browning's speaking with a priest
during his first Italian trip, and there is no way of knowing
whether it was anything more than a perfunctory tuvista contact.
A few days later he was back at Bassano, and from there walked
northward to the monastery at Oliero to which Ecelin II had sud-
42
denly retired after the death of his wife, Adelaide. This was
Browning's first visit to a convent or monastery.
All in all, we can conclude that Browning had little leisure
on this brief trip to explore seriously new Italian religious
vistas. He was seeking material on Sordello and his historical
u, environment, and within a month he had satisfied himself and was
on his way back to England via the Tyrol, Germany, and Belgium.
Browning himself reported to Miss Euphrasia Haworth in a letter
written a few days after he had returned to London in July, 1838:
"I saw very few Italians, 'to know,' that is. Those I did see I

^^See DeVane, Handbook, p. 80, and Sovdello, VI.789-93.

^^See Griffin, Life, p. 96, and Sovdello, I.138-39, III.
417-27, 517-18, etc.
 20

liked."^^
Six years later Browning returned to Italy, this time for a
more leisurely stay of four months, probably from August to
44
December, 1844, He landed at Naples, wandered about Sorrento,
and looked down on the lovely bay from a spot near where Shelley
had written his "Stanzas in Dejection." The countryside seems
to have inspired "The Italian in England" and "The Englishman in
Italy," both of which, as DeVane suggests (pp. 157-58), may have
been written at a later date while recollected in tranquillity.

43
Letters, ed. Hood, p. 3. The story of the critics' almost
universal rejection of Sordello, and of its symbolic notoriety,
even today, as the most difficult poem in English, is too well
known to be repeated here--nor is it pertinent to our subject.
See Lounsbury, The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning, pp.
74-94, and Cramer, "Browning's Friendship and Fame Before Marriage,"
op. cit. (above, note 35), for detailed information on the reception
of the poem. See also DeVane, Handbook, pp. 85-87, for the
humorous reactions of Carlyle and Douglas Jerrold, the more toler- *
ant comments of Elizabeth Barrett and Walter S. Landor, and the
judicious evaluation of DeVane. While it is wrong to say that
Browning was not sensitive to critical attacks--Pau7-z:ne and Sordel-^
lo remained lifelong sore spots--there is an appealing side to his
sensitivity. While living at Warwick Crescent, for example, he
had two loudly hissing pet geese to whom he genially gave the sug¬
gestive names "Edinburgh" and "Quarterly" (see Griffin, Life, p.
36), Above all. Browning was no idle weeper; he set to work
restoring his reputation by pursuing "the humble way" of his
Bells and Pomegranates series--eight small pamphlets in which be- ^
tween 1841 and 1846 were to appear, along with his unsuccessful
dramas, his most successful early poems (see Griffin, pp. 122-35.
and DeVane, p, 17).
44
See Orr, Life, p. 126. This trip is briefly mentioned in
a letter to Alfred Domett, dated Feb, 23, 1845 {Robert Browning
and Alfred Domett, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, London, 1906, p. 109),
 21

The latter poem refers to specific events during his tour--his

visit to the Isle of the Sirens on October 4, and the feast of Our
Lady of the Rosary (October 6): "Tommorow's the Feast / of the
Rosary's Virgin" (11.250-51), At Naples he met a young Neapolitan
gentleman, Scotti, who proved an invaluable traveling guide and
companion.Together they journeyed northward and Browning saw
Rome for the first time. He has left us no explicit record of
what he saw or thought or felt, or whom he met. Mrs. Orr tells
us that he and Scotti spent most of their evenings with an old
English acquaintance of Browning, then the Countess Carducci, He
visited the grave of Shelley, traced Byron's wanderings in Rome
and its environs, and one day dropped into the little church of
Santa Prassede, and saw the tombs of Cardinal Achera (1286) and
Cardinal Cetivi (1474) which were the beginnings of his inspiration
“ 46 . .
for the future poem, "The Bishop Orders his Tomb." During his
stay in Rome, he passed up an opportunity to meet Pope Gregory XVI
(1831-46), seemingly because he was not at the time particularly
interested, as he later recalled in a letter to Miss Julia Wedg-

^^See Orr, Life^ p. 126. See also Osbert Burdett, The

Bvown'ings (Boston, 1929), pp. 84-85.
^^See John Murray's A Handbook for Travellers -in Central
Italy, Part II, pp. 147-48, for a detailed description of the^
basilica. Murray's numerous Handbooks were the sine-qua-non's of
the 19th-century English traveller, and his two volumes on Italy
{Central Italy and Northern Italy) provide contemporary descriptions
of the places Browning visited during his Italian sojourns. My
references are to the 3rd ed., London, 1853. On his second Ital¬
ian trip Browning would have had the 1843 edition. In a letter
to H S. Boyd on May 26, 1847, Elizabeth Browning quotes, from
Northern Italy, a description of the bells of Pisa {Elizabeth Bar¬
rett to Mr. Boyd, ed. Barbara P. McCarthy, New Haven, Conn., 1955,
p. 284).
 22

wood. 47
Records of this second Italian trip, then, like those of the
first, reveal relatively little about Browning's contacts with
real clerical characters or situations. Except for the historical
research for Sordello on his first trip, he seems to have limited
himself to the routine sightseeing of the typical English gentleman-
traveler, while neglecting an opportunity for a papal audience.
Further, save for the pleasant companionship of Scotti, his personal
contacts were limited almost exclusively to the English and Ameri¬
can habitues at the salon of his friend, the expatriate countess.
Yet he must have been struck by the extent to which an ever-visible
religion is indigenous to every Italian scene, and how deeply, and
often oppressively, it impregnated the Italian spirit.'^® It was
these beginnings of his experience of the Mediterranean religious
sensibility which were later to mature into his great clerical
poems.
The first personal Catholic contact to which Browning has as¬
signed any importance occurred during the year preceding his second
Italian journey--in a manner quite different from what he may have
been led to expect from either his youthful reading or his Italian

47c
oee Robert Brown'ing and Jutta Wedgwood^ op. cit. (above,
note 12), p. 68: "Once when I was at Rome there befell me some
chance of being presented to the Pope—(Gregory, that was).
However, I did not go."
48tu ^ .
The first personal view of Italian Catholicism by a near¬
contemporary, Charles Cavendish Greville (1794-1865), might well
describe Browning's impressions: "In this tour, what really fasci¬
nated the sceptical Greville was that astounding phenomenon, the
Roman Catholic Church. For the first time, he faced Romanism,
not as a political controversy, but as a religion. He was, at
once, disgusted, hypnotized, forced into admiration, repelled and
mystified—yet always interested" [The Greville Diary^ ed. Philip
W. Wilson, New York, 1927, I, 213).
 23

studies and travels. In the summer of 1843 the Irish temperance

crusader and Capuchin friar. Father Theobald Mathew (1790-1856),
49
began his English crusade. His preaching in Ireland between
1840 and 1843 had been credited with cutting both the consumption
of liquor and the crime rate by fifty per cent. After preaching
and administering the total abstinence pledge to tens of thousands
of Protestants and Catholics in Lancashire and Yorkshire, Father
Mathew arrived in London in August, where, with the personal en¬
dorsements of the Duke of Wellington, Lord Brougham, and Lord
Stanhope, he was "the lion of the season and was overwhelmed with
invitations."^^ By year's end his Temperance Society numbered
six hundred thousand members in England alone. Typical of the

^^Theobald Mathew was born of a prominent family in County

Tipperary. Expelled from the seminary at Maynooth for the rather
ironic offense of hosting a party of fellow students in his room,
the future temperance crusader entered the Order of Friars Minor
Capuchin (O.F.M. Cap.) at Dublin, where he was ordained a priest
in 1814. He was the provincial superior of the Irish Capuchins
in 1828, and was once suggested for the bishopric of Cork. Upon
completing his term as provincial, he began a career of social
work and extraordinarily successful temperance preaching, which
took him throughout Ireland and England, and, in 1849, to the
United States. On Dec. 18 he was admitted by resolution to a
seat on the floor of both houses of Congress--an honor granted
only once before, to Lafayette--and on Dec. 20 was entertained by
President Taylor at the White House. His American campaign took
him through 25 states from New England to Arkansas, during which
he administered the pledge to over 700,000 people. Returning ex¬
hausted to Ireland in Dec., 1851, he suffered from ill-health
until his death at Queenstown (Cobh), Dec. 8, 1856. For fuller
biographical details, see John F. Maguire, Father Mathew^ A Biog¬
raphy (New York, 1864); Frank J. Mathew, Father Mathew^ His Life
and Times (London, 1890); Thomas F. Healy, "The Apostle of Tem¬
perance," The Catholia Vorld, CXXXVIII (1934), 436-42; and the
DNB.
^^DNBj XIII, 33.
 24

spirit of his official reception were the closing words of his '
public welcome to Norwich by that city's Anglican bishop. Dr.
Edward Stanley:
And now, Reverend Sir, you, my friend and brother from
another island, I meet you here not as a Roman Catholic
priest; I differ from your creed--I will candidly tell
you I am even hostile to it; but I meet you here in a
nobler, in a more comprehensive character than that of
a priest,--! meet you as a man like myself, as a Christian
brother, as a Christian brother on neutral ground, where
Christians of all denominations delight to meet and to
congregate together.51
In a letter to Alfred Domett, dated October 9, 1843, Browning "
described his attendance at one of Mathew's meetings, and typically
mentioned his being most impressed by the evident power of the
preacher's personality:
The most notable thing of the year has been, to me, the
visit of Father Mathew to London—this reverting to the
simplest form of worship (for the converts are converts
to his hand and voice and eye, and nothing beyond), all
these men choosing to become hettev because he, who was
standing there, better—he hade them so become; you
should have seen it, as I did. I must write out my ,
feeling on the subject in as plain prose as I can, some¬
where and somehow, and send it you. I stood on the
scaffold with him, and heard him preach, beside.52
And almost two years later, in a letter to Elizabeth Barrett on
May 24, 1845, he again recalled Father Mathew as a "good . . .
gentle and simple" man, and reminded her that he had shaken hands
CO
with the preacher.
Father Mathew's personal attractiveness was recognized and

51
Quoted in Maguire, Father Mathew, pp. 291-92.
52
Robert Browning and Alfred Domett^ pp. 92-93.
I, 77.
 25

remarked upon by the whole spectrum of contemporary literary

figures. Young Thackeray, who met Mathew on his 1842 Irish tour,
wrote: "It was impossible in hearing him to know but from previous
acquaintance with his character, whether he was a Whig or Tor^,
Catholic or Protestant.And Carlyle, who heard the crusading
friar while on his tour to gather materials for Past and Present,
related his impressions:
Passing near some Catholic chapel, and noticing a small
crowd in a yard there with flags, white sticks, and
brass bands, we stopped our hackney coachman, and stepped
forth into the thing, and found it to be Father Mathew
distributing the pledge to the lost sheep of the place,
thousands strong of both sexes. ... I almost cried to
listen to him, and could not but lift my broadbrim to
him at the end when he called for God's blessing on the
vow these poor wretches had taken. I have seen nothing
as religious since I set out on my travels as this squalid
scene--nay, nothing properly religious at all.^^
We can conclude, then, that up to the time of his marriage
and third journey to Italy, Browning's experience of Catholic
clerics and the knowledge of them which he incorporated into his

54,
^The Irish Sketch Book . . . (London, 1869), p. 62.
55.
^Quoted without citation in Mathew, Father Mathew, pp. 79-
80 Mrs. Carlyle, accompanied by John Robertson, once sat on a
scaffold to hear Mathew, as had Browning (see D. A. Wilson, Car¬
lyle on Cromwell and Others, New York, 1925, pp. 232-33), and her
enthusiasm more than equaled her husband's. She wrote to him,
Auq. 9, 1843: "You know I have always had the greatest reverence
for that priest; and when I heard he was in London, attainable to
me, I felt that I must see him . . . . [I] saw the thousands of
people all hushed into awful silence, with not a single exception
the only religious meeting I ever saw in cockneyland which
had not plenty of scoffers on its outskirts. . . . Fr. Mathew
stood ... so good and simple looking! ... I could not speak
for excitement all the way home. When I went to bed I could not
sleep; the pale faces I had seen haunted me, and Fr. Mathew s
smile" {Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. J. A.
Froude, New York, 1913, I, 165-67).
 26

early poems, seems, on the basis of available evidence, limited

almost exclusively to what he had culled from his reading. With
the sole exception of Father Mathew, whose appeal was totally non¬
sectarian, there is no record of any significant personal con¬
tacts with Catholics, lay or clerical—and even his meeting with
Mathew, despite its professedly strong impression upon the poet,
may have been only the briefest of introductions. Browning's
letters disclose that he was a privileged listener, one of the
limited group present on the platform and exchanging a handshake
with the lecturer. But there is no record of anything more, no
proof that they ever met again.
The influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the thought
and work of her husband cannot be overestimated; and yet it is
difficult, if not impossible, to delineate precisely either its
effects or its limits. Recent interpretations have swung full-
circle from the idyllic, near-legendary sentimentalities of the
late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century biographers
to Betty Miller's single-sided but revealing psychological study.
There is certainly no disputing the fact that Elizabeth's
religious commitment was deep and life-long and that Browning's
current somewhat latent religious interests revived in the late
1840's with the encouragement of his wife. As indicated earlier
in this chapter, Elizabeth Barrett long before she met Robert
Browning was an enthusiastic Non-Conformist or "Independent Dis¬
senter," vigorously unsympathetic towards any of the non-autonomous
prescriptive brands of doctrine or church-polity, Anglican, Pres¬
byterian, or Methodist.^^ Her piety was heart-felt, uninhibited,

56
Elizabeth was equally impatient with rationalism and posi¬
tivism, yet could tolerate their existence as a moral crisis
through which men must now pass (see Letters^ ed. Kenyon, II, 427).
 27

57
and often quite impressive; and even before her interest in
Swedenborgianism and her preoccupations with mesmerism, she often
58
expressed her attraction toward a mystical approach to God.
God demonstrably exists, Christ is divine, and His Church is in¬
visible—this was her all-sufficient doctrinal bed-rock; any¬
thing more was "sectarianism" and "scholastic paradox" (I, 83 and
II, 156).^^ She later prided herself on the simplicity of her
son's baptism (I, 415), disapproving as she did of High Church
sacramentalism as an unseemly indulgence in "the tendencies we
have towards making mysteries of God's simplicities" (I, 145).
Although her sisters leaned towards Tractarianism,®® Eliza¬
beth saw such a movement as running counter to the spirit of the
times (I, 387), recommended refutations of its positions to her
correspondents (I, 208), encouraged her friend and teacher, Hugh
Stuart Boyd, in his "Anti-Puseyistic Pugilism" (I, 138 and 141),
and described herself as "recoiling" from High-Churchism and all
"exclusive doctrine" (I, 191). In another letter, while regret¬
ting the Tractarians' and especially Newman's slippage towards
Rome, she hoped that it would now prove to all the real character

^^See, for example, her expressions of sympathy to her sick

friend, Mrs. James Martin (ibid., I, 33-34), and to Miss Mitford
(ibid., II, 174-75).
^^See, for example, ibid., I, 49-50.
^^Parenthetical references in this and the following para¬
graph are to Letters^ ed. Kenyon.
^*^See Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to her Sister^
1846-18S9j ed. Leonard Huxley (London, 1929), pp. 74-75.
after cited as Letters^ ed. Huxley. For examples of Elizabeth s
care not to offend her sisters' feelings, see Twenty-Two Un¬
published Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browmng
(New York, 1935), pp. 23, 27, and 69. Hereafter cited as 22 Let¬
ters.
 28

of the movement, since its logical outcome had been so strikingly

displayed. At the same time she admitted some respect for the
honesty of those Tractarians who did defect to Rome (I, 210-11).®^
She joined her father in supporting Catholic Emancipation in 1829
and the various Irish Church acts in the 1830's because they were
seen as contributing towards the Independents' goal of State
Church disestablishment (I, 252).^^
Under the influence of the eccentric and erudite Hugh Stuart
Boyd (1781-1848), Elizabeth's early passion for Greek was chan¬
nelled mostly into a specialized interest in the Greek Christian
authors and poets; and during 1842 she contributed a number of
essays on the Christian poets to the Athenaeion. She became stu¬
dent, amanuensis, and friendly critic for the blind scholar, and
throughout the years of their friendship (1827-1848) Greek lan¬
guage, literature, and patristic theology were topics seldom ab-

In a letter to her sisters in 1850 {Letters^ ed. Huxley,

p. 130), Elizabeth picturesquely refers to the "papal aggression"
of that year as the "R.C. irruption of Bishops," and playfully
reminds her "dear tractarian people" that they are the cause of it.
But unlike so many of her contemporaries, Elizabeth maintained her
equilibrium, and wrote to Mrs. Martin that she was neither "fright¬
ened'^' nor "frenzied," nor able to "get up much steam about it.
The Great Insult' was simply a great mistake, the consequence
(natural enough) of the Tractarian idiocies as enacted in Italy"
{Lettersj ed. Kenyon, I, 477).
62
Browning's opinion on the Irish Church question was similar,
and perhaps more objective. Charles Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two
Hermspheres (London, 1898), II, 261, wrote that the poet felt the '
Church of Ireland "altogether indefensible. The Catholic Church
was the Church of the Irish people, and the Protestant Church the
Church of the English people, and this was a fact of which legisla¬
tion might properly take cognisance."
 29

63
sent from her many letters to him.
Boyd himself was as much a religious polemicist as he was
a scholar. As Barbara McCarthy points out: "One theme dominates
most of his theological writings: the recurrent argument that the
early Fathers of the church held strictly Protestant views and
that only corruption can be expected of Roman 'Catholicks' and
Unitarians.Somewhat to Elizabeth's chagrin, he persisted in
opposing the Dissenters in their demands for national church dis¬
establishment because he feared that it could only hasten the far
worse establishment of Popery, which he prophesied would follow
"in forty or fifty years, perhaps in a less time." In a letter
to Boyd postmarked June 24, 1839, Elizabeth playfully referred to
his "grand prophetic view of the Pope's dynasty which is to be in
our O'Connelized country.On at least three other occasions
she felt free to question his opinion that neither Chrysostom nor
Cyril believed‘in transubstantiation.^^ Yet in another letter,

^^See EZizaheth Barrett to Mr. Boyd: Unpublished Letters of

Elizabeth Barrett Broyming to Hugh Stuart Boyd, ed. Barbara P.
McCarthy (New Haven, Conn., 1955). Hereafter cited as EB to Mr.
Boyd. Miss McCarthy's introduction contains biographical informa¬
tion on Boyd as well as a running account of his friendship with
Elizabeth Browning. Other letters of their correspondence were
published by F. G. Kenyon in his Letters, and Bennett Weaver,
"Twenty Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart
Boyd," PMLA, LXV (1950), 397-418. Elizabeth's poem "Wine of
Cyprus" commemorates their friendship.
^^EB to Mr. Boyd, "Introduction," p. xvii. See also p.
xxxii.
^^The Fathers Not Papists (London, 1834). Quoted \r\ EB to
Mr. Boyd, p. 203, n. 4. See also letter of May 30, 1834 (ibid.,
pp*. 202-03).
^^Ibid., p. 234.
^^See ibid., pp. 94, 95, and 113. See also p. 206, and
Letters, ed. Kenyon, I, pp. 116-17, for a mention of other of
their theological disagreements.
 30

she surprisingly and rather self-consciously apologized to Boyd

for her family's retaining a Catholic servant: "You will think
we have a great deal to do with Catholics!"^®
Often she described herself as "weary of controversy in
religion," and affirmed that she did not find it profitable "to
examine any more the brickbats of controversy";^^ yet she seems
to have remained constantly informed on all current religious
subjects, controversial and otherwise, and to have been familiar
with the literature on the subject, both classical and recent.
Elizabeth's piety, if not her theology, overflowed into
poetry, and a critic in the Quarterly Review for September, 1840,
while discussing in mostly admiring terms her recent work,
protested warmly against "her reckless repetition of the name of
God," She defended the appropriateness of her religious al¬
lusions in a letter to her friend, John Kenyon, and retorted with
the question as to whether her poetry is "Christian enough.
Her religious proclivities, however, stopped far short of
any hint of attraction to things Catholic, and in her next letter

0O
EB to Mr. Boyd, p. 35,
Ibid., p. 206.
70
Letters, ed. Kenyon, I, 116.
See, for example, her references to Southey's Book of the
Church,^and the answer of his "Papistical opponent," Charles
Butler's Book of the Roman Catholic Church {EB to Mr. Boyd, p. 65),
and to the Greek Fathers, Gregory and Chrysostom, to Hooker and
Jeremy Taylor, and Tracts for the Times {Letters, ed. Kenyon, I,
159), and to the Dublin Review (ibid., I, 242).
Quoted ibid., I, 65. See also I, 117, for Elizabeth's
reference to a similar complaint from the editor of the Athenaeum.
^■^Ibid., I, 127-29.
 31

to Kenyon she strenuously objected to his erroneous interpretation

of lines 243-244 of her poem "Pan Is Dead," and asserted cateqor-
ically "that no mortal priest (of St. Peter's or otherwise) is
referred to . . . but the Saviour Himself, Who is . . . the only
74
'priest' recognized in the New Testament." Obiter dicta in
Elizabeth's correspondence indicate her general and rather conven¬
tional unfriendliness toward the Catholic Church. Quite regular¬
ly and naturally she employed such usually opprobrious terms as
75
"Romish," "papist," "papistical," and "Jesuitical," and passed
on a current sprightly story about the Mohammedan origins of St.
Peter's chair in Rome before whom "the Papists . . . stand . . .
[in] silent reverence.Elizabeth evidenced some slight famil¬
iarity with Catholic liturgy when she humorously apologized to
Boyd's pretended reprimand: "Confiteov tibi, oh reverend father
These, then, were the prevailing attitudes vis-a'-vis reli¬
gion in general and Catholicism and Catholic churchmen in particu¬
lar which Elizabeth Barrett had established by the time of her
first letters to and visits by Robert Browning. It would seem
that such sentiments required little reciprocal adjustment on his
part—they but enkindled a renewed concern and less-detached in-

^^Ibid., I, 130.
^^See, for example, ibid., I, 100; II, 4-5; and EB to Mr.
Boyd, p. 65. In a later letter (ed. Kenyon, II, 115), she de¬
scribes Kossuth, the disappointing Hungarian patriot, as one who
"lies like a Jesuit."
'^^EB to Mr. Boydj p. 71.
Lettersi ed. Kenyon, I, 154. These words occur in the
prayer, "Confiteor," at the beginning of the Mass, and, with some
local variations, are also recited by the penitent in the Sacra¬
ment of Penance (Confession).
 32

terest, and provided him with one more proof that their love and
78
union had been "predestinated from the beginning."
The first reference to clerics in their correspondence oc¬
curred on January 11, 1845, in Browning's second letter, where he
gallantly promised not to shock Miss Barrett by mentioning now
"the savage things about Popes and imaginative religions that I
79
must say" in future forthright poems. In another early letter,
Elizabeth bantered with Browning over the courtly vow he seemed to
have made at the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto to make giddy with
flattery a susceptible woman like herself—in a manner which sug-
Of)
gests an easy recall of an earlier jest. A month later Brown¬
ing was amusing Miss Barrett with a story about the religious
superstitions of a storm-frightened old woman he had once observed
in Italy, as she knelt "before a little picture of the Virgin,"
ludicrously lighting and blowing out her candle before and after
each clap of thunder, hoping both to save wax and to propitiate
the elements. Three references in letters of July and August
to previous conversations about "Italy and the Cardinals" and

78
Letters, ed. Huxley, p. 5. H. B. Charlton, "Browning as
a Poet of Religion," BJRL, XXVII (1942-43), p. 274, remarks: "In
the next few years and partly through his marriage to Elizabeth
Barrett, Browning's religious sentiments became more urgent and
more articulate." See also John W. Cunliffe, "Elizabeth Barrett's
Influence on Browning's Poetry," PMLA, XXIII (1908), 169-83.
I, 6.
80
See ibid., I, 100. Loreto, in the mountains of central
Italy, is the legendary site of the Santa Casa ("Holy House") of
the Holy Family, reputed to have been miraculously transported
from Nazareth in 1294. It is still one of the most popular shrines
of Italy. The Brownings spent a day there in the summer of 1848
(see Letters, ed. Kenyon, I, 381, and Letters, ed. Hood, p. 21).
®^See I, 125.
 33

"Rome and Cardinal Acton" suggest that contemporary Roman affairs

were regular and convenient "neutral" topics in the inhibited
82
atmosphere of Browning's early visits to Wimpole Street. In
September, 1845, Browning shared with Elizabeth his impatience
with religious obedience and submission, and stated his adamant
83
opposition to the notion of an infallible church. In other
letters they expressed their mutual enjoyment of the gothic hor¬
rors of Matthew Lewis' The Monk and Richard Hengist Horne's bal-
84
lad, the "Monk of Swineshead Abbey."
After their wedding and flight from England, Robert and
Elizabeth rested for a few weeks in Paris. In a letter to her
sisters from Paris Elizabeth reported a humorous example of her
husband's fascination with out-of-the-way conversations, and an
example of his interest in current religious questions, as he dis¬
cussed in great good humor, and in Latin, the Oxford Movement
with the local clergy.®^ Another instance of Browning's consistent
graciousness and geniality with individual Catholics occurred
during their first weeks at Pisa, when the Brownings were intro¬
duced to the Italian custom of blessing the rooms of a home on
prescribed days; "Yesterday a priest came in full canonicals to
bless all the rooms of the house. Robert met him in the passage,
and taking off his hat, desired him not to turn from his usual
course on our account, as nobody's blessing could do any body any

®^See ibid., I, 142, 145, and 148.

®^See ibid., I, 220-21, and II, 345.
^"^See ibid., I, 228, 368, and 370.
®^See 22 Letters, p. 8: "[Robert] talks Latin to the
priests who inquire at three in the morning whether Newman or
Pusey are likely 'lapsare in erroribus.'"
 34

86 ^
harm." And to her sisters from Pisa Elizabeth wrote:
What he likes alone among all the catholic forms, is the
carrying of the crucifix before the corpse, in the many
ghastly funerals which pass our windows. He thinks it
significant and touching that the sign of faith should
precede the dumb Dead, and "would rather like it" to be
done in his own case!
Often she impatiently asked him not to go to the window, "but
sometimes he cries out . . 'I can't help it. Ba-- it draws me.'"®^
We know how strongly Browning disagreed with the Oxford
Movement and all its "catholicizing" tendencies and consequences,®®
and how consistently he disbelieved in blessings by formulas; and
yet such instances as these--and undoubtedly many more were passed
over unrecorded--!ndicate that he was not a "vulgar bigot" or "the *
dupe of fantastic prejudices," as some early Catholic commentators
branded him. Nor is there any record of his ever having used

86.
Letters^ ed. Huxley, p. 17. During his last days at
Asolo, Browning customarily bowed to peasants who greeted him, but
removed his hat in returning the salutation of a priest. "I al¬
ways salute the church," was his explanation; "I respect it" (see
Lilian Whiting, The Brownings: Their Life and Art. Boston, 1911.
p. 288).
87
22 Letters^ p. 24. The two dots do not indicate omissions
but are an idiosyncrasy of Elizabeth Barrett's punctuation.
See ibid., p. 23: "We are strongly against every Pretence
or pretext of Puseyism—Robert so strongly." Twenty years later
Browning explained to Miss Blagden that the principal benefit of
his recent honorary degree (D.C.L.) is "that it gives me the
natural right to come down to Oxford every now and then, nominally
to vote against Dr. Pusey, really to see what . . . Pen is about"
{Dearest Isa: Robert Browning's Letters to Isabella Blagden^ e*d.
Edward C. McAleer, Austin, Texas, 1951, pp. 271-72)
89 rr /

See "The Ring and the Book," The Dublin Review, XIII (1869),
p. 48, and Joseph Rickaby, S.J., "Browning as a Religious Teacher "
The Month, LXVIII (1890), 190. Rickaby is referring to Christmas-
Eve.
 35

in his poetry, letters, or conversation, any of the "vulgar"

terminology ("Romish," "Papist," etc.) which was habitual with
90
his contemporaries, and even with his wife. His quarrel was
with the Church as idea and institution, and not with its sincere
members, be they its ministers or its communicants.
From this time on, Robert and Elizabeth Browning frequently
visited Italian churches and attended their services, though ad¬
mittedly not for any intrinsically religious appeal or sympathy,
but for aesthetic reasons, or to hear a particularly prominent
preacher. In a letter from Pisa to her sister-in-law, Sarianna
Browning, Elizabeth described their "quiet silent life" in which
"the grand event" is "going to hear the Friar preach in the
Duomo."^^ Writing to her sisters in September, 1847, she com¬
mented on the attractive differences between the holiday-spirited
Italian observance of the Lord's Day and the dour English practice,
and went on to describe a recent thanksgiving procession conducted
on the occasion of the granting of the Tuscan constitution. She
mentioned with evident pleasure the details of the procession, the
blessing of local banners, and the joyfully triumphant singing of
. 92
the "Veni Creator" and "Te Deum"—and all this on a Sunday!
Christmas Mass at St. Peter's was a "must" on their three visits
to Rome; and at least once Elizabeth's attitude verged on some¬
thing more than that of a detached Protestant tourist, as she con¬
fessed to John Ruskin:
I was able to go out on Christmas morning (a wonderful
event for me) and hear the silver trumpets in St. Peter's.

^*^0nce, in a letter to Edward Dowden (ed. Hood, p. 123),

Browning playfully used the word "Jesuitic."
Letters 3 ed. Kenyon,_I, 321.
^^See Letters^ ed. Huxley, pp. 44-45.
 36

Well, it was very fine. I never once thought of the

Scarlet Lady, nor of the Mortara case, nor anything to
spoil the pleasure. Yes, and I enjoyed it both
aesthetically and devotionally, putting my own words to
the music. Was it wise, or wrong?93
A most embarrassing experience occured at the monastery of
Vallombrosa in July, 1847.^^ With the hope of escaping the sum- ^

93,
Letters, ed. Kenyon, II, 300. See also II, 150, where
Mrs. Browning expresses her pleasure at being able to go to St.
Peter s on Christmas, 1853, despite a siege of fever. Browning's
attraction both for monasteries and midnight Mass persisted after
the death of his wife. Rogers, Early Environment, p. 16, describes
Browning as he at least once scandalized "good Protestant friends
when attending high Mass at St. Peter's at Rome, by exclaiming
audibly at the elevation of the Host: 'It is too good not to be
true.'" One of his favorite summer haunts in his later years was '
St. Pierre de Chartreuse near Grenoble, where he spent several
months in 1881 and 1882. One of the attractions was its proximity
to the great Carthusian monastery, the Grande Chartreuse, where he
would often spend the night in order to attend midnight Mass.
San anna Browning once accompanied her brother. She was not al-
lowed to enter the monastery, but slept in the adjoining convent
(see Orr, Life, p. 313, and Griffin, Life, p. 267).
Vallombrosa was founded by St. John Gualbert (ca. 985-10731 -
on the northwest slope of Monte Secchieta, 3140 feet above the sea
Gualbert adopted the rule of St. Benedict, but added to its austeri¬
ty. His Idea was to unite the ascetic advantages of the eremetic
l^e to a life in community, avoiding the psychological and moral '
danprs of the former. The congregation was active in the 11th-
century reform struggles against simony, and this formed a long¬
standing bond, both of ideals and customs, between it and the
French reformers at Cluny. The Vallombrosan Congregation flour¬
ished, and by 1200 numbered over 60 monasteries in Italy and
°'"''9iral monastery was burned by the troops of
in r received part of his early education
in the restored monastery, Milton visited it in 1638, and an ob-
"

was established in 1654. In 1808 Napoleon's troops

plundered Vallombrosa, and it was finally suppressed by the Ital-
j ^ allowed to remain and
hn?iH- church and meteorological station, while the abbey
buildings became a school of forestry. See the Catholic Encyyalo-
 37

mer's heat, the Brownings set out at four in the morning for the
monastery which was located slightly more than eighteen mountainous
miles from Florence, and, armed with a letter of recommendation,
planned to spend two months or more with the reputedly hospitable
95
monks. Five days later they returned to Florence, chagrined
and indignant at the refusal of the abbot to agree with their plan.
Exasperated letters from Elizabeth during the next four months re¬
hearsed the unpleasant events:
We were four hours doing the [last] five miles, so you
may fancy what rough work it was. . . . The worst was
that, there being a new abbot at the monastery--an
austere man, jealous of his sanctity and the approach
of women--our letter, and Robert's eloquence to boot,
did nothing for us, and we were ingloriously and ig-
nominiously expelled at the end of five days. For
three days we were welcome; for two more we kept our
ground; but after that, out we were thrust, with bag¬
gage and expectations. Nothing could be much more
provoking.96
This incident throws light on the poet's still rather super¬
ficial grasp of the basic nature and purpose of an institution so
much a part of Catholic life, despite the erudite details with
which he was already enriching his religious poems. Had Browning
at this time been more conversant with Catholicism, the un¬
pleasantness at Vallombrosa need never have occurred. The project
he proposed was to make a prolonged summer holiday at a monastery,

94 (cont gpj [William Wetmore Story], "Vallombrosa,"

Blackwood's Magazine, CXXIX (1881), 483-508. For a full account
of the Brownings' Vallombrosa "adventure," see McCarthy, "Browning
and the Roman Catholic Church", op. cit. (above, p. 3, n. 7).
^^See Letters, ed. Huxley, p. 35, for Elizabeth's preliminary
enthusiasm for the trip.
^^Letters, ed. Kenyon, I, 333; see also 325, 336-37, 340-41,
and 342-43.
 38

a plan grounded in a misconception of the essential character of

such an establishment--that it was the religious counterpart of a
public inn. While Vallombrosa was known for its welcome to
travellers whom, in the Benedictine spirit, it regularly accom¬
modated, a monastery does not offer unlimited shelter to excur¬
sionists. Its gratuitous food and lodging are intended primarily
for the sick and for poor travellers, not vacationers--intended to
benefit the needy without interfering with the privacy and seclu-
sion of the monks. The salient facts regarding Vallombrosa
must have been attainable in a city not twenty miles away; yet
the Brownings were apparently unaware and unwarned that their plan
go
for a three months' stay was unfeasible.
Furthermore^ Browning, always the sensitive gentleman, would
never have intruded himself where he was unwelcome. The only

97
Story defends their hospitality: "They practiced hospi¬
tality from the very first" ("Vallombrosa," p. 489); "The great
precepts of the monastery which San Giovanni ordained, were charity
and hospitality" (p. 490)--while Story described himself as one
who had "no special admiration or sympathy for monastic bodies" (p.
487). The regulations for receiving women were not the caprice
of the new superior, but the rules of the order: "The laws of
their order not permitting women to enter the monastery, they
built a house expressly for them, for both sick poor and visitors"
(p. 490). Kenyon, therefore, in Letters^ I, 325, oversimplifies
when he speaks of the "misogynist principles" of the monks.
Further, the abbot extended the Browning's stay two days to provide
them an^opportunity to prepare for their unexpected return journey.
This trip possibly resulted from their reading Murray's
Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy which, in its 1847 edi¬
tion, listed a trip to the three monasteries of Vallombrosa, Verni,
and Carnaldoli for the first time. Mrs. Browning's letters show
that they followed the route outlined in the Handbook^ and Murray
makes no mention of limitations placed on the stay of travellers.
 39

satisfactory explanation of his faux pas, therefore, is that he

did not realize the predicament into which Elizabeth and he were
entering. The picture of Browning playing "on the organ in the
99
chapel, some Gregorian chant perhaps, or a hymn of Pergolesi's,"
and at the end of three days making his gratitude apparent in his
"best Tuscan"is not that of a man who suspects he is about to
be requested to withdraw as a guest turned intruder.
Although Browning, unlike his wife, did not discuss this
misadventure in his correspondence, the unnecessary exposure of
the sickly Mrs. Browning to a fatiguing journey would not have
tended to increase his esteem for monks or monasteries. Yet,
with his typical good humor. Browning cordially greeted one of
the monks whom he met a year and a half later in Florence, and
made him a present of the few English pennies he had in his
pocket.And in January, 1853, he proposed another excursion
to Vallombrosa (for one day only)--a "mad scheme," as Elizabeth
told her sister. But the night before their planned early morn¬
ing departure "the weather changed for the worse and it became im¬
possible—So glad I am."^®^ Six months later, Elizabeth, in a
more agreeable summer mood, reported to her friend. Miss Haworth,
that "Robert and I are talking of going up to the monasteries
beyond Vallombrosa for a day to two, on mule-back through forests
and mountains.On their way to Rome in November of the same

^^George W. Curtis, From an Easy Chair, 1st ser. (New York,

1892), p. 203.
“^^^Letters, ed. Kenyon, I, 336.
^°^See Letters, ed. Hood, pp. 21-22. This was probably the
"mediating monk" Mrs. Browning mentioned in Letters, ed. Kenyon,
I, 336.
‘^^'^Letters, ed. Huxley, p. 175.
^^^See Letters, ed. Kenyon, II, 119. There is no record,
however, of their ever making this journey.
 40

year, the Brownings spent a day at the great monastery and church
of Assisi, where they undoubtedly found the Franciscan atmosphere
104
a bit more to their liking than the austerities of Vallombrosa.
An important factor which partially accounts for their mis¬
calculations at Vallombrosa and which was characteristic of their
entire fourteen years in Italy, was the relative seclusion that
Robert and Elizabeth Browning maintained from all but the limited
circle of mostly English and American acquaintances. This can
perhaps be explained by the always delicate state of Mrs. Brown¬
ing's health, by their mutual need of time and seclusion for
creative work, and by their rather exclusive devotion to each
other. In her first letter from Italy to her sister, Elizabeth
assured her that "we have been nowhere but into the churches," and
that she "saw more people in my room in Wimpole Street" than now
in Pisa, and "that we both delight in the quietness" and from
Florence four years later she wrote to Mrs. Martin: "We are out
of it [Florentine society], having struggled to keep out of it
with hands and feet, and partially having succeeded, knowing
scarcely anybody except bringers of letters of introduction, and
those chiefly Americans, and not residents in Florence.To
Miss Westwood she reported that for three months they never caught
a glimpse of a newspaper; and now, having finally subscribed to a
French paper, the Sieole^ they "look through a loophole at the

104
See ibid. , II, 152.
105,
Letters, ed. Huxley, p. 5. And note her rather con¬
descending-sounding remark: "We wish in time to associate with a
few Lmy italics] Italians, for the advantage of knowing the people,
and speaking the language" (ibid.).
106 ' '
Letters, ed. Kenyon, I, 476.
 41

world.From Florence, she wrote to Mrs. Jameson: "Of

society of any sort, we have not much, nor wish for it, nor miss
it .,108

Although their contemporaries often decried English residents

in Italy as mostly being "worth very little consideration" and "a
miserably mended class,and Elizabeth often agreed,the
Brownings spent several summers at the baths of Lucca, "an especial¬
ly and almost exclusively English resort";^^^ and the friends
they did cultivate seem to have been almost exclusively English or
American. In two volumes of letters, bristling with references
to American and English acquaintances, Mrs. Browning mentions only
a dozen Italians with whom she and her husband came into associa¬
tion. Two of these were a doctor and a priest-tutor for their
son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett ("Peni"), and six were friends of
Ferdinando, the husband of Wilson, the Brownings' maid. Another
was Professor Ferucci, who had gained them access to the university
library in Pisa, but of whom they admittedly knew little.
At least part of the reason for the Brownings' few contacts
with Italian society was its seeming "inaccessibility." "One may

^°^Ibid., I, 324.
^°®Ibid., I, 378.
^^^Griffin, Life^ pp. 159-60.
^^*^See, for example. Letters^ ed. Kenyon, I, 473.
^^Hhomas A. Trollope, What I Remember (New York, 1888), I,
364. See also Mabel S. Crawford, Life in Tuscany (New York,
1859), p. 52. For an example of their non-Italian social life in
Florence, see Letters^ ed. Kenyon, I, 347-48. For a description
of the English and American colony at Rome, see Griffin, Life, pp.
192-95. Thackeray's daughter was there in 1853, and reported:
"Rome was crowded with visitors that Christmasj charming Scotch
people, gracious English ladies, enterprising young Americans"
(Anne Isabella [Thackeray] Ritchie, From Friend to Friend, London,
1920, p. 94).
 42

as well take to longing for the evening star," Elizabeth wrote

to Mrs. Jameson. When the Brownings attended the carnival
ball in Florence, after ten years in Italy, the poet’s wife
rather naively marvelled at "the perfect social equality" pre¬
vailing, and "the refinement and gentleness--yes, I must call it
supeviovity—of these people," like one whose eyes looked for the
first time on a strange new land.^^^
Among their English acquaintances was the mother of Nicholas
Wiseman, the future cardinal and archbishop. Their first meeting
with Mrs. Wiseman, which took place at Fano in 1848, Elizabeth
called a happy accident." "A very intelligent and vivacious
person. ... she spoke with touching pride of the childhood and
manhood of her son." She went on to wish that "Dr. Wiseman
would ask her to minister to the domestic rites of his bishop's
palace at Westminster."

•*u .u
112 . Italian who called regularly at Casa Guidi, took tea
with the poets, talked liberal politics, and showed signs of per¬
sonal affection for them and their son was the young Neapolitan
intellectual, Pasquale Villari (see Edward C. McAleer, "Pasquale
IX, 1957^"40-47)^''°''"'"^'’" Library Quarterly,
113 .
later life, Browning seems
to have had few Italian friends and little taste for Italian so-
of Bronson, he depended mainly on
the kindness of Sir Henry and Lady Layard. of Mr. and Mrs. Curtis
of Palazzo Barbaro, and of Mr. and Mrs. Frederic Eden, for most of
the social pleasure and comfort of his later residence in Italy"
(Urr, L^fe, p. 315).
114
od Kenyon, I, 380-81. This remark could be
and hSInU^iif c^i^TOus implication that Wiseman's table
and hospitality before his appointment to Westminster had the
reputation of leaving something to be desired-curious, in the
the context of "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which was
probably written two and a half years later (see DeVane, Handbook,
 43

It was through Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe that the Brownings

later learned of Henry Manning, who had become a Catholic in 1851,
and was, in 1865, to succeed Wiseman at Westminster. Mrs. Stowe
"admired Manning immensely," and at one time thought of becoming
115
a Catholic herself. According to Mrs. Orr, the future Cardinal
was "among the distinguished or interesting persons whom [the
Brownings] knew in Rome"--but she adds no details.Browning,
however, does not seem to have shared the enthusiasms of either
Mrs. Stowe or Mrs. Orr, when he wrote to Miss Blagden on February
15, 1859: "I heard Manning preach the poorest, most illogical,
117
imprudent of sermons, last two Sundays."
One of the most interesting and perhaps the most important
of Browning's Catholic acquaintances was the Reverend Francis
118
Sylvester Mahony ("Father Prout"). Browning first met Mahony

^^^See Letters, ed. Kenyon, II, 409-10.

^^Srr, Life, p. 229.
^^^Learest Isa, p. 36.
^^^Mahony, author of "The Bells of Shandon" and the "Prout
Papers," was born in Cork in 1804, and educated at Clongowes Wood
College, Ireland, and St. Acheul , France. He entered the Jesuit
novitiate at Paris in 1821, and was sent to Rome in 1823 for his
course in philosophy. He returned to Clongowes as a prefect in
1825, and after a student escapade was sent to Freiburg to continue
his studies. (While out on a picnic with their prefect, the
students had joined a political meeting at a local inn, where they
had shared too generously in the liquid conviviality and not^
returned to the college until the next morning. The Catholic
Enayatopedia, XII, 504, says only that Mahony left Clongowes after
a brief stay." Encyclopedia Bvitannica, 1964, XIV, 680, says
that he was "involved in scandals that led to his resignation
which sounds as sinister as the actual event was humorous.) At
Freiburg he and his Jesuit superiors agreed that he had mistaken
his vocation and should leave the Society. Against the advice of
all, he next entered the Irish College at Rome and was ordained in
1832. He returned to Cork, where he filled a chaplaincy at the
 44

when they were both beginning to take their places in the London
literary circle, probably in 1835 or 1836, "at dinner at Emerson
Tennent's, and since has crossed paths with him on various points
of Europe." Their early contacts in London seem to have been
mostly of a light and friendly, but passing, nature."We
talked and agreed about Rabelais and Erasmus," Browning remembered
in 1869, "disagreeing as notably when he undervalued Spenser.
I henceforth continued to meet him about town, generally in Regent
Street. Their later meetings in Italy were more intimate.
On May 16, 1847, Mrs. Browning humorously wrote to her sister of
Mahony's ubiquitousness and their unexpected meeting with him in
Leghorn. A few months later Mahony was passing through

118 (cont'd)p, 1 u -x 1
Cholera Hospital. After a disagreement with
his superiors, he ceased his sacerdotal functions, and began his
T London, writing for Fraser's and Bentley's.
In 1846 he was sent to Rome as correspondent for the Daily News,
Twelve years later he was in Paris for the Globe. There he died
in 1866. Throughout his life he had maintained his goodstandinq
in the Church. The Tablet^ a Catholic paper, once referred to
him as a suspended priest." Mahony sued for 2000 pounds, and
the case was settled out of court with an apology. For biographi¬
cal information, in addition to the encyclopedias and DNB see
of Father Front (London,
1881); C. G., Father Prout," The Irish Monthly^ LII (19241, 34^
55;_ Cyril Clemens, "Father Prout and the Brownings," Dalhousie
XVII, (1937), 163-67; and Ethel E. Mannin, Two Studies in
Integ^Uj: Gerald G^ffin and the Rev. Francis Mahony ("Father
Prout"(London, 1954).
119
Letterst ed. Kenyon, I, 385.
120
"Although Prout and his young acquaintance met fairly fre¬
quently during the next few years, they did not really begin to
know each other until both had moved to Italy" (Clemens, "Father
Prout and the Brownings," p. 164).

, ^ of Father Prout (the Rev. Francis Syl-

vester Mahony) ed. Blanchard Jerrold (London, 1876), p. 61. One
of the^^Prout Papers" was entitled "The Days of Erasmus."
See Letters^ ed. Huxley, pp. 28-29.
 45

Florence on his way to Rome, and Browning took advantage of his

123
two-hour stop-over to visit with him at the stage. It was on
this occasion that Mahony "hissed [Robert] in the street, mouth
to mouth, a good deal to his surprise." More appreciated by the
very English Brownings was Mahony's subsequent promise of a let-
124
ter of introduction to the librarian of the Pitti Palace. In
the autumn of 1848, Mahony suddenly appeared once again at a time
when Browning had been ill for nearly a month with a fever and
severe sore throat. He shocked the Italian attendants with his
"eccentric prescription" of eggs and port wine, but it quickly
strengthened the patient, while his "cheerful face and jests"
comforted the fretting wife. A month later, however, Elizabeth
reported with understandable pique that, since his medical coup,
"Father Prout has spent every evening here except onej" fatiguing
Robert and her with his endless conversation, and particularly up¬
setting Elizabeth with his pipe-smoke and "apparatus for spit-
ting."^^^ A few days later Mahony mercifully left for Rome where
he was a correspondent for Dickens' Daily News; but the Brownings
and he continued to meet and enjoy each other's company in Paris
126
and London, as well as in Italy.
Except for this one instance of overstaying his welcome,
both the Brownings found the priest as wholesome and kindly as he
was erratic. "I thought him a man full of sympathy and in want
of it," the poet recalled. "His love for the two or three who

Letters^ ed. Kenyon, I, 355.

^^See Letters^ ed. Huxley, pp. 60-61.
^^^See ibid., p. 92, and Letters^ ed. Kenyon, I, 385-86.
^^^See, for example, ibid., I, 392; II, 286; Letters^ ed.
Huxley, p. 170; and Final Reliquesy p. 62.
 46

had got at his real nature, despite of its fantastic disguises

was all the more intense," he added--with the apparent implica¬
tion that he himself was among the rare "two or three.He
went on to recall his certainty of "the goodness of Mahony's
heart," and "his fine scholarship and rare faculty [which] were
plain to everybody"; and with the tiresomeness of the Florentine
sojourn softened by the years. Browning described Mahony as talk¬
ing "wisely, kindly, and considerately." In a letter from Rome
on March 9, 1860, Browning specifically requested the publisher,
Edward Chapman, to send two copies of Elizabeth's new Poems Before
Congress to "Rev. Francis Mahony, Paris," as well as copies to the
poet's father, and to his friends Isa Blagden, the Rossettis, and
William Allingham.^^® Mahony's attention to her husband in his
illness endeared him to Mrs. Browning, who declared: "I shall al¬
ways be grateful to Father Prout, always. ... the utmost kind¬
ness and warmheartedness have characterized his whole bearing to¬
wards us." She went on to picture Mahony as "not refined in a

127,
^ + -1 appear that Mahony ever discussed in
Browni-nq, more than
"m/ 2 n r to be a Jesuit, referred to him as
Mr Mahoney [SIC] , the celebrated Jesuit" [Letters, ed. Kenyon,
I, 385). Nor was she better informed of the reasons for his
ceasing to live as a priest: "I don't understand," sh^wrote
ecclesiastically"
from^ieaJ’tf Ift-ifi contributed to Fraser’s
from 1834 to 1836, after Mahony had given up the rpniil;^^' m-nic+v^w
regular ministry.
and therefore were not the cause of his problems Browning's
knowledge of Mahony's case seems to have been as incomplete as his
wife s. And his mention that Mahony's "reputed Jesuitism put
people on their guard" {Final Reliques, p. 62). can mean that he

op7o£ri:us sense]'"’’ "

128'r
See Few Letters^ p. 129, V
 47

social sense . . . yet a most accomplished scholar and vibrating

all over with learned associations and vivid combinations of
fancy and experience—having seen all the ends of the earth and
the men thereof, and possessing the art of talk and quotation to
129
an amusing degree." Later she often spoke of "his great force
i?n
and kindness," and said that he was "always very cordial."
Mahony was a man of ranging general interests and a master
linguist, and presented himself as a politically knowledgeable
friend and man of letters, but with evidently little or no refer¬
ence to the priesthood in which he had ceased to be active.
Conversation between him and a man of Browning's wide reading
probably explored many fields, especially Italian ecclesiastical
and political affairs about which he and the Brownings were both
131
increasingly concerned. And while he was not a typical
churchman, he would have been an almost endless source of informa¬
tion about clerics, especially contemporaries, whom he had met on

129
Letterst ed. Kenyon, I, 385-86.
130
See, for example, ibid., II, 286, and Letters^ ed. Huxley,
p. 60. Of Mahony's Catholicism or priestly character, there is
in all this not a word. Yet, although inactive after he went to
London in the 1830's, and laicized completely in 1863, Mahony
managed to strike some sort of balance between his secular life
and his clerical status. Gerardine Macpherson, Memoirs of the
Life of Anne Jameson (London, 1878), p. 239, describes Mahony as
"wearing an ineradicable air of the priest and seminarist in
strange contrast with his frank Bohemianism."
^^^Prout's reports to the daily News largely concerned Pius
IX's early attempts to renovate the Papal Temporalities, and the
growth of the Risorgimento. Excerpts from his articles appear in
Final Reliques^ and were also published separately in 1847 as
Facts and Figures from Italy.
 48

his travels in Ireland, England, France, Switzerland, and Italy,

both during his years as a seminarian and functioning priest, and
during his career as a journalist. Browning may have tapped
this store of experience. During the years of his friendship
with Mahony there is an obvious increase in his grasp of the
technical details of Catholic life and practice—though there is
little evidence of change in Browning's basic attitudes regardino
the Catholic Church. It is not likely, on the other hand, that
Mahony, who seldom restrained his impulses and who notoriously
spoke out his mind in all company, would have stifled his beliefs
and opinions during his many hours with the Brownings. More
logical is the supposition that Browning, v/ho appears to have been
most congenial in his social behavior, never broached in Mahony's
hearing the ideas of the Church which he sometimes expressed else¬
where. At the same time we may hazard a guess that the curi¬
ous poet probably gleaned at least some of his Catholic erudition
from the well-stocked mind of the many-faceted priest-journalist.
As early as 1847, during his first months with Elizabeth in
Italy, Browning had written to Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord
Houghton, begging him to signify to the Foreinn Office his willing¬
ness to take part in the rumored British Ministry to the Holy See.
Admittedly, such a position would, at this time, have appealed to

132.
Mahony appears consistently to have defended the Catholic
Church, the early career of Pius IX, and the Jesuits who had dis-
missed him. His curt comment on "Ch ristmas in Rome," by an
American Protestant clergyman, was: "Rome cannot be understood
by a Jonathan fresh from his conventi cle" [Final Reliques, p. 377).
According to Kent, Wofks of Pvoutj p. xv: "A scoffer at Christi-
anity or a depreciator of Catholicism he constantly looked upon
from first to last with abhorrence." One of the "Prout Papers"
is a defense of the Jesuits, entitled "Literature and the Jesuits."
 49

the Brownings for its economic as much as for its political op¬
portunities; yet this request also clearly shows the direction
of their thinking, since an official British presence in Rome
would, it was hoped, hasten the cause of Italian unity by opening
avenues of compromise, Austrian opposition and French vacillation
notwithstanding, between the Pope and the Italian nationalists.
Their enthusiasm for the Risorg-Cmento is a frequent topic
in the Brownings' correspondence—especially Elizabeth's—and
led to their constant interest in the life and career of Pope
Pius IX.The election of Pio Nono in 1846 over the strong
protests of the Austrian government was greeted with unprecedented
approval both in Italy and England because of his reputation as a
progressive. Immediately he set about initiating long overdue
political and social reforms in the Papal States, granting an
, amnesty in 1846, and a liberal constitution two years later.
Elizabeth wrote to Boyd in 1846: "The new Pope is more liberal

^^^In his letter to Milnes, Browning wrote: "England needs

. . . send a Minister before the year ends to this fine fellow,
Pio Mono" (T. Wemyss Reid, The Life^ Letters, and Friendships of
Richard Monokton Milnes, First Lord Houghton, New York, 1891, I,
^ 384). The rumor was well founded. The Greville Diary, II, 306,
records that Lord Russell "had ordered a bill to be drawn up to
legalize our intercourse with the Pope." Lord Minto was sent on
an exploratory mission in 1847. Mahony reported this rumor
Rome in his letters to the Daily News Final Reliques, p. 42
For an account of Browning's early attraction to diplomacy, see
Burdett, The Brownings, pp- 72-73, 103, and 156.
^^Vor a thorough account of the interest of English literary
figures in 19th-century Italian affairs, see Harry W. Rudman,
Italian Nationalism and English Letters: Figures of the Risorgi-
mento and Victorian Men of Letters (New York, 1940). For a
recent biography of Pius IX, see E. E. Y. Hales, P'io Nono, A
Study in European Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth Century
(London, 1954).
 50

than popes in general, and people write odes to him in conse-

135
quence." When she wrote to Mrs. Westwood in the following
September she was less guarded in her opinion:
We were glad to be here just now when there is new
animation and energy given to Italy by this new wonderful
Pope, who is a great man and doing greatly. I hope you
give him your sympathies. Think how seldom the libera¬
tion of a people begins from the throne, a fortiori^ from
a papal throne.136
And to her sister in the same month she v/rote:
He is a great man. I call him great .... A most
devout man . . . and brave and gentle at once. . . .
He rides about the streets on a mule, they say, and
dreams by night and day, of doing good humbly.
Think of such a Pope!13/
But Pius' reforms proved too little and too late to satisfy
the revolutionary "Young Italy" movement. On November 14, 1848,
his prime minister, Count Pelligrino Rossi, was stabbed on the
steps of the Chamber of Deputies; and ten days later the Pope
himself fled to Gaeta, his enthusiasm for reform at an end. Mrs.
Browning expressed her disappointment at the turn of events to
Miss Mitford: "The poor Pope I deeply pity; he is a weak man
with the noblest and most disinterested intentions. ... He
should have gone out [to the mob] and so died, but having missed
the opportunity, nothing remained but flight";^^® and to her
sister Henrietta: "Dreadful nev/s from Rome. . . . Poor Rossi —
and poor well-meaning Popell"^^^

135
EB to Mr. Boyd, p. 283.
136
'letters, ed. Kenyon, I, 344.
137
Letters, ed. Huxley, p. 46.
138
Letters, ed. Kenyon, I, 392.
139I
Letters, ed. Huxley, p. 98.
 51

A few months later, after Pius had begun to harden in his

opposition to the liberals, Elizabeth wrote that the French
intervention and the Pope's ambiguous position made him seem to
be an "obstinate idiot . . . good and tenderhearted man as he
surely is. . . . It makes us two very angry. Robert especially
is furious" (I, 420).^^*^ But just five weeks later, Elizabeth
washed her hands of any pro-papal taint ("The Pope is just a
pope"), and decried the abortive "Pope-enthusiasm" of the previous
two years "which Robert and I never caught for a moment" (I, 425-
26).
In her depression over the violence of the revolutionaries
and their "inintellectual" methods, Elizabeth clung to one con¬
soling fact: "That the Papacy has for ever lost its prestige and
power over souls is the only evident truth bright and strong
enough to cling to" (I, 439). As the frustratingly petty comic-
opera behavior of the conflict's principals—French, Austrian,
Italian, Papal, and Liberal—became ever more obvious, Elizabeth
grew hostile and bitter: "The old serpent, the Pope, is wriggling
his venom into the heart of all possibilities of free thought and
action. It is a dreadful state of things. Austria the hand,
the papal power the brain!" (II, 98).
Six years later, in April, 1859, in a report to Sarianna
Browning on the Italian situation, Elizabeth had mellov/ed a bit,
and the besieged Pontiff was only "the poor old innocent Pope
(II, 311). The Pope, despite his "obstinacy," is but an old
man, now reduced to senility, bewailing himself, and haplessly
enacting ineffective so-called reforms (II, 353). In February,
1860, she parodied the

^^^Parenthetical references in this and the two following

paragraphs are to Letters, ed. Kenyon.
 52

despair and rage of the Papal Government. The Pope

can't go out to breakfast, to drink chocolate and talk
about "Divine things" to the "Christian youth," but he
stumbles upon the term "new ideas," and falling
precipitately into a fury, neither evangelical nor
angelical, calls Napoleon a sioario (cut-throat), and
Vittorio Emanuel a an assassino. ... In fact, all
dignity has been repeatedly forootten in simple rage
(II, 461).
In March, 1860, the Pope invoked an excommunication against those
who had abetted the separation of Romagna from the Papal States.
In a letter to Isa Bladgen on April 19, 1860, Browning happily
mentioned his enclosing a copy of "the 'Scomunica' [Excommunica-
141
tion] and my photograph."
Even after the death of his wife. Browning maintained his
interest in the contemporary papacy, and he especially opposed
the notion of papal infallibility. In a letter dated October
19, 1870, he expressed impatience with Isa Blagden's complaint
over the violent manner in which Rome had been annexed to the
new Kingdom of Italy:
Was "time" to operate on the Pope & Cardinals, as it had
already pretty well operated on the people: Or were
these to be plagued and policed and all the rest of it,
that "the Spiritual Head" might excogitate dogmas to all
eternity? In what way is he a prisoner, poor old "in¬
fallibility"? . . . Dearest Isa, let us rather congratu¬
late ourselves on having seen the extinguishment of this
inveterate nuisance.142
In concluding this single-faceted survey of Browning's life,
I believe that we can derive from it some conclusions as to the

141
Dearest Isa^ p. 60.
142
Ibid., p. 348. The doctrine of papal infallibility
was defined by the First Vatican Council on July 18. 1870. Pius
IX became the "prisoner of the Vatican" after the annexation of
Rome to Italy, September 20, 1870.
 53
I

importance of his various Catholic and clerical contacts. First,

Browning's long and irregular friendship with Francis Mahony,
"Father Prout," would seem to have provided him his only signifi-
cant peTsonal and diveat contact with either a cleric or a Catholic.
And although Mahony was evidently a sincere and committed Catholic
during his whole life, as well as an extremely knowledgeable one,
he was certainly not a typical priest or cleric. The extent of
his contribution to Browning's knowledge, while possibly and even
► probably great, must remain mostly in the area of prudent conjec¬
ture. Any other personal associations with either Catholics or
clerics seem to have been relatively insignificant.
Second, the greatest source of Browning's information con¬
cerning Catholic clerics seems to have been his vast reading,
beginning early in his childhood and continuing throughout his
life. This would include most notably the thousands of books of
all kinds, in his father's library, later his own, the extensive
research he carried out for his major poems, notably Sordello and
The Ring and the Book^ and his near addiction, in middle and later
life after his initial Pisan and Florentine "isolationism," to
^ numerous English newspapers, especially the Times, and to the re¬
views, both English and French-all of which chronicledjn great
detail contemporary religious events throughout Europe.
Finally, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a most important
source of her husband's general religious interests and attitudes,
especially towards the Catholic Church—though more perhaps by
reinforcing and focusing, than by forming or originating them.
This is especially true in the development and persistence of his

, ^"^^See Griffin, Life, p. 290, and New Letters, pp. 68 and

104.
 54

interest in contemporary Italy, which centered upon the Pope,

both as person and idea, and which, as we shall see, was to play
an important part in Browning's conception of "The Pope" in The
Rt-ng and the Book.

Most of Browning's contacts, therefore, with Catholicism

and with clerical persons and situations seem to have been of a
secondary and indirect nature. As a result he remained essential¬
ly an outsider, observing an alien scene with mostly preconceived
and unchanging attitudes and patterns of thought--much more so
than one might expect from someone who spent half a life-time in
Italy. Yet he achieved an enormous artistic success with the
materials of which he did avail himself.A single word or
anecdote, a minute technical detail, a controversial, preferably
obscure, name or character, a passing street-event or accidental
meeting--any one of these, when absorbed into his habitual thought
and interpreted by his richly-molded sensibility was capable of
being transfigured into the dramatic situation that is the Browning
hall-mark. Like the imaginative mind of James's man of genius.
Browning took "the faintest hints of life," "the very pulses of the
air," and converted them into revelation. He was able to create
the convincing world of each of his poems because he was blessed
with the inventive faculty "which for the artist is a much greater
source of strength than any accident of residence," or, we might
add, any circumstance of religious allegiance. Pre-eminently,
Browning was one of those rare people "on whom nothing is lost."^^^
144r
4-1, k- enlightening discussion of the unique amalgam of
the subjective and the objective which constitutes Browning's
method, see the introductory chapters of Donald Smalley's Brovm'^
^ng s Essay on Chattevton (Cambridge, Mass., 1948).
See Henry James, "The Art of Fiction," The Art of Fiction
^ssays by Henry James^ ed. Morris Roberts (New York,
X y j p, 11,
f-

CHAPTER II

THE "PHILOSOPHER OF THE IMPERFECT" AND HIS CLERICS:

A CAREER SURVEY

While it is a critical truism that any attempt to divide

and classify an entire literary corpus will almost always result
in an at least partial artificiality and oversimplification, it is
’’ equally true that only by means of such a potentially distorting
process can the fifty-year literary output of one of England's
most prolific poets be rendered manageable. I propose, there-
,fore, for the purposes of this study, that Browning's most im¬
portant, best known poems can be usefully placed in the following
categories: 1) Poems of the Historical Grotesque; 2) Poems about
Art and Artists, Music and Musicians; 3) Casuistical Poems; 4)
Poems about Love and Marriage; and 5) Philosophical and Religious
Poems.^
These five groups would seem to embrace the particular areas
of the poet's abiding interests; within them all he consistently
voiced his distinctive views of God, man, life, and salvation;
and, as we shall see, within each of these interest-areas he
achieved his most successful artistic expression in a poem which
featured a major clerical character.
^ Most famous perhaps of his "grotesques," are such poems as
"Porphyria's Lover," "In a Laboratory," "My Last Duchess," and

^For some similar attempts at classification, see H. B.

Charlton, "Browning as a Poet of Religion," XXVII (1942-43),
299-300, and "Browning: The Making of the Dramatic Lyric, ibid.,
XXXV (1952-53), 371; and Whitla, The Central Truths p. 40.

55
 56

"The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed s Church. But many
2
of the pieces in Paaahiarotto (1876) must also be included.
The great monologues on painting and music of Browning's middle
years ("Pictor Ignotus," "A Toccata of Galuppi's," "Master Hugues
of Saxe-Gotha," "Abt Vogler," "Fra Lippo Lippi," and "Andrea del
Sarto") form an obviously important group. Yet as late as the
Parleyings (1887), his last attempt at a major poem. Browning
whole-heartedly devoted himself to the psychological analysis of
Francis Furini and Gerard de Lairesse the painters and Charles
Avison the musician. Browning's casuistical poems include not
only the controversial "Bishop Blougram's Apology" (1855), but
also the seldom read "Mr. Sludge the Medium" (1864), "Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau" (1871), and Fifine at the Fair (1872).
Poems about love and marriage frame Browning's entire career from
the "yeasty incoherencies" of Pauline (1833) and the melodramatic
"In a Gondola" (1842) to the astonishingly vigorous love-lyrics of
Asolando (1889). Philosophical and religious poems, in addition
to "Rabbi Ben Ezra," "Saul," "Karshish," "A Death in the Desert,"
and Cknistmas-Eve and Easter-Day^ include such later major en¬
deavors as Red Cotton Right-Cap Country (1873), La Saisiaz (1878),

2
For two useful discussions of Browning's use of the gro¬
tesque, see Lily Bess Cambell, "The Grotesque in the Poetry of
Robert Browning," Bulletin of the University of Texas ("Humanities
Series," No. 5, April, 1907), pp. 1-38, and Mary Lynch Johnson,
"The Grotesque in Browning," Meredith College Quarterly Bulletin^
Series 20 (November, 1926), pp. 3-19.
3
Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantia Tradition in Eng¬
lish Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1937), p. 362.
4 .
"Browning plumbed the depths of the love of man for woman
and woman for man more impressively and more repeatedly than any
English poet since Shakespeare" (Griffin, Life, p. 132).
 57

Fez’t-shtah's Fancies (1884), and the beautiful Epilogue to

5
Asolando.
Browning's supreme performance, The Ring and the Book^ over¬
laps all classifications. Book I ("The Ring and the Book") is
one of Browning's most complete examinations of art and its func¬
tion; "Count Guido Franceschini" is a casuistical poem and a gro¬
tesque, as well as a study by indirection of love and marriage.
The entire work is a profound study of this topic as well as of
philosophy and theology--with "Guiseppe Caponsacchi" and "Pompilia"
qualifying, perhaps preeminently, as love poems, and "The Pope" as
Browning's most mature and comprehensive expression of his philo¬
sophical and religious thought.
In the poems in each of these areas and throughout Browning's
career, a dominating thematic problem was the eternally irrecon-
cilable tensions between the infinite and the finite, the ideal
and the actual, eternity and time, the spirit and the flesh, in¬
tuition and reason, love and knowledge, aspiration and accomplish-
ment--all variations on an indefinitely multipliable yet basically
identical theme.® Within such patterns of conflict Browning per-

®That such groupings, despite their unavoidable usefulness,

can never be clear-cut, that there will always be overlappings and
only partial appropriatenesses, is apparent when we realize that
"The Bishop Orders His Tomb," as well as "My Last Duchess," coulc
certainly find places as poems about art, that Bishop Blougram s
Apology" is a religious poem as well as a study in casuistry, and
' that "Sludge," though he is cast in a contemporary rather than^a
historical context, would more than qualify as one of Browning s
grotesques.
®"In his choice of subject matter, then. Browning demon¬
strates intellectual and psychological consistency. . . .interest
in conflict, incongruity, failure, and abnormality--are differing
^ expressions of a unified sensibility" (Roma A. King, The Bow and
the Lyrej pp. 131-32).
 58

ceived reality and struggled to understand it; and, most im¬

portant, by means of the same dramatically fertile patterns he
sought artistically to communicate his y^sior\--the Browning vi-
sion--a characterizing quasi-tragic irony, traditionally labeled
the "philosophy of the imperfect."
Critics have from the very beginning recognized these recur¬
ring dichotomies in Browning's poetry, but have only recently
given them near-universal acknowledgment--though they perhaps have
not yet defined their universal applications.^ Mrs. Sutherland
Orr wrote in 1891 that "the sweet and the bitter lay, indeed, very
close to each other at the sources of Mr. Browning's inspiration."^
Henry Jones in his early important study of Browning's religious
and ethical beliefs stressed the conflict between knowledge and
love, intelligence and intuition--a conflict which the poet was
able neither to resolve nor to hold effectively in suspension.^

"Recent critics have drawn attention to the underlying in¬

security in Browning's optimism" (William A. Madden, "The Victorian
Sensibility," 75, VII [1963], 87). Madden later perceptively dis¬
cusses "the failure of the mid-Victorian attempt to control the ir¬
rational by force of will" (p. 95).
^Lifej p. 297.
Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher (New
York, 1891). Jones describes Browning's dilemma: "The self¬
communication of the Infinite is always incomplete; love is a
quality of God, intelligence a quality of man; hence, on one side,
there is no limit to achievement, but on the other there is im¬
potence. Human nature is absolutely divided against itself.
This is what makes Browning think it impossible to re-establish
faith in God, except by turning his back on knowledge" (p. 306)-.
Though a very helpful and perhaps essential aid in synthesiz-
ing Browning s philosophical strongths and wGaknessGS, JonGS sggitis
in placGS to bG too rigorously intorostGd in criticizing thG poGt's
thought only in terms of his own Hegelian-Unitarian approach to
reality. A strongly negative but, I believe, overstated recent
criticism of Jones's study is Philip Drew's article, "Henry Jones
on Browning's Optimism," VP^ II (1964), 29-41.
 59

Eventually, according to Jones (p. 164), the poet, dismayed by

the limits of intellect, surrendered to the heart and, "so
cautious that he will not declare his own knowledge to be valid
for any other man," came close to falling into a kind of logical
solipsism. As Browning expressed his dilemma in La Saisiaz;
Cause before, effect behind me—blanks! . . .

. . . things may be as I behold.

Or may not be, but, without me and above me, things
there are;
I myself am what I know not—ignorance which proves
no bar
To the knowledge that I am, and, since I am, can
recognize
What to me is pain and pleasure: this is sure, the
rest—surmise.
If my fellows are or are not, what may please them
and what pain,--
Mere surmise: my own experience--that is knowledge,
once again!
(255-64)
That Browning not only discovered the cleavage between
reason and love to be irreconcilable, but increasingly favored the
heart at the expense of reason, is by far the most common reading
today. William A. Raymond sees Browning's "intellectual agnosti¬
cism" as the high price he paid, along with many other Victorians,
for spiritual peace.E. D. H. Johnson, writing in The Alien
Vision of Victorian Foetry^ declares that "to Browning . . . fles
and the spirit seemed natural allies against the insidious dis¬
tortions of the intellect," and that as he grew older he relied
more and more on an "intuitional psychology," flashes of truth
that short-circuited the mind (see pp. 93 and 15). In her stim-

^^The Infinite Moment^ p. 131. Seealso pp. 8-9, and 38,

for a brief summary of past and present critical opinions.
 60

ulating biographical study, Betty Miller describes Browning's

first confrontation of the deadlock between head and heart, and
vigorously recounts how he found his own unsatisfying solution
by a violent rejection of Shelleyan atheism in favor of a witless .
surrender to the sentimental ethics of his mother:
Reason divided him from the one being he could love:
reason, therefore, must be sacrificed. With a truly
Herculean effort, which seems to have absorbed all his
youth's strength. Browning performed upon himself an act
of re-grafting. . . . Forcibly, in the course of this
struggle, reason was dethroned and degraded.H
In his discussion of La Saisiaz, William DeVane notes as charac¬
teristic of Browning's later thinking that human knowledge is of
no use whatever in solving the riddle of human existence, and
that man must resort to the "intuitive knowledge" of his heart.
Norton B. Crowell, however, strongly disagrees with any and
all accusations that Browning sought to denigrate or disenfranchise
human reason. Crowell bases his concept of Browning's psychology
on his theory of the triple soul, "What Does, what Knows, what Is;
three souls, one man." "Far from believing that human nature
is a duality of head and heart sundered by an illimitable gulf.
Browning insisted on the unity of the triple soul of man."^^

11,
_ Robert Browning: A Portrait, pp. 10-11. While in sub¬
stantial agreement with Betty Miller's interpretation of Browning's
psychology, Hoxie N. Fairchild objects to her singling out this
specific traumatic experience. See Religious Trends in English
Poetry (New York, 1957), IV, 140. ^
12
See Handbook, p. 377. See also DeVane Parleyings, p m
"A Death in the Desert," 1. 103. See also ibid., 11. 82-
102, and "Bishop Blougram's Apology," 1. 249: "I use heart, head
and hand."
14
Crowell, The Triple Soul, p. 45.
 61

What Browning did attack, Crowell argues, was exaggerated rational¬

ism which tended toward disorder and disunity within man. And
while "it is true that in the triumvirate of body, mind, and
spirit (which embraces love), 'love is best,'" it does not follow
that there should be a struggle for supremacy between the head and
the heart.
But although Crowell does not find in Browning this doctrine
of essential tension, he rejoins the mainstream of current critical
opinion when he discusses the significance in Browning's pre¬
occupation with human limitations and the hopefully positive func¬
tions of failure and doubt, and the resultant antithetical pat¬
terns of the infinite versus the finite, and aspiration versus
performance.^^ Man is finite and therefore imperfect. The
source of all his religious, intellectual, and artistic dynamism
lies in his insatiable appetite for perfection, though he is
necessarily and fortunately doomed to failure--fortunately, because
for Browning, for whom life is struggle and effort, perfection is
death or the end of striving.
Perhaps the finest recent study of both the eternity-time

15 See also pp. 22-23.

Ibid., p. 5.
16
See ibid. Chapter I, "The Divine Agency of Ignorance."
17 p. xiv: "Life has a single supreme function:
See ibid,
to test man's endurance and faith through frustration, evil, and
doubt." As Whitla puts it in The Central Truths p. 69: Brown¬
ing saw that perfection in art was as serious a defect as certain¬
ty in religion." J. H. Miller in The Disappearance of God, p.
140, sums up Browning's solution to the problem of evil: What
comes to perfection perishes." Stockton Axson in Browning: His
Times, His art. His Philosophy," Rice Instztute Pc^hlets, YMIU
(1931), p. 192, speaks of Browning's "comfort in imperfection.
 62

and the spirit-flesh dichotomies in Browning is William Whitla's

The Central Truth. Whitla sees the Incarnation of Christ as
an all-pervasive symbol by means of which Browning maintained an
aesthetic unity throughout all his work. In the light of his
never-hesitating belief in the "Word made Flesh" Browning saw
significance in the struggles of his artists, musicians, and poets
in fitting their mental or visual "words" to the limits of matter,
and in the frustrations of his lovers in achieving their "two-in¬
oneness. And with Christ at the center of history, time also
becomes less incomprehensible as its flux stands fixed in the
grand Moment of the Incarnation. "When St. John in Browning's
poem ["A Death in the Desert" (210)] says that for him the life
and death of Christ '--Is, here and now,' he is making of the
whole complex of Christ's action a moment in and out of time,
an eternal moment.And in David's "See the Christ stand!"
The moment of vision is also the moment of Incarnation.
It is fitting "to the finite his infinity"; it is the

18r
Honan, in a review of Whitla's book in FP, II (1964),
author of an "evangelical fervor reminiscent
mI ;the Browning societies." He admits that Whitla's reading of
A Death in the Desert," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea del Sarto,"
and the central symbols, "if not the characters," of The Ring and
the Book are particularly good." He further admits that "[Whitla
IS the first to give us a close reading of . . . the poems seen
... of the Christian Incarnation"; and
that this IS a valuable contribution since "Browning ceaselessly
inquired into the meaning of the Incarnation. He wove its mean¬
ing into the fabric of many poems—he did so intricately in The
R^ng and the Book." Yet Professor Honan seems unwilling to ac-
cept the book for what it is-a "thesis" study, no less than his
own Browmng s Characters, with the overemphasis which frequently
comprises the strength of this "genre," as well as its weaknesses.
Whitla, The Central Truth, p. 34.
 63

eternal present which is seen wholly, and comprehended

with unusual clarity. This moment is a constant
aesthetic problem for the artist, and Browning's solu¬
tion is to solve the aesthetic by means of the religious.20
Man wholly lives only when he can grasp and exploit, flash-like,
the analogous "infinite moments" in his own religious, artistic,
and amorous life-experiences.
What is most characteristic of Browning's viewpoint or
"philosophy of life," however, is not that he consistently per¬
ceived existence to be a state of tension and struggle--every
thinking and sensitive person comes to perceive it as such; and
for a man drawn to the dramatic as Browning was, such a view is
doubly inevitable. Rather, the Browning philosophy is distinc¬
tive precisely in so far as it is a philosophy of impevfeoUon, a
"philosophy of incompleteness." Despite his own often loud
protestations of belief in ameliorative progress, and despite the
enthusiastically eulogistic efforts of his early worshippers as
well as the thoughtful arguments of a modern critic such as
Crowell, the fact seems still to stand that "the universe, for
Browning, like the self which coincides with it, is a struggle of
immense irreconcilable forces locked in elemental combat."
The operative word for our purposes should be "irreconcilable."
The underlying theme of failure, frustration, and inadequacy would
seem to account for the contradictory assertions which critics can
mass to defend contradictory opinions of Browning's "true"
philosophy. For Browning does contradict himself. This in¬
ability to resolve in his own mind the truly paramount problems

^*^Ibid., p. 17.
^^ee J. H. Miller, The Disappearance of Godj p. 99.
V

^^Ibid., p. 83.
 64

which he raises marks his vision of reality definitely and

characteristically as a philosophy of imperfection.
In the vigorous struggles of the majority of his personae
there is no permanent advance, but only a return to a deeper,
more tormenting understanding of their starting point. Any suc¬
cess when attained--in the realm of knowledge, of love, of artistic
endeavor, or of faith--is only momentary. And even the brief
moment of success is radically clouded by the ever-present realiza¬
tion of its essential transitoriness.
Browning's "faith" is more often rather a hope, despite
ineluctable reasons for the contrary--actually a "hope against
hope." When in Ckristmas-Eve Browning speaks in his own person
and seems to achieve a certain religious stability within orthodox
Christianity, there is no conclusion, no reason given, merely "I
23
choose here." In poems written thirty years later he is still

23
See J. F. Macdonald, "Inhibitions of Browning's Poetry,"
Studies in English^ by Members of University College^ Toronto, ed.
Malcolm W. Wallace (Toronto, 1931), pp. 203-33. Browning's over¬
all non-intellectual approach to Christianity is clearly shown in
his mode of belief in the central doctrine of the Incarnation.
He believed in Jesus not for the import of His Incarnation, Death, '
and Resurrection, but for the inspiration of His personality.
He made no use of the Redemption in his religious thinking, regard¬
ing the death of Christ not as a sacrifice having a supernatural
efficacy but as a mere demonstration of divine love, the prime
analogue of all lesser loves. "That love," he told Mrs. Orr,
could only reveal itself to the human heart by some supreme act
of human [Browning's italics] tenderness and devotion; that fact, *
or fancy [my italics], of Christ's cross and passion could alone
supply such a revelation" (Orr, "Religious Opinions of Robert
Browning," Contemporary Review^ LX, 1891, p. 879). Whitla, The
ce-ntral Truth, p. 42, expresses much the same idea: "The Incarna¬
tion is not understood by Browning in terms of the Atonement for
man s state; it is seen in terms of a psychological need for the
fulfillment of finite man in an infinite expression of divine love."*
 65

tormented by the same doubts, and, if anything, his religious

faith is diluted even more and replaced by a frustrating skepticism
and a deepening realization that "failure is the universal rhythm
of human life."^^
The view of life, therefore, which Browning projects is
cyclic rather than progressive, to be graphed as a circle rather
than as a spiral.Step by step, heroically achieved optimism
is canceled out by a monotonously recurring pessimism. His im¬
mense energy can find no limiting, and hence no meaning-bringing,
form. "He remains in a state of pure virtuality, torn to pieces
by 'multifarious sympathies.' . . . potentially everything, he is
actually nothing at all."^^ Such impotence turns every joy to
dust, and leaves death, and a desperately clutched-at "other life,"
27
as the only meaningful change to expect.

H. Miller, The D'Csappearance of God^ p. 144.

^^Jones, pp. 309-11, points out a curious flaw in Browning's
thought: his frequent failure to distinguish between a pantheistic
cyclic optimism, which asserts that all things ore good, and a
linear historical Christian optimism, which asserts that all
' things are wovk-ing together for good. Browning felt that all
' things were good, but could seldom convince himself of the reason¬
ableness of such a feeling. See Hoxie N. Fairchild, "Browning's
'Whatever Is, Is Right,"' CE, XII (1951), 377-82. for a suggestive
analysis of Browning's doctrine of "active inactivity, by which he
maintains a typically Victorian, though unconscious, defense
against essential change.
H. Miller, p. 94. See also E. D. H. Johnson, "Robert
Browning's Pluralistic Universe: A Reading of The Ring and the
Book " UTQ, XXXI (1961-62), 20-41, for an illuminating discussion
i of the analogies between Browning's ideas and William James s view
of life as an indeterminate and contingent process.
^^J H Miller, p. 148, relates Browning's philosophy to his
poetic practice, and speaks of "the eternal return-the infinitely
prolonged repetition, life after life, of different versions of the
same failure to escape from finitude." Whitla, The Central Truth,

I
 66 1

Mrs. Orr wrote more truly perhaps than she knew when she
described Browning's essential inspiration as a "bitter-sweet"
view of reality; likewise, readers and scholars have more often
sensed than defined, yet unquestioningly accepted, the term
"philosophy of the imperfect" as the most appropriate description
on
of Browning's thought.

^ ^^p. 102, remarks that "his life [from Pauline to

Asolandol shows a remarkable consistency as the same principles
are enunciated, and the same agonizing struggles to relate them
to experience suffered again and again." However, Crowell, The
Triple Soul^ pp. 29-30, totally disagrees and holds that Browning's
philosophy is progressive and ameliorative.
Miller, p. 148, suggests some thought-provoking analogies
between the thought of Browning and that of Franz Kafka: "Their
metaphysical experiences are in many ways the same, but the emo¬
tional tone and atmosphere are radically different. Browning is
a very British and Victorian Kafka, a Kafka whose ebullient good
cheer cannot be dashed by even the most disastrous failure. There’
is a little unintentional Kafkesque humor in the picture Browning
gives of man hoping against hope, picking himself up after some
incredible disaster, dusting himself off, and plodding indefati-
gably on. . . . Like Kafka's heroes. Browning's characters believe
in God, and will be satisfied with nothing less than to "get to
God." Browning's characters too cannot reach their goal, and, as
in The Castle^ the chief testimony to God's existence is the con- "
tinuation of the ever-renewed, ever-frustrated struggle to reach
him. The difference is in Browning's robust acceptance of his
Ixionlike situation, and in his earnest desire to believe that
life is good and just: 'Strive, mankind, though strife endure
through endless obstruction, / Stage after stage, each rise marred
by as certain a fall! / Baffled forever—'" (11. 97-99). And
Miller concludes: "This theme of failure is the best approach to “
the seeming contradictions of Browning's treatment of the problem
of evil."
28
See above, pp. 58-59.
29 . .
In this discussion, I do not intend to deny that Browning
IS an optimist--but he is an optimist more in spite of, than be¬
cause of, his philosophy of the imperfect. Despite his inability "
to reason himself out of his dilemmas, his emotional bias towards
 67

A brief illustration will show that the sense of incomplete¬

ness, of cyclic, unresolved conflict, permeates the poems of each
of the interest-areas which I have distinguished; it will also
demonstrate the typicality of Browning's clerical poems within
the context of the poet's entire work. Porphyria's mad lover
seeks to capture a perfect moment from time's onrushing change¬
ableness, yet succeeds only in losing forever what he most values.
His final words suggest a beginning realization of total frustra¬
tion and portend a ghastly shriek of despair.
As Robert Langbaum points out, the combination of villain
and aesthete creates an especially strong tension in both the dy-^
ing Bishop at St. Praxed's and in the Duke of "My Last Duchess."
Other essential tensions rise from the worldling-churchman com¬
bination, which I shall later discuss, and the Bishop s implied
* ultimate failure in both vocations, as he awaits a death that now
can be neither saintly nor magnificent.

29 (cont'd)|^^^^QjQj^y forced him to justify himself to his

reason by denying the sufficiency of that reason and trusting love
and intuition above all else. Browning affirms rather than con¬
cludes that despite all contrary-seeming evidence, everything
somehow works together for good and that through some mysterious
providence even the most apparently wrong action or situation wi1 I
ultimately make for salvation if the participants will only throw
every energy of their moral being into it (see Tracy, Browning s
Heresies," SP, XXXIII, 1936, p. 623). As Raymond.^ Inf^n^te
Moment, p. 9, notes, this brave, almost athletic, dash and
verve" of his thought "constitute its perennial originality and
attractiveness . . . giving it headiness and flavor. And as
Jones remarks, this instinctive optimism, in contrast to their
many affinities, constituted the most notablo difforence between
the attitudes of Browning and Carlyle. S&q Browning as a Philo-
soTphioat and Religious Teaohet', pp. 50, 90-91.
^^See The Poetry of Experience, p. 86. Langbaum here is
speaking explicitly of a tension in the responses of the reader to
the two characters. The same tension, however, exists in the
portrayal of the characters themselves.
 68

Browning's choice of Renaissance settings for so many of

his poems of the grotesque and for his poems of art and music
enabled him to exploit a period of history in which the conflicts
of two worlds, one dying and the other painfully rising to life,
are reflected in the lives of his characters. Lippo Lippi is
caught in the conflict between two views of life and art, neither
of which he is destined to resolve. The poem ends with a begin¬
ning, the gray beginning" of dawn, and Lippo leaves us to resume
his endless round of edifying madonnas and "sportive ladies." In '
Andrea del Sarto's life and art the two poles of tension are the
perfect and the imperfect compounded with the long years of con¬
flict between the painter's artistic conscience and his love for
his wife. As Whitla remarks, "Browning chooses to make of the
‘Faultless Painter' the faulty husband.Ironically, perfec¬
tion in art is contrasted with moral failure, with both conditions ^
equally impotent. Reduced to the ultimate in human passivity,
Andrea can only self-pityingly acquiesce to one more in the eternal
series of assignations between his wife and her "cousin."
Browning realized that music, in its state of constant
becoming, was perhaps uniquely equipped to communicate the fleet¬
ingness of life.^^ The formality of Galuppi's toccata at first
strikes the confident monologist as the perfection of death when
contrasted to the hectic gaiety of Venice. But as he listens

31
The Central Truths p. 66.
32
George M. Ridenour, "Browning's Music Poems: Fancy and
Fact," FMLA LXXVIII (1963), 369-70. sees Browning's music pSems
as concerned with two main questions: "The relation between the
chaos of experience and our shapings of it (always, at any time),
and the relation between the fixed form of the shapings and the
flow of time to which they are in turn subject (historically)."
 69

longer he realizes that, paradoxically, it is the music which

lives on, repeating its message of mortality, and allowing old
Galuppi himself to share in a kind of eternity as he warns the
young man, now growing chilled and feeling older, of the ravages
of time--on himself and his sciences, no less than on the soulless
Venetians. Master Hugues' "mountainous fugues," perfect but un¬
inspired, lead both the composer and the organist to frustration.
Abt Vogler's art tells not only of his aspirations as he reaches
for the music of heaven, but it also tells of his limitations.
As the musician stops playing, the "palace of music" vanishes,
"and the good tears start" at the sudden realization "that the
gone thing was to go. / Never to be again!" (11. 57-60.).
Vogler wishes that his creation could linger in existence
like the creation of Solomon, but his artifact is created
simply to fade and die, only to be replaced by another,
perhaps inferior, perhaps more beautiful by far [cyclic,
not necessarily progressive]. The musical extemporiza¬
tion, then, is analogous to life: it is short, fading,
and quickly comes to death.33
The difficulties in interpreting Browning's casuistical poems
led contemporary reviewers, for example, to accuse the poet of
eulogizing the Second Empire in "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,"
and of defending the lechery of Don Juan in Fifine^ and still
induce contradictory readings of "Bishop Blougram's Apology."
These difficulties are perhaps inherent in Browning's virtuoso
technique in developing his characters' arguments. He allows his

^^Whitla, The Central Truths p. 84.

^^See DeVane, Handbook, p. 363. H. N. Fairchild, however,
in "Whatever Is, Is Right," CE, XII (1951), 380, interprets the
poem as a defense of Napoleon III.
^^DeVane, p. 369.
 70

own oft-repeated rationale of the positive value of doubt to be

perverted by his low-characters, with the result that the values
of both the characters and the arguments remain in question.
Thus his casuistical poems often seem to be something else than
artistic portrayals of the subtlety and complexity of human moti¬
vation where at rock-bottom an objective point of appraisal is
always presumed to exist even when not presently recognized; they
seem rather to be decisive attempts to create a picture of human
behavior as a dilemma where the truth, if it does exist, is im¬
pervious to ordinary investigation.
"The central problem of Browning's love poetry is invariably
one of unsuccessful communication between the sexes"^^ in a world
of temporal flux. In "Love in a Life" the lover pursues his un¬
seen love through "room after room" of the house of life they in¬
habit together, yet with never a glimpse of his beloved—"she goes
out as I enter." And in the companion piece, "Life in a Love,"
the lover expresses his growing awareness of pre-determined
failure, though he will dauntlessly--almost sportingly--persevere
in his hopeless quest:
My life is a fault at last, I fear--
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed—
But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain.
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall.
And baffled, get up to begin again,--
So the chase takes up one's life, that's all.
The speaker in "The Last Ride Together," another in "Browning's
gallery of frustrated 1 overs,clutches at his memories and

36
Johnson, The Alien Vision, p. 101.
37
Crowell, The Triple Soul, p. 6.
 71

tries to catch something eternal—an "instant made eternity" (1.

108)--that he will be able to cherish during his life without his
beloved. In "Two in the Campagna" the speaker strives to hold
fast to "the good minute"; but the barrier of the two selves
interrupts the experience that should be shared—they remain two—
and are left with only a tormenting failure: "Infinite passion,
and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn" (11. 59-60).
There is a curious ironic contrast between "By the Fireside"
and the poem which has always immediately followed it, "Any Wife
to Any Husband." In "By the Fireside" the lovers are, in a
"moment, one and infinite" (1. 181), "mixed at last / In spite of
mortal screen" (11. 234-35), and the husband is confident that
death will only eternalize their love./ In the companion poem, a
dying wife finds the bitterest thing in death to be the certainty
that her husband's love for her will wither when she is no longer
present to tend it, since woman's love is more lasting than man's.
The emphasis in the repeated "any" of the poem's title hints that
the poet intended a universal application. "Love Among the Ruins
exquisitely tells of two of Browning's most successful lovers.
Yet the monumental wreckage of the setting, with its grim tale of
the evanescence of all human things, seems cruelly to mock and to
shadow the joy the lover anticipates with the girl who awaits him
"with eager eyes and yellow hair" (1. 53). He knows truly "Love
is best!"; but he also senses that death must someday quench the
38
most perfect love.
C. R. Tracy has perceptively remarked that although perhaps
the greatest volume of Browning's most successful work can be cl as

^^See King, The Bow and the Lyre^ pp. 130-31, for additional
instances of Browning's tormented and frustrated lovers.
 72

39
sified as religious poetry, yet he wrote no devotional verse.
For him religion was always an experience in conflict, an in¬
spiration for one more retelling of the rhythmic everlasting
struggle between faith and doubt or the exigencies of the infinite
and the limitations of the finite. Furthermore, Johnson points
out "the uniform tone of nostalgia" which characterizes "An
Epistle of Karshish," "Cleon," and "Caliban upon Setebos":
The speaker in each poem instinctively realizing the
spiritual limitations of the system of thought to which
he is committed, is driven against his will to postulate
a Christian deity. Yet wistful longing never actualizes
itself in terms of faith, because it is smothered under
the weight of inherited prejudice.40
Even as "successful" a Christian as St. John, in "A Death
in the Desert," as he seeks anachronistically to explain the
doubts sown by Renan and Strauss, is made to sound a bit like a
first-century Matthew Arnold. One moment the Apostle seems to be
defending an orthodox evolution or "development" of truth: "[Man]
grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne'er forgets" (1. 450); in
another place he seems to be defending an absolute though cyclic
skepticism: "What he considers that he knows to-day, / Come but
to-morrow, he will find misknown" (11. 597-98)--and declares in so
many words that just as all previous knowledge derived from myth,
so all present knowledge will some day devolve into myth. Richard
D. Altick, in his article "The Private Life of Robert Browning,"
surely exaggerates when he describes "A Death in the Desert" as a
thundering denunciation of the intellect;'^^ but Norton Crowell
- 39
"Browning's Heresies," SP^ XXXIII (1936), 610.
40 •
The Alien Vis-ion, p. 97.
41
See Yale Review, XLI (1951), 259.
 73

expresses the other extreme when he defends the poem in toto as a

42
ringing panegyric for man's reasoning powers.
"The Pope" of The Ring and the Book is Browning's most
"well-adjusted" religious character. He is, however, the first
to admit that the pontifical office inhibits the fruitfulness of
most truly religious instincts. Seeing so clearly the glaring
defects of past and present Christians, from Popes to footpads,
he must nevertheless resign himself to a life more characterized
by ineffectual convention than by heroic Christ-like deeds. He
comments depressingly on the world about him, realizing that it
is an arena where good and evil, truth and falsehood, faith and
doubt, wrestle without victory. Within the world of the poem,
the climactic act of his life, as well as of Browning's religious
poetry, is his supererogatory consent to the execution of a petty
nobleman.
The entire Ring and the Book is a study in the deceptiveness
of what we conventionally call "truth." Honan describes the poem
as embodying "a kind of moral crisis that, in late 1697 and early
1698. indirectly involved all the citizenry of Rome, dividing it
into two camps of conflicting belief." Although, as Langbaum
carefully argues, it is wrong to call The Ring and the Book simply
a "relativist" poem, since in it clearly defined judgments of good
and evil are possible, final judgments are nevertheless based on
something deeper than logical argument, not to be measured by any
external yardstick, legal, social, or religious. The final ver¬
dict rests upon an intuited truth perceptible only to the moral
elite. Instead of the truth, it is truth as the noblest charac-

^^See Crowell, The Triple Soul, pp. 27ff. and passim.

Browning's Characters, p. 131.
 74

ters of the poem see it. And even after the Pope pronounces the
authoritative judgments of the poem, there is still a qualifica-
tion--"the ultimate / Judgment save yours" (I.1212-13)--as Brown-
. , 44
ing reminds the reader.
Once we see the al1-pervasiveness of Browning's philosophy
of the imperfect as observed in a random sampling of his poems,
we are prepared to consider in detail what we might call the
Browning clerical phenomenon: that is, within each of the princi¬
pal interest-groups of his poetry Browning achieved his fullest,
most mature, most varied, and yet most typical presentation of his
"philosophy" in poems which portray masterfully drawn clerical
characters, namely, the Bishop at St. Praxed's, Fra Lippo Lippi,
Bishop Blougram, Canon Giuseppe Caponsacchi, and Pope Innocent
XII.
"The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church," richly '
blending comic ugliness and amazing beauties with aesthetic and
religious overtones, is certainly Browning's most accomplished
poem of the historical-grotesque. "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea
del Sarto" are both magnificent pieces of poetic art. The mis¬
chievous cleric, along with the flawless painter, are supreme em¬
bodiments of two aspects of Browning's aesthetic philosophy. The
enigmatic Blougram provides Browning his best opportunity for
exercising his penchant for subtle argumentation, for playful
caricaturing of the rational processes, and for off-center wander- <
ings in the maze of human motivation. Poems about love and mar¬
riage are not only among Browning's best loved and most successful
poems, but they are also among his most numerous and yet his
shortest poems. Almost exclusively they tell of anonymous lovers,

44
See The Poetry of Exper-Cenoef pp. llOff.
 75

often in indefinite times and settings. Only in The Ring and

the Book does Browning present a love story with the historical
precision and multi-dimensioned scale found in the other areas of
his persistent interests. And once again, it is paradoxically
the celibate cleric, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, who is, with Pompilia,
the focal point for the poet's most profound meditations on human
love. Finally,■amid the great gallery of religious men, philoso¬
phers, and searchers—Paracelsus, St. John, Cleon, Karshish, Rabbi
Ben Ezra, and the poet himself in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day—it
is "The Pope" that as both character and poem crowns Browning's
career as a philosophical and religious poet.
Thus in five dramatic monologues—"The Bishop Orders his
Tomb at St. Praxed's," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Bishop Blougram's
Apology," "Giuseppe Caponsacchi," and "The Pope"—Browning, within
each of the divisions of his poetry which I have delineated, has
produced a masterpiece when his inspiration took root in a cleri¬
cal situation and embodied itself in a memorable clerical charac¬
ter.
Is there an explanation for this striking coincidence of
theme, character, and consummate performance? The answer would
seem to be that Browning found in the clerical character and in
the clerical situation—especially as they existed within the
fascinating quasi-gothic context of continental Catholicism--ele-
ments which appealed to him as most apt to provide appropriate
materials and a ready-made stage for his probing anatomies of in¬
teresting characters in revealingly critical situations. In
treating clerical characters and situations he could most fully
present his characteristic view of reality.
Each clerical situation provides, first of all, potential
tensions within a clerical character that result from his commit-
 76

ment as a professionally religious man to an absolute ideal, in

contrast with his actual performance—a complex of sincerity and
hypocrisy realized both subjectively and objectively. The cleri¬
cal situation provides also exterior or societal contrasts and
tensions, resulting from the clerical context in which genuine
religion is considered to be at odds with the moribund Latin
Catholicism in which Browning's characters exist and operate.
Four poles of tension are thereby set up among which it is pos¬
sible to portray a pattern of intensely revealing relationships
( horizontal, vertical," and "diagonal") as a human being strug¬
gles with himself and with his environment. This complexity
creates the ultimate Browningesque situation of inevitable and es¬
sential discrepancy between the ideal and any human effort, where
nonetheless success or failure, good and evil, are determined by
the degree of commitment to the unattainable absolute ideal.
There is an interesting modernity in Browning's fascination
with, and desire to exploit in art, the priest and cleric.
Browning's poetry, like much recent literature, was a poetry of
introspection; his poems, like many recent novels and dramas,
were peopled with "tensioned" individuals. Like Browning's great
characters, today's literary types assume their personality in an
atmosphere of crisis and paradox. The twentieth-century writer
and his reading public often see the cleric, especially the Catho¬
lic priest, as eminently qualified for inclusion in the ranks of
tensioned personalities."^^ Graham Greene's classic whisky priest
45-,
This seeming modern relevance of the priest is oerhanc thp
reason for the durability of such works as T S Elint'c
the Cathe^al (1935), and Georges Bernanos' Sous le soleil de^
Journal d'un cure de campagne
n ,^7!’ ®^ectnc response to Morris West^yL
Dev^^ s Advocate (1959) and The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963),
 77

in The Power and the Glory (1940) is a stranger in his own country,
a man of God for whom the voice of God is silent. Francois
Mauriac is pre-eminently the novelist of the "coeurs inquiets,"
and the priest and seminarian is a favorite character in his
46
novels. Lawrence V. McDonnell remarks: "Priestly existence
for Mauriac has its roots in a concept of living which means shar¬
ing life with mankind endangered, in the experience of being
47
united to them and of being responsible for them." This state¬
ment might well describe the Pope's acute self-awareness in The
R-tng and the Book.

Like Browning, too, the modern writer often presents the

cleric as removed from sacred things. As McDonnell says, the
priest or cleric is often employed as
a literary prism through which is diffused the spectrum
of man's problems. ... He emerges from the human
family, not so much as the one chosen by God out of their
number to serve them in the things that pertain to God,
but rather as the choice representative.
And McDonnell goes on to point out what we can recognize as an
interesting analogy to Browning's ideas of Christ and Christianity
which we have noted above:^^

45 (cont'd)j^ Power's Morte d'Urhan (1962), and, to a

somewhat lesser extent, Edwin O'Connor's Edge of Sadness (1961).
For an interesting recent study of the treatment of the clergyman
in modern fiction, see Horton Davies, A Mirror of the Ministry in
Modem Novels, New York, 1959; see especially pp. 81-84 and 179-
81 for a discussion of the reasons why the Catholic priest is a
more congenial literary subject than the Protestant minister, with
greater apparent dramatic and aesthetic possibilities.
^^See, for example, Le chair et le sang (1920), La gharisienne
(1941), and L’agneau (1954).
^^"The Priest-Hero in the Modern Novel," The Catholic World,
CXVI (February, 1963), 311.
^®See above, p. 65, n. 26.
 78

Ordinarily the sacramentality is missing . . . the

modern novel often fails to discover any connection
between the vocation of the priest and the process of
atonement in which he is involved by virtue of his
existence. . . . [But the modern writer] has a definite
appreciation of the priest in his role as representative.^9
Furthermore, it is interesting to note how Browning's use of
the clerical character and context seem to have developed. In
his earlier poems the cleric appears mostly as incidental, a
traditional walk-on performer, an ornament or prop rather than an
integral part of the poem.^^ Sometimes a cleric appears in per¬
son, as does the Patriarch's Nuncio in The Return of the Druses,
Ogniben in A Soul's Tragedy, or the Abbot Deodaet in "The Heretic's
Tragedy." In other poems clerics are merely mentioned, as are
Fra' Pandolf in "My Last Duchess," and the Reverend Don So-and-so
in Up at a Villa Down in the City." Even in poems where the
cleric is central, as in "The Confessional" and "Soliloquy of the
Spanish Cloister," the presentation is characterized by a rather
simplified and uncomplicated treatment of good and evil. The
priest who breaks the confessional seal is for Browning an ap¬
propriate symbol of a corrupt ecclesiastical society. Brother
Lawrence is totally and simply good. His articulate adversary is
totally and simply evil. Their clerical life serves as a suitable
reinforcing or contrasting background for their behavior; but such
49.
McDonnel1 , pp. 307-08. For a discussion of the priest as
scapegoat, bridgi representative and sacramental roles, see
Francis L. Kunkel
Novel ’t Scapegoat in the Modern Catholic
Ramparts,
The Monsi gnor of Pfppa Passes (IV) could perhaps be cited
as an example of a successful and rather complex clerical charac-
ter in Browning's early poetry. Though he appears in only a brief
episode, he does foreshadow Browning's later more centralized char-
acters. See the discussion of the Monsignor in Chapter III, pp
86-92.
 79

characters are little more than stereotyped personifications,

respectively, of good and evil — if not caricatures.
But as early as 1845, in "The Bishop Orders his Tomb,"
Browning's clerics begin to appear as masterpieces of a more subtle
characterization, with their significance and success as poetic
creations inseparable from the built-in ironies and tragedies of
their clerical status. Through "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Bishop
Blougram's Apology" on to The Ring and the Bookj Browning shows an
increasing fascination for Catholic and clerical themes and com¬
petency in dealing with them, as well as an ever deeper understand¬
ing of the character he presents. This line of progressively
more accomplished clerical portrayal was climaxed in The Ring and
the Book with "The Pope," Innocent XII, one of the truly great
religious characters in English literature.
Following his return to England and the achievement of The
Ring and the Bookj Browning seemed to lose interest in clerical
themes and reverted to his earlier employment of clerics and
clerical situations for mostly incidental grotesquerie. His
poetry, too, entered into a period of what he himself was later to
call "my mere grey argument.It now tended to become more
argumentative and formally didactic, and less "objective" than the
great poems of his middle years."The poetic prerogative had
faded before the demands of a more formally philosophic purpose,"
declares H. B. Charlton; and, with a hint from Hopkins, he con¬
cludes :

^^"With Christopher Smart," 1. 200.

^^See Browning's "Essay on Shelley" (1852) for the fullest
expression of his earlier opinions of "subjective and objective
poetry and poets. The "Essay" has been rep'll
bridge Edition" of Browning's Complete Works, pp. 1008-14.
 80

With increasing avidity his reason demands reasons and

is no longer satisfied with inbreakings .... [with
the result that it is in the volumes of 1842, 1845, 1855,
and 1864 that] we shall find more clearly what he has
caught, as distinct from what he has thought, of the
moral process called living.53
E. D. H. Johnson sees the explanation of the decided change in
Browning's poetry as lying in a failure in dramatic sense, "disas¬
trous for a poet who saw all life as conflict.
When we consider, then, the chronological sweep of Browning's
poetry from the single aspect of his use of clerical characters, we
can see a development from the early occasional and unintegrated
characters, through stereotypes and simple caricatures, to a ful¬
ness of creation in the great monologues from "The Bishop Orders
his Tomb" to "The Pope"; then a rather abrupt falling off of in¬
terest and the return of the cleric to a more extrinsic and in-
53,,
Browning's Ethical Poetry," bjrl, XXVII (1942-43), 41.
54,
The AZ'ien V'ts'ion^ p. 38. Henry Jones, Bvown'ing as
Philosophical and Religious Teacher^ p. 20, admits that Browning
held his theory of life "with greater and greater difficulty as he
became older, [and that] his dialectical tendencies grew and
threatened to wreck his artistic freedom," and, p. 97, that "ac¬
tion and dramatic treatment gave place to a discussion that is
metaphysical." Jones is not willing, however, to judge un¬
conditionally this later stage of Browning's career as a period of
decadence; rather he suggests that it is a "new departure in
poetry, necessitated by Browning's willingness to confront the
stubborn issues springing from his earlier works (see pp. 97-101).
Roma King, The Bow and the Lyre^ p. 7, among recent critics, is
also unwilling only to condemn Browning's later poetry. While
admitting that it is often "conceptually overladen," with its
quantities of thought . . . not sufficiently realized poetically "
he also commends the poet's willingness never to cease experiment-
ing, and to employ "structural devices that are [sometimes] boldly
effective. Similarly, on p. 5, King cites the point which Ford
Madox Ford once made that Browning attempts to invent a new verse
form for each of his "varying mental phases."
 81

cidental role like those of the Cardinal in "Cenciaja" and Daniel

Bartoli in the Parleyings.
There is also the intrinsic relational pattern among Brown¬
ing's important clerical characters themselves, as the poet
develops a series of human possibilities vis-a-vis a transcendent
ideal, from the malicious Spanish monk, through the hopelessly
deluded and frustrated dying bishop, the sensual but idealistic
Lippo Lippi, the ambiguous Bishop Blougram, heroic but imprudent
Caponsacchi, to the saintly, wise, and realistic Pope.^^
All these patterns and developments in Browning's employment
of the clerical character, situation, and theme will be considered
in detail in the subsequent portions of this study.

^^This schematization cuts across chronology at one point:

"Bishop Blougram's Apology," was probably written in 1850, Three
years before "Fra Lippo Lippi." See DeVane's Handbook^, pp. 216
and 240.
 CHAPTER III

MINOR CLERICAL CHARACTERS AND MINOR CLERICAL POEMS,

EARLY AND LATE

In proposing to consider in this chapter all Browning's

minor clerical characters, I do not mean to examine his every
mention of "pope," "bishop," "monk," "rabbi," "preacher," etc.,
as listed in the Broughton and Stelter ConaovdanaeSuch a
catalogue would be of little pertinence to this study. Rather,
I shall discuss the clerics who are, in some significant sense of
the word, "characters" in the plays and poems, and who contribute
either directly or indirectly, in howsoever minor a role, to the
life within the imaginative context of each work. I shall con¬
sider Browning's passing allusions to clerics only when they in
some way relate to the characters and poems which are discussed
more fully.
Browning's first mention of a cleric occurs in Pccraoelsus,
Book III, where the discontented physician complains to his friend,
Festus, of the small-mindedness of his students and clients. He
recalls how he once was summoned to the bedside of a dying prince,
and how he roughly drove off those who were in attendance: an in¬
competent physician, an astrologer, and two monks, one of whom
"fumbled at the sick man's mouth / With some undoubted relic—a
sudary / Of the Virgin." Freed from his tormentors,
the prince immediately recovered; whereupon Paracelsus was seized
as a sorcerer who had attempted to thwart the godly remedies of

L. N. Broughton and B. F. Stelter, A Conoordanoe to the

Poems of Robert Browning (New York, 1924-25).

82
 83

the ejected sycophants. To celebrate his "miraculous" cure, the

prince made a large thanksgiving offering to the "strenuously"
praying monks of the neighboring abbey; and for the added solace
of his people
The prince was pleased no longer to defer
The burning of some dozen heretics
Remanded till God's mercy should be shown
Touching his sickness. .
(111.463-66)2
This anecdote illustrates aspects of monks and monasteries which
at this early date (1835) had impressed Browning: their supersti¬
tion, if not hypocrisy, evidenced by their exploitation of ques¬
tionable relics, their venality, and their oppressive influence
over a gullible Christian people--items which he was frequently to
employ in his later poetry. Similarly, Paracelsus' sarcastic
reference to the burning of heretics anticipates the ironies and
3
grim humor of "The Heretic's Tragedy."
In the long "Note" which follows the poem mention is made of
Abbot Trithemus of Spanheim (1462-1516), one of Paracelsus' masters
in the arts of "predicting the future by astrology and cheiromancy,
evoking apparitions, and practicing the different arts of magic and
alchemy." The final entry tells of "one Liechtenfels, a canon,"
whom Paracelsus cured, but who refused him his fee because the
4
cure had been so swift.

^For the entire incident, see III.425-74.

^When, however, the scandalous executions are in both in¬
stances portrayed as the results of secular as much as ecclesiasti¬
cal forces--the cured prince's desire for an appropriate holiday
event, and Philip the Fair's avarice—Browning is displaying a
degree of historical sophistication often absent in an age of
mutual Protestant-Catholic bigotry.
^In the poem itself, this incident is mentioned in IV.68ff.
 84

Obviously, the clerics in Pavaoelsus are peripheral, notable

only for what they foreshadow. Here they are merely a minor part
of the gothic paraphernalia, while the detailed information in the
"note" results in what DeVane in his Handbook aptly labels "a
rather handsome exhibition of erudition" (p. 55).
In Sovdelloy which treats of the complicated struggles
between the papal Guelfs and imperial Ghibellines, the Pope of the
time, Honorius III (1217-1227), is in no sense a character of the
tale. But as principal sponsor of the Guelfs, he is never far
from the consciousnesses of the foreground participants; and on
at least two occasions he is enthusiastically hailed as the champion
of liberty: "The Pope, for us the People, who begun / The People,
carries on the People thus, / To keep that Kaiser off and dwell
with us! (1.234-36); and "The Pope, / This incarnation of the
People s hope (IV.380-81) a view of the papacy sharply contrary ''
to that held by most of Browning's 1840 readers. While the poet's
use of historical fact to some extent required him to express such
sentiments, they also perhaps portend a nascent open-mindedness
regarding the beneficent potential of the papacy which Browning
was to exhibit later in his tentative sympathies for Pius IX, and
especially in his conception of "The Pope" in The Ring and the
Book. But another and contrasting view of the papacy occurs in
Book IV of Bordello where a soldier suggests to Sordello a ballad
about the struggles of the Roman noble Crescentius Nomentanus
with the tenth-century papacy, which, a hundred years after the
unfortunate Pope Formosus, was still at its scandalous Iron-Age
nadir.

When Browning has Ecelin II, the tyrant of Mantua and a

Ghibelline chieftain, suddenly retire to a monastery, he is close- -
ly following his sources, chiefly the Storia degli Eaelini of
 85

5
Giambatista Verci. He makes no attempt, however, to derive or
create any clear motive for this surprising turn of events, while,
as Stewart Holmes has pointed out. Browning did fuse, adapt, and
alter other historical details in his attempts to strengthen the
dramatic unity of his poem. Ecelin's withdrawal remains a
rather superficial plot device, a mere occasion for Salinguerra's
ascendency and Sordello's oncoming crises.
The basic lack of sympathy for the monastic or ascetic life
which was to remain a perennial feature of Browning's thought is
evident here in the totally negative spirit of the comments which
the narrator and various characters make regarding the prince's
new "career": "Ecelin, they say, / Dozes now at Oliero" (1.138-
39), reports a Guelf envoy; Browning's narrating persona describes
Mantua's lord as he "lifts writhen hands to pray, / Lost at
Oliero's convent" (1.290-91); and Ecelin's daughter, Palma,
remarks to Sordello, "A month since at Oliero slunk / All that was
Ecelin into a monk" (III.517-18). The nearest attempt at some
explanation for Ecelin's behavior comes in the narrator's terse
comment: "Either Ecelin grew old / Or his brain altered" (IV.640-
41). And a few lines later he is described as Salinguerra's "im¬
becile / Ally" (IV.666-67).^
While Sordello^ then, "may . . . have been the germ which
infected the poet with his life-long love of Italy,"^ his treat-

^Bassano, 1779, pp. 90 and 400. For an account of Brown¬

ing's sources and his handling of them, see S. W. Holmes, "The
Sources of Browning's Sordello," SP, XXXIV (1937), 467-96.
^For other disparaging comments on monastic life, see I.
299-308 and IV.710ff.
^S. W. Holmes, "The Sources of Browning's Sordello," p. 496.
 86

merit of clerics in the poem gives little indication that they

will soon be among Browning's persistent interests.
The Monsignor-Bishop in the fourth episode of P-ippa Passes
(1841) is Browning's first clerical "character" in any real sense
of the term. As Park Honan remarks, he "is Browning's first
portrayal of a type of character that was to occur often in the
monologues: the intensely spiritual and intensely worldly man,
whose unfailing interest lies in the conflict and uncertain ad-
O
justment of two opposing character traits."
The Monsignor has suffered at the hands of critics by their
reading more into the episode than Browning's text will allow.
The reason for this, I would suggest, is the tendency—natural
enough in a scholar deeply versed in Browning's poetry--to fill
out the rather sparse characterizing details provided in this
early episode by unconsciously reading them in the light of the
more subtle motivations and complexities of character in the later
poems. When, moreover, E. D. H. Johnson describes him as "a
preliminary study for a whole family of cynical worldlings who
choose the Church as the surest means of satisfying their thirst
for power,he is relating the Monsignor arbitrarily to the
Bishop at St. Praxed's or to the Franceschini brothers, rather
than to the much more complex Bishop Blougram or the soon-to-die
Pope of The Ring and the Book whose overriding desire is to make
the most of the bit of his life that yet remains.

8
Browning's Charaatersj pp. 89-90.
9
The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry^ p. 89.
There is an interesting recent parallel in Morris West's
novel. The Devil’s Advocate (1959), in which the principal charac¬
ter, Monsignor Blaise Meredith, endeavors to salvage the last few
months of what he considers to have been a wasted life.
 87

Two articles which appeared in Studies in Philology in 1939

and 1940 have resulted in the most fruitful exchange of opinion
to date on the interpretation of Pippa Passes, especially of its
Part IV.In attempting to rectify the traditional misreading
of the Monsignor's character, J. M. Purcell correctly points out
that there is no evidence in the poem that the prelate was plot¬
ting with the Intendant for the ruin of Pippa, or that he was a
particularly reprehensible man or cleric; but he leans too far
toward an opposite extreme when he states that "there is nothing
in Part IV which will allow us to infer that the incident between
the Monsignor and the Intendant would have had any other ending
than it now has if Pippa had not passed" (p. 85). J. M. Ariail
agrees with the first part of Purcell's thesis, but points out
the weakness in his conclusion. The Monsignor delays in order
to indulge in an exercise of his intellectual cleverness, thus ex¬
posing himself to the Intendant's temptation, and, very briefly,
he does waver. The text clearly shows this, both in the villain's
bold assurance as he makes his final play immediately before Pip-
pa's song, and in the explosive manner in which, after her song,
the Monsignor calls in the arresting officers. His "Miserere"
would be meaningless if there had been no wavering in his inten¬
tion. Ariail concludes: "He might have overcome the temptation
without Pippa. He might not have done so: we cannot know. We
only know that through Pippa's song he did" (p. 127).
Norton B. Crowell exagggerates when he remarks that the
Monsignor "has connived at the basest of crimes, including the

M. Purcell, "The Dramatic Failure of Pippa Passes," SP,

XXXVI (1939), 77-87, and J. M. Ariail, "Is Pippa Passes a Dramatic
Failure?" SP, XXXVII (1940), 120-29. Parenthetical references in
this paragraph are to these articles, respectively.
 88

planned murder of Pippa, who as the daughter of his brother

12
stands in the way of the inheritance the man of God lusts after."
The text clearly indicates that the Monsignor has arrived at Asolo
unaware that his brother's child is still alive, and that he in¬
tends before he himself dies to atone at least partially for his
family's ill-gotten wealth by taking it out of the hands of the
dishonest Intendant and claiming it for himself, and for the
Church upon his heirless death. The Monsignor does linger over
the Intendant's vicious proposition, but he is finally aroused by
an overwhelming disgust against both himself and his tempter. In¬
spired by Pippa's fey-like song with its reminder of death ("Sud¬
denly God took us"), he resolutely orders the arrest of the con¬
spirator.
Even Professor Honan, whom I quoted above, exaggerates when
he attempts to describe the Monsignor as "intensely spiritual and
intensely worldly." Honan is correct in underscoring that para¬
doxic mixture of the worldly and the spiritual which so often
characterizes the Latin religious sensibility, the dramatic poten¬
tial of which Browning was beginning to recognize; but the prelate
is hardly "intensely" either worldly or spiritual. He does show

12
The Triple Soul^ p. 168. Mrs. Orr, Handbook to Brown¬
ing’s Works (London, 1892), p. 57, and Ethel C. Mayne, Browning's
Heroines^ p. 76, both state that the Monsignor connived at his
brother's murder; Edward Dowden, Robert Browning (London, 1904),
p. 61, calls the Intendant the Monsignor's "hireling." It is
true that Bluphocks' words (11.368-69) do imply that the Bishop,
through the Intendant, may have paid him to seduce Pippa; but the
words and actions of both the Bishop and the Intendant in Part IV
clearly show that Bluphocks is speaking either cynically or er¬
roneously. And at the beginning of his speech (11.332-35),
Bluphocks clumsily excuses himself for having flippantly suggested
any wrongdoing by the Bishop, who is "all that a bishop should be."
 89

elements of that cool rationality and practical diplomacy which

are often the mark of the professional Italian-trained ecclesiastic,
and which render him as much the intellectual master of Maffeo as
Blougram will be of Gigadibs. But he is unexpectedly un-Italian
in his relative indifference to the Intendant's blackmailing
threats to reveal more of his family's scandals. He further states
that he has not shared in his family's crimes: "I, the youngest,
might have rivalled them in vice, if not in wealth: but from my
boyhood I came out from among them, and so am not partaker of their
plagues" {IV.106-09). Therefore his confession that he has
"whole centuries of sin to redeem, and only a month or two of
life to do it in" (IV.133-35), and that only by his "strenuousest
efforts" will he still be able to keep himself free from mortal
sin (IV.142-43)--a statement which is regularly cited as proof of
his evil character—could just as well be the intense self-
deprecating awareness of the mystic as in the literal affirmation
of the inveterate sinner. Most likely it is the emotionally high¬
lighted concern of the ordinarily imperfect Christian as he nears
death.
The Monsignor, then, is both something more and something
less than the traditionally interpreted ecclesiastical blackguard.

^^Honan, Brown'Lng's Charactersj p. 90, speaks of the Monsi- ^

gnor's "lack of anger and indignation" and "easy tolerance of evi.,'
as reflected in the poem's diction and syntax. Yet he seems to
overlook the fact that the terminally ill prelate has made an un¬
comfortable journey from Rome to Asolo in order to correct an un¬
just situation, and his obviously growing impatience with the In¬
tendant's clumsy hints of blackmail, to the point where he seems
ready to assault physically the Intendant (seelV.179-80). The
Monsignor is controlled, subtle, enjoying his intellectual supe¬
riority and legal advantages, but he has every intention of punish¬
ing the dishonest steward.
 90

There is nothing very subtle or "intense" in his portrayal; he

is morally a rather ordinary churchman, who, like the other three
of "Asolo's Happiest Ones," achieved a revealing moment of triumph
over evil when Pippa passed by and unconsciously touched his heart
His clerical status does heighten the suspense as the fascinated
reader watches while, for a crucial moment, a most horrible crime
lies within easy reach of Pippa's "holy Monsignor." We can pre¬
sume that it was for this reason that Browning placed this episode
in the poem's climactic position, and took the structural risk of
. 14
having Pippa s fate touch that of the Monsignor.
The Monsignor's tale provides also an interesting sample of
what Browning's poetic eye saw of the outward aspects of Italian
Catholicism, and how these were held in mind until he turned to
composition. During his first Italian visit in 1838 he would
have often seen a priest at a piazza cafe make the Sign of the
Cross over his food and glass of wine and murmur a brief Latin
prayer. Browning's Monsignor does the same, though with an in¬
vented formula, "Benedicto benediaatur" (IV.4).^^ At Venice, as
we mentioned above. Browning witnessed the Corpus Christi proces¬
sion, which he here transfers from the Piazza San Marco to "the
great square" at Messina on the feast day of the Assumption, Au¬
gust 15 (see IV.9-11).^^

14
The artistic inconsistency that is perhaps involved in
this last point has been noted by G. K. Chesterton, Robert Brown¬
ing (London, 1903), p. 45; and Chesterton's criticism is com¬
mented upon by Honan, Browning’s Characters^ p. 91, n. 15.
These words correspond to no ritual text. Browning's
formula rather clumsily translates—or rather, transliterates—
into something like "May what has been blessed be blessed again."
16 ^
An interesting question is raised by the blunder of the
line on "cowls and twats" in Pippa's final speech (IV.334). It
 91

Browning's imperfect mastery of his Catholic materials can

perhaps account for some of the misreadings which we have noted.
He erroneously treats the nineteenth-century Italian Church as
if it were still entirely in its Renaissance forms. For example,
the Monsignor, as the details of his arrival and taking possession
of the episcopal palace seem to indicate, is the bishop of Asolo--
and therefore one of the notorious "absentee" bishops. The In-
tendant's threatening reminder that his accomplice at Cesena
"will confess all to the good bishop--you!" (IV.186), and thus
force the bishop to act publicly, may also indicate the same.
But episcopal absenteeism had been strictly proscribed since the
Council of Trent in 1563. The Monsignor's acting as an agent of
the Pope with the power of arrest further suggests a Renaissance
prince-bishop, or a prelate in the nineteenth-century Papal
States, not in the Austrian Province of Venezia in the 1830's.
Likewise, the pointed mention of family plots and poisonings is

16 (cont d)^^ believe that the poet deliberate¬

ly disfigured a rich lyrical passage with what has been labeled
"the literary world's worst 'brick.'" One wonders whether Brown¬
ing erroneously believed that a "twat" was part of a nun's garb
corresponding to a cowl--this "hair-raising misapprehension," as
Partridge calls it--and why its real meaning was never brought to
the author's or his editors' attention (see Eric Partridge, A
Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, London, 5th ed.,
1961, I, 919, and II, 1333).
^^This passage is admittedly obscure and could mean, if the
antecedant of "you" is "all" instead of "bishop," that the con¬
fession will be made to Cesena's bishop and thus embarrassingly
implicate the Monsignor. Another ambiguous phrase is Bluphocks'
mention of "your Bishop's Intendant's money" (11.329-30). If
the possessive "your" refers to "Bishop" as well as "Intendant,
this is another hint that he is Asolo's bishop.
 92

more appropriate for a tale of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century

Italy, even if we allow for the Sicilian origins of the Monsi¬
gnor's family.
These anachronistic touches, then, help to explain how a
reader might easily presume that a Browning cleric in such a
Renaissance-like environment would necessarily be a despicable
character. But more important, they demonstrate how the young
poet supplemented what was still inchoate and uncrystallized in
his knowledge of Italian Catholicism by filling in his personal
observations with presuppositions and materials derived from his
vast reading of medieval and Renaissance history.
Yet even at this early date. Browning, perhaps unconsciously,
was beginning to relate his clerical characters to his philosophy
of the imperfect, since he had the Monsignor read with approval
Jules's letter, and thus gave voice to his own first clear ex¬
pression of the danger of fatal "expertness" within the debilitat¬
ing limits of any single artistic convention.
Browning's only cleric intended literally for the stage was
the Patriarch's Nuncio" in The Return of the Druses, The charac¬
ter as well as his title seem to be entirely fictitious.^® En¬
dowed with conventionally sinister "asides," and a rubrical final
frustration, the Nuncio is a melodramatic villain who barely fills
the two dimensions of his portrayal. He has appropriately
reached his present honorific position by bribery, and is a master
18
He is referred to as the Nuncio of the Patriarch of the
Knights of Rhodes. "Nuncio" is a title normally reserved to
papal ambassadors, and Rhodes has never been a patriarchal see.
Perhaps Browning intended the Nuncio to be the representative of
the Patriarch of Venice, whom he conceived as somehow allied with
the Knights against their perennial rival, the Republic of Venice.
 93

of hypocritical cajolery and self-righteous indignation. The

Nuncio is perhaps the most shallowly conceived character of this
mediocre drama, and worth noting only as an early instance of
relative failure in Browning's clerical repertory.
Browning's first non-Catholic cleric was the Antinomian
heresiarch, Johannes Agricola. In "Johannes Agricola in Medita¬
tion," first published in 1836 and later included in Dramatic
Lyrics of 1842, Browning presents a fanatic's exultant, hyper¬
literal expression of the doctrine of predestination, a religious
position of which the poet thoroughly disapproved, even in its
less extreme forms, as running counter to his own developing
19
doctrine of the supreme value of human efforts.
Originally paired with "Porphyria's Lover" under the col¬
lective title "Madhouse Cells," "Johannes Agricola," as Honan
remarks, "substitutes for a horror story ['Porphyria's Lover']
20
the presentation of what might be called a 'horror' doctrine."
Professor Honan goes on to demonstrate how the two poems are alike
not only in length, meter, and rhyme, but also in their scanty and
vague treatment of character. Agricola's language and cadence
are precisely those of Porphyria's lover, and, but for their
meaning, the two monologists speak with a single voice.
There is also a similarity, as we shall see, between the
poet's treatment of the Antinomian Agricola and the Pharisaical
monk of the "Soliloquy." Both speakers are presented as essen-

^^See C. R. Tracy, "Browning's Heresies," SP, XXXIII (1936),

pp. 614-19, for a discussion of the probable relationship of this
poem to Browning's friendship with the Unitarian leader William J.
Fox and the Flower sisters, Eliza and Sarah.
Browning's Chxxracters, p. 30.
 94

tially mad, and their consequent detachment from a real world

precludes the possibility of true motivation, and hence of char¬
acterization in depth. They can only be described as "cases,"
objects of our curiosity; they are not real persons with whom we
21
can readily sympathize or identify.
"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" is Browning's first
poem set in a totally clerical context. DeVane in his Handbook^
p. 113, believes that the poem owes something to Browning's first
Italian visit in the early summer of 1838 "when he had ample op¬
portunity to observe the monasteries." We know, however, that
the poet spent only a month in Italy, and, as we have seen, he
was preoccupied with the single purpose of gaining background
materials for Sordello. Browning could well have been inspired
by the everyday sight of walled monasteries and passing friars
and monks, but he certainly had a far from "ample opportunity"
for any but the most superficial investigation. The fact that
his "cloister" is in Spain rather than Italy suggests something
more than a simple Italian origin for the poem. Shortly after¬
wards Browning wrote two other poems about contemporary Spain
which dealt with events relating to the Carlist Wars of 1832-39--
"Cristina," published with "Soliloquy" in 1842, and "The Confes¬
sional," published in 1845. The Spanish locale and contempora¬
neity of these three poems--both factors being relatively rare in
Browning's poetry—indicate, I believe, a unity of source in the
recent religious and political history of Spain, a history which

21
John W. Willoughby, in The Explioator, XXI (1962), item
5, denies a total lack of sympathy in Browning's conception, and
suggests that while the poet condemns Agricola's philosophy, he
admires his triumphant sincerity.
 95

22
was being chronicled in great detail in the British press.
The suppression of the monasteries in 1835 by the anti-Carlists,
and the total confiscation of Church property in 1842, were espe¬
cially applauded in England. Browning's first sight of monks
and monasteries in Italy in 1838 may have recalled the Spanish
situation, which then would have inspired him with his setting
and his villain—a species from which recent events had granted
a long-overdue deliverance.
I do not believe, however, that evidence can be deduced
from the poem itself to illustrate Browning's thorough disapproval
of monasticism as an institution; rather, the poem evidences an
impressive artistic objectivity--impressive, when we realize how
strong Browning's antipathies were. The poem is a portrait of
hypocritical malice and envy, and the monastery provides a bizarre,
unusual setting, a "microcosm" as Phelps suggests,which renders
the whole portrait more striking, more sharply focused and con-

random sampling of the principal reviews shows the great

number of articles on all aspects of Spanish life. See, for
example, Quccrterly Review^ LXII (1838), 385-424, for a history o
Spanish bullfighting; LXIII (1839), 279-317, of C P.
. . .
Scott's ExotiX'S'Con in the South of Spaing LXIV (1 y), >
for a review of Prescott's History of Ferdinand and Isabella.
See Blaahoood's. XLV (1839), 666-68, for a
five entitled "Assassins and Bull Fights ; LVII (1845), 191 94,
for a review of S. E. Widdrington's Spain and Spaniards ^n 1843; _
LVIII (1845) for an article on the Carlist leader, Zumalacarregui,
highly regarded by the English defenders of Cristina. See bl^n-
tdgh Revieu, LXVIII (1839), 199-215, for a review of Prescott s
HUtc-mi LXXII tl?'*!). 2“-20, for a review of J. G. Lockhart's
translation of ancient Spanish ballads; LXIV (1841), 24-35, for
discussion of the Gypsies of Spain.
^^William Lyon Phelps, Robert Browning (Indianapolis, 1932),
pp. 184-86.
 96

trolled. Browning was primarily interested in presenting a

malicious person, monk or not, who is undoubtedly more striking
in a monastery where pettiness is more likely, and where the
slightest personal incompatibility can be devastatingly exag-
24
gerated.
The Browningesque tension of this poem, however, is not
derived from a highly personalized interior struggle, such as
will typify the poet's later clerical characters. The conflict
in the Spanish cloister is an essentially external one between
two basically different human beings. The nameless soliloquist
is an lago in miniature, embodying the mystery of human evil
within what Crowell describes as "the smallest soul in villaindom,"
while Brother Lawrence is one of Browning's most engaging "in¬
nocents." Crowell further remarks that "it is to strain the
sense of the lines to find him vacuous," or, as the editors of a
pc
standard anthology describe him, "a great big bore." The ma¬
levolent monk, with his obsessive concern for external religious
observance and his free indulgence in a pettiness of spirit more
diabolical than human, is in direct antithesis to Browning's

24
H. B. Charlton, "The Making of the Dramatic Lyric," BJRL^
XXXV (1952-53), 350, notes that Browning's exploitation of the
cloister setting extends even to the poem's title. Browning's
titles often function as a prodding or prompting "to hazard a
guess," and "arouse an expectancy, normally directly fulfilled,
of the appropriate setting for the episode it preludes. . . .
Sometimes the prompting is more dramatic, because it arouses an
expectation exactly the opposite of what will immediately be
forthcoming: for instance, the title, "Soliloquy of a Spanish
Cloister", arouses expectancy of a holy recluse's intense com¬
munion with God; but in fact its first words are: 'Gr-r-i—
there go, my heart's abhorrence!"'
25
The Triple Soul^ p. 171. See Hazel ton Spencer, Walter
E. Houghton, and Herbert Barrows, British Literature from Blake
to the Present Day (Boston, 1952), p. 694, n. 11.
 97

philosophy and a striking example of the perversion which the

poet habitually saw as a latent danger in the ascetic life.
Brother Lawrence, on the other hand, embodies all the elements of
unpremeditated virtue which, for Browning, was the primary factor
constituting human goodness in any circumstance or environment.
Lawrence's gardening is a symbol of the wholeness of his life.
Occupied with organic life, he himself lives in striking contrast
to the empty ritualism of his adversary, whose every thought,
26
word, and act is a denial of life and a repression of the natural.
The irony of the soliloquist's speech lies not only in his
uncomplimentary general self-revelation, but more precisely in his
unwitting characterization of himself as a beast. The "Gr-r-r"
of the poem's first and last lines frame the monk's self-portrait,
while his favorite epithets are "Swine" and "Swine's Snout." He
projects his own animal-like sexuality, when he imagines that a
mere glance at a woman or a pornographic novel would be stimulus
enough to induce Brother Lawrence to "grovel" in sin.
One result of this simplified black-and-white personifica¬
tion is that the two characters may seem to verge on caricature.
H. B. Charlton suggests that perhaps "the venom of the monk . . .
allows itself too much comic license to pass for serious portrai-
^ ,.27
ture.
Recent discussions of the poem have concentrated on the
still undecided interpretation of two passages: the "great text
in Galatians," with its "twenty-nine distinct damnations," and

^^See Thomas C. Kishler, "A Note on Browning's "Soliloquy

of the Spanish Cloister,"' PTj I (1963), 70-71.
^^"The Making of the Dramatic Lyric," op. cit. (above, n.
24), p. 373.
 98

"Hyj Zz/j Mine." As for the first, most scholars, including

DeVane, now seem to agree, though still reservedly, with Arnold
Williams' convincing argument that the disputed text is probably
po
Galatians 3.21. But Williams also retains the possibility
that the text is imaginary, with the literal reference limited
simply to Galatians itself as a Pauline letter filled with noto¬
riously difficult passages. Browning probably uses "twenty-nine"
as the French use trente-sixj or the Hebrews seven, twelve, forty,
and seventy, simply to indicate a good number. There is much
less agreement on the curious "Hy^ Zy, Hine." Richard D. Altick
has recently argued that it is the beginning of a formula designed
to invoke Satan. I believe, however, that Patrick W. Gainer
has presented a more convincing case for the words as the mocking
echo of the Vesper bell—basing his argument on the consistency
of Browning's use of italics throughout the poem to signify "mock¬
ery" in the sens.e of "derisive imitation.
Another minor puzzle is presented by the seemingly hybrid
invocation "Plena gratia / Ave^ Virgo." Gainer (p. 159) suggests

28
See DeVane's Handbook^ pp. 113-14, and Williams' article.
Browning's 'Great Text in Galatians,"' MLQ^ X (1949), 89-90.
John P. Cutts, "Browning's 'Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister,"' N S n.s. V (1958), 17-18, is convinced that "twenty-*
nine is literal, and signifies the 17 vices of Gal. 5.19-21 plus
the 12 virtues of 22-23. Impressed by the coincidence of their
totalling 29, he declares that the vices and virtues "can become
twenty-nine if the envious monk could induce his brother to trust
his works instead of his faith." The mathematical coincidence
discovered by Cutts is curious and perhaps significant, but his
reasoning is far-fetched, and tends to mark the evil monk as hold¬
ing a caricatured Lutheranism.
30
See "Memo to the Next Annotator of Browning," VP I (1963)
31 II
"'Hy, Zy, Hine. ibid., pp. 158-60.
 99

that "the speaker's hate-distorted mind causes him to utter

words of the Ave Maria confused with the Litany of the Blessed
Virgin^ resulting in a complete distortion of the Vesper prayers."
While it is obvious that Browning intended his villain to mock
the opening prayers of Vespers, a problem arises from the fact
that the first prayer of Vespers was the Pater Noster ("Our
Father"), with the Ave Maria the second prayer; and the Litany
occurs neither in Vespers nor in any of the other Hours. More
accurately, then, according to Gainer's theory, at the sound of
the bell the compulsive formalist would likely have spouted forth
with a confused form of the Pater. But did Browning intend
these words to be a confused version, or did he erroneously pre¬
sume that they were the opening Latin words of the Catholics'
"Hail Mary"? In a day when the Ave Maria had not yet been popu¬
larized by the musical settings of Verdi, Gounod, and so many
others, I do not believe that this possibility can be totally dis-
^ counted.
r-'

^^Browning's error in his selection of Vesper prayers may

have resulted from equating the Vesper bell with the evening An-
gelus. The thrice-daily Angelus bell is a signal for an anti-
phonal prayer honoring the Incarnation derived from the Marian
passages of Luke 1, and includes most of the words of the present-
day form of the Ave Maria, Such an error would be natural after
Browning's first brief experience of the multiple bell-ringings o^
a Catholic conmunity.
^^Gainer's discussion has, I believe, made a real contribu¬
tion towards a correct interpretation by eliminating all but two
possibilities: either, as he argues, these words signify hate-
induced confusion in the speaker's mind (whatever might have been
' the error in Browning's mind in his selection of Vesper prayers);
or Browning has simply further erred in attempting to represent
the opening words of the Ave Maria^ a prayer which he would
stereotypically have associated with any Catholic ceremony. For
unless they are to represent a confused version, there seems to be
no poetic reason for their interpolation, since the correct words,
"Ave Maria gratia plena," correspond, both in meter and rhyme, to
"" the words Browning actually used.
 100

A number of other items illustrate that while Browning

possessed general information on monastic life, he was not
qualified to discuss its details with the accuracy required for
a perfect poem of so intense and narrow a scope. No laborious
research was needed to discover that most religious dine in com¬
mon, wash the utensils they use, celebrate feast days with a
special menu, and are summoned at intervals during the day to sing
the Canonical Hours, and that some work in the cloister garden.
But Browning missed the point that by rule monks dine in silence,
speaking only when necessary, and then in Latin. He seems to
have had a partial knowledge of this latter rule when he has the
wicked speaker mimic Lawrence's query, "What's the Latin name for
'parsley'?" a natural enough question in a vegetarian environment.
Browning was further unaware of the most basic monastic rule of
poverty, or common ownership, whereby a goblet "marked with L. for
our initial would have been out of the question. The references
to Arianism and Manicheanism, which Browning includes to represent
an exaggerated religious intellectual ism, are curiously anachro¬
nistic, since these heresies would in the nineteenth century have
exercised no one except the professional scholar.
These are all minor details, but they do point to an un¬
familiarity with some of the actualities of monastic life and con-

34.
Miriam K. Starkman's article, "The Manichee in the Cloister
A Reading of Browning's 'Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister '"
/^M,_LXXV (1960), 399-405, is a theologically sophis?i?ated dis¬
cussion, but a valid contribution only on the basis of the theory
that the poem is set in the Middle Ages or Renaissance. She also
tends to over-universalize the perennial currency of the opprobri-
ous term Manichee in religious polemics. After the Albigensian
and Cathanst panics of the late Middle Ages, the use of th^term
was rare, and in no sense colloquial.
 101

temporary Catholic thought, natural enough in one whose knowledge

35
came mostly through books, and not from personal association.
Browning's only other Spanish clerical poem is "The Confes¬
sional," first published in Dvamatio Romances in 1845. Along
with the practice of clerical celibacy, auricular confession was
under steady attack in the British press during this time, and
much of the political and religious unrest in the Catholic
countries was being blamed on the clergy's alleged unscrupulous
abuse of the confessional. Because of the natural sympathy of
the British for the anti-clerical anti-Carlist government, Spain
- was a special focal point of interest during the 1830's and
,1840's.^^ DeVane seems correct, then, when he differs from
earlier commentators and interprets this poem as a contemporary
utterance, probably arising from the poet's interest in the civil
wars in Spain and their aftermath under Queen Cristina who had in-
1 spired his 1842 poem, "Cristina."

^^But critics who declare that this poem "gives us a glimpse

into the whole monastic system" (Phelps, Robert Browning, p. 184),
or "is a very correct picture of cloister life" (G. W. Cooke, A
Guide-Book to the Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning,
Boston, 1891, p. 164), are even less informed than Browning.
^®In addition to diplomatic and economic support for the
anti-Carlists, Britain unofficially recruited and transported a
regiment of voluntary mercenaries, the "British Legion." See
Alexander Somerville, History of the British Legion and the War in
Spain (London, 1839), and "The British Legion," Blackwood's, XLII
(1837), 169-78. For a typical example of current discussions of
both auricular confession and clerical celibacy, see the reviews
of J. Michelet's Du Pretre, de la Femme, de la Famille in Black¬
wood's, LVIII (1845), 185-96, and in the Quarterly Review, LXXVI
(1845), 299-354.
^^Compare DeVane, Handbook, p. 171, and Edward Berdoe, The
Browning Cyclopaedia (New York, 1928), p. 116-17.
 102

"The Confessional" is one of Browning's strongest attacks

on any Catholic practice, and the confessor is objectively his
most reprehensible clerical villain. I would question, however,
whether Browning fully realized how offensive his poem would be
to a Catholic reader, or suspected that the violation of the con¬
fessional seal was the most heinous crime he could have alleged
against any Catholic cleric, real or fictitious. The poem, more¬
over, is something else than simply a religious expose or polemic.
Over and above his anti-Catholic tendencies was Browning's pre¬
occupation with the theme of freedom's struggle against mis-
government of any kind. The dramatic potential of confessional
abuse, when combined with the current non-Catholic fear and curi¬
osity, provided him with an especially dramatic example--almost a
universal symbol--of religio-political perversion.
The poem is in no sense a character study, either of the
mendacious confessor, the agonizing speaker, or the betrayed
38
Obviously, Browning was not disposed to favor Catholic
integrity, especially where there was a case of reputed
lovers of liberty striving to shake off the heavy hand of the

wa^TOi
was 5™ cal
not typical. In defense of his choice of example
In trirainalit)
he miaht

- -li
°f Confessiotial Seal (St. Louis 1927)
Jo itlcs poem on JontemJoJa^y Ua ian

.h»'£ S’ii,- :sgss;;,™

 103

Beltran. As the appalled reader watches, the poem unfolds in

swiftly succeeding scenes; the hate-crazed girl grovelling in
her dungeon, the confessional parody before and after the un¬
suspecting love-making and fatal confidence, the bound Beltran in
his love's embrace upon the scaffold, and, finally, the frame¬
like return to the cursing girl. Browning is obviously more in¬
terested in the tragic series of events, as both a fascinating
and a significant tale of horrors, than he is in the characteriz¬
ing subtleties of the specific participants.
Once again Browning's presuppositions and lack of first-hand
experience regarding Catholic practices has led him into some
minor inaccuracies. Most unrealistic, for example, is the
penitent's mention of proper names, either hers or her lover's,
whereby she first exposed herself to the confessor's wiles. In¬
ferring with DeVane that the poem's events are intended to be
more or less contemporary with the time of composition. Browning
has also again succumbed to the same kind of anachronistic pre¬
sumptions we have noted earlier. While a violation of the con¬
fessional seal would be a rare but credible abuse at an earlier
date, in the nineteenth century it would be practically unthinkable,
even in chaotic and Catholic Spain. There is an ambiguity as to
Beltran's execution. Mention is made in the penultimate stanza
both of a "stapled block," which suggests beheading, but also of a
"busy hangman"; finally, Beltran is described with his "head

^^Henry Charles Lea in his admittedly unfriendly but im¬

pressively documented study, A History of Auriaular Confessions
and Indulgenoes in the Latin Church (Philadelphia, 1896), I, 455,
is able to cite no case of violation after 1705, and this at
Carcassonne, France.
 104

strapped back," which could suggest garroting. As a matter of

fact, in 1828 the garrote was decreed the sole mode of capital
punishment in Spain.
Critics who read the poem as a portrayal of one more typical
instance in the grisly history of the Inquisition ignore a number
of historical details. The Inquisition as an investigative tri¬
bunal was abolished in Spain in 1834. Prior to this no one con¬
victed of heresy had been "relaxed" by the tribunal to the civil
authorities since 1826, and this had been the first and last such
horror in the nineteenth century. Even if Browning meant
Beltran's arrest and death to be set at an earlier age, the over¬
night procedure narrated in the poem is unhistorical1y swift for
an Inquisition process. Nor is there any reference in the poem
to heresy. Beltran was executed for his alleged civil treason.
The unscrupulous confessor had sacrilegiously used the information
he obtained in the confessional to betray the young revolutionary
leader to the government authorities (presumably Carlists); the
Inquisition is nowhere mentioned or hinted at.^^
40,
See H. C. Lea S ,4 H'istory of the Inquisition in Spain
(Philadelphia, 1906), IV, 461, for an account of the 1826 case;
see Lea's Vol. II and III
for the complicated procedure of the
tribunal.
41,
Such minor details are, I believe, worth notina bprfm<;p
avanab?P^tn information about the Inquisition
available to him from various sources, and it would therefore have
tndp his habitual endeavor for historical verisimili-
tude to have ignored these sources if the poem explicitlvcon-
it^rlts^•^''thI"who^■ Confessional" finds
Its roots in the whole unpleasant atmosphere of Spanish coercion
and tyranny with which the Inquisition is ineluctably identified

histSTo? tJr?nqSisi«or ^
 105

An earlier and truly "minor" cleric in Browning's gallery

is the painter. Fra Pandolf, in "My Last Duchess." A number of
attempts have been made to explain why Browning invented a friar
to paint the Duchess' portrait. Berdoe suggested that Pandolf
was a rival for the Duchess' smiles, and hence a prime cause of
42
the Duke s jealousy. Norton Crowell develops this same line
of thought and seems to presume that Pandolf is a preview of Fra
Lippo Lippi: he speaks with assurance of the unfortunate lady's
"na'ive acceptance of the obvious flattery of Fra Pandolf, who
calls the blush to her cheeks as much for perverse sexual pleasure
as for art"; and concludes that her suspicious husband ordered
"the painter [to] finish the portrait in a single day as a means
of occupying hands suspected of dexterity in the art of love as
43
well as of painting." On the other side, both DeVane in his
Handbook^ p. 109, and Louis D. Friedland in his definitive article
on the poem's sources believe that Browning made the painter a
friar to remove all implications of an affair between the painter
44
and the Duchess.
I believe that both interpretations go far beyond the evi¬
dence of the text. In an age and land which produced both Fra
Angelico and Fra Lippo Lippi, and a host of other less-famous

42
See Brcnm-ing Cyolopaed-iuj p. 282.
43
The Triple Soul, p. 172. Similarly, George Monteiro,
"Browning's 'My Last Duchess,'" YV, I (1963), 236, n. 3, believes
that the Duchess understood Pandolf's "stuff" as "courtesy," in
the courtly sense, the object of which is ideally another man's
wife.
^^See "Ferarra and 'My Last Duchess'" SP, XXXIII (1936),
678. For the most recent attempt at tracking down the sources
of this poem, which includes rather than rejects Friedland's find¬
ings, see Lionel Stevenson, '"My Last Duchess' and Parisina,"
MLN, LXXIV (1959), 489-92.
 106

painting "fra's," what would be more appropriate than a Fra

Pandolf(i) as painter at the court of Ferrara? As to the friar's
integrity, the Duke's description of his compliments is, as he
himself admits, purely a guess ("perhaps"), an attempt to assure
the admiring envoy that the living Duchess was much more shallow
and common than the "earnest glance" of the pictured Duchess might
suggest. Pandolf, the Duke patronizingly explains, simply hap¬
pened to catch a fortuitous blush, and was thus inspired to
create a work of art infinitely more beautiful and more valuable
than its undeserving model.The Duke further belittles his
departed wife by implying that even this blush was unjustified,
since such a compliment from the friar would have been a meaning¬
less formality and not the sincere "courtesy, she thought."
Fra Pandolf, therefore, was only a painter--an extremely
sensitive and competent one—who, unlike the Duke, appreciated
living beauty. . His clerical status is irrelevant. It was eleven
years later that Browning grandly exploited the possibilities
latent in a Renaissance cleric-painter.
Another minor cleric is Pope Theocrite in "The Boy and the
Angel," a short poem which was published in Dramatio Romances and
Lyrics (1845) along with "The Confessional" and "The Tomb at St.
Praxed's." The pope is fictitious, and the poem's attractive
simplicity of form and sentiment is reminiscent of Pippa's songs,
as critics have always remarked. Browning attempts no charac¬
terization beyond Theocrite's sincerity and simple good will, both
as boy and pope. The poem is a parable illustrating the ir-
45r
tion nf thp elaborate, though similar, interpreta-
trait between the living Duchess and her por-
IZ V.- f®.^^3nton Millett, "Art and Reality in 'My Last Duchess, I li

The V^otor^an Newsletter^ No. 17 (Spring, 1960), 2S-21.

 107

replaceable importance to God of the humblest praise and service.

But besides its echo of Browning's earlier poems, "The Boy and
the Angel" points to the future in its specific employment of the
pope to exemplify the basic irrelevance of churchly honors. This
underlying supposition that the papacy can be as much a handicap
as a help in truly serving God hints at ideas which Browning's
great Pope will express in The Ring and the Book.
Ogniben, the papal legate in A Soul’s Tragedy, stands as a
link between the Monsignor of Pippa Passes and Bishop Blougram,
and with them forms an impressive trio of urbane clerical manipu¬
lators. More completely realized than the Monsignor, Ogniben is
just as determined to expose mercilessly the crime of his chosen
victim, though his motives are more political than the eschato-
logically oriented Monsignor's. More in control of the situation,
he is able to enjoy every moment of his virtuoso performance,
without the revelatory crisis suffered by his predecessor. To
this extent, he is perhaps somewhat less human, less real, than
the Monsignor.Like Blougram, Ogniben is a master casuist and
a consummate actor; but, again, he is less real than the English
bishop--his effortless-seeming mastery is something other than a
precariously human balance of inner tensions as is Blougram's.
But like Blougram also, Ogniben is allowed to employ some of the
poet's most precious principles and to distort them into a perverse
47
antithesis of his philosophy of ever-imperfect truth.

^^Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Browning in the spring of 1846

that Ogniben was "almost too wise for a crafty worldling" {RB-EBB,
II, 14). In lieu of this somewhat enigmatic remark, I would sug¬
gest a paraphrase: "He is almost too wise for a realistic charac¬
ter."
^^See especially the speech beginning in 11.380.
 108

Presumably, the legate's name, like his character, is not

what it seems at first sight. "Ogniben" is an obvious and ironic
Italian derivative: ogni "each" "every" or "all" and hene "good"
or "well"; it seems also to be an anagram for the Italian name
Benigno "benign" "harmless." Browning has thus, with the same
name, caught both the outward appearance of the prelate's person,
and his inner duplicity.
As to possible reasons for Browning's choice of a alerioal
manipulator, in addition to his being--at least since Romeo and
dramatic convention,^® we can point to the poet's pre¬
vious success with the manipulating aspects of Pippa's Monsignor,
and to the interest-rousing effectiveness of the popular stereotype
of the frighteningly subtle and unscrupulous Latin churchman.
The happy choice of Faenza with its historically factual dependence
upon the Papal government afforded another reason for a clerical
legate, as well as for frequent and ominous references to Rome and

48.

ElizabethatJnflu^nSr?; B^oin^ng's'^la'y'! 1ty of

promise f^rirofessinq
in my person" (II.599-601)! See a!so°II loJ'^n?*" Horae's authority
smith's theory ("The Relatinn nf Richard Gold-
Controversy." op cit ab!!e n Poetry to Religious
Pino is a surrogn^for Newman ^ PE- Chiap-
the Catholic Church--af ffrsf.’nn and after his entrance into
perverted by thr!iniste^Tnnu!L"I''E®i^ idealistic, and then
especially when we realize hnw^mn^h r^ Roflic—is a bit far-fetched,
sincerity, whatever he mav havp .^i^owning respected Newman's
quite likely, howLer St ?he his delusions. It is
churchman, aggravated’bv the suspicion of Italy and its
documented by Goldsmith contributed^tn J°'^^'"°''®'"sies, and well
as we have already suggested ^ ^ ^ creation of Ogniben,
 109

While DeVane may be correct in his opinion that the play

and its characters have no literary antecedent but are "pure in¬
vention" and that "its main source appears to be his observation
of men and conditions in Italy during his tour of 1838," he does
allow for some still undiscovered historical basis. It would
seem, however, more accurate to ascribe only the play's inspiration
to Browning's Italian journey. Had Browning written of Italy in
the nineteenth century instead of in the Renaissance, DeVane's
notion would be more adequate. Moreover, the poet would not have
seen Faenza until 1848 when, with Mrs. Browning, he probably passed
through on the way to Florence from Ravenna. It is further
plausible that the spark which fired Browning's fancy may have
come from an authentic history of Faenza, the Eistorie di Faenza,
by Giulio Cesare Tonduzzi, in which there is an account of the at¬
tempt of a citizen named Alberghettino to gain sole control of the
city following a successful revolt. Peace is restored only after
the arrival of the Papal Legate, Beltrando, who enters the dis¬
turbed city, as did Ogniben, "con bonissimo colto, et con molte
52
demonstrazione [sic] d'affetto," as Tonduzzi describes it.
Ogniben's political theory is an impressive application of the
ideas of Machiavel1i's The Frinoe, two copies of which Browning

^^See Handbook, p. 192.

^^See Griffin, Life, pp. 165-66.
^^This work is referred to in McCarthy's "Browning and the
Roman Catholic Church," op. cit. (above, p. 3, n. 7). The Eistorie
is not mentioned in the Catalogue, but Browning may have seen it
in the British Museum or in Italy while researching Bordello.
The Eistorie was published at Faenza in 1675. The uprising dis¬
cussed above occurred in 1307, and is mentioned on pp. 398-99.
 no

possessed.
Browning's few references to Catholic practice are not
thrust into the play with noticeable design, but fall into place
as an understood part of the scene. The "ave-bell" (the evening
"Angelus") is rung (1.2); the childhood friendship of Luitolpho
and Chiappino is remembered as they "took at church the holy-water
drop / Each from the other's finger" (1.59-61); and a bystander
mentions in passing St. John Nepomucene (Nepomuk), the patron
saint of Bohemia (11.47-64).^^
Chvistmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850) marks the beginning of
the twenty years of Browning's middle period, the period of his
finest work: Men and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae (1864), and

53,
stantia/^^in^c^.P^M ^^^-93. One curious circum-
lian^Lu Machiavelli is afforded by the un-Machiavel-
nan Luitolpho lying perdue in some quiet corner,--such as San
(iforse/^and th^ j;®5*:-'"eceiving daily intelligence"
(li.34 36), and the exiled Machiavelli at his rural retreat at
San Casciano, keeping abreast of Florentine happeningr^see Oreste*
».ore!’'?92?fpS«S)! of Nioolo MaoMca,etli. Balti- '

1-1Q1 e NePoiiucene was murdered by King Wenceslaus IV in 1383 or

Queen Johannf’^H^°-''®l^h^^ confessional by
Q een Johanna He is thus often considered a patron of confes-
tes,ue ,ro-

in this tale t:inro 'oere is also an anachronism

I • j . since St. John was not canoni7pH im+’ii 1790 c

of^^ague! was ptlrto^delth^iJI^iaga fo^^h' °"f’ vicar-gener^

 Ill

The Ring and the Book (1868-69). BecausG th© two poems make up
what is essentially a personal religious testimony, the principal
characterization consists in the indirect revelation of the poet
himself.
In Christmas-Eve, which surveys three religious points of
view--the Non-Conformist, the Catholic, and the nineteenth-century
rationalistic--the Dissenting preacher is the only cleric who is
described in any detail. And it is he whom the searching narra¬
tor finally chooses as leading the godliest mode of Christian
worship, despite his "immense stupidity" and tawdry congregation.
He is the "pastor vociferant," yet endowed with "excellent earnest¬
ness." The preacher's rhetorical defects are legion, yet through
him the poet realizes that it is only in the Mount Zion Chapel of
"the trampled sect" "[that] His All in All appears serene, / With
the thinnest human veil between" (xxii.1306-07). The Pope,
presiding at Midnight Mass in St. Peter's, is a characterless
automaton, Peter's so-called successor, leading a "raree-show" of
"buffoonery," "posturings," and "petticoatings (xxii.1325-25).
The speaker admits that "some truth shines athwart the lies," but
Rome and its worship is essentially sterile, a beautiful but empty
chalice (xxii.1278-1300). The conventicle, with all its earthy
imperfections, offers man the surest road toward the discovery and
appreciation of the transcendent perfection of the Infinite God.
The other alternatives, the poet discovers--St. Peter's teeming
hive and Gottingen's rarified hall--nurture only pretense and
55
hubris.

rather heavy-handed satire against Catholic worship

seems to derive from something else than simply anti-Catholic
prejudice. Browning likely had his mind's eye on the Tractarians
as his flippant
in England, more than upon the Catholics in Italy,
 112

"Holy-Cross Day," first published in Men and Women^ osten¬

sibly twenty stanzas with an introductory prose note, is actually
a three-part work, each part centered in a briefly but pointedly
sketched clerical character. The prose opening reflects a sanc¬
timonious Catholic cleric's view of the practice of compelling
Jews of the Roman Ghetto to attend a Christian sermon.The

55 (cont'd) . .
^references to "the surplice question" (xiv.839)
and the air-fouling "frankincense's fuming" (xvi.903-11) indicate
Further aggravating his disgust at the Pope's liturgical perform-*
ance would be his profound disappointment over Pius IX's now proven
political incompetency, after the halcyon hopes of 1846. But,
even so, Dowden {Browning, pp. 128-29) finds his condemnations too
facile: Such a short and easy method of dealing with Roman
Lathol1C dogma and ritual cannot be commended for its intelligence;
It IS quite possible to be on the same side as Browning without be-
ing as crude as he is in misconception." In fairness it should be
noted that this poem was written before Browning had been to Rome
and perhaps before he had attended a Mass anywhere. Later, as we
have seen, his tastes mellowed, and he frequently went out of his
way to attend Mass, which he found aesthetically if not religiously
pleasing at St. Peter's and at the Grande Chartreuse. Later ^
still, his religious preferences seem to have tended towards the
Anglican Church, a far cry from the chaste worship of the Zion
Chapel (see DeVane, Handbook, p. 199).
56
The idea of these sermons originated with the Jewish con¬
vert, Joseph Tzarfati (Andrea del Monti), who began preaching a
to a voluntarily assembled audience of Jews in^l573
In 1577 Gregory XIII commended his work and in 1584, in the Con¬
stitution, sanata Mater, decreed that the weekly sermons were to
be obligatory, but delivered "nulla cum obtrectatione aut irLundia
sed magna cum cantate et modestia" (see Hermann Vogel stein and
Paul Rieger, der Juden in Rom, Berlin, 1896 II 172-731
Sixtus V 585- 590) limited the discourses to 6 timereach vLr ^ *
Clement VIII (1592-1605) restored the original schedule in a'^Bull
Caeca et perfidia Hebraeonm obdurata (1592), whoL t tie is a ’
notable shift from Gregory's mildness and a clear indication of thp
rigors suffered by the Jews during his pontificate, the time of ^
Browning's poem see Emmanuel Pierre Rodocanachi L cl- ! ^ /
lee Guf/. Paris, 1891, p. 280). HotJ crtst Sl; (^^14?^
never mentioned in accounts of this practice. The preachers were
 113

bishop's secretary's shallow religious rationalizations are the

^ stock-in-trade of bigots of every era; and the graceful praise
of his lord-bishop's pulpit performances, suggests that his diary
57
may not be altogether private. The first eleven stanzas ex¬
pose the resentful attitude of a Jewish listener towards this
distasteful proselytizing, and towards Christians in general.
But the vicious irony of his speech lies not in its self-charac¬
terization, but in its revelation of the true character of the
preaching bishop. The prelate is not only a seducer of young
boys, but he is now pharisaically urging the conversion of one of
^ his regularly engaged procurers, a service the Jew would be legal¬
ly forced to abandon if he became a Christian.
The remainder of the poem, sharply contrasting to the
bishop's hypocrisy and the Jewish listener's rancor, is a repre¬
sentation of Rabbi Ben Ezra's triumphant "Song of Death," in which
the seer declares his fidelity to the God of Israel, and calls upon
^ Christ and His teaching to condemn the so-called Christians on
.-u . own 4.terms. 58
their

56 (cont ^)ordinarily Dominican friars, but Browning seems

to have employed a bishop merely to underscore the grotesqueness
of the whole situation. Gregory explicitly decreed that the
^ sermons were not to be given in a church, but in the second stanza
Browning mentions a nameless church. H. B. Charlton, "Browning
as a Poet of Religion," BJRLj XXVII (1942-43), 275, says it is St.
Peter's! Many generations after 1600, when the Jewish community
- was more numerous, various small churches were used.
^^Another similar and very minor clerical character is the
Abbot Deodaet in "The Heretic's Tragedy," companion piece to
* "Holy-Cross Day." He, like the bishop's secretary, indulges in
pious phraseology to justify a most unreligious act here, the
ritualized cruelty of the execution of Jacques du Bourg-Molay,
Grand Master of the Knights-Templars.
^^Judith Berlin-Lieberman, Browning and Hebraism, (Jerusalem,
 114

"Holy-Cross Day" is the first expression of Browning's life¬

long interest in and sympathy for rabbinical learning and the Jews
Thackeray's daughter once wrote: "Browning had a theory which he
used to propound that almost all great men had a strain of Jewish
blood kindling in their veins—where his own came from I do not
59
know." And unlike his Protestant and Catholic clerics, Brown¬
ing's Jews are all men of integrity.
In addition to its own intrinsic poetic worth, the Rabbi's
"Song of Death" is significant for its anticipation of the popular
poem "Rabbi Ben Ezra" which Browning wrote eight or nine years
later, probably in 1862. But unlike the "Song," the Rabbi in
this later poem has lost his distinctive Jewish or rabbinic out¬
look and is a totally subsumed persona for the thought of the ma-

58 (cont'd)
1934), pp. 36-53, discusses the poet's acquaint-
ance with Rabbi Ibn Ezra (1092-1167), and establishes the fact
that several works about or by Ibn Ezra were available to Brown-
ing, especial ly in the Vatican Library. But she makes no refer-
ence. .^?
4 4 Death." Browning's "Song" mentions "the
Ghetto s plague, but the first Ghettos were established in 1516
at Venice, and at Rome in 1555 (see David Philipson, Old European
Jewrres Philadelphia, 1894, pp. 21, 123), though informal exclu-
sion dates from the 14th century. The "garb" and "badge of
shame date from 1215 (Philipson, p. 20, and Salo W. Baron, Social
and ReUgvous H^story of the Jews^ New York, 1937, II 90)
Sermon to Christian fellowship" is also anachronistic if it
refers to the conversionist sermons, since they began in 1584.
Either Browning has interpolated freely a work of Rabbi Ibn Ezra,
or the Song" is entirely fictitious.
59
inon\ Isabella Ritchie, From Friend to Friend (London,
1920), p. 99. The myth that the poet had a strain of Jewish as
well as Negro blood has long since been disproved. His knowledge
ot Hebrew language and literature, however, was impressive.
Berlin-Lieberman, p. 13, describes a manuscript copy of Joooserin
now in the Bodleian, on which Browning jotted down notes in Hebrew
script with correctness and ease. neorew
 115

ture poet, one of Browning's most successfully conceived "philoso¬

phers of the imperfect." More directly perhaps than St. John in
"A Death in the Desert" and the Pope in The Ring and the Book^ the
Rabbi is Browning's idealized, and perhaps subconscious, portrait
of his own meditative self.
Along with Browning's familiarity with the historical Rabbi
Ben Ezra, a number of other obvious influences contributed to the
poem's inspiration. Though a vigorous fifty years old, the
death of his wife in 1861 naturally drew the poet to a fulsome
enunciation of his feelings concerning time, age, death, and im¬
mortality. "Abt Vogler" was probably a product of the same in¬
spiration.It was at this time, too, that Browning first read
FitzGerald's Rubaiyat^ and there seems to be no doubt that the
latter stanzas of the "Rabbi" are a direct answer to the Persian
hedonist.
Browning has the Rabbi express his own most typical ideas.
Pain and doubt have a constructive value (Stanzas vi, vii); God
values aspiration more than prideful accomplishment (vii, xxiii-
xxv); flesh is godly and not a handicap to spirit (xii); and im¬
mortality is hinted to be something like reincarnation--or at
least life similar in kind in both this world and the next (x,
. xiv).^^ The Rabbi also realizes that he is an alien in an age of
doubt and that few men share his faith in the transcendent real it
of both the present and the future:

60 See DeVane, Handbook^ p. 290.

61“■cFor an interesting discussion of this last point with
reference to Browning's poetry in general, see Hoxie N. Fairchild,
Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York, 1957), IV, 156-58.
See also A. C. Pigou, Browning as a Religious Teacher (Lonoon,
1901), pp. 75-76.
 116

Now, who shall arbitrate?

Ten men love what I hate.
Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;
Ten, who in ears and eyes
Match me: we all surmise.
They this thing, and I that: whom shall my soul
believe?
(xxi i)
The only touch of Hebraism left in the old Rabbi, in addition to
his patience in adversity, is this note of alienation and the
Biblical image of the potter's wheel, with which Browning vigorous
ly counters FitzGerald's use of the same image.
The other monologue of Dramat-is Personae in which specific
characterization is less important than the exquisite poetic
philosophizing is the greatest of Browning's poems upon music,
"Abt Vogler." Few poems of comparable length in any language
have so magnificently combined genuine lyrical passion with meta¬
physical profundity. William Whitla has described the poem as a
momentary attempt to see "as a unified whole what is by nature
partial and linear," an activity analogous to what the mystic
does when he attempts union with the wholeness of God (the philos¬
ophers Pure while yet living within the strictures of
space and time. The fact, however, that Georg Joseph Vogler
was a Catholic priest would seem to be as irrelevant to Browning's
poem as it was to the Abbe's musical career. Browning came to
know and appreciate Vogler's musical theory through his own music
teacher, John Rolfe, who had been a student of Vogler. This
fortuitous relationship, along with Vogler's reputation as an im¬
provisor, and Browning's delight in resurrecting little known or
forgotten personages, seems wholly to account for his choice of

62
See The Central Truths p. 82.
 117

character. The musician's priesthood was simply an historical

fact, and, after the title, is not alluded to again.
A briefly sketched priest appeared in the same volume, in
the strange "Gold Hair; A Tale of Pornic," Browning's strident
attack on the religious liberals of Essays and Reviews. When
grave-pilfering children discover the first "double Louis-d'or,"
they immediately call the priest. The country cure comes to life
with a few deft strokes of the poet's pen as a worthy compatriot
of Browning's other more elaborately presented clerical politicians
... he heard.
Marked, inwardly digested, laid
Finger on nose, smiled, "There's a bird
Chirps in my ear"; then, "Bring the spade.
Dig deeper!"--he gave the word.
(xix)
With peasant shrewdness and practicality, he takes possession of
the thirty gold pieces to prevent their being wasted by the dis¬
traught parents on a new grave in potter's field; and, with an
appropriately homey touch of proverbial wisdom, urges that the
dead girl's bones be left in peace and the money spent on a new
altar to match his little church's new pavement:
. . . 'Milk that's spilt'
--You know the adage! Watch and pray!
Saints tumble to earth with so slight a tilt!
It would build a new altar; that, we may!
(xxvii)
The passing reference to the golden-haired girl's final con¬
fession (xxiv) links this much of the poem at least to a quite dif¬
ferent death-bed scene in the poem "Confessions" which was written

^^For an excellent detailed account of Vogler's life, see

Helen J. Ormerod, "Abt Vogler, the Man," Browning Studies^ ed.
Edward Berdoe (London, 1895), pp. 267-82.
 118

two years earlier but also published in Dramatis Personae. Here

a dying man triumphantly recalls the days of his loving, while a
hapless priest, unnecessary and unwanted, persists in "buzzing in
[his] ears" with a lugubrious exhortation to repent. Browning is
here repeating an idea more lengthily developed in many other
poems (e.g., "The Statue and the Bust," "Too Late," "Dis Aliter
Visum") that love is the only absolute and must transcend all in¬
stitutionally enforced morality. In this poem, however, unlike
the others, the lovers had grasped this truth and achieved their
moment of happiness before it was too late. The inept would-be
confessor merely accentuates the pettiness of the conventional
standards he represents.
The minor clerics of The Ring and the Bookj though dwarfed
by Canon Giuseppe Caponsacchi and the Pope, are nonetheless many
and varied, and are often gems of characterization. Count Guido
Franceschini, a major character of the poem, qualifies as a cleric
by having received "an order or two" (IV.402) in an unsuccessful
attempt to further his career at the papal court. It was on the
basis of this canonical technicality that, following his civil
conviction, he petitioned the Pope for a review by an ecclesiastical
court. Mention is made of Guido's clerical privilege not in the
old Yellow Book itself, but in two of the three manuscript letters
appended to the Book. But neither in the sources nor in the
64,
W. Model 1, The Old Yellow Book (Washington,
1908), pp. 190-91, and 298, n. 42. The pamphlet discovered
at Rome in the^^Royal Casanatense Library in 1900, the so-called
third source," states that the condemned murderer was "conceded"
the block instead of the gallows, "rather out of respect for his
having taken minor religious orders than for other reasons " The
ineffectual "other reasons" perhaps involved a claim for mercv on
account of his even more minor noble status. The "third sourrp"
is reprinted in Griffin, Life, Appendix B. Scholars are not in
 119

poem itself is there a clear statement of just which of the minor

orders Guido actually received.
The most detailed mention in the poem of Guido's status is
confusing and inaccurate:
My client boasts the clerkly privilege,
Has taken minor orders many enough,
Shows still sufficient chrism upon his pate
To neutralize a blood-stain: presbyter^
Primae tonsurae^ subdtaoonusj
SaaerdoSj . . .
(1.257-62)
First, there is no annointing of the head with chrism in any of
the ceremonies of ordination, major or minor. Second, in ec¬
clesiastical Latin, presbyter and sacerdos are synonyms: Guido is
not a priest. Nor is he a subdeacon, since his clerical status
clearly did not inhibit his marriage. "Tertium Quid" later men¬
tions that Guido "could but dally with" the tonsure and "an order
or two" (IV.402), and could not follow his brother to the priest¬
hood because, as he explains with a perhaps unintentional pun,
"He being Head o' the House, [was] ordained to wife" (401).
Later Guido himself says:
I assumed
Three or four orders of no consequence.
They cast out evil spirits and exorcise.
For example; . . .
(V.268-71)
Most likely, then, in addition to the tonsure, he received the
four minor orders below subdeacon.

64 (cont ‘^)agpeement as to whether Browning was acquainted

with this account (see DeVane, Handbook^ p. 328, and Letters, ed.
Hood, pp. 85 and 351).
^^First tonsure, strictly speaking, is not an "order," but a
sign of intent whereby the Church confers its clerical privilege
on an aspirant. The "minor" or non-sacramental orders are porter
 120

A masterpiece of hypocrisy in Book V, Guido not only seeks

to exploit his ordinations, but at the same time brazenly admits
to his clerical judges that he had sought the minor orders for
the most worldly of motives. He mockingly begins his defense in
the form of a sermon—the name of the indivisible Trinity!"
(V.121)--and is soon diabolically implying a fitting likeness
between himself and St. Francis of Assisi, and even Christ (140
ff.). Affectatiously, he seasons his speech with off-hand refer¬
ences to the current theological dispute over Molinism, employs
Biblical quotations and analogies which he warps to correspond to
his own and his judges' situation; and unwittingly insults the
judges by displaying a bold, overfamiliar knowledge of the ins-and
outs of clerical corruption and political motivation.
In Book XI the villain is totally unmasked and shown to be a
creature of pure and universal hatred; as Pompilia sadly admitted
"Hate was . . . the truth of him" (VII.1710). The Secondary
Source states that Guido died asking pardon for his sins and with
the name of Jesus on his lips.^® The Casanatense account also
65 (cont'd), ,
, \ost%av%us)t reader (leotov)^ exorcist, acolvte
the promise of celibacy
made at the reception of the subdiaconate. The "major" or sacra-
mental orders are those of deacon, priest, and I'shop? In thl
early Church, any one of the orders could be terminal, with the
recipient not intending to advance to the priesthood. At the
ime of The R^ng and the Book (1698), permanent non-priestly

+ 1 ^ chaps. 4 and 11), though they were still

tolerated on a local basis. Historically, this was perhaps whv
Franceschini's plea. ^I would
letted ^''Lniaf gratuitous comment in Ugolinucci's
/_ -a-'i- of the clergyship so far as it miaht he alleaed"
Sncil nqfi? TA p- 191)- The Second Vatican
mar?ld dlacona?! ““'horized bishops to restore a permanent

^^See Hodell, OYB^ pp. 224-25.

 121

reports that Count Franceschini died a model of Christian resigna¬

tion.^^ The Guido, however, of The Ring and the Book is Brown¬
ing's creation, and his last recorded words, when he hears the
Company of Death approach his cell, rise, as DeVane in his Hand-
bookj p. 336, aptly puts it, "to the perfect crescendo of terror":
Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours,
I am the Granduke's--no, I am the Pope's!
Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Mari a,--God,
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?
(XI.2416-19)
With the open-ended ambiguity of these final lines, it seems to me
that Browning succeeded in paying court to history while maintain¬
ing a consistency with his foregoing characterization of a fierce
68
and bestial villain.
Browning's frequent mention of Guido's clerical status gave
this factor a far greater importance in the poem than it seems to
have had in the murder case. It is referred to at least once in
every monologue, though not at all in the official documents--
only in the two post factum letters cited above, and then just in
passing. However, Browning's insistent stress fulfilled a neces¬
sary structural function by enhancing the narrative significance
of the Pope's monologue.®^ By thus emphasizing the pertinence of

®^See Griffin, Life^ pp. 324-26.

^^But see A. K. Cook, A Commentary upon Browning's "The Ring
and the Book" (London, 1920), pp. 316-18, and E. D. H. Johnson,
"Robert Browning's Pluralistic Universe," JJTQ, XXXI (1961-62), 28.
Both Cook and Johnson interpret this passage to mean that Guido is
in no sense repentant, but diabolically self-seeking to the end.
^^Hodell, OYB^ pp. 300-301, n. 62, thinks that the histori¬
cal Innocent XII had only a slight connection with the case, and
was not at all in touch with the proceedings until actually called
upon to judge Guido Franceschini's claim to the clerical privilege.
 122

the poem's climactic book, he provided a strong organic basis for

maintaining the reader's expectations through the nine-book maze
of detail to a plot-conclusion that had been revealed at the very
beginning. And on the more immediate narrative levels, Guido's
reiterated status gave Browning numerous built-in occasions for
underscoring the villain's hypocrisy, and, by easy extension, for
satirizing Italian ecclesiastical attitudes and practices. This,
in addition to the poet's everlasting indulgence in the delights
of religious and legal oddities.
The Franceschini family was a veritable spawning-ground for
clerical villains. Guido's brother, the Abate Paolo, is well
defined by F. E. Faverty as "the moving spirit of the tragedy.
He had from the very first induced his brother to seek his fortune
in Rome, had artfully arranged his marriage, and had then sponsored
his endless suits over dowry and divorce; and, finally, he had
diplomatically suggested the final assault and murders. In his
article, Faverty follows the self-pitying but still ambitious
priest-courtier after Browning has left him, and conjectures that

^^See Frederic E. Faverty, "The Absconded Abbot in The Rina

cmd the Bookj SP, XXXVI (1939), 88. There is no justification
for Faverty s calling the Abate an "Abbot," especially since there
is no mention either in the sources or the poem of Paolo ever hav¬
ing been, even titularly, a monastic superior. "Abate," like
Abbe, is often only a title given to a diocesan priest to dis¬
tinguish him from the religious priests who are called "Padre," or
Pere." The Abate is twice referred to as a "regular priest"
(11.290 and V.359), which would in itself technically mean that he
IS a member of a religious order founded since 1500, whose members
are genencally referred to as "clerks regular," to distinguish
them from the "monks" and "friars" of the older orders. This
does not, however, seem to be Browning's meaning. Rather he
seems to mean that Paolo is "regular" in a roughly contrasting
sense to Guido's "irregular" or incomplete clerical status.
 123

his endless pleas for employment or pension may have finally ob¬
tained for him a minor bishopric.
"Other Half-Rome" describes the Abate as "smooth-mannered
soft-speeched sleek-cheeked" (III.251), an almost slap-stick
clerical fop
. . . giving now his great flap-hat a gloss
With flat o' the hand between-whiles, soothing now
The milk from out its creases o'er the calf,
Setting the stocking clerical again.
(III.264-67)
Preening himself in the hope of someday becoming a cardinal, his
every exit is a procession, as he goes forth "grandly,--as if the
Pope came next" (III.376). The effeminate connotations are car¬
ried through in a number of ways. In assuring Guido that he
alone has the talent to deal with the shrewish Violante, Paolo
explains how a priest's interest in woman is neither sexual nor
spiritual, but pragmatically political: "Priests play with
women, maids, wives, mothers,--why? / These play with men and
take them off our hands" (IV.464-65); and again: "Mothers,
wives, and maids, / These be the tools wherewith priests manage
men" (IV.501-02). Later Violante herself sadly affirms his
peculiar talents: "A priest is more a woman than a man, / And
Paul did wonders to persuade" (VII.545-46).
Yet Paolo is also "calm and cold" (III.301), capable of
"rutilant fraternal fire" (III.359), at once calculating and
decisive in his management of his brother's deteriorating affairs
One almost wishes that Browning could somehow have given him a
book of his own in which to reveal the full complexity of his
versatilely evil personality. The Pope suggests this richness
when he contrasts Paolo's subtlety with Guido's unadulterated vil
lainy and exclaims:
 124

This fox-faced horrible priest, this brother-brute

The Abate,--why, mere wolfishness looks well,
Guido stands honest in the red o' the flame.
Beside this yellow that would pass for white.
(X.876-79)
Another Franceschini brother, Girolamo, is also a priest.
He is described by the Pope as both similar to and different from
his two brothers:
Priest, Canon, and what more? nor wolf nor fox.
But hybrid, neither craft nor violence
Wholly, part violence part craft ....
(X.894-96)
but worst of all, "a new distinctive touch I see, / Lust—" (X.
902-03), a reference to Girolamo's alleged attempts to seduce his
sister-in-law, Pompilia, apparently with the consent of Guido and
his mother (see VII.802-08)
Browning's Archbishop of Arezzo (historically a bishop),a
prelate with a stale and worn-out smile (see VII.782-83), is
singled out by the Pope for a special castigation as a hireling
who refused to feed his sheep when he ignored Pompilia's plea for
protection from the Franceschini family (see X.982-89). Prior to
this, the Archbishop had shown his mettle by urging Caponsacchi to
take orders for motives not unlike Guido's and the Abate's (see
VI.268ff.).
Pompilia had desperately appealed also to an Augustinian
fnar named Romano. The frightened priest's genuine but impotent

Throughout the poem Guido is described as the eldest of

the Franceschini brothers, and Girolamo the youngest Actuall
ao 0 was the eldest, and Guido the youngest"(see Griffin!
p. -546,^n. I, and Cook s Commentary^ p. 38, note on line 291).
n. 10, Griffin, L^fe, p. 317, n. 2. See also below, p. 2
 125

sympathy proved equally frustrating and even more cruel than the
Archbishop's politic and patronizing rebuff. Romano is one more
of Browning's well-meaning but half-hearted characters who missed
the "good moment," in whom reason perverted the intuitional brave
"first thought," and who were thus enabled to live out their
lives in a safety that is a radical failure. He was a "good"
man, he wept real tears, and sincerely promised to write Pompilia's
letter—but "then the good man took counsel of his couch, / Woke
and thought twice, the second thought the best" (IV.819-20); "he
burnt the letter he had writ, / Said Ave for her intention, in its
place" (IV.833-34). To Browning, such pusillanimity is almost
beneath contempt, a vicious rationalization of Christian meekness
and resignation into an excuse for cowardly inaction--the precise
antithesis of his own aspiring ideals. As the Pope disgustedly
observes:
[Romano] meets the first cold sprinkle of the world.
And shudders to the marrow. "Save this child?
Oh, my superiors, oh, the Archbishop here!"
(X.1474-76)
In addition to Girolamo Franceschini, Browning introduces
three other canons of S. Maria della Pieve in Arezzo, the Canons
Conti, Crespi, and Guillichini, all friends of Caponsacchi. Each
of them is described in terms obviously intended to contrast with
the uninhibited, paradoxically unpriestly, warrior-priest. Conti,
for example, is the "fat little Canon" (VI.581), "fat and waggish"
(VII.980), who refuses Pompilia his aid (VII.1303ff.). Canon
Crespi is sour, sulky, and a gossip (VI.1098-1104). Guillichini
comes off slightly better: though he had first refused to help
Pompilia, prudently pleading a severe political gout (VII.1293-97),
he had later assisted Caponsacchi and Pompilia in their escape, and
 126

had thereupon been condemned to the galleys by Arezzo's governor

(VI.2007-13), "clerical privilege" notwithstanding. But he too
shares in the general condemnation of Arezzo's canons: "red-
clothed milk-swollen poppy-heads / That stand and stiffen 'mid
the wheat o' the Church!" (II.931-32)--al1 the canons, that is,
except the heroic and lay-clothed Caponsacchi.
The final cleric of The Ring and the Book is another
Augustinian, Fra Celestino. He is in one sense the most important
cleric in the poem, since it was his testimonial letter which
provided Browning with the "proof" that Pompilia and Caponsacchi
were innocent, and thus justified his basic handling of the ambig¬
uous materials of the Old Yellow BookJ"^ The friar's imaginary
sermon is not a eulogy glowing with facile optimism, but a sombre
reminder of the always partial and only tenuous triumph of good¬
ness, which is all that man can justifiably hope for on this side
of the grave. His sermon completes the Pope's monologue by draw¬
ing together the final threads of the poem, ratifying the Pope's
(and Browning's) judgment of the case, and of life itself.
Fra Celestino is the only thoroughly admirable minor cleri¬
cal character in the entire poem; and, like the great Pope, he
seems to have been "built to specifications," a poetic creation
far transcending the known facts, but admirably suited to be the
poet's own spokesman. In striking contrast to most of the other
primping and avaricious clerics of the poem, Celestino's utter
selflessness is wonderfully suggested in this brief description of
him by "The Other Half-Rome":

73
Celestino's affidavit is reprinted in Griffin, pp. 322-23.
 127

that poor old bit of battered brass

Beaten out of all shape by the world's sins.
Common utensil of the lazar-house--
"* Confessor Celestino ....
(III.793-96)
Caponsacchi, in a moment of appreciative enthusiasm, declares
that Rome has no better man than the Augustinian--save only the
present Pope (see VI.2029-38). And lest he seem merely pious.
Browning narrates the report of his sensible refusal to be car¬
ried away on the current wave of theological panic which was wil¬
ling to blame all the world's evils on Molinos' errors (see III.
91-104).
A single unrealistic flaw in this appealing portrait is the
melodramatic manner in which the friar "helped" Pompilia to make
her death-bed confession. He relentlessly urged her to dredge
up her past faults--and not only hers, but others' also! What
from every other indication was for the dying girl a most consol¬
ing experience, is here made to seem especially harrowing and
painful:
... Don Celestine bade "Search and find!
For your soul's sake, remember what is past.
The better to forgive it."
(VII.591-93)
And again:
Don Celestine urged "But remember more!
Other men's faults may help me find your own."
(VII.622-23)
This emphasis on Celestino's need to learn the "whole story"
was, however, dramatically appropriate--whatever its sacramental
irrelevance—in order to reinforce the credibility of the friar's
testimonial sermon.
Actually, the historical affidavit upon which the sermon is
based would have been disregarded in any civil or ecclesiastical
 128

court, and is on all accounts worthless, as the cynical "Tertium

Quid" correctly implies (see IV.1468-75)
After The Ring and the Book Browning almost totally lost
interest in the poetic possibilities of clerics, major or minor.
In Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), for example, his theme
was the tragic conflict generated by the happy earthy love of
Leonce Miranda and his irrational religious aspirations, which
were encouraged, as Chesterton put it, by "the sicklier side of
Romanism." But the nun and the priest who represent the miracle
mongering, "all-collecting Church" (1.965) are nameless and un¬
particularized.

74,
It is possible that Fra Celestino considered such a state¬
ment necessary lest his silence be interpreted as an admission of
Pompilia's guilt. It is further possible that he intended it to
be an unequivocal revelation of the girl's innocence, since in the
17th century it was still the opinion of many moral theologians
that after the death of a penitent, a confessor could, for grave
reasons, reveal information known only from the confessional,
provided it were in no way injurious to the reputation of the
deceased. The careful letter, therefore, is historically realis¬
tic, but not the public sermon. The friar could also have been
released from the confessional seal by Pompilia's permission--
though this is never mentioned. Even on the presumption that
Pompilia was not innocent, Celestino's letter can be interpreted
as an extraordinarily adept equivocation for the preservation of
professional secrecy. A careful reading of the letter reveals
that at no point does the friar say that Pompilia is not quiltv of
the crimes she was accused of. He merely affirms the extra¬
ordinarily holy state of her soul during the four days of his
ministrations, and reiterates the general principle that such he¬
roic dispositions can normally only be the fruit of an habitually
holy life. For a discussion of this final possibility, see Paul
+1 C.S.C., Fra Celestino's Affidavit and The Ring and
the Book/' MLN LVIII (1943), 335-40. Note especialfj Shner's
correction of Hodell's translation of Celestine's final senSL
Browning^ p. 124.
 129

The heroine of The Inn-Album (1875), after being abused by

an elderly adventurer, had buried' herself in a squalid village as
the wife of a poor, narrow-minded clergyman. She shared his
labors, though she found him and herself incapable of loving
either each other or their clod-like parishioners:
Who lives
With beasts assumes beast-nature, look and voice.
And, much more, thought, for beasts think.
Selfishness
In us met selfishness in them, deserved
Such answer as it gained,
(IV.323-27)
This man, with his death-in-life unimaginativeness, is intended to
be one more example of the poet's perennial doctrine of the frustra¬
tions of small-souled perfection:
Limited every way, a perfect man
Within the bounds built up and up since birth
Breast-high about him till the outside world
Was blank save o'erhead one blue bit of sky--
Faith: he had faith in dogma, small or great.
(IV.246-50)
The poem "Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper"
(1876), the first poem in the volume of the same name, contains one
of Browning's few explicit attack on his critics. A versified
riot," as Duffin describes it,^^ "Of Pacchiarotto" is an ostensible
burlesque in Hudibrastic rhymes. Yet it includes, amid its fool¬
ery, serious doctrine which is expressed by an appealing Francisc. n
"abbot," who convinces the foolish Pacchiarotto that success is not
to be found in this life: "Earth is earth and not heaven, and n'er
will be" (xxi.366). Once more it is the wise cleric who speaks
for the poet.

^^Henry Charles Duffin, Amphibian: A Reconsideration of

Browning (London, 1956), p. 241.
 130

"A Forgiveness" is an exciting grotesque piece in which a

jealous husband confesses his wife's murder to her priest-lover
just before he stabs him through the confessional grate with the
same jeweled, poisoned poignard with which he had killed his wife.
In "Cenciaja" Browning has supplemented Shelley's tale of
The Cenai by presenting a matricide, the Santa Croce case, as the
justification for Pope Clement's refusal of clemency to the con¬
victed Beatrice Cenci.^^ But an innocent son, the Marchese
Onofrio, was tried and beheaded for the Santa Croce murder. The
unfortunate Onofrio, Browning tells us, had been unlucky enough
to involve himself with the mistress of Cardinal Aldobrandini, the
Pope's nephew. The Cardinal had immediately taken charge of the
murder case and efficiently destroyed his rival.
Browning's portrayal of the Pope and the Cardinal reveal a
curious yet typical mixture of objective and subjective elements.
By introducing the Santa Croce case as the determining factor in
Clement VIII's Cenci decision. Browning has in effect corrected
Shelley's antagonistic and unhistorical presentation of the Pope
as a thoroughly vicious man. Browning's willingness to present
objectively, and even with a touch of sympathy, the practical
realities which influenced the Pope's judgment, is consistent
with his usual treatment of the popes as persons--e.g., Honorius
in Bordello, Theocrite, and Innocent XII—as well as his long-
suffering open-minded attitude towards the person of Pius IX.
Yet, just as historically, the otherwise mostly conscientious
Clement VIII was the last great practitioner of papal nepotism.

77r
For discussion of Browning's use of his sources in
"Cenciaja,"
Xin (1934) ,'390-400: ''Browning's Cenciaia," PQ,
 131

And so Browning, never one to overlook imaginative possibilities,

added scandalous incidents to the life of the historical papal
nephew. Cardinal Aldobrandini, and created one of his most un¬
pleasant clerical grotesques. Nor would the poet pass up the
opportunity for a rollicking taunt at the expense of the papacy
itself which he now believed to be in its death-throes both as a
religious and as.a political institution. Exasperated by the
frustrating years of Pio Nono's ineptitude, by his reactionary
IT

Syllabus of Errors (1861), and, more recently, by the definition

of papal infallibility (1870), Browning concluded his poem with a
pointed reminder that things in the Eternal City are different
now, God's tardy justice has finally triumphed, for "Victor [Em-
, manuel] rules, this present year, in Rome."
In "Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial," Brown¬
ing's second poem devoted entirely to the spectacle of seventeenth-
century anti-Semitism, we meet a supercilious Cardinal who, in a
strange parody of Christian humanism, explains to his Jewish cred¬
itor how he rationalizes his devotion to his gallery of paintings
■' on pagan themes. He assures the Jew that, whenever the day's
light is richest, he piously keeps the one truly seductive Titian
unfurled.
The hypocrisy of these Catholic prelates is thrown into
sharp contrast by the Jewish rabbi "Jochanan Hakkadosh, in the
“ longest poem of Browning's Joooser-ia volume of 1883. Like Rabbi
Ben Ezra, though less successfully, Jochanan articulates a sum¬
mary of the poet's favorite metaphysical ideas--here a rather
dense series of statements on the superiority of love over length
of years as the principal criteria for evaluating life and its
varied experience. The poem is primarily expository, rich in al-
 132

lusions to rabbinic lore and Jewish history, but with neither the
lyric beauty of "Rabbi Ben Ezra," nor the exciting characteriza¬
tions and dramatic interest of Browning's earlier clerical poems.
The two priests of the Farleyings (1887) are quite different
in their conception. Daniel Bartoli (1608-1685), acknowledged
Italian prose stylist, is merely the poet's foil, invoked only to
illustrate how much more moving a true story is than a pious fable.
The Jesuit has long irritated Browning with his miracle-clogged
legends. Now the edifying teller of tales must listen, and the
maskless poet will tell his own real account of the duke and the
heroic druggist's daughter—which he then proceeds to do in three
hundred and forty swiftly-narrating iambic pentameters.^^ Francis
Furini (1600-1649) was a competent painter, who at the age of
forty became an exemplary parish priest: "Good priest, good man,
good painter" (1. 64). The poet, however, is interested in the
artist rather than the pastor. Browning refuses to believe his
biographer, Baldinucci, that Furini had on his deathbed repented
his famous nudes and ordered them burned. Rather, he uses the
occasion to defend the beauty of the female body as a supreme
artistic inspiration--an echo of Lippo Lippi--and goes on to place
upon the priest's lips a long and incongruous sermon against the
nineteenth-century evolutionists. Both the philosophy of art and
the theology are vintage Browning, and once again a cleric has
been employed as the poet's spokesman.
"Fust and his Friends," the "Epilogue" to the Farleyings, is
a dialogue between Johann Fust (ca. 1400-66), the reputed inventor
of the printing press, and seven talkative friars who have come to
investigate reports that Fust (whom Browning partially identifies
■ 7g

See DeVane, Browning’s Farleyingsy pp. 50-68.

 133

with Dr. Faustus) is indulging in magic. The friars, Dominicans

and Barnabites, are harmless enough, but exceptionally petty and
stupid. Their vaudeville-like struggles to remember the Latin
words of an exorcising psalm, which they had only glimpsed at in
rare hand-copied manuscripts, is finally resolved when Fust tri¬
umphantly hands them each a copy of the psalm produced by his
fearsome new machine. Fust's concluding hymn of praise to God
and man for the gift of words in print is the poem's highpoint
and the poet's eloquent personal thanksgiving. But the primary
significance of the humorous dialogue between Fust and the fumbl¬
ing friars is the conflict between the two worlds they represent.
The friars symbolize for Browning a dying world of religious
superstition and its helplessnesses and irrelevancies when con¬
fronted with the new world of enlightenment which was now to begin,
largely through the instrumentality of Fust's "magic." The
friars' fear of the Hussites' use of printing, and Fust's prophetic
vision of Luther's writing and teaching carry this theme through to
the poem's conclusion.
"The Cardinal and the Dog" was probably written in 1842, but
was not published until 1889 \x\ Asolandoj Browning's final volume.
His source was an anecdote from Wanley's Wonders of the Little
Worlds in which it is told how Cardinal Crescenzio, Pope Julius'
legate at the Council of Trent, is frightened to death by an
ominous black dog, evidently sent from hell to punish him for his
intransigence toward the Protestants.
"The Pope and the Net" and "The Bean-Feast," published in
the same volume, seem to be based on "Gregorio Leti's garrulous
and inaccurate Vita di Papa Sisto F. The first poem, which

79 See DeVane, Handbook^ p. 537.

 134

tells of Sixtus' simulation of humility and decrepitude before

his election to the papacy, is Browning's attractive version of a
legend which derived from the vigor and draconian severity with
which, during his brief five-year reign, Sixtus stamped out the
corruption which had flourished under his weak predecessor,
Gregory XIII (1572-1585). "The Bean-Feast" reflects the same
Pope's reputed concern for the poor, and narrates a probably
apocryphal incident in which he visited incognito a poor hovel in
order to enjoy a nostalgic meal of beans and oil, the like of
which he had not tasted since his peasant youth. Neither of
these two poems is at all bitter or anti-papal. In the first
poem the reader easily detects the poet's esteem for the violent
old Pope, who, from his first "unworthy me" sigh to his triumphant
"I have caught the fish" retort, so magnificently outfoxed the
feather-bedding Cardinals. The poet's respect in "The Bean-Feast"
is unequivocally announced in the encomium of the first lines:
He was the man--Pope Sixtus, that Fifth,
that swineherd's son:
He knew the right thing, did it, and
thanked God when 'twas done.
A few general statements can now be made regarding Browning's
creation of minor clerical characters during the more than fifty
years of his career. In his minor clerics, as we have attempted
to illustrate. Browning constantly supplemented his lack of first¬
hand experience with the erudition he had gleaned from his enormous
reading. He sometimes applied his data anachronistically, yet
seldom failed to achieve fascinatingly interesting, if not abso¬
lutely accurate, poems and characters. The myriad worlds he con¬
structed or suggested almost always seem real, and there is nothing
more that can be desired of any artist.
 135

It is most pertinent to this study to note the various ways

in which his handling of minor clerics seems to have anticipated,
paralleled, influenced, or differed from, his treatment of his
five great clerics. In addition to what we have pointed out al¬
ready when discussing individual minor clerics and poems, we can
in general conclude that in such early clerics as Pippa's Monsignor,
the Spanish monk, and Ogniben, Browning showed a dominant interest
in the clerical situation's potential for significant poetic char¬
acterization. This awareness resulted in such early full-scale
achievements as "The Bishop Orders his Tomb," "Fra Lippo Lippi,"
and "Bishop Blougram's Apology." Partially paralleling this ap¬
preciation of the cleric as poetic character, is Browning's employ¬
ment of the cleric as integrated narrative device (e.g., the con¬
fessor in "The Confessional," Fra Pandolf in "My Last Duchess,"
and the clerics of "Holy-Cross Day" and "The Heretic's Tragedy").
In the Dvconatis Fevsonae volume of 1864, Browning introduced a
further element--which he so successfully employed in "Rabbi Ben
Ezra" and "Abt Vogler"--the cleric as persona for the poet.
These three modes--the cleric as character interesting in himself,
as meaningful narrative device, and as "personal" persona—v^ere
versatilely combined in Browning's conception of the two major
clerics of The Ring and the Bookj Giuseppe Caponsacchi and the
Pope. Both are triumphs of complex characterization enriched by
the built-in ironies of their clerical status, both share in sig¬
nificant plot-furthering actions, and both express the poet's most
profound and cherished ideas and yet maintain their dramatic au¬
tonomy.
After The Ring and the Book there were no other major
clerics, and Browning's minor clerics tended to lose their artis-
 136

tic integrity. They are often blatant spokesmen (even propagan¬

dists) for the poet himself, as are the Franciscan in "Of Pac-
chiarotto," Rabbi Jochanan Hakkadosh, and Francis Furini. Others
are either faceless nonentities, like the nun and priest in Red
Cotton Night-Cap Country and the parson-husband in The Inn Alhvm^
or merely satirical contrivances against whom the poet rather
freely rails. Among this latter group are Cardinal Aldobrandini
in "Cenciaja," and the silly friars in "Fust and his Friends,"
and, though with less animus, the Jesuit historian, Daniel Bartoli.
The light, almost playful treatment of Sixtus V in "The Pope and
the Net" and "The Bean-Feast" is probably Browning's most success¬
ful creation of a clerical character in the poetry of his last
twenty years.
During his entire career Browning maintained a rather uni¬
versal open-mindedness, and often sympathy, towards the various
occupants of the troubled and troublesome papal throne. A list
of his "good" popes, most of whom we have already cited in this
connection, includes Honorius III, Theocrite, Innocent XII,
Clement VIII, and Sixtus V. I believe Browning's patience with
the holders of an office which he abhorred can be at least partial¬
ly explained by the extraordinary attraction which the personality
of Pius IX had upon his contemporaries, even his most violent
political and religious enemies.
In contrast to his treatment of the popes, Browning is
equally consistent in his portrayal of most cardinals, bishops,
monks, and friars, as venal, hypocritical, and often lecherous,
clerical villains.
Browning is impatient with ritual and religious formalism
of any kind, which he feels too often distracts from and becomes a
substitute for personal sincerity and good works. One of his
 137

principal strictures against the hateful monk of the Spanish

cloister is the vicious man's preoccupation with meticulous external
religious practice which he uses to justify his diabolic behavior.
Browning ridicules papal ceremonies at St. Peter's as well as the
naivete verging on superstition of silly monks and friars.
Closely related to his distaste for ceremony is his hostility to
institutionalized religious asceticism. Monasticism, and espe¬
cially celibacy, more often than not either debilitate the human
character by reducing man to moral non-relevancy, or else provide
hypocritical respectability for the most selfish and lascivious
elements of society.
One Catholic practice which Browning most often employed or
alluded to was auricular confession. In addition to the in¬
stances we have already pointed out, confessing and confessors are
briefly referred to in "Cristina and Monaldeschi." Among nine¬
teenth-century Protestants, no Catholic peculiarity was more
popularly stereotyped as the symbol of all that was wrong with
Romanism than was sacramental confession. At the same time and
often for the same critics, the confessional was the object of an
almost morbid fascination and curiosity. And if Browning was any¬
thing, he was a nineteenth-century English Protestant, totally
critical of institutional Catholicism.
 CHAPTER IV

THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB

AT ST. PRAXED'S CHURCH

The finest poem of Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) and,

along with "My Last Duchess" (1842), the most popular and most
frequently anthologized of Browning's early poems, is "The Tomb
at St. Praxed's," called in 1849 "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at
St. Praxed's Church." In perhaps no other poem prior to Men and
Women (1855) did Browning display so splendidly his unique techni¬
cal gifts--precise dramatic diction, shatteringly ironic point of
view, and visual, aural, and tactile imagination--in fashioning
both a character and a world of richness and subtlety. Indeed,
he was seldom again, if ever, to surpass this achievement.
"The Bishop Orders his Tomb" and "My Last Duchess" are often
discussed together as related pictures of Italian Renaissance
egoism. Lionel Stevenson has linked them both to Browning's in¬
terest in the history of Ferrara's Este family--an interest whichi^
dates at least from his readings for Sordello?' Yet on the af¬
fective level there is a great difference between the two poems.
While in the Bishop's portrait we are, for an exquisite moment,
drawn into and enveloped by the voluptuous and turgid world of
marbly mistresses and blue-veined madonnas, in "My Last Duchess"
we remain mostly like spectators at a wax museum—so horribly real

L
/II Pertinacious Victorian Poets," VTQ, XXI (1952),
240-41. This article has been reprinted in Victorian Literature:
Mode^i Essays ^n Cr^t^c^sm, ed. Austin Wright (New York 1961) pp

138
 139

it all seems, yet we comfortably know that it is only a brilliant

and ingenious facsimile. As for the two speaking characters,
the dying Bishop inspires a carefully controlled but genuine sym¬
pathy—or at least pity—as we observe his gradual realization of
his waning control and growing helplessness. The Duke perhaps
equally grips our interest, but we remain essentially detached,
clinical, and certainly unsympathetic.^ The excellence of "The
Bishop Orders his Tomb" was early recognized by Elizabeth Barrett.
In July, 1845, she wrote to Browning of "the St. Praxed's which is
of course the finest and most powerful . . and indeed full of the
power of life . . and death"; and in November of the same year
she again spoke of it as "in a first place" among all of his
3
poems.
While Stevenson is of the opinion that the basic model for
the Bishop was probably Cardinal Ippolito d'Este the Younger, he
admits that details of the portrait were probably drawn from many
other sources, both real and fictional. None of the details, how¬
ever, fit any prelate who is known ever to have been affiliated

^Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience, p. 83, speaks

of the Duke's "immense attractiveness," which results from his
matchless intellectual superiority and high-handed aristocratic
manners, and which, he concludes, is a kind of "sympathy, in¬
dependent of moral judgment. Langbaum's distinction between sym¬
pathy and moral judgment is quite valid, but his application of
this distinction to the reader's response to the Duke is question¬
able We are fascinated, interested, even perhaps admiring; but
I am not sure that "sympathy" accurately describes this reaction.
Langbaum's perception of one of the basic elements in Browning s
ironic technique seems much more applicable to the Bishop of bt.
Praxed's than to the Duke of Ferrara.
I, 134, and 277. The two dots do not indicate
omissions but^re an idiosyncrasy of Elizabeth Barrett's punctua¬
tion.
 140

with S. Prassede Church in Rome. St. Charles Borromeo (1538-84),

Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan, whom Browning met in Wanley's
Wondersj^ was associated with the church as its titular cardinal;
but he died at Milan and lies entombed in the Duomo there. As
one of the Catholic Church's greatest intramural reformers, his
career was in contradiction to all that the Bishop of the poem
stood for.
Every Cardinal, even today, becomes a titular pastor of a
church in Rome—a relic of the days before cardinals when the
papal electors and councilors were simply the pastors of Rome's
churches. But Browning's Bishop was not a cardinal. His obvi¬
ous right to manage what happened at St. Praxed's, his control of
vast wealth, and his references to his predecessor, indicate that
St. Praxed's was in some sense his cathedral or episcopal see.
Yet no bishop except the Pope could have been associated with a
Roman church in,precisely the way that Browning's poem implies.
Browning either did not realize the technical inaccuracies in his
portrait, or freely and justifiably created an imaginary situation
dramatically consistent with his poetic purposes. For his inten¬
tion was not to tie his Bishop to any historical figure of the
late Renaissance, but to create a representative of certain in¬
teresting specimens of that lusty age.
Likewise, the poetic description of St. Praxed's Church and
its tombs was the result of the same creative method: taking a
hint from history and/or a chance personal circumstance, the
poet's imagination then freely combined, altered, or added accord¬
ing to its own genius. Browning visited S. Prassede in October,

4
See The Wonders of the Little World, pp. 226 and 585.
 141

1845, and saw there the ornate tombs of Cardinals Achera (1286)
and Cetivi (1474). The tombs in the poem—Gandolf's and the
proposed one on which the dying Bishop had set his heart, do not
fit any of those in the basilica. Yet Browning saw in the in¬
terior adornment of the church much Renaissance art of the kind
mentioned in the poem. Within S. Prassede, as it was described
in the travel-books,^ there were elevated figures of Christ, of
the church's patronal virgin-martyr, and of Moses holding the
Tables of the Law; and there were columns of jasper and black *
marble. None of these decorative details, however, adorn any
particular tomb.
In his recall of the actual church. Browning freely appro¬
priated its various items to uses other than those in which he
saw them employed. Combining them with other elements either
purely imaginary or derived from other churches and tombs which
he may have seen or read about, he succeeded in creating a new
and poetically superior setting to fit his essentially new charac¬
ter. As Stevenson has remarked:
We begin to get a glimpse of Browning's creative methods
when we see him thus selecting details from several sepa¬
rate models and combining them under the guise of ficti¬
tious characters so that he can intensify one particular
impression and thus epitomize a historical era in a single
episode.6
Many commentators believe also that the contemporary reli¬
gious climate, specifically the Tractarian disputes, contributed
to the inspiration for this poem, basing their belief on Browning's

^See, for example, Murray's Handbook for Central Italy, Part

II, pp. 147-48. Murray's Handbooks are discussed above, p. 21,
n. 46.
^"The Pertinacious Victorian Poets," UTQ, XXI (1952), 241.
 142

1845 letter to the editor of Hood's Magazine in which he wrote:

"I pick it [the poem] out as being a pet of mine, and just the
thing for the time--what with the Oxford business."^ As these
words of the poet imply, however, the appropriateness of the poem
"for the time" seems to have been mostly a post factum realiza¬
tion, an afterthought, rather than the result of a direct inten¬
tion in its composition. Certainly, candles, incense, Mariolatry,
the Mass, and the Real Presence were at this time a pervasive
part of the popular English image of Roman Catholicism and "the
Oxford business," and Browning was not loath to employ them in his
portrait of Renaissance corruption. But this is something else
than to affirm, as some critics have, that the poem was composed
as a specific and direct attack on the Tractarians.-
We can, then, clearly perceive three general areas within
which, in varying degrees but with almost pattern-like regularity.
Browning's unique genius discovered sources for "The Bishop Orders
his Tomb," and most of his other successful poems as well. First,
there was his extraordinarily varied and detailed knowledge of
history (for this poem, the Italian Renaissance and the d'Este
family); jecond, his personal experiences (the visit to S. Pras-
sede Church); and third, some contemporary religious, political,
or artistic situation (the Tractarian Movement).
John Ruskin erred when he described the poet who wrote "The
Bishop Orders his Tomb" as "long resident in Italy," and for that
reason "able fully to enter into the Italian feeling."® True,

New Letters^ pp. 35-36. See also DeVane's Handbook, p.

166, n. 24.
^Modern Painters, ed. E. T Cook and Alexander D. Wedder-
burn (London, 1903), IV, p. 446.
 143

Browning had been almost ten years in Italy when Ruskin wrote the
fourth volume of Modem Painters, which was published in 1856;
but he had just returned from a relatively brief three months'
Italian tour when the poem was sent to the editors of Hood's on
February 18, 1845. This same error was expressed by the poet's
friend, the Irish and Australian statesman, Charles Gavan Duffy,
who remembered that Browning once told him that the allusions to
the Catholic Church in his poetry "were mainly attributable to
local circumstances. He had lived in Italy and he took his il¬
lustrations of life from the facts that fell under his notice
there.This explanation obviously does not apply to such an
early poem as this. And we can wonder which poems it does ex¬
plain, since very few have anything to do with contemporary Italy.
Latent in Ruskin's supposition and in Duffy's memoir is the
unhistorical presumption that the Italy of the 1840's was essential¬
ly the same as the Italy of the sixteenth century, and that Brown¬
ing's magnificent historical portraits were faithfully based upon
what he saw or heard on his Italian trips or during his long Ital¬
ian residence. Rather, as I have repeated often, it is in Brown¬
ing's reading that we find the basis of the central spirit of this
poem, as of so many others. His interest and affection for Italy -
were certainly stimulated by his Italian experiences. But par¬
ticulars in his poems were almost exclusively literary and histori¬
cal. With imaginative skill and sensitivity Browning was able
fully to enter into the feeling of the Italian Renaissance. What¬
ever contemporary element there is in "The Bishop Orders his Tomb"
concerns indirectly nineteenth-century England rather than Italy.-

^My Life in Two Hemispheres (London, 1898), II, 261.

 144

Discussions of this poem traditionally mention Ruskin's

high praise to the effect that the poem perfectly embodies the
most characteristic qualities of the central Italian Renaissance.^*^
But like much of Ruskin's personalized historical impressionism,
such a statement is quite erroneous. As we shall see in the next
chapter, his famous encomium would have been much more appropriate
as a description of "Fra Lippo Lippi." Browning seems deliberate¬
ly to have dated the dying Bishop's speech even more precisely than'
the indefinite 15--' of his sub-title when he has the Bishop's
"nephews" attending "the Jesu Church" (the Jesuits' II Gesu) which
was not begun until 1575. The High or Central Renaissance is
rather fluidly defined within the decades before and after 1500,
but certainly not after 1530, much less 1575. By the last quarter
of the sixteenth century the Italian Renaissance was deep into its
define and Italy was already entering the period of early Baroque.
And it is this hybrid age, more insecure and crisis-filled perhaps
than Lippi's earlier Renaissance, that Browning's poem so impres¬
sively delineates, and that so easily lent itself to the grotesque
mode in which he exceJMed^ For "The Bishop Orders his Tomb" is
probably Browning's most successful venture into the religious and
historical grotesque.

"Grotesqueness" or "grotesquerie" as an artistic trait is an

elusive quality which does not easily accommodate itself to a
clarifying discussion, much less to a neat definition or descrip¬
tion. - Basically, the grotesque seems to include both the beauti¬
ful and the ugly, or rather the ugly made beautiful when it is
portrayed by a vital and genial curiosity as a new and untapped

Modevn Pa'intevs^ IV, 449.

 145

source of appreciative interest. An artist's energetic exuberance

and love of surprise take hold of some bit of experience which in
isolation would be simply ugly, or even vulgar, and show it to us
in a new light so that we discover in its incongruities and "ugli¬
nesses" an object of new delight and admiration. A vast curiosi¬
ty on the part of the poet induces us to share with him an alien
experience and to recognize the sacredness of the simple and even •"
of the seemingly ugly. Lily Bess Campbell, in her brief early
study of Browning's use of the grotesque, described the poet of
the grotesque as one "who discovers new ways of interpreting life,
of elevating the debased.
The aspects, then, which seem to be most operative in the
grotesque are ugliness freshly apprehended as also beautiful--or
at least worthy of interest--and an uninhibited energy of percep¬
tion which, when combined with a kind of exuberant humor, enables
the artist simultaneously, as it often seems, both to laugh and
marvel, or to be fascinated as well as horrified or disgusted.
It is this enthusiastic, though often temporary, resolution of op¬
posites in both matter and mode (beauty with ugliness, attraction
with aversion) which, I believe, lies at the heart of the grotesque.
In the created grotesque each of these contributory elements has so
permeated the whole that the aesthetic analyst is hard put to
determine where one begins and the other ends; yet he perceives
that they are all present and operative.

^^"The Grotesque in The Poetry of Robert Browning," op. cit.,

(above, p. 56, n. 2), p. 34. Miss Campbell goes on to describe
the poet of the grotesque as combining the function of realist, im¬
pressionist, and naturalist. No character is too low, no incident
too trivial or too horrible for Browning to make it the subject of
his art. C. H. Herford, Robert Browning (London, 1905), pp. 42,
and 237-38, considers the grotesque mode a device for realism.
 146

Beauty, ugliness, energy, humor, pleasure, and abhorrence

are all present and stunningly operative in "The Bishop Orders his
Tomb." Nothing is too homely or too lyrical to be excluded from
the creation of so complex an effect. Above all, the sheer
poetic delight of this poem is inseparable from the central in¬
congruity that it is a Bishop, a publicly recognized man of God
and consecrated witness to the primacy of the spiritual, who is
splendidly featured as the consummate sensualist. What Fried-
land has written regarding the poem's satirical success can, with
even more pertinence, be said of its success as grotesque: "The
sharp contrast . . . derives from the priestly faith in a heavenly
immortality combined with a profound unwillingness to forego
temporal glory. No such . . . overtones would be involved in a
comparable wish of a layman." We can see this clearly by imag¬
ining a parallel poem of the dying Duke of Ferrara ordering his
tomb. Such a poem would be not only essentially different but
also less interesting or successful as a grotesque because its
clash of contradictory and ironic elements would be more muted.
The clerical character-and-situation, with all its dramatic
ramifications, built-in ironies, tensions, and potential contra¬
dictions, presents the artist able, as Browning was, to exploit it,
with an opportunity for unsurpassed poetic characterization, while
at the same time rendering the character a perfect example of
Browning's philosophy of the imperfect. The Bishop and Andrea
del Sarto are both failures because each in his own way has al¬
lowed a thirst for material perfection to twist his aspiring fac¬
ulties to the point of perversion. Each provides an eloquent
negative testimony to Browning's doctrine that perfection can be
12,
"Ferrara and 'My Last Duchess,"' sp_, XXXIII (1936) 665.
 147

sought in this life only at the cost of all truly human values.
Yet the Bishop's failure is less excusable and more startlingly
, grotesque than the graying painter's precisely because he is a
bishop, who presumably should be even more sensitive than the
artist to the other-worldly demands of his profession. Miss
Campbell has declared that Browning became the poet of the grotesque
"because of a struggle between idealism and realism, between fact
' and truth, the finite and the infinite. ... It was conflict that
did it; and conflict made for revolt—revolt against hypocrisies -
and sham."^^ The Bishop's life was a total, though unconscious,
hypocrisy, and all these contradictory elements are forcefully
revealed as operating within the tension that existed between his
life and his profession.
Browning's superb achievement in "The Bishop Orders his Tomb"
can perhaps be best epitomized in the celebrated line in which he
has the dying Bishop describe his hoarded lump of lapis lazuli:

"Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast." Park Honan has

selected this verse to illustrate how Browning was able to use
three aspects of the Renaissance--its sensuality, art, and reli-
gion--in three different mutually illuminating ways to reveal the
speaking character.I believe this line can provide also a
revealing illustration of Browning's grotesque mode at its best
and serve as a helpful preliminary to a discussion of the poem as
a whole.
In an attempt to discover the salient elements of Browning s
grotesque, I have suggested four which work in elusive combinations

► ^^"The Grotesque in the Poetry of Robert Browning," op. cit.

(above, p. 56, n. 2), p. 17.
^^See Browning's Characters pp. 134-35.
j
 148

"beauty, ugliness, energy, and humor. Each of these seems to be

especially operative in the line mentioned above. On a discrete
and partial level there is a legitimate basis for the aesthetic
emotion in the simile's beautiful connotations of femininity, love,
and motherhood, on the one hand, and of rich and exotic color on
the other, a suggestiveness which links it in tone with the Arabic
derivative lazuli. At the same time there is an undeniable ele¬
ment of ugliness in the hint of immodesty, violation, and even
' sacrilege, all of which are recurring themes throughout the poem.
The electric energy of such a descriptive tour de force is an im¬
mediate result of the startling inventiveness of its author's rare
and fertile imagination. There is also an element of indulgent
humor in the line's bold excess as both the reader and the artist
delight in the ingenious, almost whimsical, balance of divergencies:
the seemingly coarse yet inimitable diction, the sensuously con¬
ceived Virgin Madonna, and the Bishop's own gargoyle-like picture
of his marbled self with the gorgeous "lump" poised between his
knees.
When these four components of the grotesque are contemplated
in a single image, there is an aesthetic pleasure in its perfect
fitness, or inevitability, in relation to both the speaker and his
situation. The Bishop is a decadent aesthete with an almost
tactile delight in color, yet an accomplished rhetorician; a vul¬
gar exhibitionist who looks forward to a crudely self-centered
eternity, he is, most incongruously of all, a man of at least par-
tially authentic though sterile religious faith. Thus it is the
breast of the Madonna, Christ's Virgin Mother, that he envisions;
not a madonna's--one of the innumerable "mother-and-child" images "
of the late Renaissance which had lost its specifically religious
signification.
 149

Roma A. King, Jr., in speaking of the poem as a whole, has

carefully indicated the ironies which result from the tensions
between the objective facts of the Bishop's real life and the
15
Bishop's subjective view of himself. He has, however, stopped
short of pointing to what I believe is the heart or core of the
poem's tensions and polarities. The one overarching fact of the
poem and its fascinating character is not that the Bishop is a
typical Renaissance man, a linguist and an aesthete, a vindictive
lecher and a self-blinded and self-pitying fool; not even that
he is a quasi-Christian; but precisely that he is all these things
and a cleric, a bishop. Browning had written before and would
write again about Renaissance men, moral and immoral. But in this
poem he created a new character in whom all these facets found in¬
creased intensity in the character's clerical status.
From the first word of the poem's revised title to the
Bishop's final nostalgic reminiscence of his long-dead mistress,
the reader is never allowed to forget who he is and what he "orders"
before he dies. Roma King sees in Browning's early change of the
poem's title from "The Tomb at St. Praxed's" to "The Bishop Orders
his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church" the poet's desire to place a new
emphasis on the ironic situation of the dying Bishop who is now un-
^ 1 fi
able effectively to order anything. But the revised title also"
threw new stress upon the speaker, the Bishop, who orders the tomb.
And the inserted place and date, "Rome, 15--," further accentuated
the ecclesiastical reference. For as every nineteenth-century ^
English schoolboy knew, the dominant fact of Rome in the sixteenth
century, and a fountainhead of all horror and sin, was its degen¬
erate Church.

^^See The Bow and the Lyre^ pp. 52-75.

^^See ibid., p. 52.
 150

Three important ironic devices are introduced in the poem s

first two lines: (1) the recurring, almost antiphonal, religious
epigrams, Biblical and otherwise ("Vanity . . . !"), each of which
reiterates the "Memento mori-Sic transit" theme; (2) a mention of
the Bishop's sons and a first suggestion of their filial indiffer¬
ence ("Is Anselm keeping back?"); and (3) a preliminary hint of
the complex ritualistic and sacramental imagery and symbolism
("Draw round my bed"), which, as we shall see, permeates the entire ,
poem.
The irony of each of these strand-like motifs is intensified
by the fact that the speaker is a cleric, to the extent that they
are among the most revealing passages of the poem. The Bishop's /v
Scriptural sentiments are most often expressed as familiar para¬
phrases and not as literal quotations: thoughts derived from the
Bible, therefore, are a natural, integral, yet ineffectual, part
•«. of the churchman's thought-life. The same is true of his other
reflections on death and the transitoriness of material things.
Thus in the context of his total situation, and by juxtaposition
with his other far-from-religious sentiments, the rather conven¬
tional utterances of a dying bishop on the verge of delirium have
become a parody that is both sacrilegious and ridiculous. At the
same time they provide a descriptive ironic commentary that pierces
to the heart of the Bishop's life-long religious impotency.
The "Vanity" line, a literal enough quotation from Eccles.
18
1.2, takes on a special importance by coming first in the

^^For a brief but illuminating discussion of the function

of ritual in the poem, see Lawrence Poston, "Ritual in 'The Bishop
Orders his Tomb,'" The Viator-Lan Newsletterj No. 17 (Spring, 1960), *
pp. 27-28.
18
The entire verse in the King James Version reads: "Vanity
of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity."
 151

poem and thus setting, as it were, an ironic label upon the

Bishop's pretentious "order," coupled as it is with the later
certainty that it will not be carried out. And this discrepancy
on the articulated level is itself a symbol or "theme-statement"
for the basic vanity of the Bishop's entire life. “
A moment later he affirms that death is as inevitable for
himself as it was for his mistress:
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since.
And as she died so must we die ourselves.
And thence we may perceive the world's a dream.
Life, how and what is it?
(7-10)
Here the Bishop has suggestively juxtaposed salient contraries
(she and I, the Bishop; life and death) which summarize his past
life as well as his present predicament. He has dishonored his
profession; he is now foolishly attempting to come to terms with
death. Furthermore, he for whom life and concrete sensuous satis¬
faction were an exact equation, is now reduced to questioning the
reality of all being; while at the same time he is obsessed with
immortalizing that life with a pretentious tomb. »
The Bishop next speaks piously of how "peace seems all. /
Saint Praxed's ever was the church for peace" (13-14). Yet he
immediately continues with the account of how he "fought / With
tooth and nail" (15-16), but unsuccessfully, to save his niche
from Gandolf; but now he looks forward to an eternity spent in
this church of peace gloating over his episcopal rival whom he
shall at last have mastered in funereal prominence as well as in
illicit love.
The Bishop continues in a brilliant passage filled with
curses against Gandolf, more anticipatory gloatings, and luxuriant
descriptions, when suddenly he feebly surrenders himself to his
 152

intruding subconscious and interjects a paraphrase from Job 7.6:

Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
(51-52)19

The utter incongruity of this reference to Job, the perfect and

upright servant of the Lord, and his message of material imperma¬
nence, is highlighted by the lines which immediately precede and
follow it. The Bishop, almost ghoulishly, has imagined his
rival's discomfiture when he shall be forced to look upon the new
tomb deliberately positioned so that he cannot do otherwise:
"Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!" (50). Job's senti¬
ments are then immediately followed by a resumption of his detailed
commission to his sons: "Did I say basalt for my slab, sons?" (53)
--as if, by the insistent mention of stone, he found a moment of
solidity to cancel, at least temporarily, the frightening voice of
God's servant. Where in one breath he has suggested that the
grave ends all, in the next he is haunted by the necessity of
adorning his own grave in order somehow to cheat death of its total
victory.
A moment later the Bishop, in full possession of his faculties
once more, is specifying the details of the tomb's bronze bas-
relief in which Christ on the Mount of Beatitudes and Moses on Mount
Sanai will mingle with Nymphs and prurient Pans. The mixture
would be ludicrous if we were not so sure of the total lack of
sensitivity to such inconsistencies on the part of the Bishop and
many of his contemporaries, both lay and ecclesiastical.
Here he chooses two of the most definitive incidents of the

19 .
King James version: "My days are swifter than a weaver's
shuttle, and are spent without hope." See also Job 7.9: "He
that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more."
 153

Old and New Testaments. In one scene the proud Bishop hopes to
have Christ pictured delivering his Sermon on the Mount in which
He proclaimed the superiority of poverty of spirit, meekness,
mercy, purity of heart, and peacemaking over all self-regarding
attitudes; and in another he wishes to see molded the figure of
Moses, his face still aglow with God's mysterious Light, as he is
about to read from the stone tablets on which are promulgated
God's uncompromising demand for an absolute First Place in men's
lives, as well as his severe and unequivocal sanctions against
sexual promiscuity and thievery. In sharp ironic contrast is
his choice of mythological subjects. The Dionysiac implications
of the tripod and thyrsis, and the figure of "Pan / Ready to
twitch the Nymph's last garment off" (60-61), suggest not-too-
subtly that the Bishop's lack of respect for his promise of
priestly celibacy was equalled by his lack of any but the most
puerile notion of the meaning of sexual love.
Towards the end of the poem the weakening Bishop's lapses /
into incoherency become more frequent and prolonged. At one
point he substitutes St. Praxed for Christ." Then exultant over
the coup he achieved by having Ulpian substituted for Cicero in
Gandolf's epitaph, he suddenly breaks into a startlingly candid
admission based on Genesis 47.9: "Evil and brief has been my pil¬
grimage" (101).^^ By "evil" Jacob had meant the sufferings that
are an inevitable part of a life spent in the service of God and
His People. For the Bishop's life, however, "evil" becomes a

^^King James Version: "And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The

days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty
years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been,
and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of
my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage."
 154

moral judgment. The glimpse of truth is far too painful; im¬

mediately he once again, with a new note of urgency, returns to
•"his illusory symbol of permanency: "All lapis, all, sons!" (102).
Each of the speakers or referents which the Bishop in his
various stages of consciousness either employs or refers to for
these religious echoes performs the function of an implicit death¬
bed prosecutor: the stoical yet faithful preacher of Ecclesiastes,
the abused mistress, the virgin martyr whose "church for peace" the
Bishop seeks to desecrate, the other-worldly Job, dutiful and per¬
severing Jacob, and, most damning of all, Christ and Moses. Di¬
rectly and indirectly, each serves to reveal additional facets of
the unhappy man's failure, and provides him an unconscious link
with the reality that he has persistently denied or ignored in his
more deliberate statements. <LThis interplay between the Bishop's
various levels of consciousness is an essential element of the
poem's structure of irony and creates the overriding caricature of
Christianity and the Christian priesthood as conceived and prac¬
ticed by the scandalous cleric, a caricature which is at the heart
of the poem and its characterization.
An even more subtle, almost-tragic connotation can be found
in the second thematic strand—the Bishop's relation to his sons.
The mere existence of the putative sons, standing now before him,
serves as an unimpeachable indictment which continuously accuses
him of infidelity to his priestly vocation. Yet he is nonetheless
probably their father, and they are his sons: and the old man's
feeble attempts to rouse in them some slight filial instinct—some
touch of gratitude, at least for his Frascati villa, if not for
life itself—takes on a genuine poignancy. We almost pity the
devilish old man in his grotesque projection of the eternal-Lear
 155

which hides waiting to be played, deep in the subconsciousness of

even the most deserving parent.
j Anselm, seemingly the eldest, sets the theme by his obvious
unresponsiveness to his father's condition: "Is Anselm keeping
back?" The Bishop automatically reverts for a moment to the
transparent "nephew" fiction; then, realizing its uselessness,
displays his own-fatal insensitivity towards his sons when he un-
- wittingly reminds them of the possibility of their totally anony¬
mous bastardy as well as his and their mother's wholesale promis¬
cuity:
. . . sons mine ... ah God, I know not! Well--
She, men would have to be your mother once.
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
(3-5)
A sentiment which from the lips of any other Italian father would
have constituted an unforgiveable curse is here reduced to a
bloodless, shoulder-shrugging sigh, a far less important fact
than his amorous triumph over his rival long ago.
As he goes on to describe his elaborate tomb and its set¬
ting, the Bishop mentions nine surrounding columns, with "the odd
one at my feet where Anselm stands" (28). This brief image pos¬
sibly again suggests the son's illegitimacy ("the odd one"); but
certainly it also connotes the basic flaw in the Bishop's relation
to his sons and, by extension, in his relations to all other per-
A

sons. All are essentially ornaments to be possessed, to stand

and serve "at my feet."
The list of instructions continues until interrupted by the
strangely incongruous exclamation: "My sons, ye would not be my
> death?" (36). In the light of the expiring Bishop's actual situ¬
ation these words are nonsense; yet their unrealized literal
 156

meaning reveals the full extent of their speaker's naive and ob¬
sessive trust that the right artistic formula for his tomb will
somehow neutralize his own physical extinction.
As his control over his faculties noticeably weakens and
his perception of his sons' true intentions increases, the Bishop
becomes more desperate, alternately cajoling and pathetically in¬
dignant:
Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all . . .
(45)
. . . but I know
Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee.
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp
Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me--all of jasper, then!
'Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve.
(62-69)
From the Bishop's point of view he has been generous to his sons.
They stand to inherit his material wealth, and anything beyond
this his jaded sense of values cannot comprehend. His lack of
love and respect towards them and their mother would be meaning¬
less, nonessential quibbling. Villas, baths, horses, manuscripts,
and mi stresses--these will all be theirs. What more could a
father, dutiful or otherwise, have done for his sons? Yet he
senses at once their cynical indifference toward him. Even now
while he pleads they seem to be plotting ways to anticipate pos¬
sessing his properties. Helplessly, he appeals to Anselm's non¬
existent love, no longer "nephew" but "child of my bowels." Then
in a kind of panic he can only suggest another kind of stone,
"jasper . . . pure green as a pistachio nut" (69-71), repeating
the pattern noted before, where his progressing insecurity is
momentarily countered at each step by a new vision of solid sculp-
 157

tured beauty. The note of bribery becomes more blatant and more
perverse when the Bishop next reminds his sons that his prayerful
intercession with St. Praxed will be especially potent in provid¬
ing them with swifter horses, more valuable manuscripts, and in¬
exhaustible bevies of new mistresses--but only "if ye carve my
epitaph aright" (76). Again he recalls his sons' "tall pale
mother, with her talking eyes" (96), but only that she might a
moment later share in their curse: "Ever your eyes were as a
lizard's quick, / They glitter like your mother's for my soul"
(104-05).
In a rush of despair he suddenly realizes that his hopes are
futile, and that in reality he will lie in a tomb "starved" and
"impoverished." Present and future are confusedly merged within
his dimming consciousness as he petulantly orders his sons to
leave him in his cheap tomb--the one "order" that they are certain
to obey:
There, leave me, there!
For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude
To death--ye wish it--God, ye wish it!
(113-15)
The sons from whom he sought the fulfillment of his foolish dreams
of eternal materiality now stand as executioners eager to inflict
upon him the only "death" he has ever feared, a total and final
physical ugliness. Earlier in the monologue, whenever the truth
had threatened to destroy his egotistical delusions, the Bishop
had instinctively focused his attention on stone as a symbol of-
hope and security. Now for the first time he has admitted to
himself the vanity of all his plans, and immediately his thoughts
center upon another image of stone, designed this time to accentu¬
ate rather than conceal the horrible facts of physical corruption.
 158

Stone--
Gritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat
As if the corpse they keep were oozing through—
And no more lapis to delight the world!
(115-18)
Having proven their uselessness, the sons are curtly dis¬
missed: "Well go!" Automatically, and perhaps with an accompany¬
ing sigh of mixed regrets, the old man lifts his hand and murmurs a
final blessing that is appropriately yet incongruously both pater¬
nal and priestly.
Stripped of the respect and sympathy of his sons as well as
his beautiful tomb, the Bishop appeals to the image of "departing
altar-ministrants" with which he unconsciously mirrors his own
long-departed priestliness. Finally he reverts to the only
satisfaction that remains--the memory of Gandolf's envy and his
mistress' beauty, both of whom are as dead as he himself soon will
be.
The ironies inherent in the Bishop's clerical status, there¬
fore, have been intensified with each mention of his sons and their
mother. His failure as a celibate priest has been exceeded only
by his failure as a lover and a parent, one failure compounding the
other. On the professional and religious levels he has destroyed
his integrity, supposedly for the sake of human love and material
wealth; yet, on the strictly human level he has gained nothing
but a selfish and lustful memory. The Bishop's bankruptcy is
total; nothing is exempt, neither grace, love, honor, mental
wholeness, filial loyalty, nor possessions--not even the ultimate
disposal of his bodily remains.
Ritual and gesture form the third and perhaps most signifi¬
cant strand of imagery in "The Bishop Orders his Tomb." Parallel
 159

to the imagery relating to the Mass and the Eucharist is an

equally pervasive stress upon place or position, the sons' and
their expiring father's, his tomb's and Gandolf's, and the initial
and finally altered respective relationships of one to the other.
The movement toward, and then away from the Bishop's bed, when
seen together with the explicitly religious imagery, becomes a
symbolic expression of his fatal egotism. Always he has striven
to be the center of attention. Now as he lies dying, both his
bed and his hoped-for tomb become in his distorted imaginings a
kind of altar, with himself as the center of worship.
The Bishop first bids his sons to gather closely around his
bed, as if to reassure himself that he can still command their
respect and attention. "Draw close" (34), he soon repeats; "Ye
mark me not!" (63) he chides; then, in the final realization of
his helplessness, "Well go! . . . and, going, turn your backs / —
Ay, like departing altar-ministrants" (119-21). This movement,
as Lawrence Poston has noted, provides the poem with one of its
structural frames,establishing as it does an imaginatively
visual and kinetic commentary on the Bishop's disintegrating situ¬
ation. It also suggests a kind of mock liturgical act in which
the sons' final rejection is seen as the termination of a reli¬
gious ceremony; yot such a "ceremony" is actually no less a
mockery than the many liturgical services af which the sinful
Bishop himself had been an unworthy ministrant.
Even more explicitly, the position of the two tombs, his
and Gandolf's, becomes related in the Bishop's mind to his delusion
of godlike centrality.' Bewailing how Gandolf "cozened" him out of

^^"Ritual in 'The Bishop Orders his Tomb,"' op. cit. (above,

n. 17), pp. 27-28.
 160

the choicest niche, the Bishop imagines that even from his lesser
niche he will still be able to see the pulpit and the empty choir-
stalls, and look "up into the aery dome where live / The angels,
and a sunbeam's sure to lurk" (23-24). Curiously enough, he men¬
tions only "seeing" the pulpit and altar-fronting choir area.
Sermon and psalmody have no special appeal; what is important is
his own prominence of place which their proximity signifies.
Angels, light, and the monumental dome--all signs of God's presence
--are boldly grasped at and applied to enhance the tomb's admitted¬
ly inferior setting. The Bishop goes on to describe his proposed
tomb as a "tabernacle," a word which immediately suggest the Old
-'Testament Tabernacle wherein the Shekinah or Divine Presence was
manifest, as well as the Eucharistic tabernacle of the New Testa¬
ment.
But the Bishop's victory over Gandolf will be finally con¬
summated, not by discovering the previously unsuspected but still
minor advantages of the new tomb's location, but by the unquestioned
superiority of its stone, sculpture, bronze, and epitaph. He
begins his careful instructions with a gorgeously sensuous image
which relates his heart's desire to the wine of the Eucharist:
Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe
As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse.
(28-29)
The Bishop seems to parallel further Christ's ultimate
sacrifice and his own ironic hope for ultimate aggrandizement when
he instructs his sons to dig for his absconded Z-apfs XazuZ'i in
"the white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood" (37). The
pertinent suggestiveness of this latter bit of rural detail may
possibly have been a happy accident. But it is not inconceivable
that Browning remembered that the garden on the slope of the Mount
 161

of Olives where Christ suffered his Agony was called Gethsemane,-

which is Aramaic for "olive-press." If so, he has subtly sug¬
gested that the Bishop's hopes are soon to dissolve into a bizarre
and fruitless imitation of Christ's redemptive Agony.' The
Bishop's mimic self-apotheosis continues as he likens his lump of
22
lapis lazuli to God the Father's globe in the Gesti, and predicts
that it will gain for him a kind of permanent if reluctant worship
from the envious Gandolf.
Ritual and sensuousness combine as the Bishop spells out the
delights he anticipates from his proximity to the liturgy:
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass.
And see God made and eaten all day long.
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
(80-84)
The appeal of the Mass is conceived in purely physical terms,
detached from any religious sentiment: unintelligible but pleas¬
ing Latinate sounds, soft lest any disturbing meanings intrude;
warm, reassuring candle light; perfumed odors; and a crude, al¬
most cannibalistic, picture of the consecration and communion. "
All will be solely for the dead man's pleasure and satisfaction.

^^The Bishop describes the figure of God the Father with the
lapis lazuli globe "on both his hands" (48). Actually, however,
the stone is held by an angel beneath the statue. Murray, Ea-nd-
book for Central Italy^ II, 132, in his description of the Gesu,
mentions "the Chapel of St. Ignatius in the left transept . . .
[which] was designed by the celebrated Padre Pozzi, and is bril¬
liantly decorated with lapis lazuli and verde antique. The marble
group of the Trinity is by Bernardino Ludovisi: the globe below
the Almighty is said to be the largest mass of lapis lazuli known."
M A. Tuker and H. Malleson, Handbook to Christian and Ecclesiasti-
cal Rome (London, 1900), I, 234, speaks of "an angel holding the
terrestrial globe, made entirely of lapis lazuli."
 162

Even God has been reduced to a kind of entertainer in the Bishop's

dreamlike tomb-world. ”
The present melds into the future when the still-living
prelate imagines himself as his mortuary statue which possesses
'the sensibilities of a man. In that pose he folds his hands "as
if they clasped a crook" (87), the shepherd's crook or crosier,
symbol of his episcopal office as a deputed shepherd of the flock
of Christ. At liturgical celebrations he had often held this
staff, an empty symbol of his unfulfilled pastoral vocation; now
he blindly desires to see his failure fossilized in stone, with
the indicting crosier clasped upon his reclining statue's breast.
Brief as it is, the foregoing analysis of three motifs--the
recurring pious platitudes, mostly unrealized by the Bishop, yet
devastatingly accurate and self-incriminatory; his sons' indif¬
ference and even hostility; and the pervasiveness of symbolic
gesture and ritual—when considered in relation to the Bishop's
clerical status, has pointed the way to a fuller understanding
and appreciation of this extraordinarily rich poem.
In examining many other aspects of "The Bishop Orders his
Tomb," the speaker's "clericality" is a most enlightening point
of entry. For example, the poem is not only a brilliant portrait
of a grotesque character; it is also a grotesquely incisive reve¬
lation of a corrupt society. We can lay aside the question of
the universality, or even the typicality, of such a man as the
Bishop in the ecclesiastical society of the late sixteenth centu¬
ry. But such specimens did exist, and their very existence
23
Berdoe, Browning Cyclopaedia, p. 81, points out that the
Bishop was one of a vanishing breed by the late sixteenth century.
This was the age of the reforming Council of Trent and the Counter-
Reformation. Among their first fruits were such churchmen and
 163

brands the society which tolerated and even exalted them as

something far less than ideal."" The spectacle of two bishops at¬
tempting to "cozen" each other out of the choicest burial niche
is ludicrous in the extreme; at the same time it is a tragically
eloquent indication of the low moral calibre of many bishops of
sixteenth-century Italy. The Bishop's love affairs, at least the
one mentioned in-the poem, took place before he was consecrated,
but presumably after he had become a priest. The sons were born,
and they and their mother publicly known (the "nephew" ploy was
strictly pro forma)-, yet the unfaithful priest suffered seemingly
no handicap against his later promotion to the episcopacy.
Gandolf himself was perhaps already a bishop when the amorous
rivalry was in full play. The Bishop's sons, evidently as ad¬
dicted to debauchery as their father, were prominent worshippers
at one of Rome's most fashionable churches. The line describing
their Sunday habits is deftly ambiguous: "Ye worship in the Jesu
Church so gay" (49). The deceptively off-hand modifier performs
a multiple function describing the insincerity of the sons and the
superficiality of the entire congregation at worship, as well as
the flamboyant baroque of the church's interior. The implication,
therefore, is that on all levels religion at Rome is a mere social
form, lacking depth or substance. This theme of aesthetically
full but religiously empty worship is reiterated in the sensuous-
indeed epicurean--description of the Mass and the Eucharist which
was discussed above. -

23 (cont gg Charles Borromeo, Ignatius Loyola,

Francis Xavier, Robert Bellarmine, Peter Canisius, Philip Neri,
John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Angela Merici, and the count¬
less members of the many religious orders of teaching men and
women, nurses, and missionaries which were founded in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries.
 164

In the course of his spotted career the Bishop had procured

not one, but a number of villas, at least one for each of his
sons—and they seem numerous. A religious institution which
provides such perquisites for its ministers, whatever their rank,
or tolerates their acquisition, had inexcusably exposed itself to
the most scandalous abuses. And evidently even the Pope was not
exempt from such allurements. As his confidence disintegrates,
the exasperated Bishop threatens to disinherit his sons and leave
his wealth to the Pope: "All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the
Pope / My villas!" (102-03). The presumption in the mind of both
the poet and his character seems to be that the Holy Father would
be far from reluctant to accept the estates, and that in his hands
not all their income would be expended upon hospitals and orohan-
24
ages.
Finally, there is a jarring note of anti-Semitism in the
Bishop's uncouth description of his lapis lazuli: "Big as a Jew's
head cut off at the nape." The literal reference is probably to
the head of John the Baptist as portrayed in many Renaissance
paintings. Yet the more universal connotation in the Bishop's
words is unmistakeable, and singularly consistent with sixteenth-
century attitudes among lay Christians as well as their clergy.
_ The Bishop s personal religious ideas are a curious amalgam
of Christianity, paganism, and pathological delusion. The weight
24
possible that Browning intends to mirror in this poem
the court of Gregory XIII (1572-85), the predecessor of the Pope
Sixtus whom he immortalized in "The Pope and the Net" and "The
Bean-Feast. Though personally beyond reproach and a champion of
reform during the early years of his pontificate, the later year?
of Gregory s reign were marked by civil chaos resulting from'^his
inability to control the local barons and handitu who raided and
rioted not only throughout the Papal States but in the city of
Rome Itself. ^
 165

of these anomalies is accentuated when we realize that his epis¬

copal consecration has deputized him to be an authentic teacher
of Christian doctrine. His words imply an orthodox belief in
Christ as Son of Mary and therefore true man, and in Christ as »
redeeming Savior. But he professes a horribly distorted under¬
standing of the traditional Catholic doctrines of the interces¬
sion of the saints, the Real Presence, and transubstantiation. ”
As Park Honan remarks: "The Bishop at St. Praxed's has reached a
state of being in which conflicting tendencies have produced
their own rationale, in which religion and sensuality have become
intertwined and inseparable."^^ The Bishop's view of death and
personal immortality are as materialistic and one-dimensional as
his view of life.- Personal immortality is but an extension of
earthly existence in which life is continued on its same physical
plane. As he lies in his tomb he will be able still to see,
hear, feel cold or warmth, gloat in triumph or gasp in pain. His
intensively acquisitive spirit will constantly feed itself on new
sensations if not on new possessions.
The success, therefore, of "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at
St. Praxed's Church," both as a work of art and as an example of
Browning's historical-grotesque, is intimately bound up with the
professional status of its central character. It is the Bishop
'qua bishop who makes the poem's myriad ironies and its bizarre
and earthy incongruities "work." His person, his profession, and
his historical era, working as one, function as a kind of objec¬
tive catalyst whereby the poet can meld together his weird com¬
bination of immorality, sensuous art, and religion, and transfigure
them into a tense and satisfying aesthetic unity. Browning dis-

Browning's Characterp. 219.

 166

covered a connatural joy in ideas and situation, as well as in

words, that are grinding, jostling, rasping, and discordant--a
quality which C. H. Herford epitomizes as "a rush of exuberant
power," and which, he asserts, is particularly characteristic of
26
the grotesque. The more surprising the discordances, the more
vigorously was Browning inspired to attack and fuse them into
startlingly new visions of beauty. It is the inherent paradox
of Browning's grotesque mode that a poem which so vividly pictures
human depravity and religious corruption is at the same time, and
most appropriately so, a masterpiece of poetic characterization,
structure, imagery, and diction. The realistic basis of this ap¬
propriateness is, quite simply, the identity of the poem's monolo-
gist. The detailed and immensely valuable studies of Park Honan
and Roma A. King, Jr., become indispensable when the multiple
ironies and grotesque incongruities which they have brought to
light, as well as the poem's more conventional beauties, are seen
as primarily rooted in the fundamental fact of the Bishop's iden¬
tity.
26
Robert Browning^ (London, 1905), p. 259.
 CHAPTER V

FRA LIPPO LIPPI

In Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1855) we have the "fullest

expression of^the poet's aesthetic philosophy,"^ as well as one of
2
his most successful and "most characteristic" poems. Where the
faultless Andrea del Sarto ironically demonstrates the artistic
and human cul de sac that awaits the security-seeking hyper-per¬
fectionist, the effervescent friar presents Browning's artistic
ideals directly. As William Lyon Phelps remarked: "Fra Lippo

■Lippi and Andrea del Sarto are both great art poems, and both in
3
striking contrast. The former is dynamic, the latter static."
The two together constitute one of the nineteenth century's most
comprehensive and attractive aesthetic statements.
This is not to say that the artistic or dramatic integrity
of either poem is at all vitiated by blatant didacticism or prop¬
aganda. But it seems undeniable that in addition to the creation
of two fascinating characters. Browning also intended the poems to
be, each in its distinct way, apologias for his own poetic prac¬
tice. A striking ingredient of the poems' success is their per¬
fect balance of aesthetic theory and dramatic objectivity. This
is especially true of "Fra Lippo Lippi" in which the "doctrinal"
element is presented explicitly and almost formally, yet with no

^Johnson, The Alien Vision, p. 116.

^DeVane, Handbook, p. 208.
3
Robert Browning, p. 203.

167
 168

loss to the poem's over-all artistic perfection.^ "Apologia" may

perhaps be too strong a word to describe Browning's purpose in
either of these poems. However, there is no doubt that Browning
intended them both to be not only fine portraits of two interest¬
ing characters caught up in the artistic dilemmas of the Renais-
-sance, but above all clear statements of his own position in the
literary climate of England where he was challenging accepted —
poetic theories. In the "Faultless Painter" Browning saw the
sad results of yielding to compromise—personal and financial, as
well as artistic. And in Lippi Browning found a very sympathetic
character, "like himself highly individualistic, suffering from
the tyranny of artistic convention" and a lack of appreciation by
“the critics. He saw the fifteenth-century friar's place in art
as analogous to that which he occupied in poetry: "The occasion
of examining the artistic situation in the Renaissance had, in the
poet's mind, been given a contemporaneity so that he could see his
"• vocation in terms of Fra Lippo."^
4
W. David Shaw, "Character and Philosophy in 'Fra Lippo
Lippi,"' VP, II (1964), 132, remarks: "The triumph of 'Fra Lippo
Lippi,' like most of Browning's greatest monologues, is that just
as the monk cannot separate flesh from spirit, so we, as readers,
cannot isolate the characters from their ideas. The poem evokes
a synthetic image, an indissoluble fusion, of character and
philosophy together."
5
DeVane, Handbook, p. 219.
^William Whitla, The Central Truth, p. 66. DeVane, p. 218,
writes: "Certainly the artistic creed which Browning ascribes to
Fra Lippo Lippi is much more his own than Lippi's, and finds ex¬
pression in the poet's own person in Old Pictures in Florence."
Louis Etienne, a 19th-Century French critic, in a review which oc¬
casioned his public correspondence with Browning in the Pall Mall
Gazette over the Lippi-Masaccio chronology, made this comment
about the Poet and his friar: "II est lui-meme un fra Lippo, moins
les escapades ("Une nouvelle forme de poesie dramatique," Revue
des Deia: Mondes, LXXXV, 1870, 723). For a further reference see
below, P- 175, n. 18.
 169

We clearly see Browning's sympathy in his conception of

Lippi, as both man and artist, and his desire to arouse the sym¬
pathy of his readers, if we briefly examine his use of his three
principal sources: Giorgio Vasari's Le vite de' Fittovi and
O

Filippo Baldinucci's Notizde^ both semi-historical, and Walter

Savage Landor's fictional "Fra Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius
the Fourth"^--where we can note Browning's gentle but purposeful
manipulation of biographical facts in order to render the truant
friar as ingratiating a spokesman as possible. His waywardness,
for example, is portrayed as principally the result of the harsh
circumstances of his youth during which he developed an acute in¬
stinct for self-preservation. He was thus induced to remain in
the friary long after he realized that he and the religious life
were incompatible. With seemingly deliberate stress, Browning's
poem twice mentions that Lippi pronounced his vow of chastity at
the age of eight, and therefore ought not reasonably to be blamed
for his later violations.’* Vasari, however, merely says that
Lippi's Aunt Lapaccia "made him a friar" in the Carmelite convent,

Le Vite dei piu Celehvi Fittovi^ Saultovi e Arohitetti,

first published at Florence in 1550 and 1568. According to
DeVane, Handbook, p. 216, the edition Browning used was published
in Florence, 1846-57. A complete translation, more accurate than
the E. H. and E. W. Blashfield and A. A. Hopkins translation of
1896, is the Everyman's Library edition, ed. William Gaunt, 4
vols., 1963, and based on the Temple Classics edition, tr. A. B.
Hinds, 1900. The best English translation is the Modern Library
abridgement from the translation by Gaston duC. DeVere, ed. Robert
N. Linscott, 1959. References in the following paragraphs are to
this edition.
^Delle Notizie de' Frofessori del Disegno da Cimabue . . . ,
Firenze, 1767-74. For the account of Lippi see III, 212-20.
^Imaginary Conversations, ed. Charles G. Crump (London,
1891), II, 373-96.
 170

and that he was "kept with others in the novitiate under the
discipline of the schoolmaster" (p. 117); nor does he make any
mention of vows. -^Indeed, religious vows (of poverty and obedi¬
ence, as well as chastity) are pronounced after the noviceship,
which is the legally established year of preparation and trial
before vows. ** Even before the Council of Trent had standardized
the rule of the various religious orders, fifteen was the accepted
minimum age for religious profession. And as a matter of fact,
Edward C. Strutt, Fra Lippo's most reliable biographer, states
that he pronounced his first vows on June 8, 1421, fifteen years
after his probable date of birth in 1406.^^ The young artist,
then, probably spent the first five of the six years before 1421

10,See Fra L-ippo Lippi (London, 1901). Lippi's name appears

in his convent's records for the last time in an entry for January,
1432. Vasari (p. 118) implied that he severed relations with the
Carmelites even before this. But separation seems to have been
first cum liaentia^ and then gradually grew wider. In 1439, 8
years after he had left the Carmine, Lippi still described him¬
self in a letter to Pietro di' Medici as "uno di piu poveri Frati,
Che sia in Firenze" (J. W. Gaye, Carteggio inedito degli artisti
. . . j Firenze, 1839, I, 141). To the Carmelites he was still a
fnar until he was dispensed from his vows in 1461 and allowed to
marry his mistress (see Strutt, pp. lOOff.). There is no record
of Lippi s ordination to the priesthood. Merle M. Bevington,
'Three Letters of Robert Browning to the Editor of the Pall Mall
Gazette^ MLN^ LXXV (1960), 309, confusing clerical orders with
religious vows, erroneously says that he took "orders" in 1421.
Strutt, p. 20, conjectures that he was ordained after 1432 when he
left the convent. This seems unlikely, however, since after his
profession he had ten years within the convent to prepare himself
or orders. If he did not avail himself of the opportunity then.
It IS improbable that he did so when he was in effect his own
master and bent on following an artistic rather than a clerical
benefices which he later possessed could have been
held for the revenue they brought, the sacerdotal functions being
performed by a delegated priest. ^
 171

simply as an orphan-scholar or ward of the convent, living and

"studying" with the novices under one of the schoolmaster-friars.
Vasari shows that Lippi's loose behavior derived from a
basic character-trait, and therefore was more than simply a
healthy youthful reaction to unwise and unjust sexual repression
--though this latter position is employed as an essential element
in the sympathy-inspiring technique of Browning's poem. He was,
as Vasari writes,
so amorous, that, if he saw any women who pleased him,
and if they were to be won, he would give all his pos¬
sessions to win them; and if he could in no way do this,
he would paint their portraits and cool the flame of his
love by reasoning with himself. So much a slave was he
to this appetite, that when he was in this humor he gave
little or no attention to the works that he had undertaken
(p. 119).11
It was for this reason that Duke Cosimo de' Medici, having com- “
missioned him to paint a picture, once shut him up in his own
palace, lest he go out and waste his time—and thus provided the
immediate occasion out of which Browning created his poem.
Vasari goes on to say that
Fra Filippo was much the friend of gay spirits, and he
ever lived a joyous life. He lived honorably by his
labors, spending extraordinary sums on the pleasures of
love, in which he continued to take delight right up to
the end of his life (p. 124).
Vasari's unflattering sketch was elaborated by Landor's
humorous treatment of the wayward friar and Pope Eugenius, in
which the naive old Pope offers to validate Lippi's union with

^^William Irvine, "Four Monologues in Browning's Men and

Women," VP, II (1964), 157, exaggerates Browning's additions when
he remarks that Vasari said nothing either of Lippi's licentious¬
ness or the economic pressures of his youth.
 172

.12
the former nun, Lucrezia Buti, and thus legitimize their child.
Horrified at the thought of marriage, the panic-stricken friar
strenuously refuses:
Man and wife! Consistory and chancery are nothing to
this fulmination. ... It is man and wife the first
fortnight, but wife and man ever after. ... I love
Lucrezia: let me love her; let her love me. I can
make her at any time what she is not: I could never
make her again what she is. 13
Boyd Litzinger has noted that the characterizing sauciness
of Browning's friar is more readily traceable to Landor's fiction
than to Vasari's comparatively sedate and historically founded,
14
though inaccurate, account.
The "pure rage" which drove Lippi to "do these wild things
in sheer despite" and to "play the fooleries you catch me at"
(252-53) is attributed in the poem to the other friars' inter¬
ference in his art; yet he is living at this time with the Medici
and not in the convent. Furthermore, Lippi's confinement in the
Medici palace was for two days, as Vasari reports (p. 120), not
three weeks--this longer time clearly invented by Browning to ex¬
cuse the friar's latest escapade.

12
Vasari (p. 121) was uncertain whether Lucrezia was a nun
or a boarder at the convent of Santa Margherita at Prato. Strutt,
however, presents documentary proof that she was a professed reli¬
gious (see p. lOOff.). Lippo and Lucrezia were dispensed from
their vows by Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini), not Eugene IV,
in 1461, and allowed to marry. This dispensation is a further
confirmation that Lippi was a professed religious but not a priest,
since a papal dispensation for the latter, though theoretically
possible, would have been a unique instance until the mid-20th
century.
13
Imaginary Conversations, II, 395.
14
See "The Prior's Niece in 'Fra Lippo Lippi,"' n & o ns
VIII (1961), 344, n. 2.
 173

Historically gratuitous also is the alleged dissoluteness

of this particular convent of Carmelite friars. Yet the por¬
trayal of Lippi's religious brethren, and especially the Prior,
as clerical miscreants provided an artistically necessary sym¬
pathetic contrast whereby Browning was able to make the artist-
friar, who could not be completely absolved of history's charges,
the best of a sorry band.
The Prior's less-than-edifying private life is epitomized*'
by his "niece," to whom four pointed references are made in the
poem. She is either his mistress or his daughter--probably the
former^^--and she neatly parallels the ironically transparent
domestic fictions employed in other poems (the Bishop of St.

^^For a description of the relatively healthy moral climate

of Florentine society at this time--noble, ecclesiastical, and
bourgeois--in comparison with other Italian cities, especially
Rome, see Stanley Leathes, The Renaissance^ Vol. I of The Ccm-
bvidge Modem History (New York, 1902), pp. 150-51. Browning
seems never to have personally come into contact with any reli¬
gious house in which disorders existed. But in August, 1861,
eight years after "Fra Lippo Lippi," his friend Edward Lytton
("Owen Meredith"), wrote of an episode of drunkenness and at¬
tempted rape at the Carthusian monastery at Camoldoli. Browning
unsuccessfully asked for further details. (See Letters from Owen
Meredith (Robert, First Earl of Lytton) to Robert and Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, ed. A. B. Harlan and J. L. Harlan, Jr., Waco,
Texas, 1936, pp. 174-75, and 193). In the same month. Browning
mentioned the affair in two letters to Isa Blagden {Dearest Isa,
pp. 83 and 85; see also p. 86, n. 1). His comment in the
second letter, "I don't know why it should not be true, indicates
more probably his or Miss Blagden's questioning of Lytton s ac¬
curacy, rather than any reluctance to believe monks capable of
such depravity. [Lytton confuses the Carthusians and Camaldolese]
^^Of recent critics who discuss this point, Whitla, The
Central Truth, p. 63, suggests that the prior's niece is his
"mistress or daughter," Litzinger, however, in two articles (see
above, n. 14, and below, n. 27) affirms that she is his mistress.
 174

Praxed's "nephews," and Andrea del Sarto's wife's "cousin").

Professor Litzinger, in the article cited above (note 14), has
demonstrated that the Prior's "niece" is directly derived from an
incident narrated in Landor's Conversation^ in which Lippi tells
the Pope how he and three equally light-hearted clerical com¬
panions, a canon and two abbates, were captured by Barbary pirates
while on an outing near Ancona with the canon's beautiful niece,
Donna Lisetta. Brother Lippo appreciatively describes the canon's
niece as "worthy to be the niece of an archbishop.The transi¬
tion from Landor's "canonico's niece" and "niece of an archbishop"
to Browning's "Prior's niece" was an easy one for the alert and
nimble poet. And just as the girl in the poem who was to be the
model for Lippi's St. Lucy parallels the lovely Lisetta who, the
friar admits, was the model for one of the angels in a favorite
painting of the Holy Family hanging in the Pope's bed-chamber, so
"the Prior's niece who comes / To care about his asthma" (170-71)
clearly echoes Lisetta, the ecclesiastical courtesan. The same
consistent dependence upon Landor's Lisetta is evident in one of
Lippi's "stornelli": "Flower of the quince, / I let Lisa go, and
what good in life since?" (55-56)—in which we can also catch a
hint that the versatile friar may have once hoped to have had the
Prior's "niece" for his mistress.
Browning persisted throughout his life in defending the posi¬
tion that Tomaso Guidi or Masaccio ("Hulking Tom") was the disciple
or at least the follower of Lippi—here taking Baldinucci for his
authority rather than Vasari. It is now generally agreed, how¬
ever, that Masaccio was senior to Lippi and probably his master.

Imaginary Conversations, II, 376.

 175

As Merle M. Bevington remarks when he discusses the poet's ex¬

change of letters with the French critic, Louis Etienne, Browning's
error was mostly an innocent one, due to the hopelessly confused
and contradictory chronologies of the authorities available to
him. He was especially misled by Baldinucci's dating of Lip¬
pi's birth in 1400. But Browning also seems to show a certain
bias, or at least an overeagerness, in his definitive acceptance
of one position and absolute rejection of the other—both of which
were at the time equally uncertain. Bevington points out that
the poet ignored the accepted dates of 1401 for the birth of
Masaccio and of 1441 or later for the "Coronation of the Virgin,"
since "Fra Lippo Lippi could hardly have referred to a painter
forty years old, and even on the basis of his date of 1400 for Fra
Lippo's birth, only one year his junior, as 'a youngster here.'"^^
Browning's good-natured but insistent replies to Etienne's at¬
tempts to correct his error display, moreover, a surprisingly deep
concern over a relatively minor point.
Browning's solicitude, however, is more understandable if we
remember that it was necessary for him to maintain that Lippi was
the(first important Renaissance realist)in order that the signifi¬
cance of the painter's career might be validly presented as a
-parallel to the poet's career, and the friar thus serve as an ap¬
propriate spokesman for his own philosophy of art. Once Browning
had, as DeVane puts it, caught "Baldinucci's hint that Lippi was
the first naturalist and realist in painting, selecting by prefer-

^^For copies of these previously unpublished letters and a

brief account of the Browning-Etienne debate, see Merle M. Beving¬
ton, "Three Letters of Robert Browning to the Editor of the Pall
Mall Gazette," MLN, LXXV (1960), 304-09.
^^Ibid., p. 309.
 176

20
ence contemporary scenes and figures," he was easily inclined
to read the Carmelite friar's place in the history of painting in
terms of his own position in nineteenth-century English poetry.
It was necessary, therefore, as we have seen, for the poet
to win sympathy for his character so that his doctrine would be
accepted. At the same time it was poetically advantageous to
maintain and underscore the ironies inherent in the fact that
this discerning artist was a philandering friar. Browning had
discovered in Fra Lippo Lippi not only the pioneering and per¬
secuted artist, but also the clerical-rogue. This is not to say,
however, that there is in the poem any dichotomy in structure,
narration, or imagery, or that the championing of an aesthetic
theory and the dramatic presentation of character and situation
are distinct and parallel, or superficially juxtaposed in a merely
coincidental unity. Rather, it was a characteristic mark of
Browning's genius during these middle years of his career to
recognize the dramatic possibilities latent in the fusion of
didactic and artistic elements, and to exert himself to exploit
and manipulate his material so as to produce a great dramatic poem
that is at the same time a profoundly philosophic one. And, once
again, it seems to me that the point of unity, the quasi-catalyst,
which both fuses the various elements and makes the poem uniquely
right, is the fact that Lippi the artist and sensualist is also
Fra Lippo the cleric.

20
Handbookj p. 218.
21
a popular usage justifies classifying Lippi
as a clenc. Browning, however, errs in consistently referring
to Lippi and the other Carmelites as "monks" instead of "friars^"
but a deliberate choice! as
has suggested, in order to establish an allitera-
ive pattern to epitomize the duality and tension between man and
 177

The religious and clerical ironies which Browning employed

permeate the entire poem. Even seemingly casual references to
the saintly subjects of Lippi's paintings, real or imagined,
integrally function within the dominant ironic pattern. Three
times, for example, Lippi mentions St. John the Baptist who, in
addition to being a patron of Florence and therefore an under¬
standably frequent subject of the Florentine friar's commissioned
works, was also a great ascetic who castigated worldliness and
sexual abuses. There is also a reference to St. Lucy who suf¬
fered death to preserve her virginity; to Job who was patient
under every kind of persecution; and to St. Lawrence and St.
Ambrose, staunch defenders of the rights of the Church. Most in¬
congruously appropriate of all, perhaps, was the painting Lippi
was working on the very moment before he scrambled out the Medici's
window: "Jerome knocking at his poor old breast / With his great
round stone to subdue the flesh" (73-74). For St. Jerome, in ad¬
dition to practicing severe bodily penance and translating the
Vulgate, was almost fanatically devoted to virginity, and wrote
numerous works attacking both women and marriage. As translator

21 (cont sensuality and piety," and to link up

structurally with all the other (m)-words and phrases of the poem,
a simple listing of which "actually provides a fair outline of the
poem" (see Browning's Characters, pp. 261-62). Support for
Honan's ingenious discovery can perhaps be found in the fact that
Browning is accurate in most of his other references to the Car¬
melites. Their superior, for example, is consistently referred
to as a "prior" and not an "abbot," and their religious house is
correctly a "convent" and not a "monastery." But see also below,
p. 182, n. 25.
^^See Margaret W. Pepperdene, "Fra Lippo Lippi, 70-75," The
Explioator, XV, item 34: "The juxtaposition of Lippi and Jerome
indicates the irony of Lippi's immediate situation and suggests^the
dilemma of the monk who cannot resist a world he has renounced."
 178

of the Vulgate Jerome had another point at issue with the rebel¬
lious friar, since the Vulgate would have been the source of most
of the unlearnt Latin which Lippi hated as a symbol of deadly ec¬
clesiastical formalism and irrelevancy.
Browning's personal antipathy towards monasticism, which we
have seen before and which made his sympathy for Lippi even more
unquestioning, is evident in the friar's brief but damning de¬
scription of life in the Carmine as "day-long blessed idleness"
(105). No other words of Browning more effectively express the
hypocrisy and uselessness, allegedly inherent in asceticism, which
so enraged the storm-breasting poet.
Browning's aesthetic, supposedly like Lippi's, considered
flesh and spirit as natural allies against the distortions of
intellect. An abstract universalized art, like an ascetic life,
was irreligious and immoral because untrue--a literally sacrile¬
gious parody on ,reality. It is when he is pleading for his artis
tic ideals that Lippi's deeply religious insights burst through to
-^transcend his virtuoso self-justifications and reveal him as in
many ways a profoundly religious as well as sensual man and artist
The irony of this position is projected and symbolized in his life
He sportively flaunts the ordinary moral code, not only of monks
and clerics, but of the ordinary Christian as well. But he is
also a professed religious, and so presumably could not have
remained entirely unaffected by his many years' exposure to theo-

(cont Sotheby Catalogue^ p. 17, no. 66, describes a

full length portrait of St. Jerome "standing with hand to his
breast, his Cardinal's hat at his feet," attributed by Browning to
Taddeo Gaddi (1300-66). See the reference to this painting in
"Old Pictures in Florence," xxvi. The Catalogue, p. 16, no. 65,
lists another painting, "Christ at the column," by Antonio Pol¬
laiuolo (1429-98), "with landscapes and with figures of saints in
background," including St. Jerome naked, beating his chest.
 179

logical ideas and religious ideals--the worthwhile element of

"the old schooling" (231)—both as a student and as a professed
friar.An essential aspect of Lippi's sensuality, as it is
conceived by Browning, is his sensitivity to beauty and his open¬
ness to sympathy and love, both human and divine. As the friar
describes, for example, a vivid scene of real murder and frustrated
revenge which he has seen and painted, he seems suddenly stag¬
gered by the mystery of human evil and the power of men to mock
Christ's sacrifice; and he pauses as if to commiserate with
Christ "Whose sad face on the cross sees only this / After the pas¬
sion of a thousand years" (156-57). He climaxes his plea for the
recognition of real flesh, hair, eyes, legs, and arms, both as fit
subjects for art and as the most effective means to "paint the
soul," by declaring that even if per impossi.h'ile "there is beauty
with no soul at all" in a given painting.
If you get simple beauty and nought else.
You get about the best thing God invents:
That's somewhat: and you'll find the soul
you have missed.
Within yourself, when you return him thanks.
(217-20)
The religious function of art, therefore, is something more than
pious ornamentation or a simplistic Neo-Platonic denial of the
world. Rather, art should result in a deeper discovery of both
God and one's self in an experience of material beauty. Lippi's
function as realistic artist, as he says in a later passage, is an
analogously priestly one, to "interpret God to all of you!" (311).
He briefly elaborates this idea, in what have come to be two
of the poem's most famous lines: "The world's no blot for us, /

^^Lippi also later remarks: "I think I speak as I was

taught" (265).
 180

Nor blank; it means intensely and means good" (313-14); and he

concludes with a final metaphor, clearly inspired by the Eucharist,
in which he presents his vocation in terms of a sacramental ef¬
ficacy: "To find its meaning is my food and drink" (315).
The painting friar's list of the real world's wonders, all
of which should by right be endlessly immortalized on panel,
plastered wall, and canvas, is in effect a hymn of adoration and
thanksgiving, and a profession of faith:
. . . you've seen the world
--The beauty and the wonder and the power.
The shapes of things, their colours, lights
and shades.
Changes, surprises,--and God made it all!
--For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no.
For this fair town's face, yonder river's line.
The mountain round it and the sky above.
Much more the figures of man, woman, child.
These are the frame to? What's it all about?
To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon.
Wondered at?
(282-92)
God's works--paint anyone, and count it crime
To let a truth slip.
(295-96)
Such dynamically religious statements would perhaps have
seemed not altogether appropriate coming from a Renaissance layman.
From a friar, however, they are not only appropriate but attain an
even greater forcefulness from their paradoxical contrast with his
non-conforming behavior. Lippi's unique combination of un¬
disciplined yet religiously minded sensuality provided the poet
with an especially engaging and dramatically forceful concretion
of his own religio-artistic creed.
One extrinsic aspect of Lippi's aesthetic theory which fur¬
ther enhanced its appeal to Browning was his consequent conflict
 181

with all forms of authority. Not only the explicitly ecclesiasti¬

cal authority, but every other area of authority as well--civil,
patronal, and artistic--each of which tended to press upon and in¬
hibit Lippi's life and art, had at its roots a fundamentally reli¬
gious or pseudo-religious inspiration. And it is against them
all that the clerical-artist is forced to struggle.
Lippi's problem with the police is compounded by the fact
that he is a friar, and thus in their eyes had added sacrilege to
fornication: "A monk, you say--the sting's in that!" (77). He
has just left the confinement of his patron's house where he was
shut up for "three weeks," forced against his conscience, if not
against his will, to paint "saints and saints / And saints again"
(48-49)--all of which, Duke Cosimo doubtless believed, were fur¬
thering true religion as well as adding to his collection, but
which more often involved a waste of talent upon what Whitla aptly
calls "a sterile mediaeval equivalent to modern mediocre mass-
production."^'^ The weight of traditional artistic authority is
represented by Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Lorenzo Monaco, each a
great painter of the past, but for that very reason no longer
relevant, representing as they now do, for Lippi as well as for
Browning, an inadequate religious inspiration.
In the poem these three sources of conflict are brought
together and embodied in the person of the convent prior, his con¬
formist brethren, and the institutional Church they represent.
Lippi's moral and social problems are the result of a basically
false and, for Browning, immoral asceticism whose representatives
had unjustly taken advantage of his eight-year-old innocence, and
are now intent upon condemning him to a life of hypocritically-

24 The Central Truths p. 58.

 182

observed clerical celibacy. Lippi's years of long-suffering

willingness to "swallow my rage, / Clench my teeth, suck my lips
in tight, and paint / To please them [the Carmelites]" (242-44),
was an early instance of hand-to-mouth patronage for the sake of
"the good bellyful, / The warm serge and the rope that goes all
25
round" (103-04), before he became equally dependent upon the
more lavish bounty of the Medici family—while remaining just as
bound to his wearisome saints and angels. And it is the preju¬
diced old Prior himself who takes on the role of art critic and
presumes to invoke the former masters as touchstones of Lippi's
new realism.
As a result of such multiple conflicts with authority, the
/ Renaissance friar finds himself mostly alienated from all parts
of his world--social, moral, artistic, and religious—an aliena¬
tion with which Browning could readily sympathize. His own
romantic flight and self-imposed exile, religious questionings,
and still (in 1855) half-hearted critical acceptance and financial
precariousness seemed the inevitable price every true artist must
pay if he is to fulfill his rightful vocation as both innovator
and prophet. "
On the verbal and imagistic level, as distinguished from the
situational, a key irony of the poem seems to lie in the consistent
25
^ Browning makes a slight error in referring to the Carmel¬
ites'"rope." A thrice-knotted rope is a distinctive mark of the
Franciscan habit. Carmelites wear a less conspicuous leather or
cloth belt to bind their tunics. Browning has Lippi, when describ
mg his frescoed characters, include "every sort of monk, the black
and white." But it is not clear whether he realized that the
white "monks" would have been Carmelites or "Whitefriars," so
called from the white wool mantles or capes worn over their brown
habits, and the black would have been Dominicans or "Blackfriars "
who wear black capes over their white habits.
 183

1y explicit references of Lippi to himself in a self-deprecating

way—especially his frequent characterizing of himself as "a
beast"--and the other friars' equally consistent revelation of
themselves as actually much more "beastly" than the humble friar.
Park Honan has already noted Browning's employment of the images
of harmless and friendly animals (mice, pilchards, rabbits, a
lark, etc.) "to express the speaker's own cleverness, sympathy for
9 ft
life, and peculiar innocence." However, an even more important
use is made of animal imagery to highlight the ironic contrast
between the earthy Lippi and his "learned" convent brethren.
Twice the ingenuous friar quite sincerely admits that he is "a
beast." The first occasion is in reply to the surprise and evi¬
dently somewhat‘scolding comment of the otherwise indulgent con¬
stable that a "monk" should have been caught in such circumstances;
Though your eye twinkles still, you shake your
head-- _ ^
Mine's shaved--a monk, you say--the sting s in
that!
If Master Cosimo announced himself.
Mum's the word naturally; but a monk!
Come, what am I a beast for?
(76-80)
Lippi's hypothetical contrast of himself with the Duke--which is
at the same time a bold identification--tends to remind the officer
who his clerical captive's patron is, and thus politically to
dilute his indignation over the painter's admittedly "beastly" un¬
clerical behavior and lessen his eagerness to complete his arrest.
But the very introduction of the concept of "beast" in relation to
"monk," occurring as it does immediately before his lengthy ex¬
planation of his life in the convent, tends also to prepare the

Browning' s Characters, pp. 178-79.

 184

way for the transfer of beastliness from the delinquent but

honest friar to the pharisaically observant inhabitants of the
Carmine. The first friar we meet, after Lippi, is gross and
thoroughly unattractive, the "religion" of his cant and garb in
marked contradiction to his self-indulgent appearance as he
sardonically questions the young orphan:
"So, boy, you're minded," quoth the good fat father
Wiping his own mouth, 'twas refection-time,--
"To quit this very miserable world?"
(93-95)
The friars' basic lack of human sympathy for young Lippi's
destitute state, and their materialistic, even commercial, motives
in taking him in are immediately evident: "Let's see what the
urchin's fit for" (106).
In explaining to the constable how eight years of hunger and
fear had taught him to use his eyes well, Lippi mentions how he
was often reduced to a less-than-human state and forced to scavenge
with fighting dogs, and how, by carefully noting which would bite,
he was sometimes able to steal a bone from a tolerant cur. But
Lippi immediately goes on to tell how, when some of the friars
were for throwing him back into the street, it was the Prior who
recognized the potential value of his artistic talents, and deter¬
mined to retain and exploit them in order to further the Carmelites'
cause in their quarrels and petty rivalries with the Dominicans
and Camaldolese. Just as Lippi was able to use his talents to
survive precariously amid the snarling dogs, so later he conven¬
iently conformed and survived amid the ridiculously feuding friars.
In the course of his narration of a related group of episodes,
Lippi s identification of himself with the animals has subtly
shifted to the prideful Carmelites.
 185

Lippi describes how his first attempts at fresco were con¬

demned by the Prior for being tod fleshly realistic:
"Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true
As much as pea and pea! it's devil's-game!
Your business is not to catch men with show.
With homage to the perishable clay.
But lift them over it, ignore it all.
Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh."
(176-82)
Then in a ludicrously na’ive attempt to explain what the soul is,
the Prior succeeds only in exhibiting his own basic inability to
formulate a genuinely metaphysical, much less a religious, concept.
"Your business is to paint the souls of men--
Man's soul, and it's a fire, smoke . . .
no, it's not . . .
It's vapour done up like a new-born babe--
(In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth)
It's . . . well, what matters talking,
it's the soul 1','
(183-87)
The supposedly "beastly" Lippi comes nearer than the stuttering
Prior to comprehending the religious potential in human portraiture
when he suggests that the aim of the true artist should be first
and foremost to make "her eyes all right and blue"; then "try to
add life's flash" (213). His "life's flash" is perhaps the most
accurate expression of the new and vitally spiritual essence which.
Browning was sure, both he and Lippi had contributed to the artis¬
tic experience of their respective eras.
The Prior's depravity is further suggested when one of Lip¬
pi's figures, modeled on his "niece," strikes him as Herodias, the
adulterous consort of Herod Antipas, "Who went and danced and got
men's heads cut off." Both history and popular tradition have
branded Antipas, like his father, Herod the Great, as a ruler of
the utmost cruelty and beastly licentiousness. The association
 186

of the Prior's mistress with Herodias, therefore, implicitly as¬

sociates the Prior himself with Herod and all his sexual as well
91
as his tyrannical excesses. -
In contrast to the Prior's animal-like sexuality, to whom
his mistress is an "Herodias," to Lippi the lovely "niece," with
her prettiest face," can "mean hope, fear, / sorrow, or joy"
(210-11), and thus be an image of the mystery of human love and
beauty, "the best thing God invents" (218).
Once more Lippi pleads with the watchman: "You understand
me: I'm a beast, I know" (270). Yet he has just expressed one
of his most forceful arguments for the religious significance of
all of God's created works, as well as an ineluctable justifica¬
tion of his artistic theories, if not of his behavior:
For me, I think I speak as I was taught;
I always see the garden and God there
A-making man's wife: and, my lesson learned.
The value and significance of flesh,
I can't unlearn ten minutes afterwards.
(265-69)
Lippi's self-reproaching "I'm a beast" is then followed by an ac^
count of his hopes for his alleged disciple, Masaccio. And out
of a recital of the new painter's future accomplishments, Lippi un
affectedly creates the God-charged litany of praise which we have
27, See Matt. 14.3-12 and Mark 6.17-29; see also Flavius;
H. K. bhilleto and C. W. Wilson, (London, 19071 III a?
l Microcosm: ’T ePn-oJJ ’N?L; n 'F,

PHor^ clo^hinr't' • • discover a wolf in

 187

OO
quoted above.
The contrast centered in the Prior's niece is made even
more explicit a few moments later in the poem when, in describing
his future painting, the "Coronation of the Virgin," Lippi sees
"the little lily thing" (385) as a model for the virgin-martyr,
St. Lucy, and a worthy participant in the heavenly triumph of the
Queen of Virgins. Lippi's sensuality, then, for all its early-
seeming excess and acknowledged "beastliness," is made to appear
progressively more attractive, honest, and even idealized--a
quality certainly altogether different from the pusillanimous and
inhumane self-indulgence of the other friars and their Prior.
The poem's final section, in which Lippi describes his ex¬
piatory "Coronation," presents a prima faaie hindrance to a wholly
consistent interpretation. Lippi swiftly slips from the oracular
to the "apt word to excuse himself," while the painting he proposes
seems but another of his endless "saints"—this time a monumental
Madonna and child, "Ringed by a bowery flowery angel-brood, /
Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet" (349-50).
For William Whitla, the poem's conclusion involves a "com-
"posite symbol" in which the psychological conflicts and dramatic
situation are resolved and "wrapped up with a sense of finality,"
that is contradictorily also regarded as a beginning. Accord¬
ing to William Irvine, however, the ideas of the poem are "under¬
cut by irony" in the final section, and one is left with the com¬
plex, unchartable personality of Lippi himself as it welters in a
■ "romantic confusion of morals and aesthetics, soul and sense, pas

^®See above, p. 180-

^^See The Central Truth, p. 65.
 188

Sion and virtue.

Roma A. King, Jr,, regards the painting as "a symbol of
Lippo's whole experience," which brings our minds back to the
beginning of the poem. Lippi's life must inevitably be a round
of artistic compromises and roguish episodes, accompanied by end- ...
less internal struggles and intellectual searchings in which the
painter will forever be partly successful and partly unsuccessful.
J. L. Kendall sees the concluding shift in Lippi's attitude
and his description of his new painting as evidence of the friar's
rhetorical virtuosity. The dramatic moment requires that Lippi's '
primary purpose be, not to defend his philosophy of art, but to
persuade the officer of the law to release him without a word to
the Prior, the Duke, or anyone else. He is lofty and idealistic
as long as the traffic will bear. But upon sensing an oncoming
hesitancy in his simple auditor, he swiftly and deftly transposes
his plea to a lower key, and eventually makes good his escape with '
a hand-shake and an offer of lighted escort from the mesmerized
captain. Kendall does not deny the sincerity or the character-
revealing function of Lippi's various moods. He merely reminds
the reader not to lose sight of an essential level of the complex
situation.
W. David Shaw has characterized the poem's conclusion as a
"wilful negation" in which the philosophy quickly dissolves.
Lippi had achieved a momentary resolution, a Browningesque "flash
of perception." But the struggle is not permitted to end; for

30 ,1
II (1964)^^158°^'" Browning's Men and Women," VF,
31
See The Bow and the Lyve, pp. 50-51.
1960), pp°°18-21^°'^ Vision," Victorian Newsletter, No. 18 (Fall,
 189

when the dialectic of flesh and spirit is permanently resolved

"the poem will cease to be a dramatic monologue and degenerate
into a mere lecture by the poet." The "dialectic condition is
preserved and the drama prevented from becoming a disquisition.
Once a character discovers the "truth," the dramatic
action is complete. Because we can predict what such
a character will say, he is seldom entertaining as a
person. This paradox helps explain why Browning's in¬
creasing preoccupation with the "truth" could prepare
the way for the tedious exposition of his later period.
With the possible exception of Whitla's "finality that is
at the same time a beginning," and Irvine's note of impatience,
the opinions sketched above all contribute helpfully to a fuller
explanation of Lippi's inconsistency. But I doubt if a clearly
demonstrable reason can be discovered. When reading the poem,
though always conscious of Lippi's inconsistency, we are never
disappointed or surprised; on the contrary, from his first to
his last "Zooks!" we are experientially satisfied: this is the
way he is and ought to be. It is only with a post factum and
non-poetic reflection that Lippi and his final lines may suddenly
offend our sense of logic. I would suggest that "Fra Lippo Lippi
is a prime example of Browning's triumph of dynamic character over
constraining logic.* Browning, as we have seen, was certainly
interested in presenting a cogent statement of his aesthetic
ideals; and this he has done. But, as W. David Shaw has implied,
the poet allowed his dramatic intuition and his intense delight in
his character to outstrip his strictly "doctrinal" interests.
To have lost hold of Lippi as the wayward friar--clerical puck and
satyr—and to have resolved his conflicts in a final and consistent

^^"Character and Philosophy in 'Fra Lippo Lippi,"' VP, II

(1964), 131.
 190

answer-packed aesthetic or ethical formulation, would have been

to destroy him. One essential of his knavish personality was
his antipathy to all types and phases of institutionalism, not
the least of which was the ever-threatening inhibition of his
words and behavior by the conventional expectancies. Lippi as
r

Lippi must remain unpredictable, unable, even when half-willing, to

conform to a categorized stability which for him (as for Browning)
meant an artistic sterility. Thus, when the poem ends Lippi is
still a painting friar, still agonizingly beholden to the repres¬
sive establishment, both religious and ducal.
This note of pain amid the frolicsomeness is a particularly
important part of Lippi's portrait, and reflects his internal
struggles just as the contrasts between him, his patron, and the
other friars, help to define his external struggles. The
painter's "flashes of perception" are not sustained or often
powerful enough to inspire him to any action other than his clan- <
destine nightly escapes and despairing daytime conformity. His
whoring cannot be totally explained away by the hypocritical ideals
of the monastery and his own acute perception of the sacramental
reality of the human body. Nor can his artistic compromises be
entirely excused by the exigencies of room-and-board, and the de¬
based and domineering taste of his patrons and religious superiors.
Lippi seems at times painfully aware of these inadequacies in him¬
self, but unable fully either to realize or to carry out any actual
reconciliation. He himself is to some extent weak, cowardly,
partially lacking in understanding, a lesser but real hypocrite—
and he realizes it. His basic talent, rich sensitivity, genuine
humility, and religious insight mark him as an immeasurably nobler
human being than his "betters." But he mostly perceives only the
 191

contradictions and weaknesses, almost always saying and revealing

more about his true self than he actually realizes. His keen
objective gifts are not matched by a correspondingly productive
self-awareness.^^ - Lippi's references to himself as a "beast,"
;■ while ironically managed by the poet, as we have seen, are sub¬
jectively sincere self-evaluations. He really believes he is a
beast; his facile explanations may win him indulgence and sympathy
from the police captain, but his own personal disgust is not so
easily allayed. "Rub it all out!" the Prior had commanded; and
Lippi sadly comments: "There's my life in short / And so the thing
has gone on ever since" (221-22) and presumably so it will con¬
tinue. His painful despair often erupts in "pure rage"; but he
still allows himself to "paint / To please them—sometimes do and
sometimes don't" (243-44).
In the poem's final section Lippi is almost grovelling in
his self-depreciation. He describes his earlier righteous in¬
dignation as merely "an idle word / Spoke in a huff by a poor
monk," and attributes his noble sentiments to nothing more than
expediency: "It's natural a poor monk out of bounds / Should have
his apt word to excuse himself" (see 336-42).
He is momentarily elated by the anticipated details of his
saint-filled "Coronation"; surprises himself with the boldness
of his included self-portrait;^^ and appreciatively glows when

^^I differ here from Professor Honan {Browning's Charaoters,

p. 133) who seems to interpret the rel igion-and-sensual ity con¬
trast in Fra Lippo as a means whereby we are brought "to judge
him and to see him as he sees and judges himself," rather than as
a strictly dramatic irony whereby the reader sees and judges more
or differently than does the speaker.
^^The lines seem to represent Browning's misinterpretation
of the painting. The elderly kneeling figure in the right fore-
 192

his angelic Saint Lucy, against the implied objections of the

saintly throng--and even of God Himself--defends his right to be
there:
"Not so fast!"
--Addresses the celestial presence, "nay--
He made you and devised you, after all.
Though he's none of you! Could Saint John
there draw—
His camel-hair make up a painting-brush?
We come to brother Lippo for all that,
Iste perfecit opus!"
(371-77)
Here is Lippi's greatest moment, an unexpected exaltation and
recognition of the artist's godlike re-creative powers. Yet,
significantly, it is only a dream; and, ironically, it occurs in
relation to a masterful but conventional "pretty picture,"
deliberately calculated to please his pious patrons, the nuns of
Sant' Ambrogio's. The sublimity is further checked by Lippi's
imagining his subsequent playful behavior amid the celestial com¬
pany in terms of a coy seduction, complete with a pursuing "hot¬
head husband." Then comes his final frustrating comment--pain-

^ Aground of the "Coronation" is certainly not Lip¬

pi, but probably the painting's patron. Canon Francesco Maringhi,
who commissioned the work in 1441 (when he was 70 years old and
Lippi 35) for the high altar of the church attached to the Bene¬
dictine nunnery of Sant' Ambrogio, where the canon had endowed a
chaplaincy. The figure is dressed as a secular priest, without
the white cape, hood, or scapular of a Carmelite. The ascrip¬
tion, with its verb "perfecit" rather than "fecit," can accurate¬
ly be translated: "This is the man who caused to be done the
structure and whole foundation"--!.e., benefice, altar, altar-
furnishings, and altar piece. The only certain portrait of Lip¬
pi, in full Carmelite habit, is the marble relief on his tomb in
the Cathedral of Spoleto, which was supervised by his son, Filip¬
pino. For more details on this question, see Montgomery Car¬
michael, "Fra Lippo Lippi's Portrait," The Burlington Magazine^
XXI (1912), 194-200.
 193

fully embarrassing, yet typical--in which he frankly admits another

betrayal of his high aspirations for the sake of conformity and
security:
And so all's saved for me, and for the church
A pretty picture gained.
, p K (388-89)
The irony in every facet of Lippi's person and behavior is
in keeping with Browning's overriding "philosophy of the imperfect."
Somehow--and Browning is seldom more explicit, though he feels it
is so—an imperfect life is essential for perfect art. A con¬
sistently doctrinaire, and therefore limited, realist would have
been another "faultless" but uninspired painter. For all his
exasperating inconsistency, Lippi did produce painting which Brown¬
ing considered sincere exemplifications of the painter's own best
aesthetic principles. In the face of suffocating social and reli¬
gious pressures, he bent, sometimes broke, but also sometimes pre
vailed. His inability to maintain, or perhaps even to recognize,
his successes was a poignant element in his tragedy, and perhaps
comprised an ultimate self-sacrifice.
Obviously, the internal as well as the external ironies are
inseparable from the roguish friar's clerical condition. A lay
Lippi as Renaissance libertine would have been notably less strik¬
ing; yet the moral "shock" of the clerical Lippi is both dis¬
tanced by history and safely conventionalized by a tradition about
monks and other Catholic clerics accepted without question by the
► vast majority of Browning's readers.The poem is thus able to
support large elements of humor and pathos as well as a convenient
antipathy towards asceticism in general and its monastic versions
in particular. Convincing also are the notes of guilt and self-

^^See Irvine, "Four Monologues," VP, II (1964), 156.

 194

denunciation. A cleric often is expected by outsiders to be

personally introspective--even morbidly so—as well as psycholog¬
ically and theologically knowledgeable. The rogue-artist as
friar, therefore, provides a basis for a characterization that is
dramatically more complex than a thoughtless, unhesitant pioavo
would be. Fra Lippo could legitimately be portrayed as pious,
audacious, oracular, and sublime, and at the same time sensual,
compromising, trivial, and even childish. The contradictions
are already potential in the Renaissance clerical situation.
Their exploitation by a master poet created a character and a
poem whose subtleties will forever entertain and mystify, without
ever ceasing to be credible. The poem's mysteries are inherent
in the rich humanity it portrays, a humanity grappling with the
intricacies of an equally rich environment.
In the preceding chapter it was suggested that Ruskin's
praise of "The Bishop Orders his Tomb" as a perfect expression of
the Renaissance would have applied more accurately to "Fra Lippo
Lippi," which is certainly a more detailed picture of the Renais¬
sance, and also seems to be more historically suggestive. The
era portrayed in the earlier poem was a decaying Renaissance, and
in it both Ruskin and Browning concentrated upon the evil elements
37
of the age. We can notice that most of the elements singled
out by Ruskin as comprising its characteristic spirit are evil:
"its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of

37
See Modem Pa-inters^ IV, 449. Whitla, The Central Truths
p. 57, characterizes both "My Last Duchess" and "The Bishop Orders
his Tomb" as "fragments of the unified picture of the Renaissance
that Browning would later present in 'Fra Lippo Lippi,"' and "par¬
tial examinations of the partially grotesque." Certainly rather
than the dilettante or clerical aesthete. Browning has, in Lippi,
created the clerical artist.
 195

itself." The next three qualities with which he concludes his

list ("love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin") are not un¬
conditionally praiseworthy—a love of luxury being most often a
vice, and a love of art and good Latin being at the root of much
of the preceding iniquity. In "Fra Lippo Lippi," however. Brown¬
ing treated what Stopford Brooke called the "early manhood" of the
Renaissance.^® More than a character study of a truant artist-
friar, the poem is also a "character study" of the Italian Renais¬
sance. The captain and his men, the Medici, the Prior and other
friars, and the variegated characters of Lippi's childhood experi¬
ences and of his paintings—all help to create the historical con¬
text. This is the portrait of a specific clerical artist in a
specific age, the character and his age helping to illuminate each
other. Lippi is so deeply set in time and place that the result
is not only an undeniably "round" character, but a "round" setting
as well. Each of the elements within fifteenth-century Florentine
society is represented in the poem: the bourgeoisie and commonalty,
the nobility, the reactionary Church; and they in turn are set in
contrast to the dawning secular-liberal spirit which is personified
by Lippi himself.
Much of the mentality of the respectable citizenry and the
lower classes is suggested in the implied words and behavior of the
captain and his cloddish underlings. The relative ease with whic i
Lippi, after the initial excitement, browbeats the "hangdogs" of
the watch reflects Browning's notions of the poor man's customary
" fear and subservience to the clergy and his shoulder-shrugging
tolerance of clerical immorality, especially when encouraged by a
small bribe and an adroit mention of powerful friends; -

^^The Poetry of Robert Browning, (New York, 1902), p. 302.

 196

Drink out this quarter-florin to the health

Of the munificent House that harbors me
(And many more beside, lads! more beside!)
And all's come square again.
(28-31)
The captain, on the other hand, is sophisticated enough to be
rather cynically amused at the friar's delinquency and discomfort
(Lippi marks his knowing look, and twice mentions the "twinkle"
in his eye); but simultaneously he is still enough of a respecter
of the clergy to be troubled, and even disgusted.
At first apologetic, the officer archly reminds the friar
that he has another reputation in addition to his fame as an art¬
ist, and self-importantly mentions that he is well aware of
"brother Lippo's doings": this is not the first night he has been
known to sport with a "wee white mouse." They both laugh, and
Lippi races on with his explanation, only to be caught up abruptly
by the captain's rejoinder that he is not just another rake, but a
"monk." Lippi then launches into a detailed story of his life,
how he was cozened into "renouncing the world," and how badly his
talent and his ideals have fared at the hands of the stupid friars.
His earnest thoroughness indicates that the officer's problem over
the clerical element of his scandalous behavior was the crucial
dramatic fact which fired Lippi on to his most thoughtful self-
defense.
We get another and less pleasant glimpse of the middle-class
citizenry when Lippi recalls the hardships of his pre-convent
years. He describes how he depended for survival not only upon
scraps and refuse, but also upon the fickle moods of the discarder
who might or might not allow him to salvage the thrown-away fruit
or candle dripping without a kick or a public whipping. The fact
that such cruelty and indifference to poverty coexisted with pious
 197

participation in the Corpus Christi procession which honored the

Eucharist, the primary Christian sign of fraternal love and com¬
munion, is a pointed commentary on the social short-sightedness
of much of the religious spirit of the age.
In addition to the easily put-off lesser guardsmen, a live¬
ly cross-section of Florentine common-folk is presented in Lippi's
brief descriptions of the various characters "at church" in his
early fresco. Naively pious but "good old gossips" wait "to con¬
fess / Their crib of barrel-droppings, candle-ends"; a "breath¬
less fellow . . . Fresh from his murder" sits on the altar steps
in a brazen but accepted abuse of sanctuary, surrounded by a ring
of admiring urchins; the murder victim's son is a witless parody
upon Christianity as he simultaneously shakes a fist in vengeful
hatred "with one fierce arm" and makes the Sign of the Cross with
the other; and finally a mysterious "poor girl"--perhaps his
lover—"her apron o'er her head," steals up to the altar and gives
the fugitive "a loaf, / Her pair of earrings and a bunch of
flowers," kneels for a moment in prayer, "and so was gone" (146-
62). Near-superstitious piety, self-advantageous as well as self-
frustrating religious conformity, realistic love and devotion--al1
are represented in Lippi's unappreciated tableau.
Moments later Lippi is telling of his "purpose-serving"
painting of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence, scratched and beaten to
the bricks beneath by the fanatic indignation of the versatile
"pious people," while they contradictorily "say prayers there in a
rage"--to the edification and satisfaction of the sponsoring
clergy: "Hang the fools!" (323-35).
Lippi's noble patron, Duke Cosimo, fills his galleries with
the friar's "respectable" works, evidently as willing as the Prior
 198

to tolerate the painter's unclerical diversions so long as his

talent can be profitably exploited. A mere hint of Medici in¬
terest is enough to frighten off the watchmen; while the power¬
ful patron's total control over Lippi's body as well as his brush
enables him to keep the friar away from his cloister indefinitely
—such is the power of the Medici purse and favor over the com¬
pliant ecclesiastical authorities.
In Lippi's life, the oppressive aspects of the Church are
primarily represented in the person of the Prior, who is not only
an obtuse critic:
"It's art's decline, my son!
"You're not of the true painters, great and old"
(233-34)
but a hypocritically pious lecher. Lippi's imaginative taunt
neatly lays bare both of his superior's defects:
Flower of the pine.
You keep your mistr . . . manners, and I'll
stick to mine!
(238-39)
Fra Lippo, as I have suggested throughout this chapter, both
provides, on a broad social level, a pole or focal point of con¬
trast and opposition, and at the same time reflects, on the level
of his own inner conflicts, the complex tensions and interrelation¬
ships of the various groups who made up the life of Florence.
Lippi conforms but resists, both inwardly and outwardly. His
artistic and religious idealism and his integrated appreciation of
life are often enfeebled; but they are never entirely vitiated by
his frustratingly childish inconsistency. Somehow the character
remains whole, and able to continue its struggle towards its in¬
toxicating goal--a struggle that is often plagued with weakness and
blindness, but instinctively maintains its intrinsic rightness.
 199

Whether we concentrate on the struggles of Lippi with him¬

self or with his contemporary society, the arena is inevitably a
clerical one. Lippi is a cleric; his fifteenth-century environ¬
ment is inseparable from the Church. Whatever else Browning
thought of the Renaissance Church, he appreciated its potential
for multiplying and enriching the beauties of his art. In this
poem he has, moreover, gained a splendid, though probably un¬
conscious, posthumous retribution for Brother Lippo--one whose
ironies the friar would have enjoyed hugely. The Church, in
Browning's eyes, had badly used the miscast "monk"; now the poet
has mercilessly used the Church to immortalize the no longer dis¬
honored painter.
 CHAPTER VI

BISHOP BLOUGRAM'S APOLOGY

Perhaps no poem in the Browning canon has been more per¬

sistently baffling to critics and ordinary readers alike than
"Bishop Blougram's Apology." The questions it endlessly inspires
involve not only specific details, but the meaning of the whole
poem itself, the moral and dramatic status of its characters, the
speaking Bishop and the silent but operative Gigadibs; and the
poet's involvement with the characters and with their arguments.
The more traditional opinion has been that Blougram is a
scoundrel and a hypocrite;^ and, as a corollary, that the poem is
a vicious satire against the Catholic Church in the person of one

See, for example, Chesterton, Robert Brown-ing^ p. 201; Lord

Dunsany, "Browning is Blougram," Nineteenth Century, CXXXIX (1946),
176; Hoxie N. Fairchild, "Browning the Simple-Hearted Casuist,"
VTQ, XVIII (1949), 235-36; Raymond, The Infinite Moment, pp. 140-
141; Johnson, The Alien Vision, p. 99; Joseph Miller, The Dis¬
appearance of God, p. 146; and most recently, Crowell, The Triple
Soul, pp. 196-97, 201, and 222, who asserts that Blougram, along
with Browning's other casuists, is an example of intellectual per¬
version, and that Gigadibs, in his "superior honesty," flees to
Australia "where the word is not yet perverted beyond all recogni¬
tion." Dunsany further suggests that, despite Blougram's hypoc¬
risy and Gigadib's sincerity. Browning unconsciously identified
himself with the former. C. N. Wenger, "The Masquerade in Brown¬
ing's Dramatic Monologues," CE, III (1941), 225-39, has presented
an explicitly Freudian reading of the poem in which Gigadibs is
seen as a rival projection of the poet's subconscious and thus a
symbol for his better self. Berdoe, Cyclopaedia, pp. 77-78, ad¬
mitting Blougram's knavery, is embarrassed by the likenesses to
Cardinal Wiseman, and is primarily interested in exonerating the
Catholic prelate.

200
 201

2
of its typical prelates. An interesting conclusion is that
Gigadibs, therefore, is intended to be in some sense a hero, or
at least the dramatically ironic victor, in the poem's subtle
3
but ostensibly one-sided clash of wit.
A diametrically opposite interpretation was presented in
1945 by F. E. L. Priestley who, after a painstaking analysis of
the progress of Blougram's argument and his piece-by-piece dis¬
memberment of Gigadibs' position, concluded that the poem is a
mixture of irony and sincerity in which a deeply religious man,
albeit a skilled and light-hearted dialectician, proves to a carp¬
ing auditor who would refuse to accept any argument based upon
religious feelings rather than empirical fact that a life of reli-
4
gious faith is the only course for a sensible man. Mr. Priest¬
ley's eminently defensible position has been substantially followed
by two of the most distinguished of modern Browning scholars;
William DeVane, for whom Blougram is essentially "sincere and elo¬
quent,"^ and Roma A. King, who characterizes the Bishop as basical¬
ly honest and conscientious.^
A third and, I believe, more fruitful series of interpreta¬
tions has sought to reconcile these two extreme positions and ar-

^See, for example. Duffin. Amphibian^ p. 195; and Litzinger,

"Robert Browning and the Babylonian Woman," Baylor Browning Inter¬
ests, No. 19 (1962), pp. 19-20.
^See, for example, Johnson, The Alien Vision, p. 99: "Giga¬
dibs revolts against Blougram's intellectual gymnastics"^^and
achieves a triumph by his plunge into "unthinking action"; and
Crowell, The Triple Soul, pp. 197 and 201.
^"Blougram's Apologetics," UTQ, XV (1945-46), 139-47.
^Handbook, p. 242. In the first edition of the Handbook
(1935) DeVane had agreed with the traditional "anti-Blougramists."
He revised his opinion, however, in the latest edition (1955).
^See The Bow and the Lyre, pp. 76-99.
 202

rive at a perhaps richer appreciation of the poem's meaning and

its subtleties. Rejecting as oversimplifications the either/or
dichotomies regarding Blougram's moral stature and Browning's
sympathies, the proponents of this third position have attempted
to present a more comprehensive poetic synthesis. In other
words, they have discovered the Bishop to be a unique combination
of good and evil; and Browning's feelings towards his character
to be correspondingly mixed and ambiguous, and at the same time
pragmatically controlled as they reveal themselves to the reader.
As early as 1904 Edward Dowden hinted at such a reconcilia¬
tion when he interpreted the poem as not only an ironic refutation
of Gigadibs and his fellow crass rationalists, and hence a proof
of Blougram's sincerity and Browning's sympathies, but as also a
character study from the age of doubt. Browning was probing the
possibilities of faith in a classically delineated cynic, "an
episcopal Pascal.-Montaigne.In such a discovery-process the
argumentation and the characterization are of equal importance.
C. R. Tracy, however, seems to have been the first to ex¬
plore formally Browning's subtle use of Blougram's complexities
as something more than ingredients in a mere descriptive or
moralistic portrayal. "Browning's real purpose," he wrote, "was
to comment on matters of faith in a sceptical world," and not,
therefore, to defend, judge, or attack either Blougram or his
O

model. Cardinal Wiseman.

Interesting parallels between "Bishop Blougram's Apology"
and Emerson's "Montaigne" have recently been brought to light by
C. E. Tanzy, along with convincing evidence that Browning was

Browning^ p. 200.
^"Bishop Blougram," MLR, XXXIV (1939), 425.
 203

reading Emerson's essay shortly before or even while writing his

poem. Tanzy carefully illustrates how the ambiguities of moral
judgment are deliberately maintained so that the positive side of
skepticism can be objectively presented as a better alternative
to either pure materialism or pure idealism: "For on the 'surface'
level Blougram is evil; on the 'real' level he is good. The
change in Gigadibs demonstrates how invisible good lying beneath
visible evil functions through and in spite of that evil."
Rupert E. Palmer has further advanced this line of interpre¬
tation and, most valuably, has discovered a significant error in
Chesterton's report of the famous conversation between Browning
and Charles Gavan Duffy concerning Cardinal Wiseman.In the
light of this error. Palmer has decided that Priestley's reading
is possible, but not necessary. The poem can be interpreted as
the "straightforward presentation of the views of a very complex
man, who probably has felt the pull of faith but also has felt.

9„,'Browning, Emerson, and Bishop Blougram," VS, I (1958),

266. And see R. W. Merson, "Montaigne, or the Skeptic," Repre¬
sentative Men, in Complete Works, (Boston and New York, 1903), IV.
^^According to Chesterton, Robert Browning, pp,^^187-88,
Browning was surprised at Duffy's interpretation of Bishop
Blougram's Apology," "which had just appeared," as hostile to
Catholicism and a satire on Wiseman. "Certainly," the poet re¬
plied, "I intended it for Cardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider
it a satire, there is nothing hostile about it." Duffy, My Life
in Two Hemispheres, II, 261, however, reports the conversation as
occurring in 1865, ten years after the appearance of the poem, and
remembers Browning as saying simply that he did not believe he had
treated Wiseman "ungenerously," and making no unequivocal denial
of hostility, as in Chesterton's version. See Palmer, "The Uses
of Character in 'Bishop Blougram's Apology, MR, LVIII (I960),
108-18. The immediately following parenthetical references are
to this article.
 204

and just as strongly, the desire for power, wealth, and luxury"
(p. 115). Palmer then analyzes "the poem's ironic use of a
morally ambiguous speaker to suggest the possibility of religious
faith" (p. 116); and, as for Wiseman, concludes that Browning has
"presented a thoroughly ambiguous portrait of a contemporary and
used that portrait ironically to point a deeper truth" (p. 118).
The first two approaches to the poem which we have mentioned
(i.e., pro- or anti-Blougram) tend to concentrate on the charac¬
terization of Blougram as an end in itself: his argument is
genuine or false, tactically or pervertedly sophistic, to the ex¬
tent that he is sincere or hypocritical. A more integrated read¬
ing of the poem considers the equal function of argumentation—
the poem's as well as Blougram's—or rather, Blougram's character
and argument as elements in the meaning of the total poem. Brown¬
ing has attempted to use the reader's ambivalent sympathies and
prejudices as they regard Blougram in order to control his response
to the poem's over-all defense of faith against doubt.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the widespread acceptance of
the traditional or negative interpretation of "Bishop Blougram's
Apology" has been the rather inexact application of the words
casuist" and "casuistry" in almost every discussion of this and
Browning's other closely reasoned "argumentative" or "special
pleading" poems. Although, as Professor King has most recently
reminded us, the word "casuist" is not always a derogatory term,^^

^^See The Bow and the Lyre, p. 76; see also Dowden, Brown-
^ng, p. 199: 'Casuistry ... is not properly the art of defending
determining truth"; Chesterton, Rohert Browning,
p. 194: It IS actually supposed, apparently in the current use of
words, that casuistry is the name of a crime; it does not appear
to occur to people that casuistry is a science, and about as much
a crime as botany."
 205

it is used in a derogatory sense almost universally when applied

to Browning's poems--and this despite the clearly neutral basic
meaning of the word in standard dictionaries.^^ Under such con¬
ditions, "casuist" has become but another name for a subtle,
cerebral villain.
Browning's traditionally labeled "casuistical" poems, in
addition to "Bishop Blougram's Apology," are "Mister Sludge, 'The
Medium,"' "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," Fifine at the Fair^ and
the two monologues of Guido Franceschini in The Ring and the Book^
"Count Guido Franceschini" (Book V) and "Guido" (Book XI). In
these latter five poems there is really no question of Browning's
sympathies or intentions. Despite his sometimes too-subtle
defenses, his playful contrariness, and some conjectural sub¬
conscious influences, no serious critic will argue that Browning
intended Sludge, the Prince, Don Juan, or Guido to be anything
other than fascinating scoundrels. With Bishop Blougram, how¬
ever, there are unavoidable questions and problems, especially if
he is unthinkingly classified as a "casuist, and hence as evil.
The one essential quality by which Blougram's "Apology" is
correctly grouped with these others is the virtuoso display of

^^Webster's (4th ed.) gives as the first meanings: "the

study of or the doctrine that deals with cases of conscience, the
reasoning about or resolution of questions of right or wrong in
conduct through the application of religious or secular ethical
principles or rules." The Catholic Erucyolopedia defines casuistry
as "the application of general principles of morality to definite
and concrete cases of human activity, for the purpose, primarily,
of determining what one ought to do, or ought not to do, or what
one may do or leave undone as one pleases; and for the purpose,
secondarily, of deciding whether and to what extent guilt or im¬
munity from guilt follows an action already posited.
 206

ambiguous, self-justifying, and witty moralistic argumentation

which they all contain. From this single aspect, ignoring for a
moment their preoccupation with the moral and aesthetic questions
which concern the artist, we can include "Fra Lippo Lippi" and
"Andrea del Sarto" as two of Browning's most distinguished "argu¬
mentative" poems, and--according to the broad and more precise
meaning of the word--they could also qualify as "casuistical."
Though in these two poems there is no question about Browning's
sympathies, the subtle reasoning and the witty and energetic self-
defense are as carefully and as brilliantly challenging as in any
poem Browning ever wrote.
Actually, as far as Blougram's sincerity or hypocrisy and
Browning's meanings are concerned. Bishop Blougram stands some¬
where between Fra Lippo and the four unquestionable villains.
If, therefore, the derived meaning of "casuist" as sophist stands
without distinction or explanation, such a classification is in¬
accurate for Bishop Blougram, and its use should be limited to the
poems which feature dishonest and evil arguers. The application
of the word "casuistical" to Browning's poems in its pejorative
sense is the doing not of the poet but of the critics.Quite
early, moreover, Mrs. Orr in her Handbook used the alternate word
"argumentative" to describe the poems now called "casuistical";
and more recently Donald Smalley in Evowning's Essay on Chattevton
has brilliantly discussed the same poems under the rubric of "poems
of special pleading." Smalley, however, judged all the speakers
in these poems to be thorough-going imposters.
But whatever the labels may be, it seems clear that of all

13
In his poems. Browning uses the word four times; "Master
Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," xvii; The Ring and the Book, I\/.1473;
VIII.429; XI.381.
 207

the poems of Browning usually called "casuistical," "Bishop

Blougram's Apology" is by far the most artistically successful.
One important factor in its success is the moral ambivalence of
the speaking character and of his situation and its outcome.
The resulting ironies make for a more interesting and more mean¬
ingful characterization as well as more effective "special plead¬
ing." The weaknesses of Browning's later casuistical poems,
especially "Mister Sludge" and "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," can
perhaps be attributed to the poet's lack of moral or ethical de¬
tachment from his subject, as well as his over-indulgence in
flights of sophistry for their own sake, with a consequently
fatal lack of pointed and economical adaptation of means to any
end other than near-caricature.
In the remainder of this chapter I propose to demonstrate
how what I have designated as the third way of interpreting
"Bishop Blougram's Apology" can be further substantiated, and the
poem's unique excellences better understood and appreciated, by a
detailed analysis of Browning's use of the dramatic opportunities
which derive from the specifically clerical elements in Blougram s
character and situation.
The poem can be usefully looked at as a double or two-leveled
tour de force. On the first or internal level Bishop Blougram
cleverly and mercilessly bests Gigadibs on his own ground, turning
the shallow journalist's heretofore unquestioned and stock argu¬
ments into the very instruments of his defeat. In a sense,
Gigadibs' debacle is as much a self-inflicted one as it is Blou¬
gram's victory.
On the second or external level the poet is carefully manip¬
ulating his readers. He seems first to present their stock image
 208

of the traits and character of a Catholic bishop, and then con¬

tinually surprises them by employing this unprepossessing prelate
as a potent spokesman for the case against religious infidelity.
Not that there is necessarily a temporal sequence in Browning's
tactics. Rather, a primary source of the poem's success, and
even its beauty, would seem to lie in the poet's ability to balance
and combine these two levels while at the same time he purpose¬
fully maintains the reader's alternating responses in order to
create a rich but controlled complexity.
For devising this external level Browning was fortunate in
having at hand the contemporary figure of Nicholas Cardinal Wise¬
man, who for at least half a decade following the 1850 restoration
of the Catholic hierarchy was England's Roman Catholic "Public
Enemy Number One."^^ Browning probably never met Wiseman, though

14
Nicholas Wiseman was born at Seville, Spain, in 1802, the
son of a prosperous Irish merchant. In 1804 his father died, and
the family returned to Waterford. He entered Ushaw, a Catholic
preparatory school near Durham, in 1810, and in 1818 began his
studies for the priesthood at the English College in Rome, where
he was ordained in 1825. His Horae Syriaaae (1827) created a
sensation, and he was nominated by Leo XII to be Professor of Ori¬
ental Languages at the Roman University. The next year, at the
age of 25, he was President of the English College, a renowned
linguist, popular preacher and lecturer. A series of sermons in
London (1836-37) were attended by more non-Catholics than Catholics.
In 1836, with Daniel O'Connell, he began the Dublin Review. He
was consecrated a bishop (1840), named Coadjutor for the Central
District, and President of Oscott College, appointed Vicar-Apos¬
tolic for the London District in 1849, and Cardinal of Westminster
in 1850. His first pastoral letter, "From Without the Flaminian
Gate," was filled with inflated rhetoric and Catholic "triumphal¬
ism," and caused an uproar, which was only partially quieted by
his more temperate and realistic "Appeal to the English People."
His later years were saddened by the scandalous dispute over suc¬
cession between Errington, champion of the hereditary Catholics,
and Manning, leader of the ultramontane converts. He had, how-
 209

he and Elizabeth spent three days in 1848 at Fano with the future
Cardinal's mother, who spoke "with touching pride" about her al¬
ready prominent son.^^ The poet, however, would hardly have
looked upon her maternal enthusiasm as a reliable source of infor¬
mation. DeVane has suggested that the idea for the poem may have
come from Francis Mahony ("Father Prout").^^ I believe that
Mahony may have provided some of the specialized ecclesiastical
and biographical details, but it is not likely that he would have
agreed with the unflattering personal items which Browning in¬
corporated into his portrait of Blougram. Mahony seems always to
have admired Wiseman. Writing in the early 1840's of the pre¬
ponderance of Italians in the College of Cardinals, Mahony declared:

14 (cont'd)g^g^^ before his death in 1865, lived down most

of the animosity of 1850. Wiseman found the English Catholics a
sect, and left them a Church. See Wilfrid Ward, The Life and
Times of Cardinal Wiseman (London, 1897); Denis Gwynn, Cardinal
Wiseman (New York, 1929); E. E. Reynolds, Three Cardinals: New-
man^ Wiseman^ Manning (New York, 1958).
^^See Letters, ed. Kenyon I, 380-81; and see above.p.
42 There is, however, an intriguing possibility that the Brown¬
ings may have met Wiseman at one of the soirees given for the new
Cardinal at Florence during a stopover on his "progress" from Rome
to London in mid-October, 1850 (see Ward, I, 530). We know that
the Brownings were at Casa Guidi during the summer, fall, and
winter of 1850, except for a few weeks in Siena during September
(and October ? . See Letters ed. Kenyon, I, 456-78. If they
did not attend any of the affairs, they would certainly have heara
much about them and about the guest of honor. According to DeVane,
Handbook, p. 241, the poem "was probably written during the winter
of 1850 and the spring of 1851, at Florence."
^^See DeVane, Handbook, p. 241. DeVane also suspects that
Mahony served as a model for Gigadibs, "though not, of course,
exactly copied." Mahony was, in fact, not an agnostic, but a
sincere Catholic, and a much more successful journalist as well as
a more formidable debater than the half-learned^Gigadibs. McCarthy,
"Robert Browning and the Roman Catholic Church, p. 206, n. lb, has
suggested T. A. Trollope as a possible model for Gigadibs.
 210

"The time is far remote when men of mind, Lingard or Wiseman, will
be raised to the dignity which God and nature intended for them."^^
Rather than suspect a personal or first-hand source of in¬
formation, I would suggest that most if not all of Browning's
knowledge about Wiseman and contemporary English Catholicism could
easily have been extracted from the daily press. During the
early 1850's both the newspapers and the reviews were filled with
the kind of information that best suited the poet's purposes, and
that also fulfilled many of his own long-established expectations
concerning the Catholic hierarchy. For I believe it must be ad¬
mitted that, except for the specifically contemporary details,
Blougram is, at least externally, but another of Browning's grand-
scaled Renaissance clerics. With his urbanity, political astute¬
ness, epicurean tastes, intellectual energy, and merciless delight
in watching his opponents squirm, he shares many of the distinctive
traits we have already seen in the Monsignor of Asolo, Ogniben,
St. Praxed's Bishop, and the minor clerics of The Ring and the Book
—to mention only the most important. He is precisely what we
would expect Browning to imagine a recently appointed English
Catholic bishop to be, one whom he had never met, but who he knew
was born in Spain and educated in Rome. When we add to this
Browning's instinctive distrust of all "hybrid and ambiguous na¬
tures and nationalities,"^® we can easily understand how the poet
could quite honestly have avowed to Gavan Duffy that, while he

The Final Reliques of Father Proutj 240. John Lingard

(1771-1851) was a respected historian and one of Wiseman's teachers
at Ushaw. His History of England was published 1819-1830. Rumor
had it that he, along with the controversial Lamennais, had been
made cardinals in petto by Leo XII in 1826.
18
Henry James, William Wetmore Story and his Friends^ II, 91.
 211

definitely did have Wiseman in mind when he wrote the poem, he

did not feel he treated him "ungenerously." As far as the poet
could imagine, such a prelate would be a Blougram, naturally
politic and ambiguous, and necessarily struggling with unbelief,
as must all Christians whatever their ethical status. Nor had
he made any judgments, good or bad, about the Bishop or the
Cardinal of Westminster. He had, moreover, given his Bishop a
good case which he had won decisively. Browning, therefore, was
not especially, if at all concerned about satirizing Wiseman, or
any other Catholic person or policy. Rather, he was most con¬
cerned in laying bare the essential weakness of the agnostic posi¬
tion, and for this he was interested in using Wiseman and all the
redundant associations which such a controversial figure brought
with him in order, not to attack Catholicism, but to strengthen the
paradoxical presentation of his own case for religious belief.
Raymond's judgment seems accurate when he asserts that Browning's
general reaction to Roman Catholicism, as well as to Wiseman and
Newman, "may be described as critical but not bigoted.In
"Bishop Blougram's Apology," however. Browning seems to avoid both
praise and criticism. He merely makes use of a popular and
taken-for-granted kind of public image and adapts it to his own
purposes.
We can now examine in detail how Browning used and sometime
adjusted his model and his model's Catholic world. First of all,
Blougram is a bishop, not an archbishop or a cardinal as was Wise¬
man. While the "B-B" alliteration certainly appealed to the poet
as providing a more memorable character-name and poem-title, there
is also a note of restraint or distancing, both in the avoidance of

19
The Infinite Momentj p. 136.
 212

an exact designation as well as in his alternate choice. When

he was intent on satirizing his models--the Papal legate in A
Soul's Tragedy^ Home, and Napoleon III, for example--the pseudonyms
function as hostilely ironic or ridiculing devices. Such does not
seem to be the case with "Bishop Blougram," which, to my ear at
least, suggests a certain Anglo-Saxon rock-firmness, with possibly
its own suggestion of the irony Browning saw in the contrast be¬
tween the poem's doctrine and the Bishop's devious but sure mode
of insuring its preservation.^*^
The picture of the Bishop's bon vivant worldliness was not
Browning's invention. Lytton Strachey reported that Wiseman was
indeed commonly thought to be a Blougram-type of prelate in his
personal habits and tastes. Strachey declares, however, that
so far from being a Bishop Blougram (as the rumour went)
he was, in fact, the very antithesis of that subtle and
worldly-wise ecclesiastic. . . . There was only one point
in which he resembled Bishop Blougram--his love of a good
table. Some of Newman's disciples were astonished and
grieved to find that he sat down to four courses of fish
during Lent. "I am sorry to say," remarked one of them 21
afterwards, "that there is a lobster side to the Cardinal."
Browning makes the most artistic use of this evidently his¬
torical quality of Wiseman to highlight the Bishop's sensuality as

20
Gigadibs' name, on the other hand, does seem to function
as a ridiculing device, though it is not clear whether the humor
is intended to derive from anything more than the name's sound.
Priestley, op. cit. (above, n. 4), p. 139, has suggested, "if his
name means anything," that it refers to his success in terms of a
gig (a light, cheap carriage) and the colloquial "dibs." A "gig"
and a "dib" are also two angling instruments, and the journalist's
grotesque name may ironically suggest his hope to "hook" the
Bishop, and his eventual frustration and change of role.
21
Eminent Victorians (London, 1922), pp. 65-66.
 213

I well as his surprising and enigmatic spirituality. Wine, glass,

i food, dinner, and all their associated imagery--both as expressed
and as immediately understood elements of the setting--make up
one of the poem's most persistent and significant "image-groups."
The Bishop is literally set within a frame of wine and talk.
Gigadibs' first refusal, the Bishop's suggestion of his suscepti¬
bility, and then Gigadibs' acceptance of at least two more glasses
of wine, function symbolically as the first signs of his ultimate
23
surrender.
Professor Honan has perceived how the relation between the
situation itself--a dinner on "Corpus Christi Day," the feast day
in honor of the Eucharist, or Sacrament of the Lord's Supper--and
the characters' actual eating and drinking together suggests the
elements that make up the Bishop's paradoxical portrait.
The Eucharist, consecrated elements of bread and wine, is
symbolically consumed by Blougram and Gigadibs--for the
Bishop has offered the journalist his food, and now of¬
fers him wine. But the Eucharist is both sensuous and
spiritual . . . one eats, as it were, for a spiritual
purpose.24
We have seen how in two other poems, Sordello and "Fra Lippo Lip¬
pi," mention was made of the feast of Corpus Christi simply as an
element of local color. Here Browning has employed the same
image as a basic meaning-carrying symbol.
The poet has his Bishop use another image associated with
the Eucharist when, with a brief and precise metaphor, he describes
the finality with which the secure but naive faith of the past has
succumbed to the onrush of modern science:

^^See 11. 1-2, and 971.

^^See 11. 1-2, 36-37, 132-133, and 916-19.
^^Broming's Characters, p. 147.
 214

. . . cosmogony,
Geology, ethnology, what not,
(Greek endings, each the little passing-bell
that signifies some faith's about to die).
(679-82)
From the Casa Guidi windows Browning would often have heard the
tinkle of this tiny bell rung by an acolyte as he escorted the
priest who was bringing the last Communion, or Viaticum, to the
bedside of a dying parishioner.
The Bishop's prolonged ship-cabin simile, which provides the
basis for the greater part of his argument, establishes, together
with his many allusions to foreign places, an important set of
travel images. These were undoubtedly suggested by Wiseman's ex¬
tensive travels throughout Europe and contribute to a cosmopolitan
ism in Blougram that contrasts sharply with Gigadibs' obvious in¬
sularity, and at the same time highlights the stereotyped "foreign
ness" of both the Bishop's Church and his career. To season his
discourse with an illustrative example he can with equal ease call
upon Rome or London, London or Rome (96-98). He has seen "Terni'
fall, Naples' bay, and Gothard's top" (533), and is knowledgeable
about the weather and clothes, not only of France and Spain, but
also of Russia, Algiers, and even Timbuctoo (790-95). He is also
a devotee of Italian art (113-17) and music (381-86), and French
(108, 397-98) and German (52) as well as English literature (487-
554).
Blougram also fancies himself a competent judge of architec¬
ture, and like Wiseman he has greeted Augustus Pugin's neo-Gothic
creations with something less than enthusiasm:
I doubt if they're half baked, those chalk
rosettes,
Ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere;
It's just like breathing in a lime-kiln: eh?
(7-9)
 215

preferring either the original Gothic, or the more flamboyant

pc
style of the Italian Renaissance.
With a cue taken from Wiseman's acknowledged theological
and philosophical competency, Blougram seems as much at ease with
Luther, Fichte, Schelling, and Strauss, as he is with Genesis, St
Paul, and Newman. In fact, he is better versed in the arguments
of the Rationalists than is Gigadibs himself.
Throughout the poem Blougram's immense erudition is on dis¬
play; and, far from being an empty exercise in vanity, it is em¬
ployed consciously as one of his most potent weapons against the
brash young skeptic. One moment he ironically presumes that
Gigadibs is as aware as he of the details of Leipsic printing, a
Correggio "St. Jerome," Euripides' chorus endings, the latest
Italian opera, and two obscure allusions from Shakespeare. But
at the same time, with a show of sportingness that is both af-
fectatious and patronizing, he continuously calls his opponent's
pc
attention to his step-by-step barrage of rhetorical devices;
He superfluously paraphrases common anglicized Latin and French
words (26); and he excuses himself with diplomatic aplomb for a
nimble "slip" into Italian (45).
With Wiseman's distinguished career as a lecturer and jour¬
nalist serving as a factual basis. Browning has Blougram conde-

25
See Ward, \Jiseman, I, 358-59, and Gwynn, Wiseman^ pp. 89,
93-96.
pc
For example: "A simile" (99); "Now come, let's backward
to the starting place" (144); "I mean to meet you on your own
premise" (171); "we'll proceed a step, / Returning to our image,
which I like" (219-20); "Nay, friend, I meet you with an answer
here" (387); "we can't believe, you know-- / We're still at that
admission, recollect!" (440-41); "Softly, my friend! I must dis
pute that point" (599); "Let us concede (gratuitously though)"
(775), etc.
 216

scendingly present himself as a professional comrade of Gigadibs.

The urbane clerical-journalist runs lightly through a list of the
learned articles he has recently published:
On music, poetry, the fictile vase
Found at Albano, chess, Anacreon's Greek.
(914-15)2/
A moment later he slyly recapitulates Gigadibs' "career":
You, Gigadibs, who, thirty years of age,28
Write statedly for Blackwood's Magazine,
Believe you see two points in Hamlet's soul
Unseized by the Germans yet—which view you'll
print--
Meantime the best you have to show being still
That lively lightsome article we took
Almost for the true Dickens,—what's its name?
"The Slum and Cellar--or Whitechapel life
Limned after dark!" it made me laugh, I know.
And pleased a month and brought you in ten pounds.
--Success 1 recognize and compliment.
(944-54)
Blougram then delivers his coup de grace when he, a supposedly
besieged Catholic bishop, offers to loan the humiliated Gigadibs
his superior influence in the young man's own journalistic world,

27
Though Wiseman did write on music and poetry, there is no
record of an article or lecture by him on Greek verse, classical
archeology, or chess. Among his 57 identified articles in the
Dublin Review from 1836 until 1862, we find, in addition to the
articles on both positive theology and Protestant-Catholic dif¬
ferences, others on scripture, liturgy, the Tractarians, medieval
architecture, domestic politics, social and educational reform,
foreign policy, European travel, and Spanish and English art.
His eventually most famous work was the article on the Donatists
which so strongly influenced Newman (see Dublin Review, XII [1839],
139-80).
po
In 1855, Wiseman (1802-65) was 53 years old, and Mahony
(1804-66) was 51.
 217

Which whether here, in Dublin or New York,

Will get you, prompt as at my eyebrow's wink.
Such terms as never you aspired to get.
(957-59)29

From the first word he utters to his last, Blougram is ever

on the offensive, one meticulously selected verbal stroke--sti1et-
to, lance, or broadsword--alternating with the others, until his
once garrulous and cocksure adversary, "Gigadibs the literary man,"
sat silent and crushed,
played with spoons, explored his plate's design.
And ranged the olive stones about its edge.
While the great bishop rolled him out a mind.
(976-78)
The public image of an even more prominent English Catholic,
John Henry Newman, also contributed to Browning's portrait of
Bishop Blougram. We can see this influence particularly in
Gigadibs' attacks on Blougram's honesty, the Bishop's references
to the importance of belief in miracles, and his general doctrine
on the nature of belief and unbelief. During the "Papal Aggres¬
sion" controversy, Wiseman was regularly denounced as being ar¬
rogant, rude, and treasonous, but never was he seriously accused
of dishonesty or double-talk. Commenting on Wiseman's November
20, 1850, "Appeal to the English People," a writer in the Daily
News was moved to remark:
[Cardinal Wiseman,] we see, claims to be an Englishman,
and no alien. His style, his rudeness, his hard hits,

29
Browning may have presumed that the Dublin Fevtew was pub¬
lished in Dublin. It was, however, always published in London,
with its name intended by Wiseman and O'Connell to signify its op¬
position to the Whig and Rationalistic Edinburgh Review. In 1962
the Dublin Review became the Wiseman Review. The reference to New
York may have been occasioned by the many American sales of Wise¬
man's 1854 melodramatic historical novel, Fabiola.
 218

and his plain sense certainly go far to prove that he is

neither a Spaniard nor an Italian. The document that
we print is manifestly the work of a slashing English
reviewer, not of a Roman casuist; . . .Dr. Pusey has
ten times more unction, more beatitude, more Jesuitry,
and, without the red hat, far more popery about him. . . .
[But for this reason,] the Pope's agent is not the less
but rather more to be feared and dealt with carefully.
Newman, on the other hand, even before his debate with Charles
3C
Kingsley, was often accused of speaking less than the whole truth.
We can conclude, therefore, that the specifically "casuisti- •
cal" elements in Blougram's portrait derive from Newman's public
31
image, and, as I have already suggested, from Browning's habit¬
ual presumptions concerning Catholic prelates, rather than from
any precise information he might have obtained regarding Wiseman.
32
Again, unlike Wiseman, Newman for many years, during both
his Anglican and Catholic careers, was the center of a series of
minor tempests concerning the credibility of miracles. In 1826

30
See Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua (London, 1890), "Pref¬
ace," p. xvii: "For twenty years and more I have borne an imputa¬
tion. . . . I am . . . rudely and circumstantially charged with
untruthfulness."
31
I do not believe, however, that Browning was interested in
satirizing Newman. While always fierce in his antipathies towards
Tractarianism, the poet seems genuinely to have admired Newman's
honesty and to have saved his barbs for Tractarians like Keble and
Pusey who, he believed, were insidiously subverting Protestantism,
rather than cleanly breaking with it, as had Newman.
32
But Robert C. Schweik, "Bishop Blougram's Miracles," MLN^
LXXI (1956), 416-18, has discovered an instance where Wiseman's
name was "violently yoked to Newman's thought," in an article by
W. E. Aytoun, Blackwood's Magazine^ LXXIX (March, 1851), p. 322,
an article which Browning may have read. Aytoun used the expres¬
sion "winking images," more immediately similar to Blougram's
"winking virgins" than Newman's rather ponderous "motion of the
eyes of the pictures of the Madonna." See also below, p. 228,
n. 42.
 219

he had published an essay on "The Miracles of Scripture"; and in

1843 another entitled "On Ecclesiastical Miracles." In 1851
he stepped into the "No Popery" wars with his vigorously polemical
Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. In
this work also, Newman stressed the importance of belief in
miracles, including a specific mention of the supposedly super¬
natural liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius, and the motion
34
of the eyes of certain pictures of the Virgin Mary. He was,
however, as a reading of the entire section (pp. 299-313) makes
clear, arguing primarily for the antecedent probability of the oc¬
currence of post-Apostolic miracles against the allegedly aprioris-
tic Protestant position that such occurrences are not only im-

^^They were later published together as Two Essays on Bibli¬

cal and Ecclesiastical Miracles (London, 1890). In the first es¬
say (p. 63), while stressing the possibility and even probability
of post-Apostolic miracles, Newman had explicitly denied the
likelihood or importance of the liquefaction of St. Januarius'
blood: ". . . apparent Miracles [may] be attributed to the sup¬
posed operation of an existing physical cause, when they are paral¬
lel to its known effects; as chemical, meteorological, etc.,
phenomena. For though the cause may not, perhaps, appear in the
particular case, yet it is known to have acted in others similar
to it. For this reason, no stress can be laid on accounts of . . .
the pretended liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius." See
also p. 60.
^^See Present Position of Catholics in England (London,
1889), pp. 300, 302, and 312. For another pertinent reference to
St. Januarius, see Mahony's poem in Bentley's Miscellany^, I, (1837),
1, "The Bottle of St. Januarius," which includes the following 1 ines
Be it fiction or truth, with your favorite fact,
0 profound LAZZARONI! I seek not to quarrel;
But indulge an old priest who would simply extract
From your legend, a lay--from your martyr, a
moral. „ . m
Browning's poem mentions the beggars of Naples, the lazzarom,
in line 715.
 220

probable, but theologically impossible. Newman then concluded

his argument with an expression of his own personal belief in the
liquefaction as well as the movement of the eyes of the Italian
Madonnas.
Newman, in all this, was voicing a personal emphasis, a
Catholic position, not the Catholic position, as he himself de¬
clared in the notes which he appended to the Pvesent Position (p.
416); "The former of these two points [antecedent possibility of
miracles] I hold in common with all Catholics; the latter [St.
Januarius and the Madonnas] on my own private judgment, which I
impose on no one." The Church, while always defending the pos¬
sibility of miracles, has never officially proposed any specific
miracle, other than those connected with the life of Christ as an
article of faith. The Church's approval of devotional practices
at the site of an alleged miracle or private revelation is a kind
of Nihil Obstat: God may be honored in a special way at this place
with no danger to faith or morals; while at the same time there is
a deliberate abstention from passing judgment in a positive sense
on either the occurrence or content of the miracle or revelation.

35,
P. 32: "I will avow distinctly that, putting out of the
question the hypothesis of unknown laws of nature (that is, of the
professed miracle being not miraculous), I think it impossible to
withstand the evidence which is brought for the liquefaction of the
blood of St. Januarius at Naples, and for the motion of the eyes of
the pictures of the Madonna in the Roman States." But note how
Newman's stressed "hypothesis" limits his belief to the literal
fact of the phenomena's occurrence, and explicitly excludes a
judgment as to their miraculous or supernatural nature.
For an official statement on this and analogous matters,
Beatifiaatione et Canonisatione of Benedict
tilitpr^flnnrih;,t-^' I' "... hisce revel ationi bus
tall ter approbatis, licet non debeatur nec possit [my italics] ad-
hiben assensus fidei catholicae, debetur tamen assensus fidei
 221

Browning was likely not aware of these distinctions and would

naturally enough have ascribed Newman's popularized opinions both
to Wiseman and to the "typical" Bishop Blougram as universal
Catholic traching.
In a somewhat similar way, Blougram's idea of religious
faith owes something to Newman, or at least to Browning's casual
understanding of Newman. Though, as C. R. Tracy has pointed out,
"there is no proof that he ever read Newman," his information
37
"might easily have come from newspapers or hearsay." Blougram
stresses the irrationality or "unproveability" of the objects of
faith, and exults in the resultant uncertainties which he sees as
providing a salutary asaes-is for the strengthening of love. This,
of course, is Browning's own doctrine, and knowing no other, he
would presume that this alone was faith, and must substantially
agree with whatever Wiseman (or Newman) would have said on the sub¬
ject.^® The traditional Catholic teaching as to the rationality

36 (cont d)hLinianae juxta prudentiae regulas, juxta quas nempe

tales revelationes sunt probabiles et pie credibiles." According
to the Acts of the Fifth Provincial Council of Malines, 1938, p. 6,
the official voice of the Belgian Hierarchy: "In the opinion of
the Church, it is in no way necessary for all the faithful to be¬
lieve in these matters. All that the Church declares is that, in
her judgment, they are in no way contrary to faith and morals and
that there are sufficient indications for their pious and cautious
approval by human faith." These quotations can be found in Ed¬
ward Schillebeeckx, O.P., Mccry, Mother of the Redemption, tr. N. D.
Smith (New York, 1964), pp. 154-55.
^^"Bishop Blougram," MLR, XXXIV (1939), 425.
^®Ward, Wiseman, II, 514, describes the following scene at
Wiseman's death-bed, where with his Canons present, "the book of
the Gospels was handed to him to kiss. ... He put his hand upon
it, and said ... 'I wish to express before the Chapter that I
have not, and never have had in my whole life, the very slightest
doubt or hesitation on any one of the Articles of this Faith; I
have always endeavoured to teach it; and I transmit it intact to
my successor.'"
 222

of faith insists, however, on an assent based upon reason, both

as to its content and the reliability of its source; faith may
go beyond reason--that is, beyond the limits of natural knowledge
—but not oontra rat-ionem. The resulting state of the mind is a
supernaturally strengthened absolute certitude.
Newman's explanation of knowledge and belief is a mostly
original one--again, a but not the Catholic position. Sometimes
he does stress the anti-intellectual elements, but more often he
seems to be interested in refuting the exaggerated intellectual ism
of the Rationalists, properly so-called, rather than in defending
an untraditional anti-intellectualism. His was, moreover, a
psychological analysis rather than an objective or ontological
one, stressing the experiential aspects of belief rather than the
logical or metaphysical. He discovers a fundamental empirical
distinction between assent and inference, certitude and proof, and
then introduces a new and never adequately explained "illative
sense" as the ultimate reason for our certitudes.
Browning could hardly be expected to have found the ideas of
Newman, even if he had read them, particularly useful for his
poetic purposes. He simply knew that Newman, and therefore
Catholics, believed in miracles; Newman, and therefore Catholics,
stood four-square for faith and against Rationalistic unbelief.
In these two ideas he found immediately valuable ammunition for his
and Blougram's ironic defense of faith against religious skepticism.
While making use of many of the neutral biographical facts
concerning Wiseman, Browning also exploited certain clearly hostile

39
See An Essay In Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London, 1885),
especially Chapter IX. For a brilliant analysis and critique of
the Grammar of Assent, see M. C. D'Arcy, S.J., The Nature of Belief
(New York, 1945).
 223

aspects of the Cardinal's public image that were so much a part

of the religious controversies of the early 1850's. Set in
alternating contrast with Bishop Blougram's increasingly "spiri¬
tual" self-revelation, the negative themes in his portrayal create
a deepening character-ambiguity, as well as a progressively
paradoxical religious strength. By the end of the poem these
seeming inconsistencies have resulted in an ironic underscoring of
the potency of his arguments.
The re-establishment of the Catholic Hierarchy by Pope Pius
IX on September 29, 1850, had aroused anti-popery panic on a scale
not experienced since the "Titus Oates Plot" of 1678. A most ag¬
gravating issue was the title of Archbishop of Westminster bestowed
upon the new Catholic Primate, Nicholas Wiseman. Prevented by the
1829 Emancipation Act from reassuming the titles of the original
Catholic sees, Canterbury, London, Winchester, Durham, York, etc.,
the new hierarchy had decided on generally non-historical titles
such as Southwark, Beverly (York), Hexham (Durham), Clifton
(Bristol and Salisbury), etc.^° For the new primatial archdiocese,
which included the London area north of the Thames (the Counties of
Middlesex, Essex, and Hertford), the title of Westminster was
chosen--appropriate, perhaps, but soon a focal point of anti-
Catholic alarms over the safety of the Abbey and even the Houses
of Parliament.
Such was the inspiration for the pointed reference in the
third line of the poem; "We ought to have our Abbey back, you
see." Nothing Blougram could have said would have more effec-

^°For an account of the discussions and problems in choosing

names, drawing boundaries, and appointing bishops for the new
dioceses, see Gordon Albion, "The Restoration of the Hierarchy,
1850," in The English Catholics: 1850-1950^ ed. George A. Beck
(London, 1950), pp. 86-115.
 224

tively stirred up the nightmarish visions of Catholic "aggression"

and "usurpation." The self-appropriating "our," the presumptive
"back," and the taken-for-granted, self-evident connotations of
"you see," give the line a tone devised to inflame the wrath of
all loyal and Protestant Englishmen.
Blougram next seems to fill the ugly image of the clerical
functionary for whom liturgical ceremonies are a boring, but
profitable, toil:
These hot long ceremonies of our church
Cost us a little—oh, they pay the price.
You take me--amply pay it!
(10-12)
with an unbecoming and tasteless familiarity suggested by the
"You take me" of the last line. The Protestant reader now un¬
hesitatingly begins to identify himself with Gigadibs, and im¬
mediately shares in the journalist's "despising" (thrice-repeated
in ten lines, and to be repeated many more times, with ever-in-
creasing irony). And the reader is all the more willing to echo
Gigadibs' protests against his unscrupulous host's attempts to
impugn his young guest's disinterestedness as he partakes of the
episcopal luxuries. The Bishop deliberately aggravates the situa¬
tion with his insulting puns on the word "protest," which seem
subtly to identify his non-believing opponent with his own even
more virulent Protestant adversaries:
1 well imagine you respect my place
{Status^ entourage^ worldly circumstance)
Quite to its value--very much indeed:
--Are up to the protesting eyes of you
In pride at being seated here for once--
(25-29)
Don't you protest now! It's fair give and take.
(46)
 225

The reader's expectations are reinforced by the reference

to "an unbelieving Pope" (65)--a congenial idea even though the
Bishop denies its possibility--as well as by the allusions to the
papal pretense to be "the monarch of the world" (69), and the
death-exposed ultimate meaninglessness of the pontifical "baubles"
(75).
The Bishop next seems to stand self-accused as one of
Browning's pusillanimous antagonists when he condemns Gigadibs'
supposed idealism, and defends his own real but prosaic accomplish¬
ments:
. . . whatever more or less
I boast of my ideal realized
Is nothing in the balance when opposed
To your ideal, your grand simple life.
Of which you will not realize one jot.
I am much, you are nothing; you would be all,
I would be merely much: you beat me there.
(79-85)
But it is soon clear that Gigadibs has actually been espousing a
sterile perversion of Browning's idealism, deceiving himself with
an "abstract intellectual plan of life / Quite irrespective of
life's plainest laws" (92-93). Thus momentarily and for the first
time, the two characters begin to reveal themselves as something
other than what they seem. The beginning of the long ship-cabin
simile further undermines Gigadibs' case; but at the same time t'e
urbanity, mock-courtesy, and rather frightening erudition of the
clever Bishop discourage as yet any real confidence in his sinceri¬
ty.
To score a new point, Blougram identifies himself with his
opponent's skepticism which can accept "no faith that is not
fixed, / Absolute and exclusive, as you say" (162-63), and elo¬
quently exposes its impracticality:
 226

Where's
The gain? how can we guard our unbelief,
Make it bear fruit to us?--the problem here.
Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,--
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self.
To rap and knock and enter in our soul.
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring.
Round the ancient idol, on his base again,--
The grand Perhaps!
(179-90)
Once feel about, and soon or late you hit
Some sense, in which it might be, after all.
Why not, "The Way, the Truth, the Life?"
(195-97)
The cabin simile is partially resumed and Blougram, echoing
Newman, emphasizes the effect of belief upon human actions: "Be¬
lief or unbelief / Bears upon life, determines its whole course"
(228-29). Gigadibs' brand of unbelieving idealism has been un¬
productive, a dreamlike indulgence; while Blougram has kept his
dreams and doubts at a deliberate minimum, made faith his "waking
life," and used "heart, head and hand / All day ... [to ] build,
scheme, study, and make friends" (245-50).
With another adaptation from Newman, Blougram goes on to
qualify what has just sounded like cynical, self-seeking expediency
and disavows any arbitrary religious compromise for the sake of
worldly profit:
We can't be too decisive in our faith.
Conclusive and exclusive in its terms.
To suit the world which gives us the good things.
In every man's career are certain points
Whereon he dares not be indifferent.
(272-76)
The Bishop further contradicts the stereotype of the Catholic
1 227

t
I

I Hierarchy as an enemy of religious liberty when he avows that a

man must unconditionally follow "The form of faith his conscience
holds the best" (296). But when he describes the form of Chris-
j tianity which he holds the best as
The most pronounced moreover, fixed, precise
I And absolute form of faith in the whole world--
; Accordingly, most potent of all forms
i For working on the world,
(306-09)
j his choice of significant qualities is not one to inspire confi¬
dence in the English reader of 1855. His mention of "Peter's
I creed, or rather, Hildebrand's" (316) suggests one of his Church's
i most frightening modes of "working on the world," and derives from
current attacks on the Pope and Wiseman as threats to both the
civil and religious authority of the Crown.
Wiseman was also attacked for his ecclesiastical dress and
for the ceremony surrounding his person, especially for his honor-
I ific titles and the obeisant kissing of his ring. All of these
aiougram accepts, with a not very convincing reluctance:
Something imposed on me, no choice of mine;
No fancy-dress worn for pure fancy's sake
And despicable therefore! now folks kneel
And kiss my hand--of course the Church's hand.
(333-36)41
The Bishop, for the sake of argument, is momentarily will inn
to admit indulging in even lower tastes than foolish vanity.
"Grant I'm a beast"; but he immediately employs this deceptively
vulnerable admission to lower Gigadibs' guard for one of his most
i telling blows: "Why, beasts must live beasts' lives! . . .My

i ^^T. A. Trollope, What I Remember, I, 338, a generally un¬

friendly observer (see above, p. 209, n. 16), mentions Wiseman s
annoyance at people who insisted on kneeling and kissing his ring.
Blougram's disclaimer ("of course the Church s hand ), however,
seems more officious than sincere.
 228

business is not to remake myself, / But make the absolute best of

what God made" (349-55). Blougram is much more than a beast;
much more, too, than the "fool or knave" which Gigadibs and his
tribe label him. He is a magnificently complex individual, each
facet of whom is unique and significant:
Fool or knave?
Why needs a bishop be a fool or knave
When there's a thousand diamond weights between"
(404-06)
He escapes all "gross weights, coarse scales and labels broad"
(403). On the other hand, there is no mystery or distinction in
the disbelief of the superficial Gigadibs,
You . . . clever to a fault.
The rough and ready man who write apace.
Read somewhat seldomer, think perhaps even less—
(420-22)
nor in the belief of
Lord So-and-So—his coat bedropped with wax.
All Peter's chains about his waist.
(424-25)42
Concerning them, "Who wonders or cares?" But a believing Blougram,
"the man of sense and learning too," to whom "All eyes turn with
interest. . . . Enough; you see I need not fear contempt" (427-31).
With a mastery of detail more characteristic of an historian
and litterateur than a churchman, Blougram argues that only the
presupposition of Napoleon's blind and absolute faith in his per¬
sonal destiny prevents us from judging him a madman; and that

In the same Blackwood's article referred to above, p. 218,

n. 32, Aytoun in decrying English conversions to Catholicism,
laments: "The chain in the church of St. Peter ad Vincula has al¬
ready been suspended around more than one English neck in token of
the entire submission of the proselytes to the spiritual yoke of
Rome."
 229

Shakespeare, for all his accomplishments, actually achieved less

in the way of personal satisfaction than the lesser but realisti¬
cally aspiring Bishop; what Shakespeare could only imaginatively
create, Blougram has either seen or become:
We want the same things, Shakespeare and myself.
And what I want, I have: he, gifted more.
Could fancy he too had them when he liked.
But not so thoroughly that, if fate allowed.
He would not have them also in my sense.
(539-43)
Once more, however, Blougram steps into his role of papisti¬
cal intruder: Shakespeare naturally reminds him of Pandulph, and
he frankly admits that he plays "that personage," (520), an allu¬
sion no less provoking than his earlier gratuitous expropriation
of Westminster Abbey ("our Abbey") in line 3.
But a moment later, after Gigadibs has proposed Martin
Luther as an example of "all-or-nothing" belief, Blougram surprises
by at first acclaiming Luther's enthusiasm, and willingly admitting
the moral superiority of the Reformer's zeal over his own risk¬
avoiding contentment. Then he pauses to suggest that Luther's
success was but historical "luck," and that such unconstrained
ardor might logically lead to the further "reforms" of Strauss.
With Luther now contorted into a potential ally of the
Rationalists, Blougram presses his advantage over the nonplussed
Gigadibs and lays down a barrage of Browning's most eloquent for¬
mulations of the "philosophy of the imperfect" as it applies to
religious faith:
I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.
The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say.
If faith o'ercomes doubt. How I know it does?
By life and man's free will, God gave for that!
To mould life as we choose it, shows our choice:
That's our one act, the previous work's his own.
(602-07)
 230

What matter though I doubt at every pore,

Head-doubts, heart-doubts, doubts at my fingers'
ends,

If finally I have a life to show.

(610-15)
All's doubt in me; where's break of faith in this?
It is the idea, the feeling and the love,
God means mankind should strive for and show forth
Whatever be the process to that end,--
And not historic knowledge, logic sound.
And metaphysical acumen, sure!
"What think ye of Christ," friend? when all's
done and said.
You like this Christianity or not?
It may be false but will you wish it true?

If you desire faith--then you've faith enough.

(620-34)
The Bishop's disconcerting "Romanism" intrudes for a moment
again when he stresses his (but not Wiseman's) Roman birth, while
at the same time he declares this accident of foreign birth
"reconcilable" with his being an Englishman (643).
But the overpowering rhetoric continues:
Pure faith indeed—you know not what you ask!
Naked belief in God the Omnipotent,
Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much
The sense of conscious creatures to be borne.
It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare.
Some think. Creation's meant to show him forth:
I say it's meant to hide him all it can.
And that's what all the blessed evil's for.
It's use in Time is to environ us.
Our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough
Against that sight till we can bear its stress.
Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain
And lidless eye and disemprisoned heart
Less certainly would wither up at once
Than mind, confronted with the truth of him.
(647-61)
 231

With me, faith means perpetual unbelief

Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.

Say I--let doubt occasion still more faith!

(666-75)
Interspersed with these ringing affirmations are four embar¬
rassing references to the infamous "vnnking virgins" and St.
Januarius' restless blood, along with a bold marshalling of
"brother Newman," "the Church," "my pope," and--as a most recent
example of papal excess--the 1854 definition of the dogma of Mary s
Immaculate Conception.Yet the paradoxic effect of these Roman
peculiarities, as they are neatly employed by the poet, is ulti¬
mately to strengthen rather than weaken his case for religious
faith. Rome and its English surrogate, for all their "frauds" and
"usurpations," have an infinitely saner position than Gigadibs and
his Rationalist allies:
"It can't be—yet it shall!
Who am I, the worm, to argue with my Pope?
Low things confound the high things!" and so forth.
That's better than acquitting God with grace
As some folks do. He's tried—no case is proved.
Philosophy is lenient--he may go!

Again, the Bishop seems to prejudice his case when, to

introduce his final arguments on the effect of religious belief
upon human conduct, he speaks of his flock as "the rough purblind
mass," of whom "We are . . . lords" (756-57), and the "creature-
comforts" (766) which have accrued to him as their bishop. But
Blougram comes out ahead, with the best of both worlds: I m at

43,
^See 11. 702-05, for the mention of Newman, the Church,
and the Immaculate Conception. For references to the Madonnas
and St. Januarius, see 11. 377, 699, 728, and 743.
 232

ease now, friend; worldly in this world, / I take and like its
way of life" (797-98). More important, the very comforts have
enabled him to fulfill better his duty towards God: "God, if he
pronounce upon such life, / Approves my service, which is better
still" (801-02). Gigadibs would have an ethic based upon
philosophy or "natural religion"; but Blougram proves that the
unbelieving journalist's sense of right and wrong is actually
based upon the crudest kind of instinct, while the supposedly gross
and beastlike Bishop,
Who want, am made for, and must have a God
Ere I can be aught, do aught?--no mere name
Want, but the true thing with what proves its truth.
To wit, a relation from that thing to me.
Touching from head to foot--which touch I feel.
And with it take the rest, this life of ours!
I live my life here; yours you dare not live.
(846-52)
The Bishop turns upon his adversary for the last time, urges
him to confess that he secretly wishes he too were a bishop, and
then compounds the humiliation by relentlessly laying bare Gigadibs
inferiority as a newspaper man as well as his ineffectiveness as a
theological disputant.
I do not believe that the poem's epilogue was, as Fairchild
asserts. Browning's escape hatch, whereby he enabled himself to
pass a definitively negative judgment upon Blougram's ethical am-
• • 44
biguities. Rather, the same ambiguities are maintained even in
the epilogue. Browning first ridicules the Bishop's (and Wise¬
man's) old and new episcopal titles (972-74); but then presents
him in a far from uncomplimentary contrast to the vanquished jour-

44
See "Browning the Simple-Hearted Casuist," UTQ, XVIII
(1949), 234-40.
 233

nalist whom he has reduced to speechless doodling. Blougram is

still "the great bishop" who "rolled him out a mind / Long
crumpled, till creased consciousness lay smooth" (978-79).
The ambiguities and ironic juxtapositions persist to the
end. "For Blougram," the poet reveals, "believed, say, half he
spoke" (980). But which half? The blatant and cynical pragma¬
tism, or the unabashed sublimities? Or was Blougram's halving
carried out according to another more intricate principle of di¬
vision? The assertion that "He felt his foe was foolish to dis¬
pute" (983) the unbelieved portions indicates that these were the
journalist's own shallow thoughts which the Bishop had carefully
twisted to his own advantage. Further, "He said true things, but
called them by wrong names" (966), which, after all, is much less
blameworthy than saying wrong things but calling them by true
names, as had Gigadibs. This gentle rebuke is perhaps Browning's
way of apologizing for the Catholic-sounding phrases, which have
nonetheless enabled him to highlight the intrinsic strength of his
doctrine.
Finally, Browning sets his Roman bishop, as it were, back
into "true" perspective. Blougram has accomplished more than he
intended: Gigadibs has not only ceased to be a Rationalist, but
he has in effect rejected the Bishop's Church and his rationalized
worldliness, and has become something very much like Browning's
own kind of evangelical Protestant--a position which in the poet's

'^^This fulsome line was added in the 1889 edition of Brown¬

ing's Vlovks. For Browning's first use of the image, see "The
Last Ride Together," iv:
My soul
Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll
Freshening and fluttering in the wind.
 234

mind was just as alien to Catholicism as Rationalism, though in a

radically different and less crucial way. "The implication sure¬
ly is that in starting over again from the beginning, with a
plough and the Gospel, Gigadibs will arrive at a purer Christianity,
than Blougram."
Browning, then, has clearly made the most of the clerical
situation of his greatest "casuist." Thoroughly eclectic in his
use of contemporary history and biography, he has evolved from a
popular stereotype and from real life, as well as from his vibrant ^
imagination, a magnificent original. He chose his cleric care¬
fully. A simple clergyman's debate with a skeptic would have been
a pious tract. A typical bishop of the Established Church would
have been more than a match for the fallaciously self-confident
Gigadibs. But the weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies, secular
and religious, in the 1850's were filled with learned articles by
learned Anglican bishops. The events and personalities of the

46
Robert Langbaum, "Robert Browning: Ame Elast-ique^" Vic¬
torian Newsletter^ No. 13 (Spring, 1958), p. 13. The exact mean¬
ing of the poem's last line ("And studied his last chapter of St.
John") is not clear. It may simply mean that Gigadibs read his
Bible from beginning to end, i.e., from the first chapter of Gene¬
sis to the "last chapter" of St. John's Revelation. It may, how¬
ever, have a more subtle reference to the images of sheep, flock,
and shepherd which occur frequently in the poem, and in the last
chapter of St. John's Gospel (21.15-17) where Christ commanded
Peter to feed his lambs and his sheep; as well as in the last
chapter of Revelation (22.1-3) where the triumphant Christ is
called "the Lamb." The poem (197) also contains a direct quota¬
tion from John 14.6, "The Way, the Truth, the Life," and a para¬
phrase (877) of Psalms 23.1, "Pastor est tui Dominus." Mrs Brown--
mg once wrote that the "seventeenth chapter of John's gospel is
my system of divinity" {Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford ed.
Betty Miller, London, 1954, p. 140). Interestingly enough, John's
seventeenth chapter contains many paraphrases of the Good Shepherd
parable in his tenth chapter.
 235

"Papal Aggression" provided the poet with an opportunity whose

ironic possibilities he recognized as both challenging and con¬
genial. His most vigorous as well as his most lyrical state--
ments in defense of religious faith would be startlingly effec¬
tive if spoken by a Roman Catholic prelate--with emphasis on the
"Roman." Such a persona^ moreover, could be based on actual
Catholic personalities, Wiseman especially, about whom every
Englishman, informed or otherwise, had some definite opinions,
such a situation Browning's talent for psychological revelation
and dramatic reversal would enjoy full scope. A careful reading
of "Bishop Blougram's Apology" proves the artistic correctness of
Browning's choice.

No discussion of "Bishop Blougram's Apology" would be com¬

plete without a mention of the now famous review of Men and ^omen
which appeared in The Rambler: A Cathol-lo Joiamal and Review in
January, 1856.^^ While savoring to the full the Bishop's triumph
over his Rationalist opponent, the reviewer went on to criticize
the full portrait of Blougram as a lamentably inaccurate, if not
hostile, characterization of its obvious model. Cardinal Wiseman.
Ever since Browning's 1881 letter to the Browning Society's
founder, F. J. Furnivall, in which he cites a guess of "Father
Prout" (Francis Mahony) as his authority,^® the review has been
taken for granted as the work of the prolific Wiseman himself.

47.
'See The Rambler V (1856), 54-71. Many discussions imply
that the review is exclusively concerned with "Bishop Blougram s
Apology." Actually the discussion of this poem takes up only four
pages.
48 See Letters, ed. Hood, pp. 194-95.
 236

4-9 ^
Mrs. Orr repeated the attribution in her Handbook^ though she a

omitted it in the later Life and Letters of Browning. Cooke, I

Berdoe, Griffin and Minchin, and DeVane, each in turn, have un-
questioningly accepted both Browning's memory and Mahony's con-
jecture as proof of the fact. Finally, in 1953 Wiseman's author- |
ship of the article was canonized by its inclusion as Item C154 in il

the Broughton, Northrop, and Pearsall Bibliography.

In 1904 Edward Dowden showed some hesitancy when he qualified j||
his assent with the remark: "... if Father Prout rightly at- "J
tributes to that eminent ecclesiastic a review of Men and Women in *1
The Rambler . . but T. R. Lounsbury is the only early com¬
mentator who rejects the attribution outright, declaring it "high¬
ly improbable.
Boyd Litzinger, in a brief article in the Victorian News- 1:
52 II
letter, has recently reopened the discussion by pointing out that,^;
even presuming Browning's notoriously inaccurate memory to have ^
been accurate--in this instance, twenty-five years after the fact--
there is still room for doubt in the accuracy of Mahony's reason¬
ing that the reviewer must have been Wiseman, because "nobody else
would have dared to put it in." Professor Litzinger points out
that Mahony s reason seems less than pertinent when we remember
that Wiseman was at this time (1855-56) in the early stages of his
long disagreement with the Rambler and its editors, John More Capes
and Richard P. Simpson, precisely because they had "dared" to pub-

See p. 172, n. 1.
50
Browning, p. 146.
51
^The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning, p. 177.
"Did Cardinal Wiseman Review Men and Women'^" Victorian
Newsletter, No. 18 (Fall, 1960), 22-23.
 237

lish material which the Cardinal considered potentially harmful

the Church in its delicate English situation. It is therefore
not very likely that he would have continued his contributions to
the magazine while officially disapproving of its editorial poli¬
cies. Litzinger concludes that Wiseman's authorship of the 1856
review is still very much a moot question.
In 1960 Josef L. Altholz published his detailed study, The
Liberal Catholic Movement in England: The "Rambler" and its Con-
53
tributors^ 1848-1864. Though he makes no explicit mention of
the article in question, Altholz does marshal a great amount of
evidence to show that long before 1856 the Rambler had come to be
regarded with suspicion by many of the English bishops for its
loudly proclaimed independence of ecclesiastical control. At the
same time it consistently championed the so-called "convert party"
and their "Romanizing" tendencies against the "old Catholics."
In 1853 there were frank articles on past scandals in the Church,
and in 1854 and 1855 a series of editorial letters questioned the
usefulness of Thomistic metaphysics. In the July, 1855, issue
Simpson began a series of letters discussing the nature of original
sin. He was accused of theological errors, and even the usually
54
sympathetic Newman thought the letters "very unjustifiable."
Wiseman appointed a commission of three theologians in June, 1856,
to examine Simpson's doctrines. No formal censure resulted, but
Simpson proposed to Wiseman that he insert a notice of his with¬
drawal from the discussion, with, however, no judgment pro or con

^^London, 1960.
54
Letter of Newman to Capes, January 19, 1857. Quoted by
Cardinal Gasquet, Lord Acton and His Circle (London, 1906), p.
xxiii. Altholz remarks, p. 33, n. 29, that "Newman's objection
was to self-taught laymen writing theology, rather than to the
theology itself."
 238

on his doctrine. Wiseman agreed, and Simpson's statement ap¬

peared in the Rambler for September, 1856.
Disputes over various matters continued. In October, 1856,
the Rambler carried a satiric article by Simpson which gave con¬
siderable offense by seeming to be an unwarranted reflection on the
intellectual shortcomings of the old Catholics, the "little remnant
of Catholic England," and which also parodied a passage of an arti-
55
cle in the Dublin Review which had been attributed to Wiseman.
The aggressive attitudes of the Rambler began to alarm some of its
friends, notably Brownson and Newman. The latter was "pained and
56
almost frightened."
Another article in the November, 1856, Rambler criticized
the Catholic poor schools, and further attacked the intellectual
ability of the old Catholics. Wiseman replied that such critics
"stand aloof, and do not share the real burthen of Catholic labour,
and charged that "this intellectual separation" from the main body
of Catholics was "the creation of party, upon the very worst
57
ground, that of a distinction of old, and new. Catholics."
Altholz describes Wiseman's difficult position:
[His] primary concern, throughout his career, had been to
bring together the old and the new Catholics into one
harmonious community. He was therefore opposed to any¬
thing savouring of a party spirit within the Catholic body.
Wiseman was at this time [1856] beginning the great strug¬
gle of his primacy against the "anti-Roman" and anti-
Convert old Catholic clergy, led by his own coadjutor.
Archbishop Errington. It was therefore necessary to dem¬
onstrate to the old Catholics that he was still one of

^^See Altholz, p. 36.

56
Letter of Newman to Ambrose St. John, May 7, 1857. Quoted
in Ward, I, 437.
57
"The Present Catholic Dangers," The Dublin Review, XLI
(1856), 450.
 them, that he had not become the party leader of the con¬
verts. This was one reason for his sharp criticism of
the Rambler. ^8
It seems clear that throughout the 1850's the Rambler was
regarded as an enfant terrible by Wiseman and most of the Catholic
bishops, ever fearful of anything that might disrupt the delicate
balance of English Catholicism. Therefore, the answer to Litzin-
ger's "moot question" concerning Wiseman's authorship, when con¬
sidered in the light of Altholz' study, begins to seem less moot
and more probably negative, especially since the theory of his
authorship is based solely upon a long-remembered remark of Mahony
who, if he was correctly quoted, seems to have misunderstood the
actual editorial situation of the Rambler in 1855-56. At the very
least, it is no longer possible to affirm categorically that Wise¬
man wrote the Rambler review.
 CHAPTER VII

GIUSEPPE CAPONSACCHI

Over the years a preponderance of critical interest concern¬

ing The Ring and the Book has centered in the question of Browning'
fidelity to his source materials as he discovered them in the Old
Yellow Book. Allied to this central topic, and ultimately reduci¬
ble to it, have been frequent discussions of the appropriateness
of Browning's ring metaphor and the conscious or unconscious mean¬
ings of his lifelong insistence that he had been historically
loyal to the "truth" and "fact" of the actual murder case as it
was recorded in the legal documents and in contemporary popular ac¬
counts.^
There can certainly be no regretting the contributions which
such studies have made toward understanding the genesis of an un¬
deniable poetic master-work and the unique psychological traits of
a master-poet. Though this line of investigation will and perhaps

^See for example: Charles W. Hodell, The Old Yellow Book

(Washington, D.C., 1908); A. K. Cook, A Commentary Upon Browning’s
"The Ring and the Book" (London, 1920); John Marshall Gest, The
Old Yellow Book (Boston, 1925); J. E. Shaw, "The 'Donna Angelicata
in The Ring and the Book," PMLA, XLI (1926), 55-81; Paul A.
Cundiff, "The Clarity of Browning's Ring Metaphor," PMLA, LXIII
(1948), 1276-82; Robert Langbaum, "The Ring and the Book: A
Relativist Poem," PMLA, LXXI (1956), 131-54, later reprinted in The
Poetry of Experience. See also the recent lively exchange of
views in the Victorian newsletter: Cundiff, "Robert Browning*
•Our Human Speech,"' No. 15 (Spring, 1959), 1-9; Donald Smaliey,
Browning s View of Fact in The Ring and the Book," No. 16 (Fall,
1959), 1-9; Cundiff, "Robert Browning: 'Indisputably Fact,"' No.
17 (Spring, 1960), 7-11; Langbaum, "The Importance of Fact in The
Ring and the Book," ibid., 11-17.

240
 241

must continue ad infinitum—so intransigent is the evidence and

so profound is the artistic product--! am inclined to agree with
the general conclusions of Cook, Shaw, and Smalley that, despite
Browning's sincere convictions that he had weighed all the testi¬
mony without prejudice and had accurately penetrated into the
secrets of his characters' souls, he actually read and shaped his
material by patterns already established in his own habits of
creative thought. As Smalley remarks:
Browning worked as an artist and produced poetry rather
than case histories. He drew nature as he saw it from
his subjective point of sight. More than most literary
artists, he let old habits of composition guide his hand
in new portraits even when he professed to paint from
1 i f e. 2
Browning, therefore, seems to have pushed his ring metaphor further
than logic would allow him to go: he did not disengage his fancy
or, as Cook puts it, "unfasten" it from the facts; there is no
3
final "repristination." And if The Ring and the Book is not
quite a "glorious misinterpretation" [my italics], as J. E. Shaw
asserts,"^ it is certainly a glorious but singularly subjective in¬
terpretation of the insolubly ambiguous raw material contained in
the Old Yellow Book.
But all such investigations, whatever the reliability of
their conclusions, are, at the most, preliminary to the apprecia¬
tion of the poem itself. Once we have discovered that Browning
adjusted and revised the facts of the Old Yellow Book^ probably
even more than he himself realized, we still have said nothing

''Browning's Essay on Chattertonj p. 77. See also p. 54.

3
See Cook, Commentary^ p. 2.
^"The 'Donna Angelicata' in The Ring and the Book," PMLA,
XL! (1926), 55.
 242

about his greatness as a literary artist. Interpretation or mis¬

interpretation, all agree that the glory and the splendor of The
Ring and the Book is most important, not its conformity to its
tortuous original.
The Ring and the Book is Browning's masterpiece. We can,
however, agree with Chesterton's description that it is "merely a
sublime detective story,once we realize that his operative word
is "sublime." And Carlyle certainly said more than he intended
when he remarked to Browning: "It is a wonderful book, one of the
most wonderful poems ever written. I re-read it all through-
all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in
ten lines, and only wants forgetting."^ For its story oould have
been told in ten lines. The greatness of the poem and the proof
of its creator's masterfulness is its revelation of the sublime
richness which the poet has discovered in a seemingly sordid situa¬
tion. He has transfigured the trivial and out of the narrow com¬
pass and dry facts of an Old-Bailey-1 ike court record has made a
new world of human mystery and spiritual significance. Source
studies which highlight the differences between the original data
and the artefact, only to denigrate the artist because he departed
from his data, are perversions of historical criticism. The true
value of the historical method as a preliminary literary discipline
is to throw light upon the literary work so that its transcendent
newness may be perceived more clearly.
The three characters of The Ring and the Book whom Browning

Robert Browning^ p. 85.

See Letters of D. G. Rosetti to W. Altinaham pH r R
Hill (London, 1897), p. 234. Quoted in DeVane, Handbook/p,’3A6.
 243

has most completely idealized are Pompilia Franceschini, Canon

Giuseppe Caponsacchi, and Pope Innocent XII. The other principal.
Count Guido Franceschini, though also superbly portrayed, finds
his essential justification in the documents as the consummate
villain. But the idealistic and heroic elements in the charac¬
terization of Pompilia and Caponsacchi, and the cosmic wisdom and
sanctity of the Pope are almost totally Browning's contribution.
In these two final chapters I shall show how Browning made use of
the particularly priestly and ecclesiastical attributes of Canon
Caponsacchi and the Pope and their situations to enhance their
narrative significance and to express fully and poetically his own
m,ost typical sentiments concerning human and divine love. Since a
formal discussion of Pompilia is beyond the scope of this study, I
shall consider her only in so far as she specifically relates to
the Canon and the Pope.
H. B. Charlton was probably overhasty in his apodictic con¬
clusion that the historical Giuseppe Caponsacchi and Pompilia
Franceschini, if not guilty of adultery, were at least culpably
dishonest in their testimony. But he wisely notes the relative
value of such a conclusion:
If the test of The Ring and the Book is what Browning
stated it to be--namely its veracious repristination of
an actual event,--it fails. But the test is entirely
irrelevant. . . . Browning's Pompilia and Caponsacchi are
immeasurably more important than their historic counter¬
parts. They are a great poet's vision of spiritual
achievements within the reach of the human soul. They
are a sublime assertion of what man may make out of life.
The truth of them is the absolute conviction of their
ideal possibility which the poet's poetry gives to his
poetic fictions. Browning's Pompilia and his Caponsacchi
are true, though they never existed, least of all in the
man and woman bearing their names in the records of the
 244

Roman murder-case.^
The most significant thing which every one of the speakers,
including himself, says about Caponsacchi is: "He is a priest."
He is a hero or an adulterer, a saint or a gigolo; but always he
is these and a priest. His priesthood acts as inhibition,
scandal, or inspiration, but it is always there, always affecting
the judgments of the reader, of the other characters, and of
Caponsacchi himself. His every thought and act is crucially
defined or colored by his priestly profession, so that it becomes
one of the poet's principal devices for intensifying the interest
and irony inherent in Caponsacchi's portrait, the pathos and sub¬
limity of his love for Pompilia, and the satiric humor with which
Browning comments on the Canon's ecclesiastical surroundings.
That Browning realized this seems clear from the fact that
while in the Old Yellow Book Caponsacchi is described as a sub¬
deacon and not a priest, the poem definitely states and reiterates
that he is a priest. Now while a subdeacon is as bound to celi-

Poetry and Truth: An Aspect of Browning's The Rina and the

Book," BJRL, XXVIII (1944), 57.
g
A single mention of Caponsacchi as subdeacon occurs in the
poem, VI.344. The question of the Canon's real status is a minor
but vexing one. In the documents in favor of Guido, Caponsacchi
is consistently referred to as a "priest" (see, for example, OYB,
ix, 10, cv, 89; cxi, 94). In documents accusing Guido, however,
including the Canon's own affidavit, Caponsacchi is "no priest,"
"merely a subdeacon" (xc, 75; clxxix-clxxx, 148). It is diffi¬
cult to understand how he could have been appointed a canon before
he had been ordained to the priesthood. According to Griffin,
Life, p. 315, n. 4, Caponsacchi was baptized on March 22, 1673*
which, according to Italian custom, would have been probably no
later than a day or two after his birth; and, according to Hodell,
OYB, p. 29/, n. 26, he became a canon on November 26, 1693. At
this time he would not have even fulfilled the age requirement for
the subdiaconate as legislated by the Council of Trent, that the
candidate have completed his twenty-first year (Sess. 23, c. 12).
 245

bacy as a priest, the idea of the subdiaconate brings to the

popular mind none of the potentially dramatic connotations of the
priesthood. Browning's change though seemingly slight, was actu¬
ally quite important for the increased interest it generated and
maintained in the Canon's distinctive clerical situation.
The elements of Caponsacchi's portrait are derived from four
general sources: (1) the "others," including the poet's persona
and Guido; (2) Caponsacchi in his own self-revealing monologue;
(3) Pompilia as both source and object of his love; and (4) the
Pope as final ratifier of the finished portrait. And in the
minds of each of these four, Caponsacchi's priesthood is the cru¬
cial factor.
At the first mention of Caponsacchi in Book I, the dramatic
contrasts inseparable from his clerical situation are unmistakably
pointed out:
The young frank handsome courtly Canon, now.
The priest, declared the lover of the wife.
He who, no question, did elope with her.
For certain bring the tragedy about,
Giuseppe Caponsacchi.
(1.378-82)
"Handsome courtly Canon," "priest . . . lover," "elope . . .
tragedy"--the ironic emphasis is immediate and is summed up by the
poet's enigmatic question: "his strange course / I' the matter,
was it right or wrong or both?" (1.382-83). The priest reappears
a moment later when Arezzo is described as

8 (cont d)p^|^ priesthood, the completion of the twenty-

fifth year is required (ibid.), which for an extraordinary reason,
but only by papal dispensation, can be anticipated by as much as
eighteen months. At the time of his first contact with Pompilia
in early 1697, Caponsacchi was nearing the completion of his
twenty-third year.
 246

The man's [Guido's] town.

The woman's [Pompilia's] trap and cage and
torture-place,
Also the stage where the priest played his part,
A spectacle for angels , . .
(1.505-08)
Here, in the beginning, the triangular mise en scene is presented
explicit and complete, with a priest as the anomalous third party,
whose "part" is summed up by another ambiguous comment which is
equally apt for praise or blame: "A spectacle for angels." The
poet's imaginary preview next touches Castelnuovo, as he describes
the catastrophic locale, "Where they three, for the first time and
the last, / Husband and wife and priest, met face to face" (1.508-
09). The poet's intent is obvious in the emphasized uniqueness
of the occasion, and the tensely repeated conjunctions.
As the poet of Book I describes Caponsacchi's rescue of
Pompilia, the ambiguous "young frank handsome courtly Canon" of
line 378 has become the heroic and idealized "young good beauteous
priest / Bearing away the lady in his arms" (580-81) like the
legendary St. George. Against the saintly champion and his lady
stand the powers of darkness: Guido, "the main monster" (545);
his brothers, "Two obscure goblin creatures" (543) who "[Make] as
they were priests, to mock God more" (546), intent upon their in¬
fernal machinations against God's saints, with "Fire laid and
cauldron set, the obscene ring traced" (575); and finally, Guido
and his band of assassins, "a pack of were-wolves" (605).
The priest-hero's new stature is more literally explained.
Until the time of his flight with Pompilia, Caponsacchi had lived
the grotesquely ambivalent life of "A courtly spiritual Cupid" (I.
1017). At the first trial he had stood before his judges and
"cut the conscious figure of a fool," "bashful," "hesitating for
 247

an answer" (1.1056-58), still unclear as to his motives, and only

partially appreciating the sacred inviolability of his beloved
Pompilia. But eight months later he appeared before the same
court, and "grown judge himself," he now "speaks rapidly, angrily,
speech that smites"--in truth, "Speaking for God" (1.1059-67).
When Half-Rome, a suspicious husband, begins his comments,
the picture is reversed, and we have Caponsacchi-Lucifer, Pompilia-
Eve, and wronged Guido-Adam (11.166-68). Later he sarcastically
delineates the contrasts between the canon's religious duties and
his alleged transgressions;
And love
Did in a trice turn up with life and light--
The man with the aureole, sympathy made flesh,
The all-consoling Caponsacchi, Sir!
A priest--what else should the consoler be?
With goodly shoulderblade and proper leg,
A portly make and a symmetric shape.
And curls that clustered to the tonsure quite.
This was a bishop in the bud, and now
A canon full-blown so far: priest, and priest
Nowise exorbitantly overworked.
The courtly Christian, not so much Saint Paul
As a saint of Caesar's household.
(11.772-84)
Half-Rome parodies the arguments of Caponsacchi's defenders:
. . . what, it's Caponsacchi means you harm?
The Canon? We caress him, he's the world's,
A man of such acceptance--never dream.
Though he were fifty times the fox you fear.
He'd risk his brush for your particular chick.
When the wide town's his hen-roost!
(11.827-32)
. . . the Canon who. Lord's love.
What with his daily duty at the church.
Nightly devoir where ladies congregate.
Had something else to mind, assure yourself.
Beside Pompilia, paragon though she be.
Or notice if her nose were sharp or blunt!
(11.902-07)
 248

The game continues, as Half-Rome derides "the friendly Canon . . .

the loving one" (11.938), and his "commendable charity / Which
trusteth all" (11.1092-93), even the obvious seductions of a
treacherous wife.
The speaker is bitter over the outcome of the first trial
in which Caponsacchi was judged by his peers: "At Rome, by all
means,--priest to try a priest" (II.1010). For his "say, in¬
discretion, waywardness, / And wanderings," Caponsacchi was slap¬
ped on the wrist and directed to spend the next three years gently
sequestered ("Nowise an exile,--that were punishment") at Civita
Vecchia, where he might "Find out the proper function of a priest"
(11.1161-78). But more likely, as Half-Rome reminds us, the Canon
will spend his leisure-days polishing his Ovidian verses and flirt¬
ing with the local wenches, while at Rome there will be hopes of
borrowing him from Civita Vecchia to play this year's carnival
hero (11.1441-48). For, as he has caustically remarked, "...
there's impunity at Rome / For priests, you know" (11.956-57).
Much of the interest in Caponsacchi's portrait seems to be
summed up in the dramatic irony which is latent in Half-Rome's
remark that the Canon was sequestered to Civita Vecchia to "find
out the proper function of a priest" (11.1172). This "proper
function," according to his judges, was to be discreet and overtly
respectable, whatever the understandable human weaknesses into
which the priest might on occasion fall. For as Other Half-Rome
will say, he is "merely flesh and blood" (III.827). This permis¬
sive attitude, as we shall see, is perverted by Caponsacchi's cyn¬
ical bishop into an open and "proper" cultivation of worldliness
within the priesthood for the supposed benefit of the Church.
Later, Caponsacchi rejects the bishop's concept of the priesthood,
and while seeming to succumb to the influences of a purely human
 249

and physical love (eros), actually, and to some extent unconscious¬

ly, he finds this love to be sublimated into a new and only partial¬
ly understood spiritual love (agape) in which he discovers that his
priesthood has been perfected rather than destroyed or even com-
promised.
Other Half-Rome is a good-natured, compassionate young bach¬
elor, and he judges the case accordingly. He finds in the circum¬
stantial evidence grounds for real doubt as to the chasteness of
Caponsacchi's relationship with Pompilia; but the same evidence
leaves no doubt at all as to Guido's villainy, Pompilia's martyr¬
dom, and the Canon's proper and courageous behavior in rescuing
her. Any liberties he might have taken with the beautiful young
wife are understandable. Like all priests, he is "merely flesh
and blood" (III.827).
Yet there are reasons beyond the literal evidence--these he
calls "charactery"--which make the fugitive couple's story, de¬
spite its inconsistencies, not altogether incredible. And as
Other Half-Rome recalls these perhaps more meaningful "facts"
which an overhasty popular or prejudiced interpretation has ob¬
scured, he reveals new qualities of Caponsacchi's character which
will become the basis for the fuller idealizations of the Canon by
Pompilia and the Pope. Caponsacchi is not only the "young bold
handsome priest," but he can be "q^y grave / At the decent
minute" (III.839-40). That is why "our man the Canon here / Saw,
pitied, loved Pompilia" (III.878-79). He is a man
Whom foes and friends alike avouch, for good
Or ill, a man of truth whate'er betide.
Intrepid altogether, reckless too. . . .
(III.881-83)
Thus Other Half-Rome can argue:
 250

He only was predestinate to save,--

And if they recognized in a critical flash
From the zenith, each the other, her need of him.
His need of . . . say, a woman to perish for.
The regular way o' the world, yet break no vow.
Do no harm save to himself,--if this were thus?
How do you say? It were improbable;
So is the legend of my patron-saint.
(III.1040-47)
The crucial heart of the love story, as Browning conceived
it, was that Caponsacchi should have suddenly realized that
Pompilia was the one woman he needed to complete his life, and yet
that his love should be consummated in ultimate self-sacrifice--
thus fulfilling both his priesthood and the "regular way of the
world."
That such a high-souled reconciliation of opposites is im¬
possible is the "shriek" of the brutish Guido and his unimaginative
allies:
Here is the wife avowedly found in flight.
And the companion of her flight, a priest;
She flies her husband, he the church his spouse:
What is this?
(III.1109-12)
And it is in the same key that Other Half-Rome can re-create
Guido's anticipatory gloatings as he prepared to rush upon the un¬
suspecting couple and slay them:
Take notice all the world!
These two dead bodies, locked still in embrace,--
The man is Caponsacchi and a priest.
The woman is my wife: they fled me late.
Thus have I found and you behold them thus.
And may judge me: do you approve or no?
(III.1233-38)
But when he meets them he is cowed by the demeanor of "the priest,
alive / And alert, calm, resolute and formidable" (III.1248-49).
 251

Instead of the valorous and indignant husband, Guido can only

play the cuckold who is humiliatingly compelled to ask for arrest
and suit--"0h mouse-birth of that mountain-like revenge!" (III.1316).
The monologist's picture of Caponsacchi at the first trial is
already idealized, anticipating perhaps the Canon's later perform¬
ance. He is master of the occasion and boldly declares his wil¬
lingness to assume the personal sacrifice which might result from
his guiltless fidelity to his priesthood and to Pompilia:
Then Caponsacchi with a grave grand sweep
O' the arm as though his soul warned baseness off--
"If as a man, then much more as a priest
I hold me bound to help weak innocence:
If so my worldly reputation burst.
Being the bubble it is, why, burst it may:
Blame I can bear though not blameworthiness."
(III.1343-49)
The brilliantly clever but uncommitted "Tertium Quid" weighs
both sides of the multiple disputes, but carefully maintains his
cynical neutrality. And as for his attitude toward Caponsacchi:
Pray, in what rubric of the breviary
Do you find it registered—the part of a priest
Is--that to right wrongs from the church he skip.
Go journeying with a woman that's a wife.
And be pursued, o'ertaken, and captured . . . how?
In a lay-dress, playing the kind sentinel
Where the wife sleeps. . . .
(IV.949-55)
Like most of the others, Tertium Quid, for all his acumen, is pre
occupied, not only by the seeming incompatibility of Caponsacchi's
priesthood with his allegedly gallant zeal, but also with the fact
that the Canon had changed to lay clothes for the flight. With
his vision limited to the superficies of things, he is unable or
unwilling to see or imagine anything except what is most obvious.
And yet Caponsacchi's change of dress was a normally sensible pre¬
caution for a situation which, whether his ultimate intentions
 252

were honorable or not, required swift vigorous action and, even

more important, anonymity.
The juggling monologist can retell Guido's arguments with
great zest, and seizing upon his strongest point, and with an ef¬
fective emphasis upon the accused wife-stealer's religious profes¬
sion, dramatically exclaims:
. . . read!
Letters from wife to priest, from priest to wife,--
Here they are, read and say where they chime in
With the other tale, superlative purity
O' the pair of saints! I stand or fall by these.
(IV.1032-36)
Count Guido in his own monologues saves most of his venom
for his wife, and is relatively brief and restrained in his refer¬
ences to the Canon, except to reaffirm his charge of adultery.
He derides the priest who "thought the nearest way / To his church
was some half-mile round by my door" (V.937-38). He demands that
the judges "Punish the adultery of wife and priest!" (V.12a2),
while he alternately accepts and rejects Pompilia's son as either
his or "the priest's bastard and none of mine!" (V.1524).^ The
desperate prisoner takes a calculated risk at insulting his judges
when he boldly predicts that if he is executed, posterity will ac¬
cuse them of conniving with clerical immorality by claiming they
made common cause
With the cleric section, punished in myself
Maladroit uncomplaisant laity.
Defective in behaviour to a priest
Who claimed the customary partnership
r the house and the wife.
(V.1849-54)
And as peroration Guido prays for a new Rome, grown to Utopia-like
perfection because of his judges' brave decision; a Rome where
9
See also V.1954, 1957, and 2015-17.
there are
Priests
No longer men of Belial, with no aim
At leading silly women captive, but
Of rising to such duties as yours now. . . .
(V.2033-36)
Caponsacchi's own Book VI is a speech of wonderful variety,
in which the Canon's withering scorn against his judges and fellow
ecclesiastics and his fierce outbreaks against Guido are balanced
by the tenderest worshipful love of Pompilia and frankest revela¬
tion of himself. Yet, as he alternately resigns himself or be¬
moans the tragic turn of events, he can never detach himself from
his life's central fact: "I am a priest" (VI.60). A priest who
would have refused to act at Arezzo as he had done, "a priest who
fears the world," would there and then indeed have been the "frib¬
ble," "coxcomb," "fool," and "knave" that he was accused of being
(VI.87-88). But after the capture at Castelnuovo, when the self-
blinded Law insisted it "wanted no priest's intrusion"--his as¬
serted intentions seemed "too manifest a subterfuge!"--then and
only then was he, in terrible truth, "priest, coxcomb, fribble and
fool" (VI.94-98). For
I gave place
To you, and let the law reign paramount:
I left Pompilia to your watch and ward.
And now you point me--there and thus she lies!
(VI.101-04)
But now the Law has an opportunity at least partially to redeem its
error and finally recognize in Caponsacchi's priesthood the grounds
of a higher legitimacy that justified his attempted rescue. It is
because he was a "priest and trained to live my whole life long /
On beauty and splendor, solely at their source, / God" (VI.122-24),
that he was uniquely able to comprehend the beauty and splendour of
 254

Pompilia. Thus he challenges the court:

Better late than never, law
You understand of a sudden, gospel too
Has a claim here, may possibly pronounce
Consistent with my priesthood, worthy Christ,
That I endeavored to save Pompilia?
(VI.136-40)
Caponsacchi insists on his family's pre-eminence in Arezzo,
and therefore on the distinction between his priestly vocation and
that of the Franceschini brothers: he was not "thrust into the
Church, because / O' the piece of bread one gets there" (VI,223-24),‘
but became a priest to fulfil a family duty and, like his famous and
saintly ancestor, succeed to Arezzo's bishopric.But as he grew '
older he came to feel that priestly celibacy was too much for his
weak flesh and sought to refuse ordination. A devilish bishop,
however, convinced the young neophyte that his scruples were ludi¬
crous: such a vow need not be taken ad The dutiful
employment of his talents for making madrigals and courting wealthy

lOn
The Bishop(s) of Arezzo is (are) a source of ambiguity in
th6 pOGrn, ^ First of all, Arezzo is a diocese, and therefore its
ecclesiastical superior was historically a bishop, not an arch¬
bishop. He is so titled in the OYB, p. 307, n. 139. Browning,
however, refers to an archbishop to whom Pompilia unsuccessfully
appealed for help. But Caponsacchi's Arezzo superior is called a
bishop (VI.268), while reference is made simultaneously to an arch¬
bishop, seemingly also in Arezzo, whom the Canon should visit and
flatter (VI.354 and 458). Actually these would have been one and
the same Bishop of Arezzo. Browning's imaginary multiplication
was probably an instance of his unconscious "the more the merrier"
attitude—with literal accuracy less important than a full canvas.
Never having attended a ceremony of ordination to the sub-
diaconate in which clerical celibacy is promised. Browning describes’
the promise as something "read": "Just a vow to read'" (VI 2631
Rough rapid reading" (VI.275). Browning is confusing the'profes-
sion of vows by religious, where a formula is publicly read and
signed by each taker of vows, with the ordination to the subdiaco-
I

255

ladies can be his sufficient and proper contribution to the

Church's self-contemplating vanity as well as to her financial
glory. "So I became a priest." And for three or four years
Caponsacchi plied a singularly successful double life, "both read
the breviary / And wrote the rhymes," as eager to preach in the
Pi eve as to play at fashion arbiter for the delighted ladies he
was assigned to cultivate. He in fact outdid the Bishop's pre¬
scriptions, managing to remain faithful at least to the letter if
not the spirit of his priestly obligations, including celibacy, as
well as to his co-curricular social-politicking (VI.332-43).
But one evening at the theatre he saw for the first time "A
lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad" (VI.395), Pompilia.
She turned, looked his way, and "smiled the beautiful sad strange
smile" (VI.408). All night and the next day "did the gaze endure,
/ Burnt to my brain, as sunbeam thro' shut eyes" (VI.430-31).
Caponsacchi was never to be the same again. Within a week, not
fully understanding why, he had resolved to abandon his misshapen
way of life and devote himself unrestrictedly to his vocation.
Reprimanded by the startled Bishop for playing "truant in the
church all day long," the Canon's acute retort signaled his new
apperception: "Sir, what if I turned Christian?" (VI.469). Rumor
has it, he continued, that "There's a strange Pope ... a priest
who thinks. / ... to Rome I go. / I will live alone, one does so
in a crowd, / And look into my heart a little" (VI.473-76).

11 (cont d)|^g^g diocesan or secular clerics, such as

Caponsacchi. In the latter ceremony, nothing is "read." The
presiding bishop or his representative calls each of the ordinands
by name; whereupon the candidate replies "Adsum" ("Present") and
takes one step forward as a symbol of his free response to the
Church's call or "vocation," and his willingness to accept the ob¬
ligations of subdeacon, including perpetual celibacy.
 256

But he was deeply troubled, as he frankly tells the judges,

by the seeming irreconcilability of his new priestly resolve and
the strange attractiveness of Pompilia. Deep in thought one
evening he mused,
thinking how my 1ife
Had shaken under me,--broke short indeed
And showed the gap 'twixt what is, what should be,--
And into what abysm the soul may slip.
Leave aspiration here, achievement there.
Lacking omnipotence to connect extremes--
Thinking moreover ... oh, thinking, if you like.
How utterly dissociated was I
A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife
Of Guido,--just as an instance to the point.
Nought more,--how I had a whole store of strengths
Eating into my heart, which craved employ.
And she, perhaps, need of a finger's help,--
And yet there was no way in the wide world
To stretch out mine and so relieve myself.
(VI.480-94)
Then began the confusing episode of the love letters which
Caponsacchi avows were forged by the fiendish Guido. Curiosity
and a sense of adventure, as well as a growing pity for the vic¬
timized young wife, induced him to play along with Guido's wiles.
In the course of the exchange the Canon made his position quite
clear, and thinking to frustrate the mad husband's plot, but with
perhaps an overly-rationalized self-confidence, he bravely wrote:
In vain do you solicit me.
I am a priest: and you are wedded wife.
Whatever kind of brute your husband prove.
I have scruples, in short. Yet should you
really show
Sign at the window ... but nay, best be good!
My thoughts are elsewhere.
(VI.589-94)
But he did go to her house, thinking he intended only to
foil Guido's intrigue, but was surprised to find Pompilia waiting
 257

for him upon the terrace. Before he could explain, she was
chiding him for his presumption, "That you a priest, can dare
love me, a wife." "Such wickedness were deadly to us both" (VI.
718, 723). Her own desperate need, however, inspired a bold
confidence: "But good true love would help me now so much-- / I
tell myself, you may mean good and true" (VI.724-25). She told
him her story, more poignant now because of her recently discovered
pregnancy, and warmly expressed her new trust in the Canon's "ex¬
cess of love / Enough to save my life with, all I need" (VI.792-93).
For two days Caponsacchi wrestled with his dilemma. By some
strange alchemy, the more concern he felt for Pompilia, the more
consciously appreciative he became of his role as God's priest,
"This new thing that had been struck into me / By the look of the
lady" (VI.996-97). But he still did not understand. Thinking
only to put aside the scandalous thoughts of a priest-lover, he
resolved not to act at all on her plea, but merely to visit her
again as priest-comforter. But the sublime potential of Pompilia's
love was more than he dreamed. One more trustful look and a brief
word, and he "bade all doubt adieu." Recalling the legend of the
Apostle Thomas and "Our Lady's girdle," Caponsacchi exclaimed: "I
too have seen a lady and hold a grace" (VI.1088-89).
As he tells the judges of his flight from Arezzo with
Pompilia, he keeps assuring them:
You know this is not love. Sirs,--it is faith.
The feeling that there's God, he reigns and rules
Out of this low world: that is all; no harm!
(VI.1173-75)
Yet "she called me / Far beyond 'friend'" (VI.1584-85). Theirs
was a love that he has no human word for. He can only describe
their relationship in the sacramental terms of his own "housing"
 258

12
and "unhousing" of the Lord:
I never touched her with my finger-tip
Except to carry her to the couch, that eve,
Against my heart, beneath my head, bowed low.
As we priests carry the paten.
(VI.1591-94)
Certainly, their flight was the result of no ordinary infatuation,
but because God willed it so--
The spark of truth was struck from out our souls —
Made all of me, descried in the first glance.
Seem fair and honest and permissible love
O' the good and true—as the first glance told me
There was no duty patent in the world
Like daring try be good and true myself.
Leaving the shows of things to the Lord of Show
And Prince o' the Power of the Air.
(VI.1786-94)
The Canon despairs of being understood, and once again hurls
his contempt at the judges for their "misapprehending ignorance /
O' the human heart, much more the mind of Christ." He proclaims
that he "did bow, was blessed / By the revelation of Pompilia."
If they must "mouth and mumble and misinterpret" such an admission
and can understand no more than "The priest's in love," then "have
it the vulgar way!" But at the same time "Unpriest me ... no
longer priest / And fit companion for the like of you" (VI.1835-
45).

At the monologue's close Caponsacchi has recovered his com¬

posure and declares that he means to live his life as an honorable
priest, since Pompilia's death, more effectively than his promised
celibacy, prevents any further human contact with her. He can
face his separation with equanimity, and "pass content" his life
until death. But the painfulness of his loss and the immensity
12
See Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Habit of Perfection."
 259

of God's legitimately demanded sacrifice come near to overwhelming

him: "0 great, just, good God! Miserable me!"
The dying Pompilia is just as reluctant as Caponsacchi to
call their unique relationship "love" because it has been so vul¬
garly misunderstood:
... a priest--love.
And love me! Well, yet people think he did.
I am married, he has taken priestly vows.
They know that, and yet go on, say, the same,
"Yes, how he loves you!"
(VII.162-66)
As far as she is concerned, Giuseppe Caponsacchi s integrity,
even his sanctity, is unsurpassed and should be self-evident:
That man, you misinterpret and misprise--
The glory of his nature, I had thought.
Shot itself out in white light, blazed the truth
Through every atom of his act with me:
Yet where I point you, through the crystal shrine.
Purity in quintessence, one dew-drop.
You all descry a spider in the midst.

Pompilia is resolved to devote the few breaths which remain to her

"to disperse the stain" that has spotted the "lustrous and pel¬
lucid soul" of the noble Canon (VII .927-29).
She describes the fateful carnival night at the theatre and
her first impression of him as he sat in his box, silent, grave,
/ Solemn almost" (VII.982-83)i and how she immediately contraste
him with the brutish Guido crouching ominously behind her: "Sup¬
pose that man had been instead of this!" (VII.1000). Guido rough¬
ly accused her of encouraging the Canon's attentions, his jealousy
aggravated by Caponsacchi's profession: "Does he presume because
he is a priest?" (VII.1033).
For more than six weeks Pompilia rejected the supposed suit
 260

of the Canon as it was reported to her by Margherita, her treacher¬

ous waiting maid. But on a sun-drenched April morning she sud¬
denly awoke to a realization of the new life within her and deter¬
mined once and for all to flee Arezzo and return to Rome. She
recalled that when she had earlier and unsuccessfully appealed to
Canon Conti for aid he had politically refused, but not before
mentioning, half-playfully. Canon Caponsacchi: "he's your true
Saint George / To slay the monster, set the Princess free" (VII.
1312-13). Along with her prattle the night before, Margherita
had reported the Canon's rumored journey to Rome. And so Pompilia
decided to seek his assistance. He was summoned, and from the
terrace Pompilia addressed her plea in terms of a prayerful claim
upon Caponsacchi's priestly duty:
If it be truth,—why should I doubt it truth?--
You serve God specially, as priests are bound.
And care about me, stranger as I am.
So far as vyish my good, —that miracle
I take to intimate He wills you serve
By saving me,—what else can He direct?
(VII.1415-20)
Caponsacchi replied with god-like resoluteness:
The first word I heard ever from his lips.
All himself in it,--an eternity
Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth
0 the soul that then broke silence—"I am yours."
(VII.1430-33)
She was thrilled and knew it was her "babe to be" who had inspired
her to trust in God and wait for the priest: '"Leave God the way!'
/ And the way was Caponsacchi" (VII.1441-42).
She goes on to tell the judges her version of the flight from ’
Arezzo and capture at Castelnuovo, with Caponsacchi's the "angel's
hand . . . sent to help" (VII.1601), and Caponsacchi the "man [who]
restored my soul" (VII.1651). He is her lover, truly, but a priest
 261

also their love an ineffable, unworldly one, to be perfected only

in heaven. Caponsacchi meanwhile must remain faithful to his
priesthood on earth:
He is a priest;
He cannot marry therefore, which is right:
I think he would not marry if he could.
Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit.
Mere imitation of the inimitable:
In heaven we have the real and true and sure.
(VII.1804-09)
So, let him wait God's instant men call years;
Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul.
Do out the duty!
(VII.1824-26)
The Pope in Book X continues the idealization of Caponsacchi
— in, through, and even beyond his priesthood. He recognizes the
uniqueness of the Canon's case, transcending as it does the normal¬
ly foreseen eventualities of the Law as well as all other conven¬
tional human criteria—a spectacle indeed both to men and angels:
Pompilia wife, and Caponsacchi priest.
Are brought together as nor priest nor wife
Should stand. . . .
(X.657-59)
Thus stand the wife and priest, a spectacle,
I doubt not to unseen assemblage there.
(X.663-64)
Why repine?
What does the world, told truth, but lie the more?
(X.670-71)
In both Pompilia and Caponsacchi, God broke through man-made
boundaries and "showed for once / How He would have the world go
white" (X.679-80). Their love for each other had jointly created
"their new noble nature" (X.684) and a new kind of courage that is
normally neither a wife's nor a priest's. It is, the Pope de¬
clares, this newness "born of each / Champion of truth, the priest
 262

and wife I praise" (X.681-82), that hopefully can match the

world's evil. In effect, he proclaims Pompilia's imaginary
canonization and seeks the comfort of her heavenly intercession as
he turns to her part in the tragedy:
First of the first.
Such I pronounce Pompilia, then and now
Perfect in whiteness: stoop thou down, my child.
Give one good moment to the poor old Pope
Heart-sick at having all his world to blame.
(X.999-1003)
But not far from Pompilia in heaven's and the Pope's esteem
is Caponsacchi, "my warrior-priest. . . . Irregular noble 'scape¬
grace—son the same!" (X.1091-95). Caponsacchi has given the
Church far more than he has received from her. When the red-
stockinged prelates, though sworn to her service and rewarded with
pay and privilege, had lost their taste for championing God's
cause, this hero sprang forth. For him, "Thank heaven as I do!"
(X.1151). Was the motley-disguise any more discordant with "that
symmetric soul inside my son" (X.1130) than the oft-betrayed ec¬
clesiastical garb would have been? In his reverie. Innocent ad¬
dresses the Canon: "In thought, word and deed, / How throughout
all thy warfare thou wast pure, / I find it easy to believe" (X.
1164-66). And if perchance during his strange adventure he ex¬
perienced a strong carnal passion fired by "the perfect beauty of
the body and soul / Thou savedest," then
Thank God a second time!
Why comes temptation but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his foot.
And so be pedestaled in triumph?
(X.1179-82)
Caponsacchi is a far superior man and priest, a more effective
champion of the faith, than either the calculating honor-laden
Archbishop or the ascetic but cowardly Father Romano. Disgusted-
 263

ly the Pope exclaims: "These are the Christians not the worldlings,
I not / The sceptics, who thus battle for the faith!" (X.1481-82).
j But he consoles himself:
. . . see this priest, this Caponsacchi, stung
At the first summons . . .

All blindness, bravery and obedience!--blind?

Ay, as a man would be inside the sun.
Delirious with the plenitude of light
Should interfuse him to the finger-ends--
Let him rush straight, and how shall he go wrong?
(X.1551-60)
Throughout these later monologues--Caponsacchi's, Pompilia's,
and the Pope's--there is an increasing emphasis on the spirituali¬
zation of the love of man and woman. Conceived and written during
the years following Elizabeth Browning's death, the love tale of
The Bing and the Book enabled Browning to articulate his desire
to reconcile the fact of his wife's physical absence with his des¬
perate desire to remain faithful to her in anticipation of their
reunion in a future eternity. Not that there was any denigration
of love's physical aspects--Browning was not a Platonic lover--but
rather, the temporal imperfection of physical love on earth urged
him on to what he considered a future and more perfect idealization
when the love of man and woman will be mysteriously fused into the
love of God.
Commentators have long pointed out the parallels between
Browning's doctrine of love and Dante's. The Italian poet, as
J. E. Shaw wrote,
succeeded in framing a philosophical theory of love, in
which the love of woman was the most important feature.
His belief in the essential unity of love in the universe
conferred dignity on all its manifestations, and sexual
love,--which in animals is mere fleshly lust, but in man
is always suffused with spirit,--was to him only a stage
 264

13
on the way to the conscious love of the highest good.
Likewise, Browning could imagine Caponsacchi turning from his
frivolous worldly dalliance to the one devotion which summoned
all the good in him, and which became a worshipping mystical pas¬
sion. For so it had been with Browning himself. He had needed
his Beatrice-Pompilia to guide him from the love of earth to the
love of heaven. In "One Word More" he told of his acquisition:
Oh, their Dante of the dread inferno.
Wrote one song--and in my brain I sing it.
Drew one angel—borne, see, on my bosom!
As Whitla remarks. Browning and Dante were drawn together by
"the cherishing of the beloved, both in love as the means of full
expression, and after the beloved's death, as the means of poetic
and religious inspiration," as we see in "Prospice," the "Epilogue"
to Dramatis Personae^ and later in Ferishtah's Fancies^ as well as
14
in The Ring and the Book. But the Italian and the English
poets were also united in their convictions that, beyond and after
poetry and its inspiration, there awaited for them a still more
perfect love-consummation. In 1876 Browning wrote to console a
woman who thought she was dying: "Dante wrote what I will tran¬
scribe from my wife's Testament, wherein I recorded it fourteen
years ago, 'Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it
is, that from this life I shall pass to another better, there, where
that lady lives of whom my soul was enamoured.

13
"The 'Donna Angelicata' in The Ring and the Book." PMLA,
XLI (1926), 78.
14
See The Central Truths pp. 100-101.
15
See Letters^ ed. Hood, pp. 171-72. The Dante quotation
is from the Convivio. "Fourteen years ago" was 1862, when Brown¬
ing was beginning The Ring and the Book. For another use of the
identical quotation, %ee La Saisiaz^ 11.214-15.
 265

The lust and sadistic avarice of Guido stand in brutal con¬

trast to such timeless devotion, and underscore the reluctance of
both Caponsacchi and Pompilia to admit that their own Dantean rela¬
tionship is in any sense "love." Caponsacchi especially resents
any synonymous identification of his worshipful "enamourment" with
the murderer's marriage, any vulgar lies that "make as if I loved
his wife, / In the way he called love" (VI.182-83)Pompilia
had resisted her husband's loveless advances; to the extent that
she failed, her soul as well as his was polluted by such carnal
union and has now been needfully disinfected "as by fire" by
Guido's murderous dagger (VII.1733-39). Guido had degraded all
womanhood in her; but Caponsacchi, her "saint," had caught a
glimpse of woman's mystery:
I did pray, do pray, in the prayer shall die,
"Oh, to have Caponsacchi for my guide!"
Ever the face upturned to mine, the hand
Holding my hand across the world,--a sense
That reads, as only such can read, the mark
God sets on women, signifying so
She should—shall peradventure--be divine.
(VII.1479-85)
And this, despite their mutual weaknesses and confusions.
In a moment of near-ecstasy Pompilia steps out of her nar¬
rative role to express the timeless nature of her relationship
with the chivalrous Canon: "He was mine, he is mine, he will be
mine" (VII.1442). And a moment later she exclaims: "0 lover of
my life, 0 soldier-saint, / No work begun shall ever pause for
death!" (VII.1769-70). United now with the concept both of eter¬
nity and Caponsacchi's knightly sanctity, she feels free at last
to admit that his worship is truly that of a "lover."

^®For Guido's extended expression of his perverted views on

the nature of marriage, see V.601-984.
 266

Browning's idealization of the Caponsacchi-Pompilia love

theme is most strikingly presented through his versatile utiliza¬
tion of the Perseus-Andromeda myth and its Christian cognate, the
legend of St. George. Light or cynical speakers usually refer
to the flight of Caponsacchi and Pompilia in terms of the illicit
love of Helen and Paris (11.995-1001), and Guido's pursuit is
likened humorously to old Vulcan pursuing Mars to get back his
promiscuous Venus (VI.1431-38; IX.861-63). But whenever Brown¬
ing is representing the "true" interpretation of the story, he
habitually thinks of Caponsacchi in terms of Perseus or St. George,
with Pompilia the helpless innocent, and Guido the devil-dragon.
DeVane has counted at least thirty references in The Ring and the
Book to either the Andromeda myth or its Christian derivative.
Browning's religio-heroic characterization of Pompilia and
Caponsacchi goes even beyond saintly valor and approaches a kind
of heavenly apotheosis. Pompilia is often referred to in angelic
terms (VI.1492; X.1947); and she specifically, though confusedly,
describes her relations with Caponsacchi as being like those of the
angels in heaven, who "marry never, no, nor give / In marriage"
(Vll.1818-19). Finally, Pompilia is frequently identified or
identifies herself with the Virgin Mary: "Our Lady of all the
sorrows" (VI.695); a Madonna by Rafael (VI.887-900); "the poor
Virgin that 1 used to know / At our street-corner in a lonely
niche" (Vll.76-77); and "1 felt like Mary" (Vll.1676). Hodell
sees a specific reference to the Virgin Birth in Pompilia's emo¬
tional denial of her infant son's paternity: "No father that he

See William DeVane, "The Virgin and the Dragon," Yale Re-
vieWj XXXVll (1947-48), 33-46. This article is a comprehensive
and useful discussion of what DeVane calls Browning's "private
myth."
 267

ever knew at all, / Nor ever had--no, never had, I say!" (VII.90-
1 fi
91). Caponsacchi is the Christmas "star" which leads to her
own "House o' the Babe" (VII.1434-36). Certainly the historical
coincidence of Gaetano's birth and Pompilia's murder with the
Christmas season of 1697-98 is as symbolically significant as
Browning's deliberate antedating of the flight from Arezzo to April
23, 1697, St. George's Day. In addition to the Christmas Marian
19
allusions, there is perhaps, as E. D. H. Johnson suggests, a
further reference to Mary, an unconscious recollection of the As¬
sumption, in Pompilia's final words: "And I rise."
Caponsacchi is once compared with and contrasted to St.
Augustine (X.1922); and he associates himself with the Apostle,
St. Thomas (VI.1083). Pompilia relates him to St. Joseph, Mary's
husband and protector, both by her emphasis upon his name, "Giusep-
pe-Maria Caponsacchi" (VII.935), and in her prayer, "No, by Saint
Joseph and the Holy Ghost!" (VII.1177). He is Michael fighting
Lucifer (VII.1204), and a nameless guardian angel (VII.1601).
His being falsely accused of adultery is paralleled to the accusa¬
tions leveled against Christ by the Pharisees: "He hath a devil"
(VII.1468-71).
For such idealizations both of Caponsacchi and of his love
for Pompilia, the Canon's obligation to celibacy provided the poet

^®See OYB, p. 281 and p. 296, n. 22. Hodell confuses the

Virgin Birth of Christ (i.e.. His miraculous conception in the
womb of Mary without the agency of a human father) and the Immacu¬
late Conception of Mary (i.e., her exemption from original sin from
the first moment of her conception in the womb of her mother).
The Fisc makes a cynical reference to Gaetano's possibly fatherless
birth in IX.1318ff.
^^See "Robert Browning's Pluralistic Universe," UTQ^ XXXI
(1961-62), 35.
 268

with a built-in dramatic device. It was because of the priest¬

hood that Browning's Caponsacchi attained his unique heroic
stature. The fact that he was a priest provided rational grounds
for his internal dilemmas, for the multiple ambiguities following
upon his eventual actions, and for the sustained narrative in¬
terest they evoked; and ultimately made appropriate and believable
his hope for a mystical love-union. The incompleteness, or, as
Browning would have said, the "imperfection," of his physical union
with Pompilia became an ironically necessary condition for the
earthly anticipation of his idealized, extra-temporal spiritual
union. The poet was thereby able to maintain in his character a
subtle and dramatically interesting equilibrium of both priest and
lover. Also, Caponsacchi's love, perforce, ought to have been
spiritual and have transcended the flesh if he was to remain faith¬
ful to his priesthood. Browning, though decrying ascetical celi¬
bacy, still demanded fidelity once such a promise had been made.
None of his clerics who violate chastity or celibacy are in any
sense admirable. In fact, their unchaste infidelity is usually a
prime point of Browning's attack and ridicule. Only Fra Lippo
Lippi is at all tolerated, and he only because, as the poet tells
the friar's story, he pronounced his vows before he was of age.
Having thus vindicated the public honor of his hero and heroine.
Browning was at the same time enabled to express his personal creed
in a love that could overcome physical separation.
The most succinct and climactic characterizations of the
ideal Caponsacchi are Pompilia's "0 soldier-saint" (VII.1769), and
the Pope's "my warrior-priest" (X.1091). These two symbolic epi¬
thets, though each occurs only once, function as powerful artistic
explicitations of the dominant themes of both the plot and its
hero. Uniting as they do the notions of religious and chivalric
 269

heroism, they effectively connote Caponsacchi's exemplification

of Browning's doctrine of spiritual love, and also expressly link
it to the poet's pervading and closely related belief in the
superiority of momentary intuition to reasoning. Caponsacchi's
first sight of Pompilia was enough to transform his life. He
became immediately capable of a new and truer love as well as a
holier mode of priestly existence. In a "predestinate . . .
critical flash" (III.1040-41) he understood more of both earth and
heaven than either the lustful husband or the professional reli¬
gionists. Such an opportunity required impulsive action on the
part of the lovers so that the moment of happiness be secured,
whatever the consequences. "The spark of truth was struck from
out [their] souls" (VI.1787) and immediately acknowledged as the
will of God. Pompilia and Caponsacchi did not merely look and
wait, but they acted on the stimulus, seized their good moment, and
thus redeemed the time--unlike the Duke and the Lady in The Statue
and the Bust" who only looked, and therefore justly suffered a
memorialized eternity of frustration. Pompilia summarizes Capon¬
sacchi 's moment of truth: "how holily he dared the deed! (VII.
1784). Daring and holiness are essential marks of the "soldier-
saint" and the "warrior-priest."
On the other hand, a kind of tragic failure ensues when on a
second occasion Caponsacchi did not act intuitively, grasp the
"moment," and kill Guido at Castelnuovo:
I bow my head, bend to the very dust.
Break myself up in shame of faultiness.
I had him one whole moment, as I said--
As I remember, as will never out
O' the thoughts of me, —I had him in arm s reach
There,--as you stand. Sir, now you cease to sit,--
I could have killed him ere he killed his wife.
And did not: he went off alive and well
 270

And then effected this last feat--through me!

(VI.1859-67)
His reluctance to kill a man is understandable in terms of his
priesthood. Yet, now in the light of the horrible result of his
restraint, he knows that he would have been justified to strike
and destroy Pompilia's husband as one would a mad dog.
In a brilliant reversal of roles. Browning applies his
philosophy of action to Guido and presents the murder of Pompilia
in terms that rightly would have applied to the purifying vengeance
which Caponsacchi failed to carry out:
. . . now, the chance.
Now, the resplendent minute!

Repair all losses by a master-stroke.

Wipe out the past, all done and left undone,
Svyell the good present to best evermore.
Die into new life, which let blood baptize!
(III.1554-62)
The idealized hero's clear but post factum perception of the
fatal consequences of his short-sighted hesitancy, together with
his remorse and self-blame, certainly approach the dimensions of
the catastrophic epiphany of a classically tragic plot.
Caponsacchi's struggle is not only against the flesh and
spirit within himself the resolution of which he achieves through
an idealized sacrificial fidelity-but he, together with Pompilia,
is set at odds against the entire social establishment, domestic,
political, and ecclesiastical. As Langbaum remarks: "Pompilia
is misled by all the constituted authorities, by 'foolish parents'
and 'bad husband' as the Pope puts it, as well as by the Church and
State in the persons of the Archbishop and the Governor of Arezzo.
Caponsacchi is induced to accept ordination for unworthy motives,
20
The Poetry of Experience, p. 113.
 271

and seduced by his avaricious superior to neglect his religious

obligations and pander to the tastes of wealthy ladies. The
rumor that there is in Rome a new Pope, "a priest who thinks," is
but the exception proving the rule that the overwhelming majority
do not think—at least not the thoughts of Christ, as Caponsacchi
reminds his clerical judges (VI.1836).
Indeed, except for Caponsacchi's later self, the distant and
almost Olympian Pope, and Fra Celestino, the clerics of The Bing
and the Book^ as we have already seen in Chapter III, form a
rogues' gallery of cowards, fops, lechers, and murderers. It is
the Canon, the Pope, and the Friar who are misfits in such a fra¬
ternity. To remain faithful to God and self within the ecclesi¬
astical milieu of The Ring and the Book required literally heroic
sanctity, but an entirely self-made, self-discovered sanctity.
The Church, society, convention, and tradition are unable to as¬
sist—are, in fact, positive hindrances.
In Browning's satire against the evil clerics of the poem,
therefore, there is an increasingly explicit attack on clerical
society--or rather, on institutionalism of all kinds, with ec-
clesiasticism as its most striking Italian Renaissance form. In
his earlier poems the emphasis was almost exclusively upon the
ugly clerical persons themselves as grotesque and entertaining
characters; and though disapproval of the system which had pro¬
duced such religious aberrations was clearly understood, a pointed
attack upon society, religious or otherwise, was not at all in the
forefront of either the poet's or the reader's interest. In "Fra
Lippo Lippi" and "The Bishop Orders his Tomb," for example, the
clerical environment was employed for its rich dramatic effect;
and while at the same time it was mercilessly exposed, it essential
ly remained as setting or background. But in The Ring and the Book
 272

we see a definite tendency toward a kind of historical social

criticism in terms of classic anarchy, as the poet and his pro¬
tagonists openly espouse a universal antinomianism. All laws and
conventions are imperfect, and therefore inadequate to judge or
set standards for heaven's chosen and perfected souls. The situa¬
tion is, as Caponsacchi bitterly declares, universal "rascality /
Enlisted, rampant on the side of hearth / Home and the husband"
(VI.1511-13).
Browning's explicit criticism of society begins directly and
without complication. In Book I he ridicules the complacent at¬
titude of the Roman religious authorities concerning the use or
non-use of judicial torture; but he is soon implying that organized
religion as such is essentially indifferent to human problems: "Ah
but. Religion, did we wait for thee / ... we should wait indeed!"
(1.1002-04).
The portrayal of the numerous confrontations of Caponsacchi
and Pompilia with the poem's minor clerical characters make up a
gallery of masterful satiric miniatures. Cynical bishops, frivo¬
lous canons, the unscrupulous Franceschini brothers--al1 are oc¬
casions for devastating illustrations of the rotten state of the
late seventeenth-century Italian Church.
The articulate spectators, Half-Rome and Other Half-Rome, as
well as Caponsacchi, each discusses in detail the current tolera¬
tion of moral and religious abuses among the clergy. In Capon¬
sacchi 's case, the authorities seem more disturbed by his change
of garb than by the charges of adultery. A cynical smile, a bit
of politic casuistry, and a pro forma reprimand were foolishly
thought to satisfy the demands of justice and restore the "proper
function of a priest." According to the Canon, the judges were
concerned only with whether or not he had acted "discreetly" (VI.
 273

1688), and as a result he was "punished best a little and not too
much" (VI.1710). "In Rome, no wrong but has its remedy" (II.
1203), Half-Rome sarcastically remarks. And his more sympathetic
companion echoes his comment, but with an ominous addition:
Judged the cause:
"All parties may retire, content, we hope."
That's Rome's way, the traditional road of law;
Whither it leads is what remains to tell.
(III.1409-12)
For, as Caponsacchi sadly reminds the judges:
You dealt out law adroitly, . . .[and] those scales,
I meekly bowed to, took my allotment from,
Guido has snatched at, broken in your hands.
Metes to himself the murder of his wife.
Full measure, pressed down, running over now!
(VI.1736-40)
It is the law, civil and religious, which is called by Guido
21
to justify both his sexual brutality and the murder of Pompilia.
The anti-legal implications are particularly prominent in the ar¬
guments of. the two lawyers in Book VIII and Book IX. As Browning
re-creates their arguments, the attorneys make a travesty of the
legal procedure, and seem clearly intended to show that the machin¬
ery of legal justice is as prejudiced as public opinion and profes¬
sional ecclesiasticism, and no more capable of distinguishing be-

^^But note how cleverly Guido can shift his arguments.

While he most often appeals to law and tradition, he does at one
point adopt the very arguments of Caponsacchi and the Pope in an
appeal that he be judged in terms of circumstances which transcend
the law and more accurately reflect the will of God: "No more of
law, a voice beyond the law / Enters my heart, Quis est pro Domino?
(V.1541-42). This is another instance of the poet's ironically
allowing his most sublime ideas to be perverted and parodied by his
villains. The Pope returns Guido's question to its rational con¬
text when, as explicit answer, he permits the Count's execution (X.
2093-2109).
 274

tween right and wrong.

Caponsacchi pleads: "Here's the exceptional conduct that
should claim / To be exceptionally judged" (VI.1824-25). But in¬
stead of the judges and their law meeting the situation, all mean¬
ingful reality seems to have become polarized outside of, separate
from, and untouched by the fictional world of institutional law:
I saved his wife / Against law; against law he slays her now"
(VI.1830-31). The ineffectiveness of law, and the imperfections
inherent in the status quo call for unconventional measures. The
compulsion on which Caponsacchi acts.
That dares the right and disregards alike
The yea and nay of the world
(X.1110-11)
IS, as Johnson remarks,a genuinely heroic one, and is accompa¬
nied by a sense of religious conversion:
Into another state, under new rule
I knew mysfilf was passing swift and sure.
(VI.948-49)
The unconventional love, therefore, of Caponsacchi and
Pompilia took on new dimensions of social as well as personal reli¬
gious importance, and became a symbol of revolution and emancipa¬
tion from all domestic, legal, and religious rational isms—al1 of
which Browning saw as oppressively focused within the ecclesiasti¬
cal situation of seventeenth-century Catholic Italy. Just as
Browning found a handsome celibate most artistically apt to exem¬
plify the religious and chivalric aspects of his doctrine of ideal
love, so also he discovered in the person of the same cleric, whose?
22,
"See E. D. H. Johnson, The Alie Vision^ pp. 123-24.
23
See Johnson, "Robert Browning' Pluralistic Universe,
UTQ, XXXI (1961-62), 29.
 275

unique experiences had touched every corner of the tightly-

structured Italian society, an especially appropriate exploratory
device whereby he could probe and expose that society in its en¬
tirety. The ironies which derive from these situations are the
main sources of the poem's success as a revealing character study,
as a gripping and "sublime detective story," and as an eloquent
religio-social protest. A young frustrated Italian priest finds
motives for new fidelity to his priesthood only after he has be¬
come the ideal exemplar of human love, has involved himself in a
sensational murder-case, and finally has proclaimed the legal im¬
potence and moral bankruptcy of both Church and State.
Historians might quibble over the wholesale "blackwash" of
religious and civil society, and label it as more a caricature
than a portrait; but the fact remains that Browning has force¬
fully and artistically made his point concerning the horrors he
considers inherent in a rigid ecclesiasticism and its allied powers.
Whatever his attestations, it is as a poet, and not as an historian
or social scientist that Browning has personally and imaginatively
enhanced the raw material--the dead and limited "truth"--which he
discovered in the Old Yellow Book. He then created a believable,
and in some respects, a superior religious world—a world that,
along with producing its monsters, is capable of being at least the
occasion for an angelic Pompilia, a modern Saint George, and a
"good" Pope, the Browning-thinking Innocent XII.
 CHAPTER VIII

THE POPE

The Pope's monologue in The Ring and the Book has long been
recognized as Browning's "most complete expression of his philos¬
ophy of life," and "the most comprehensive and most authoritative
expression of Browning's ethical system."^ The Pope himself,
moreover, is clearly one of the poet's greatest characters. More
than any of the other major characters of The Ring and the Book,
the Pope is Browning's creation. The historical Innocent XII is
briefly mentioned five times in the Old Yellow Book,^ but only
once (p. 183) is there any attempt at personal characterization,
and this but a perfunctory and perhaps pro forma compliment: "The
Supreme Pontiff ... is most eager to do what is just." A some¬
what more extended mention of the Pope occurs in the Casanatense
pamphlet, which Browning may or may not have seen.^ Describing
the arrest of Guido and his accomplices after the murders, the
pamphlet reports that the Pope, upon being informed of the purported
crime, "gave commands that, without delay and with all rigor, trial
should be brought, this being a case, which, by reason of the con¬
sequences which might arise from it, should be examined into with
very special attention."^

^William 0. Raymond, The Infinite Moment, p. 137.

(1942-43) ^42-4^^^°'^’ "Browning's Ethical Poetry," BJRL, XXVII

anH Hodell, The Old Yellow Book, pp. 121, 175, 183, 190,
and 223. See also notes 62, 280, and 281.
See above, p.ll8, n. 64.
Hodell, OYB, p. 223. See also Griffin, Life, p. 325.

276
 277

According to Hodell, there is no proof that the Pope took

any more than a routine interest in the case, nor even that he did
anything else than deny Guido a stay of execution on the basis of
his claim to clerical privilege. The sentence, moreover, was by
the court, and not by the Pope, As Hodell observes, "The Pope
[in the OYB] merely took the negative attitude of non-interference."^
As we have often seen before,^ Browning's method of poetic
character re-creation was as eclectic as it was effective. His
characters and their situations evolve out of a specifically con¬
ceived historical context which is more often than not imaginative¬
ly remade to become an implicit exemplum of some current nineteenth-
century religious or political question, as well as to confirm the
poet's personal convictions concerning both the past and the
present. We see these elements operative in Browning's portrait
of the Pope Innocent XII of The Ring and the Book. Browning's
knowledge of history is as detailed as ever--often unsystematic and
sometimes Undigested, but always conscientious and painstaking.
The context of the poem is professedly the ecclesiastically centered
society of Rome and Arezzo in Tuscany during the last decade of the
seventeenth century, the papal reign of Antonio Pignatelli, Inno¬
cent XII. Into his poem Browning incorporated many details both
of real biography and of the general ecclesiastical history of the
1690's.® As we shall see, however, he deliberately exercised his

^OYB^ p. 270.
^See especially above, in the discussion of "The Bishop
Orders his Tomb," pp. 140-43.
^See Leopold Ranke, The Ecolesiastioal and Political History
of the Popes of Rome^ tr. Sarah Austin (2nd ed., London, 1841),
III, 183-87; and Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes From the
Close of the Middle Agesy tr. Ernest Graf, O.S.B., XXXII (London,
1957), 561-690.
 278

poet's prerogative by occasional slight but careful manipulations

9
of detail and emphasis.
Combined within the poem's seventeenth-century context are
also a number of nineteenth-century implications which underlie
Browning's papal presentation. From 1846 to 1870 the Pope and
Italian politics were a center of European attention. As we have
already remarked, the Brownings shared at least partially in the
curious ambivalence that existed in the popular mind between a
spontaneous affection for the well-meaning but increasingly pitiabl
Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti, "Pio Mono," and a long-conditioned dis¬
taste for the benighted and incompetent Roman Catholic potentate.
Pope Pius IX, who stubbornly blocked the way to a united Italy.
We shall examine how Browning employed his unique imaginative
gifts to combine seventeenth- and nineteenth-century elements and
attitudes into a thoroughly Browningesque yet wholly believable new
g
In addition to some changes of fact, there is the partially
anachronistic picture of the wretched state of the Italian clergy.
Papal as well as local. Actually, by 1700 Innocent XII, along
with a number of his immediate predecessors, had succeeded in
eliminating many of the more blatant clerical abuses which had
raged unchecked in the 15th and 16th centuries. Writing during
the reign of Innocent XI (1676-89), the historian and later Angli¬
can bishop, Gilbert Burnet, after severely criticizing Rome's in¬
efficient civil government and its "vast and dead wealth," went on
to report that "there is, at present, a Regularity in Rome, that
deserveth great Commendation" {Burnet's Travels: Or, A Collection
of Letters to the Hon. Robert Boyle, Esq., London, 1737, pp. 158
and 192, Letter IV). But, as we shall see, the underscored con¬
trast between the Pope of the poem and his environment was a neces¬
sary factor for the dominant spirit of frustration and bravely in¬
tuited but vague hope which lie at the heart of the Pope's poetic
characterization. As Browning conceived him. Innocent's greatness
was his ability to survive and rise above his suffocating milieu,
and thus achieve an almost solitary eminence of wisdom and holiness.
 279

Pope Innocent.
The historical Innocent XII was born in 1615 and reigned
from 1691 until his death in 1700. He is justly numbered among
the reform-minded Popes who ruled at Rome intermittently during
the century-and-a-half that followed the Council of Trent. He
was remarkably like his more famous predecessor and acknowledged
namesake, Innocent XI (1676-89), in his struggle against nepotism,
his generosity to the poor, his personal integrity, his simple and
austere life, and his championing of the Church against the Gal-
licanism of Louis XIV. But the later Innocent was worlds apart
in his temperament and modus operandi. Innocent XI tended to be
harsh and imperious, unapproachable and unyielding. His quarrels
with the French were marked by a fulsome exchange of insults and a
free-wheeling barrage of excommunications and interdicts. In¬
nocent XII, however, while just as zealous for reforming the Church
and protecting its rights, was most characterized by his gentle¬
ness and approachability. His policy towards the French was one
Of patient firmness, by which he succeeded in resolving, at least
temporarily, most of the outstanding disputes between France and
the Holy See. His most notable success was to induce Louis XIV
in 1683 to repeal the "Declaration du clerge francais," the royal¬
ly sponsored "declaration of independence" of the French Church,
which had climaxed the clash with Innocent XI. The King's action
was immediately followed by the recantation of the French Bishops
who had acceded to Louis' ecclesiastical absolutism. Relations
between the French Church and the Vatican thus became normalized
for the first time in more than a generation.

^^Innocent had earlier refused to support England's James II,

considering him a tool of Louis, but later supported the French
candidate as successor to the childless Charles II of Spain, and
thus contributed to the causes of the War of Spanish Succession.
 280

The rapprochement of Innocent and Louis was especially '

dent when in 1699 the Pope finally, though reluctantly, acce
the French King's insistent demands that he allow the condemnano
of the alleged semi-Quietism of Francois Fenelon, Archbishop of
Cambrai. This and other pro-French actions were often interpreted
by the Papal Court as subservience rather than reconciliation, and
during his last years the Pope was the object of much behind-the'
throne criticism. Thomas Macaulay perhaps echoed some of this
dissatisfaction when he described the Pope as "gentle but irrreso
lute." In addition, an increasing amount of animosity was
directed against him from the anti-French capitals of Europe.
Pope Innocent adorned Rome with public buildings, and mani¬
fested his Neapolitan origin by an enthusiastic delight in all
things maritime and nautical. At the same time he was a typica
cultured and cosmopolitan Roman prelate, having served before his
pontificate in a number of high posts throughout Europe as well as
Italy. He had been in turn vice-legate to Urbino, inquisitor in
Malta, Governor of Perugia, nuncio in Tuscany, Poland, and Austria,,
Bishop of Faenza, and Archbishop of Naples. All these biographi¬
cal items have been included in one form or another in Browning's
complex portrait of Innocent XII.
At the first mention of the Pope in Book I, the poet singles
out his impressive blend of kindness and an overriding sense of
justice: >.

^ ^. ... the Pope was kind.

From his youth up, reluctant to take life.
If mercy might be just and yet show grace.
(1.285-87)

mi. History of England^ chapter xix, p. 57, in Vol. VIII

of The Works of Lord Macaulay (New York, 1908).
 281

':9S on to indicate that the Pope's personal integrity and

». were the fruits of his wide-ranging experience:
' ... the Pope's great self,--Innocent by name
And nature too, and eighty-sixyears old,
Antonio Pignatelli of Naples, Pope
Who had trod many lands, known many deeds.
Probed many hearts, beginning with his own.
And now was far in readiness for God--
(1.296-301)12
id then summarizes in a single passage Innocent's putting an end
to ecclesiastical nepotism, his love for the poor, and his simple
ind abstemious way of life:
Also he peeled off that last scandal-rag
Of Nepotism; and so observed the poor
That men would merrily say, "Halt, deaf and blind.
Who feed on fat things, leave the master's self
^ To gather up the fragments of his feast.
These be the nephews of Pope Innocent!--
His own meal costs but five carlines a day.
Poor-priest's allowance, for he claims no more."
(1.314-21)
This rather full sketch of an unexpected kind of Pope engages
the reader's interest as both curious and incongruous, coming as it
does immediately after a preliminary recounting of the naked facts
f an ugly murder case as they were found in the Old Yellow Book, a
flippant first mention of the villain Guido's "clericality," and a
cynical synopsis of the Roman lawyers' officious and turgid argu-
■>ants.
Later in Book I and with Thomas Macaulay's "gentle but ir¬
resolute" statement obviously in mind. Browning pointedly describes
his Pope as "Simple, sagacious, mild yet resolute" (1.1214); and
he will have the Pope utter his own refutation: "Irresolute? Not

12 See also X.382-87, and 392.

 282

I, more than the mound / With the pine-trees on it yonder!" (X.

235-36).
When the poet comes to his preview of Book X, Innocent's
manner of living and working is more particularly described, and
we at once note the striking contrast between the Pope and his
earlier sketched worldly and self-seeking courtiers. We watch
How he is wont to do God's work on earth.
The manner of his sitting out the dim
Droop of a sombre February day
In the plain closet where he does such work,
With, from all Peter's treasury, one stool.
One table, and one lathen crucifix.
There sits the Pope, his thoughts for company;
Grave but not sad,—nay, something like a cheer
Leaves the lips free to be benevolent.
Which, all day long, did duty firm and fast.
(1.1226-35)
In the subsequent books of the poem the Pope is never again
so fully described until his own Book X. But the brief refer¬
ences to him in the intervening books effectively keep alive and
subtly develop the established image. Guido's defender, Half-
Rome, in order to present Caponsacchi's behavior in its worst pos¬
sible light, loudly castigates the scandalous behavior of Arezzo's
and Rome's clerical "underworld," and attacks the partiality of
Rome's clerically-dominated courts. He can at the same time
still maintain that at the center of Roman clericalism, and yet
somehow above it, there stands the almost visually ironic figure
of "Our Pope, as kind as [he is] just" (11.533). A further dra-
maticj-rony is implicit in the. reader's knowledge that this same
just Pope will judge the case quite differently from the falsely
righteous Half-Rome.

The Pope's professional integrity is indicated by Pompilia's

partisan among the spectators. Other Half-Rome, when he remarks
 283

that at this point Caponsacchi may be in danger of further prosecu¬

tion, since, although "Good-natured with the secular offence, /
The Pope looks grave on priesthood in a scrape" (III.818-19).
Other Half-Rome goes on to recall Innocent's strict implementation
of his reform program when he had earlier denied Abate Paulo
Franceschini's appeal for a special papal intervention in the
tedious suits and countersuits between Guido and the Comparini.
"Times," he declares, "are changed and nephews out of date / And
favoritism unfashionable" (III .1469-70). Clearly distinguishing
the clergy's properly religious sphere from its civil incompetency,
"The Pope / Said, 'Render Caesar what is Caesar's due!"' (III.1470-

. 71).
Yet, as in the preceding book, the speaker gives another
scandalous account of clerical foppery and venal politicking—
. this time to defend Caponsacchi and detach him from the grotesque
clerical world of the Franceschini brothers, against whom the
characters of the Pope and the "lamb-pure, lion-brave" Canon pro¬
vide a striking yet frustratingly ineffectual indictment.
Tertium Quid disgustedly mentions that the indigent but em-
“ barrassed Pietro Comparini had been the monthly recipient of a
secret papal alms; but at the same time he unwittingly adds to
the Pope's laurels by revealing Innocent's tactful sensitivity and
benevolence in all his dealings with the poor, while at the same
time he contrasts his and his prosperous listeners' own crude and
indifferent selfrighteousness:
He asks and straight obtains
The customary largess, dole dealt out
To, what we call our "poor dear shame-faced ones,"
- In secret once a month to spare the shame
O' the slothful and the spendthrift,—pauper-saints
T The Pope puts meat i' the mouth of, ravens they.
And providence he--just what the mob admires!
 284

That is, instead of putting a prompt foot

On selfish worthless human slugs whose slime
Has failed to lubricate their path in life,
Why, the Pope picks the first ripe fruit that falls
And gracious puts it in the vermin's way.
(IV.109-20)
Perhaps the most dramatically significant of all the early
references to Pope Innocent is Caponsacchi's brief but telling
remark: "A strange Pope ... a priest who thinks" (VI.473).
As we shall see, it was this historically-founded patient and
probing "thinking-power" of the Pope that Browning made most ef¬
fective use of in the meditative confession which he incorporated
into Book X.
Brief but specific echoes of the historical Innocent XII
continue to occur in the books which follow Caponsacchi's climactic:
theme-setting encomium. The Pope himself implies his easy ac¬
cessibility to the common people when he imagines a hypothetical
plea for aid from a group of peasants he might encounter on, one of
his walks in the country (X.242-58). "He suffers question, un¬
rebuked . . . ever mindful of the mob" (XII.88-93), writes the
shocked Venetian correspondent in Book XII. Fra Celestino speaks
movingly of how God in this instance has been able to work through
the true instinct of an old good man / Who happens to hate dark¬
ness and love light" (XII.590-91).
The pedantic Bottinius justifies one of his tropes by recall¬
ing the Neapolitan Pope's love of the sea: "The Pope, we know, is
Neapolitan / And relishes a sea-side simile" (IX.371-72). The Pop
himself describes Guido in a long and detailed simile as being
like the ambiguous fish ... the soldier-crab" (X.485-509); and
later he relates Guido's chances of last-minute repentance and
salvation to an all-illuminating lightning-flash he once observed
 285

over the night-shrouded Bay of Naples: "So may the truth be

smashed out by one blow, / And Guido see, one instant, and be
saved" (X.2120-21). The Venetian letter-writer twice links In-
^ nocent's love for the sea to his construction of public buildings:
A week ago the sun was warm like May,
And the old man took daily exercise
Along the river-side; he loves to see
That Custom-house he built upon the bank.
For, Naples-born, his tastes are maritime.
(XII.49-53)
A few lines later he refers to "his latest walk / To that Dogana-
by-the-Bank he built" (XI1.88-89).
The French King's interest in the Fenelon case is a topic of
current gossip (XII.63-65), as well as the Pope's alleged partiali¬
ty toward France and unfriendliness toward the other Catholic
powers, "Now scandalously rife in Europe's mouth" (XII.84). Even
Guido, somewhat incoherently, attempts to involve his fate with
Papal diplomacy when he declares that his conviction "insults the
Empev'or, / And outrages the Louis you so love" (XI .2272-73).
In 1696, three years before his mild censure of Fenelon's
teachings, Innocent had severely reiterated all his predecessors'
condemnations of the Jansenists. Since such a jarring note would
hardly have suited Browning's Pope, it is typical that the poet
not only did not ignore this well-known historical item, but he
explicitly denied it--while at the same time he seemed to have
‘ identified Jansenism with another heresy of the seventeenth centu-
13
ry, Quietism, or, as he always called it, "Molinism": "'Twas he
1 O
To be precise, "Molinism" is the name usually given to the
' orthodox theory of Luis de Molina (1535-1600) which attempted to
solve the problems arising from the seeming contradiction between
God's foreknowledge and man's free will. "Quietism" is the
technical name given to the doctrines of Miguel de Molinos (1640-

t
 286

[the Pope] who first bade leave those souls in peace, / Those
Jansenists, re-nicknamed Molinists" (1.302-03).
Indeed, one of Browning's most significant adaptations of
the seventeenth-century Italian religious environment was achieved
by means of the poem's persistent and, at first sight, curious al¬
lusions to Molinos and Molinism. In the Old Yellow Book this
heresy is mentioned only once (p. 120), when the author of the
first anonymous pamphlet suggests that those who fail to defend
the rights of a wronged husband against his unfaithful wife are
perhaps attempting "to introduce into Rome the power of sinning
against the laws of God with impunity, along with the doctrine of
Molinos and philosophic sin, which has been checked by the authori¬
ty of the Holy Office." In the poem, however, there are at least
twenty-four references to Molinism.
William Coyle has shown how carefully Browning employed
Molinism as a theme-setting and character-revealing symbol which
subtly reinforced one of the central meanings of the poem, that
human knowledge is imperfect and egocentric.Most of the evil
or lesser characters of The Ring and the Book treat Molinos as a
universal scapegoat and with indiscriminate hostility accuse him
of being the single cause and instigator of all current evil and
crime. Fra Celestino and the Pope, on the other hand, decry the
anti-Molinist hysteria, and the Pope even defends the Molinists as
possible heralds of a new and purer Christianity.

13 (cont'd)n^u • ^
'96/97), who IS so frequently mentioned in The
Rxng and the Book. For further information about Molinos, see:
John Bigelow, Molinos the Quietist (New York, 1882); Paul Dudon,
Le Quietiste Espagnol Miahel Molinos (Paris, 1921); and Montgomery
Carmichael, "Miguel Molinos, Spanish Quietist," Thought, I (1926),
14
See
the Book, II
 287

As to the possible anachronism in such a widespread Italian

preoccupation with Molinism in 1697, Coyle points out that, although
Molinos had been condemned and imprisoned in 1687, he had died on
December 28, 1696 or 1697--and, if in 1697, only five days before
Guido murdered Pompilia and her parents. It is therefore not at
all impossible that there might have been a brief revival of in¬
terest in Molinos in early 1697, which Browning then legitimately
exaggerated and exploited for his own poetic purposes. Also, as
we have seen, there was at this time (1697-99) a major theological
controversy over Fenelon whose doctrine was associated, justly or
15
not, with the quietism of Molinos.
Actually, Browning does not seem to have been at all inter¬
ested in, and perhaps not even aware of, the doctrinal differences
between Jansenism, Quietism, and semi-Quietism. To Browning,
Jansenius, Molinos, and Fenelon were simply synonyms for "heretic"
--without, of course, any of the term's sometimes pejorative con¬
notations. They were freedom-loving, religious non-conformists
who had been persecuted by ecclesiastical tyranny, and therefore,
mutatis mutandis^ Protestant Dissenters like himself. Each of
these Catholic "heretics" had at least a superficially Protestant¬
like reliance on the "inner light." Coyle explains the nature
and the limits of the appeal which the extremist Molinos may have
had for the eclectic poet:
Briefly, Molinos urged a disregard for worldly concerns
and the annihilation of identity, culminating in the
union of the soul with God. Supreme sanctification lay
in passivity, devoid of externals like ritual, formal

^^Burnet, p. 162, mentions that in 1685 the followers of

Molinos were most numerous in Naples, where they numbered an esti¬
mated 20,000. Innocent's Neapolitan background would therefore
! give Browning another plausible reason why he could be portrayed
I as sympathetic toward Molinos.
 288

prayer, confession and penance. Although there is lit¬

tle evidence in his references that Browning was altogether
certain of the denotations of Molinos' Quietism, he might
have been attracted to Protestant implications like justi¬
fication by faith, rejection of ecclesiastical authority,
and abolition of the sacraments. He would, however, have
found exceedingly distasteful the emphasis on indifference
and inaction.Id
But whatever Browning's theological acumen, or lack thereof, it is
obvious that he has made Molinism into a new thing, devoid of any
clearly specific meanings, but connoting everything that is free
and sincere in religion; and he has employed this new Molinism as
a meaningful structural device for revealing character, for depict¬
ing a world afflicted with an exclusively ecclesiastical frame of
reference, and for illustrating the theme of human fallibility.
After Browning's "heresy" has been poetically experienced as one
of the poem's major theme-carrying and character-judging leit¬
motifs, then the championing of it by the Pope, despite the histori
cal incongruity, becomes within the world of the poem but one more
consistent aspect of his appealing character.
When we turn to consider contemporary nineteenth-century
reflections in Browning's Pope, we are confronted with the problem
of distinguishing fortuitous historical coincidences from the
poet's intentional accommodations. For Pius IX, Pope of the
1860's, was endowed with many of the same personal qualities which
we have seen in the Pope of the 1690's. A handsome old man in his!
middle seventies, Pio Nono, like his predecessor of two centuries
before, was kind and approachable, a man of wit and international
experience, and energetically watchful concerning the integrity of
the clergy, especially bishops. His Achilles' heel, however, was

^^Coyle, "Molinos," p. 309.

 289

his immense lack of sensitivity to the political realities of

< modern Europe, seen particularly in his short-sighted dependence
< on Napoleon III and his uncompromising insistence on the retention
^ of the Temporal Power, long after it had become as much an obstacle
to a healthy Church as to a united Italy.
Newman could describe Pius as "one whom to know was to love,"
while at the same time lamenting the excessive adulation of ultra¬
montane English and French Catholics such as William George Ward
and Louis Veuillot.^^ Henry James perceptively expressed the
dilemma that forever colored the Protestant public's reaction to
Pio Nono when in 1869 he described his "large, handsome, pale old
face, a pair of celebrated eyes which one took, on trust, for
-

sinister." In her lively and critical account of Catholic Rome,

Frances Elliot wrote in 1871 after her first view of the Pope:
♦ "He is a fat, benevolent, soft-looking man; his expression decided¬
ly prepossessing, but at the same time essentially priestly.
On another occasion she comments that "the aspect of the Pope is
extremely benignant and pleasing; a halo of kindness and benevol¬
ence hovers around him, and the sweet smile on his calm, composed
features immediately prepossesses one towards him" (I, 64). And
later, in a phrase which remarkably resembles Browning's numerous
L descriptions of Innocent XII, she refers to the "dear, good, pacif-
^ ic Pope" (I, 119).
If, then, we consider the personal traits of the two Popes,
the historical Innocent XII and Pius IX, it was a coincidence that

. ^^Quoted in William Samuel Lilly, Studies in Religion and

Literature (London, 1904), p. 209. The great Comte de Montalambert
" was to label such excesses as "Roman Grand-Lamaism."
18
^ Henry James, William Wetmore Store and his Friends^ I, 109.
19
Diary of an Idle Woman in Italy (London, 1871), I, 11.
 290

the contemporary Pope and the Pope who figured only peripherally
in the Old Yellow Book resembled each other. But I believe it ^
was this coincidence which, when initially discovered, inspired i
Browning to perceive the dramatic and ironic possibilities latent -
in such a fortuitous likeness, and which became the purposeful
basis of the large-scaled conception of his Innocent XII, the Pope
of The Ring and the Book. Browning realized that any description
of the personality of the seventeenth-century Pontiff would sponta¬
neously remind the reader of Pius IX. With this identification
operating on both the conscious and subconscious levels, the poet
was able to widen the context of the reader's interests and sympa¬
thies and extend them far beyond the immediate world of the seven¬
teenth-century murder case. On this wider level. Browning's Pope
thus became both a portrait and an indictment of Pius IX—of the
Pio Nono who might have been if he had been faithful to his natural¬
ly noble Browning-like instincts and freed himself from the debili¬
tating "machinery" of a reactionary Church.
True, Browning's Pope was physically a part of the old order;
but he had succeeded in keeping his soul free in the midst of reli¬
gious corruption. His moral and spiritual energies were still in¬
tact, and he was able to see that an old way was swiftly dying and,
inspired by the exploits of a saintly Pompilia and a courageous
Caponsacchi, to hope that the signs of change, as yet only partial¬
ly understood, were in fact the harbingers of a regenerated new
Christian world.
In Browning's eyes, the tragedy of the "dear, good, pacific"
Pio Nono was that this modern Pope had not also been the "resolute" '
Innocent, who had been "firm" and "just" as well as "kind." Thus
the admirable promise of 1846 was swallowed up in a slough of papal
 291

presumption and vacillation which had reached their most atrocious

depths with the publication in 1864 of the Syllabus of Errors.
Roughly paralleling Browning's use of his version of seven-
I teenth-century "Molinism," though less often expressed, was his
[employment of the contemporary question of "papal infallibility.
Subtle hints as well as explicit references to the infallibility
of the Pope occur throughout the poem and operate as another
[theme-scoring symbol. While in this instance the anachronism is
more manifest, it is carried out with no less artistic success.
Although in the seventeenth century the idea of the Pope's
decisive teaching authority and the charismatic preservation of
i.his official teaching from dogmatic error was a common Catholic
1 belief, the commonplace designation of this prerogative by the
I word "infallibility" was a later development. The nature of the
[ Pope's infallibility vis-a-vis the bishops and General Councils
was in the mid-nineteenth century a topic of theological debate,
1 but the discussions were by no means universal or urgent. When
in 1867 the Pope made the first public announcement of the Vatican
Council which was to begin in late 1869, the question of infalli¬
bility was not even included on the originally proposed agenda.
But the ultramontane bishops and theologians were quickly knit
together into a party by their persuasive leader. Cardinal Manning
of Westminster, who was himself a passionate believer in the most
authoritarian interpretation of the papal prerogatives. These
"extremists" soon succeeded in making papal infallibility the reli
gious cause celehre of the late 1860's among English Catholics and
Protestants alike.
Specific references to infallibility occur at least four
times in the poem. Guido derisively recalls that the Pope had
 292

turned down Paolo's earlier petition and refused to "Afford us the

infallible finger's tact / To disentwine . . .[my] tangle of af¬
fairs" (V.1344-45). In a rather obscure passage, Dominus Hyacin-
thus de Archangelis, Guido's defense-lawyer, likens the hoped-for
favorable decision vindicating his client's right to revenge
honoris causa to the papal proclamation of a new dogma:
Then, Sirs, this Christian dogma, this law-bud
Full-blown now, soon to bask the absolute flower
Of Papal doctrine in our blaze of day. . . .
(VIII.681-83)
The allusion seems obvious, since the "absolute flower of Papal
doctrine" of Browning's day was papal infallibility. A few lines
later Archangel! asks in Guido's name:
Where do I find my proper punishment
For my adulterous wife, I humbly ask
Of my infallible Pope,—who now remits
Even the divorce allowed by Christ in lieu
Of lapidation Moses licensed me?
(VIII.701-05)
Johannes-Baptista Bottinius, the prosecuting lawyer, as he
reviews the historical precedents which will strengthen his case
against Guido, makes a single gratuitous yet rather pointed paren¬
thetical reference to the only possible basis for inerrant judg¬
ment:
Thus at least
I, by the guidance of antiquity,
(Our one infallible guide) now operate.
(IX.180-82)
Most significant of all is Pope Innocent's own questioning
of his infallibility. In the long opening section of Book X, the
Pope makes a dismal review of the series of contradictory judgments
given in the late ninth and early tenth centuries by Pope Stephen
VI and his half-dozen successors concerning the legitimacy of the
 293

election of the deceased Pope Formosus. Innocent's reaction to

these hideous antics, all of which were perpetrated in the name of
religious orthodoxy, is to exclaim in dismay: "Which of the judg¬
ments was infallible?" (X.150). The understood answer, of course,
is that none of them were.
In such a passage Browning is obviously reflecting the dis¬
cussions of infallibility which were current in his day, and singl¬
ing out what he believed to be a striking instance which proved
that the papal claims were not only unreasonable but also ludicrous.
Browning goes on to have Innocent in effect disclaim infallibility
for himself: "I must give judgment on my own behoof. / So worked
the predecessor: now, my turn!" (X.160-61). In another passage
he implies that every judgment of his or of any other man is quite
fallible:
Some surmise.
Perchance, that since man's wit is fallible.
Mine may fail here? Suppose it so,—what then?

What other should I say than "God so willed:

Mankind is ignorant, a man am I:
Call ignorance my sorrow, not my sin!"
(X.236-58)
Following his detailed review of the Franceschini case, the Pope
repeate that he is judging only as man, and willingly accepts the
risk of error:
Through hard labour and good will.
And habitude that gives a blind man sight
At the practised finger-ends of him, I do
Discern, and dare decree in consequence.
Whatever prove the peril of mistake.
(X.1243-47)
In fact. Innocent's entire discussion of the obscurity of truth
and the inevitability of human error can be interpreted as a papal
refutation of papal infallibility.
 294

It is really beside the point to insist that Browning was in

error if he believed that the doctrine of papal infallibility ex¬
tended to such matters as one Pope's judgment of another, or a
decision as to whether or not he should allow a tonsured murderer
to be executed. As a "given" in the poem, infallibility does en¬
compass such things--it is in fact the imagined point at issue, at
least negatively, in the whole presentation of Innocent's exercise
of his reasoning and intuitive faculties. In his use of a bigger-
than-life papal infallibility, as in his employment of a simplified
"Molinism," Browning created one more theme-symbol by means of
which he was able to express freely, credibly, and with a full
range of dramatic irony, his distinctive view of reality.^*^ Char¬
acter and context, history and contemporaneity, personal sympathy
and hostility, were thus fused and molded into the unique kind of
poetic situation which Browning habitually found most congenial
and most fruitful.
When we examine Book X, we see two principal structural sec¬
tions, which are preceded by a long introduction and followed by a
brief conclusion. The first of the major sections is the Pope's
20
4 : ^ be inserted here in defense
of the historicity of Browning's theological "error." When Brown¬
ing wrote his poem the doctrine of papal infallibility with’its
bad not yet been defined. As he watched and
i.?« Catholics dur-
i=? 1 5 have expected that the Newman-
labeled extravagances of the ultramontanists, especially the con¬
vert followers of Manning and W. G. Ward, would prLail at the com¬
ing Council—opinions which would logically mean that the Pope's
preservation from error extended, as if by magic, to any official
judgment, secular or religious, no matter how insignificant, and
which sometimes further seemed to identify or confuse infallibility
with revelation and inspiration. But whatever the Ixplanat on
the most extreme position, real or imaginary, would K appealed
to Browning as the most useful for his poetic purpose
 295

detailed review of the murder case (X.398-1247), with its probing

emphasis on the external causes and internal motivations which
determined the actions of each of the participants, and by which
he justifies his negative judgment on Guido's plea for clerical
privilege. The second is the Pope's extended philosophical and
religious reflection on the nature of man and Christianity (X.1248-
2109).
When thus considered from a strictly narrative point of view,
Book X fills a gap in the Old Yellow Book by providing a summing
up and a verdict, as well as an appropriately imaginative full
scale portrait of the potentially interesting but hardly mentioned
Pope. The .Pope's historical verdict and Browning's enthusiastic
and oft-repeated ratifications are thereby justified in the per¬
sonal terms of the poet's own sympathies and antipathies.
Roughly corresponding to each of these sections, though by
no means coextensive with them, are two major themes or meaning¬
bearing outlooks, one negative and the other positive, which seems
to embody the poet's moral intentions in the monologue as distinct
from his strictly narrative or artistic intentions. The negative
theme, which indeed runs through the whole poem before it achieves
its definitive articulation in Book X, is an expose and severe
criticism of the corruption and inevitable spiritual sterility
within hierarchical authoritarian religion as it was most striking¬
ly exemplified in the Catholic Church. As Browning envisioned it,
such a religious society substituted an ossified ritual for simple
and sincere worship, and sought to indulge a short-sighted dogmatic
security rather than nourish the ennobling, admittedly risky search
which marks the Browning concept of faith. The poet's religious
philosophy pervades the entire poem; but in the Pope's monologue
it is expressed more completely and more eloquently than in any of
 296

his other poetry. This monologue is justly regarded as one of

the major religious statements of nineteenth-century literature.
Browning achieved something of a tour de force when he suc¬
cessfully managed to proclaim and even to personify a criticism
of Catholicism and a forceful presentation of his own dissenting
theology by means of an artistically believable Pope of Rome.
His frequent and ingenious creations of clerical characters,
especially Catholic clerics, in his earlier poems made it in¬
evitable that he would eventually essay the most challenging
cleric of all in a major poetic work. His unquestioned triumph
with the Pope of The Ring and the Book is the measure of his dar¬
ing inventiveness as well as it is the proof of his artistry.
Again we see the happy coincidence of past and present as it
was recognized and vivified by the Browning imagination. A Pope,
Innocent XII, who by all accounts was a "good" pope, had figured
briefly, but crucially, in the Franceschini murder case. Because
of the festering Roman Question" and the widely discussed Vatican
Council, there was also an increasing interest in the present Pope,
Pius IX. He, too, in some ways was a good Pope, or at least had
been, until he succumbed to the debilitating influences of Roman
reaction. What then would be more arrestingly ironic than to have
Browning's historical Pope, whom readers would inevitably, if but
partially, identify with the now-tarnished Pio Nono, engage in a
devastating criticism of Catholic personnel and practices and
frankly question the very doctrines which the present Pope was ac¬
cused of encouraging?
That from the very first Browning realized the humorous and
satiric potential of the situation seems clear f^om his tongue-in-
cheek account of the reluctance of the defensive Roman authorities
to aid him in ferreting out additional information about the murder
 297

case once he had decided to make a poem out of the Old Yellow Book.
After his own pious disavowal of any but the most panegyric inten¬
tions, the poet had his sly Roman agent suggest a bit of spiritual
bribery--a suggestion that concludes with the three famous puns
with which Browning clouts the most prominent English Catholics
and their silly converts:
"And it tells
Against the Church, no doubt,--another gird
At the Temporality, your Trial, of course?"
"—Quite otherwise this time," submitted I;
"Clean for the Church and dead against the world.
The flesh and the devil, does it tell for once."
"--The rarer and the happier! All the same.
Content you with your treasure of a book.
And waive what's wanting! Take a friend's advice!
It's not the custom of the country. Mend
Your ways indeed and we may stretch a point:
Go get you manned by Manning and new-manned
By Newman and, mayhap, wise-manned to boot
By Wiseman, and we'll see or else we won't!"
(1.428-41)
Browning must have been delighted by the fact that his
Catholic readers would be torn between pleasure at the encomiums
heaped upon Innocent XII and dismay at the Pope's theological
truancy, especially his defense of Molinism and his slighting of
infallibility. Before he can be Browning's proper Pope, Innocent
must in fact "unpope" himself. This would seem to be the specific
significance of his examination of the grisly Formosus episode.
"Like to Ahasuerus, that shrewd prince" (X.l), this shrewd Pope
must review the past that he might come to the liberating realiza¬
tion that there is no easy road to truth. With a vivid awareness
of the ever-present risk of error, he must judge alone, and with
his own powers, as each of his predecessors, good or bad, obviously
had done—but "In God's name!" (X.162).
 298

There are a number of minor satirical touches in the retell¬

ing of this papal scandal. All the participants in the burlesque
trials were intent upon "observing forms" (X.50). Their words
were a parody upon the pompous language and specious logic of
papal decrees which had been ridiculed in the British press since
1850. "This act was uncanonic and a fault" (X.70), screamed Pope
Stephen's sycophants against the exhumed Formosus. And Stephen
himself raged at his dead predecessor: "I revoke, annul and ab¬
rogate / All his decrees in all kinds: they are void!" (X.78-79).
Stephen decreed that Formosus' dismembered body be thrown into the
Tiber "that my Christian fish may sup!" (X.88), and rationalized
his ghoulish act by a perverse and captious appeal to a venerable
Christian symbol--an application which even he cannot seriously
accept:
--Either because ofiyeT£which means Fish
And very aptly symbolises Christ,
Or else because the Pope is Fisherman,
And seals with Fisher's-signet. Anyway,
So said, so done.
Innocent also reads about Pope John IX, who at a synod in
Ravenna "Did condemn Stephen, anathematise / The disinterment, and
make all blots blank" (X.134-35), and based his arbitrary judgment,
as the chronicler reported, upon a conveniently unearthed past
example:
For," argueth here Auxilius in a place
De Ovdinationibus^ "precedents
Had been, no lack, before Formosus long.
Of Bishops so transferred from see to see,
Mannus, for example": read the tract.
(X.136-40)
The officious remark of the chronicler about Pope John--
"Ninth of the name, (I follow the best guides)" (X.130)—may refer
to the doubtful dates of the birth, election, and death of the
 299

short-reigned John IX (898-900); or they may also be Browning's

smiling but anachronistic allusion to the dispute of the historians
over the numbering of the many Johannine Popes--a dispute which
actually concerned the Popes John of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, and which was being aired in the anti-papal polemics
of the 1860's.
As we have already said. Pope Innocent is emboldened rather
than frightened by the scandalous example of his predecessors, and
begins his review of the murder case only after he has squarely
disavowed any supernatural protection beyond God's ordinary Provi¬
dence. He has thus admitted the possibility of error in a deci-
.sion which, in the world of the poem at least, ought to have been
included within the popularly understood purview of papal infalli¬
bility.
The contrast between the "irregular" but Christlike Canon
Caponsacchi and the officially tolerated clerical rascals is most
effective when it is passionately explicated by the Pope himself.
As he analyzes the causes for the absence of courageous virtue
among the vast majority of the clergy, he declares such dereliction
to be rooted in the initiative-destroying obedience and conformity
which he discovers is an essential outgrowth of the Church's
hierarchic structure. Except for the rare exceptions which only
intensify the total scandal, the clergy
prove at need
Unprofitable through the very pains
We gave to train them well and start them fair,--
Are found too stiff, with standing ranked and
ranged.
For onset in good earnest, too obtuse
Of ear, through iteration of command.
For catching quick the sense of the real cry.
(X.1189-95)
 300

Equally discomforting to Browning's Catholic audience,

though perhaps unintentionally so, would have been the facile
manner with which the Pope is able to mix a sublime appreciation
for the mystery of the Incarnation with what approaches a senti¬
mental indifference as to whether the person of Christ be an ab¬
solute historical fact or a necessary myth (X.1343-1414).
Having dismissed the clergy as individual failures, the
Pope wonders whether "our embodied cowards" might not find strength
within "Some institution, honest artifice / Whereby the units grow
compact and firm" (X.1490-91). Such hopes are dashed, however,
when he recalls how even the Convert!te nuns have betrayed their
ideals and now ravenously seek to confiscate Pompilia's posses¬
sions by slandering her name. Saddened by such betrayal of the
cause of Christ and the seeming futility of his as well as Christ's
labors, the old Pope laments with words that echo an analogous
sentiment of Fra Lippo Lippi
Can it be this is end and outcome, all
I take with me to show as stewardship's fruit.
The best yield of the latest time, this year
The seventeen-hundredth since God died for man?
Is such effect proportionate to the cause?
(X.1527-31)
The Pope's criticism of the religious orders becomes more
general as he censures their ineffectiveness, in contrast to
Caponsacchi's "uncommissioned virtue," and then listens to them
retort and further condemn themselves by admitting their conceit
and nit-picking theological "odium";
"What, we monks.
We friars, of such an order, such a rule.
2L
^ Lippi,"ll.155-57: ". . . Christ / (Whose
sad face on the cross sees only this / After the passion of a
thousand years)."
 301

Have not we fought, bled, left our martyr-mark

i At every point along the boundary-line
I 'Twixt true and false, religion and the world,
! Where this or the other dogma of our Church
j Called for defence?"
I (X.1567-73)
►I He goes on to mention in particular the disastrous disputes be-
1j tween the Dominicans and Jesuits over the Chinese Rites and decries
their waste of energy over subtle oriental verbal distinctions.
; It is mortifying to listen to the Pope imagine Euripides
I proving himself a better "Christian" than the professed followers
j of Christ. The pagan dramatist was able to derive "Out of the
fragmentary truths where light / Lay fitful in a tenebrific time"
(X.1755-56) centuries before Christ's birth a "rule of life, /
[Which] waived all reward, loved but for loving's sake" (X.1705-06).
Euripides-Innocent-Browning can thus ridicule the widely abused
"Extra ecclesiam nullus salus" principle;
Therefore I lived,—it is thy creed affirms.
Pope Innocent, who art to answer me!—
Under conditions, nowise to escape.
Whereby salvation was impossible.
(X.1680-83)
And again:
Pope, dost thou dare pretend to punish me.
For not descrying sunshine at midnight.
Me who crept all-fours, found my way so far—
While thou rewardest teachers of the truth.
Who miss the plain way in the blaze of noon [?]
(X.1775-79)
In one of the poet's rare jibes at the Jesuits, he has his
Pope describe Paolo's and Guido's rationalizations of their crimes
as a modern adaptation of the spirit of Ignatius Loyola (X.1936).
The Pope's hostile allusion to the Jesuits and their policy has an
appropriateness within the adjusted world of the poem. Histori-
 302

cally, the Jesuits were the chief Catholic opponents of the

Jansensists and Quietists. Since Browning's Pope is sympathetic
toward the Molinists, it is right that he be unfriendly toward the
Jesuits. But whatever the interior logic, most of Browning's
nineteenth-century Catholic readers would certainly have found
this reversal of expectancies in the Pope's attitudes something
less than congenial.
When he describes Guido's destination in the final paragraph
of Book X, the Pope denies the eternity of hell, as his imagination
follows
Into that sad obscure sequestered state
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain; which must not be.
(X.2123-25)
Incongruous as such a statement was when uttered by a Pope, Brown¬
ing here seemed less interested in satire than in taking sides in
a real dispute which in the 1860's was agitating not the Church of
Rome but the Church of England. After the publication of Essays
and Reviews in 1860, the nature and duration of hell became a bit¬
ter point at issue in the theological quarrels that rose between
the High-Church Puseyites and the liberal Anglicans. Rather typi¬
cally, Browning used his Catholic Pope to defend the liberal doc¬
trine against the Tractarians whom he always considered dangerous
leaners toward Catholicism.
When we examine the positive side of the Pope's religious
teaching we see again how apt a spokesman the poet has created.
Certainly Browning was more interested in catching the attention
of his Protestant readers than in embarrassing Catholics. The
Pope, more than being just another religious sage, suitably
learned and holy, is, as the maximum religious personage of the
 I

303

3 Western World, a powerful religious symbol. At the same time,

^ he had for over three hundred years been the personal enemy of
I English Protestantism, a both real and imagined threat to English
i nationality and religion. The "No Popery" hysteria of 1850, the
ij prolonged and frustrating political situation in Italy, the Syl-
j tabus and infallibility furors, and the minor Catholic renascence
i in England, had all focused a more than usual public attention as
I well as public fear upon the papacy. These factors had simulta-
c neously aggravated the paradoxic interplay of personal appeal and
abhorrence with which the English always regarded Pius IX. Brown-
j ing would have recognized almost instinctively a supreme opportuni-
j ty in the unique combination of symbol and irony which the charac-
i ter of a pope offered him. It was out of such a situation that
! he fashioned his greatest religious spokesman.
I Until Book X, the Pope is presented as a figure established
in truth and immovable security. He is good, just, infallible, a
rare thinker, but distant and seemingly untroubled by the conflicts
raging among and within lesser men. He is mentioned often enough
so as not to be forgotten, and with enough detail to stimulate a
mild non-intruding curiosity. Such a "good" pope is something new
for Browning, or for any other English poet. Yet the poem's early
descriptions of Pope Innocent consist for the most part in brief
expository obiter diota^ uniformly praiseworthy, but which function
primarily as contrasting commentaries on the surrounding religious
evil, and actually reveal very little about the man himself.
When we begin Book X, however, we are surprised to find the
Pope to be a man who from the very first reveals himself as a tired
old man, intellectually alert, virtuous, and conscientious, but
with a natural optimism that must struggle against doubts and sad¬
dening frustrations. The reader's interest is thus intensified,
 304

and the total lack of narrative suspense--the Pope's judgment of

Guido is already known--is more than compensated for by a skill¬
fully managed psychological suspense.
What begins as a leisurely reflection on his verdict soon
becomes a tense attempt to justify everything that he as Pope
stands for, and we soon realize that Innocent's doubts are not
about Guido, but about Christianity itself. All his doubts are,
as it were, objectified by the relatively minor point of law con¬
cerning the legitimacy of Guido's claim of clerical privilege.
In Browning's ethical system, it is imperative that no act be
really trivial; successful living demands that man's whole self
be engaged at every moment. Each act, therefore, can and should
be a revelation of a total life. It is in this sense that the
Pope's otherwise routine decision can become "the trial of my
soul" (X.1300), and thus an appropriate opportunity for reviewing
the whole of his (and Browning's) criticism of life.
Having disavowed his infallibility, the Pope is forced to
consider the nature of truth and the limits of human knowledge.
He concludes that only partial truth is possible, and can be
acquired only after a painful process. Words alone, however, are
inadequate to express truth. The "filthy rags of speech" (X.372)
only distort what they seek to convey so that every statement of
"fact" necessitates an unavoidable "lie."
Man must tell his mate
Of you, me and himself, knowing he lies.
Knowing his fellow knows the same,—will think
He lies, it is the method of a man!"
And yet will speak for answer "It is truth"
To him who shall rejoin "Again a lie!"
(X.366-71)
Man s ultimate intellectual attainment in this life is the realiza¬
tion that there are only two facts about which he can have absolute
 305

^certitucle--his existence and God's:

After long time and amid many lies,
l| Whatever we dare think we know indeed
I --That I am I, as He is He,—what else?
' (X.378-80)
The Pope later considers these human epistemological and
linguistic inadequacies within a larger context. There is in the
universe a "chain of knowledge" which somehow corresponds to the
("chain of being," and in which man participates. Each creature
jean know God, and in turn becomes a reflection of God for another
i

(creature, but only because God has reduced Himself to a "little-

iness that suits his [the creature's] faculty" (X.1317). The Pope
declares, however, that this knowledge of God which is derived
from the contemplation of God's visible works is not only unavoid-
iably incomplete--since it is human knowledge--but also positively
false and inadequate, because it can tell us only of God's power
and intelligence and nothing of God's perfect love. The "isoscele"
I (X.1361) that is divine perfection, with its two sides of strength
and intelligence, must be completed by a base of love. Thus the
Pope "reasons" to the core-doctrine of Christianity, the Incarna¬
tion. The cosmic need of such a revelation of God's love "may be
surmised"; its fulfillment he finds in a "tale" which he probes
with his reason and pronounces internally sound, but which yet re¬
mains independent of any objective proof. Within the closed
world of a subjectively conceived necessity he comes to the intui¬
tive conviction that the Incarnation must be true because the al¬
ternative would be intolerable.
Browning's Pope, of course, readily admits that such "theol¬
ogy" is historically and logically inadequate; but he then ration¬
alizes that such shortcomings are but one more assurance that life
really is a probation and can remain so only if our knowledge on
 306

all levels remains painfully incomplete and uncertain. Brown¬

ing's conviction that life is a trial is, as we have often seen
before, the underpinning for his "philosophy of the imperfect."
Certainty condemns man to intellectual and spiritual sterility,
and is therefore rendered impossible by a benevolent Providence.
The doubt and fallibility inherent in every human situation pro¬
vide the essential context of struggle in which alone man can
live and make progress in his distinctively human way. In the
Pope's monologue Browning adds nothing new to his philosophy of
life. But a striking new spokesman in a fascinating context give
his perennial ideas a new and eloquent urgency.
The Pope places the true value of every human act in its
seed, by which he means the integrity and energy which inspire
it. The act itself may or may not result in the ostensible "Leaf¬
age and branchage, [which] vulgar eyes admire" (X.274). In the
second part of "Saul (1855) Browning wrote: "It is not what man
Does which exalts him, but what man Would do." Man can not plead
obstacles as excuses for moral failure since the very obstacles
were intended to call forth the redeeming will and effort. The
Pope recalls how Providence had provided Guido with a salutary
combination of advantages and obstacles, aspirations and frustra¬
tions, which made his life "trial fair and fit / For one else too
unfairly fenced about" (X.426-27). Instead of engaging in a noble
struggle, however, Guido used his culture, intelligence, and reli¬
gion as means for indulging his evil instincts with greater im¬
punity rather than as weapons with which to combat them. Capon-
sacchi, on the other hand, had used his natural talents, especial¬
ly his capacity for "honest love," and braved all obstacles, risked
the terrible choice, and accepted the mixed joy and pain of a life
of selfless gallantry.
 I
I

307

I Now it is Pope Innocent's turn to prove himself. His mind

jis already made up concerning Guido. Yet under the guise of
jtesting his foreordained verdict, he accedes to a compulsion to
I

test the foundations of his own faith:

. . . shall I too lack courage?--!eave
j I, too, the post of me, like those I blame?
I Refuse, with kindred inconsistency,
j Grapple with danger whereby souls grow strong?
j I am near the end; but still not at the end;
! All to the very end is trial in life:
I At this stage is the trial of my soul
Danger to face, or danger to refuse?
Shall I dare try the doubt now, or not dare?
(X.1294-1302)
The combination of light and darkness surrounding the Incar¬
nation he reads in terms of a necessary "training and a passage"
(X.1406), in which his faith has grown through strenuous exercise.
But he is stricken when he realizes how the Christian religion has
been perverted by so many Christians into a deceptive security in
which doubt has been fatally discarded and replaced by an alien and
non-religious illusive assurance. Most disturbing of all is the
suspicion that God Himself has been frustrated. "And is this
little all that was to be?" the Pope wonders:
Where is the gloriously-decisive change.
Metamorphosis the immeasurable
Of human clay to divine gold, we looked
Should, in some poor sort, justify the price?

Well, is the thing we see, salvation?

(X.1609-25)
Earlier the Pope had convinced himself that, as in the un¬
expected circumstances which led to Guido's capture, God very
deliberately controlled the extent of evil which He later trans-
nuted into good: "Guido is found when the check comes . . . / The
nonitory touch o' the tether . . . lest sin / Exceed the service.
 308

leap the line" (X.800-05). But after meditating more deeply upon
the depressing prevalence of evil among every kind of Christian,
he for a moment gives up hope. If Christianity does not effec¬
tively inspire men to good living, what good is Christianity?
Can it even be said to exist?
A thing existent only while it acts.
Does as designed, else a nonentity,—
For what is an idea unrealized?
(X.1496-98)
The Pope alternately affirms and denies his fears, until they
are inescapably personified in an eloquent defense of the paganism
of an imaginary Euripides. Innocent proposed to answer the Greek
sage, but can do little more than reaffirm his precarious hope in
a future Christianity, which may regain the spirit of the early
Christian heroes, and of which Caponsacchi and Pompilia have been
the forerunners. Today, he asks, are not the majority of Christiai
paralyzed by

this ignoble confidence.

Cowardly hardihood, that dulls and damps.
Makes the old heroism impossible?

Unless . . . what whispers me of times to come?

What if it be the mission of that age.
My death will usher into life, to shake
This torpor of assurance from our creed.
Re-introduce the doubt discarded, bring
That formidable danger back, we drove
Long ago to the distance and the dark?

Till man stand out again, pale, resolute.

Prepared to die,—that is, alive at last?
(X.1842-57)
This is Pope Innocent's as well as Browning's attempt to come'
to terms with the religious doubts of the age. The Pope can no
more refute the arguments of Euripides than Browning can refute the-
 309

; arguments of the Victorian religious skeptics and Higher Critics.

•, Rather than confront their opponents in a dialogue, both Browning
and the Pope engage them only peripherally within the carefully
I, demarcated limits of an ascetic exercise. When the doubts become
: too persistent, they admit them, and then dismiss them as no longer
I pertinent, and move on to another prepared position that they can
I

! once again control--until it too is rendered rationally untenable.

I

I In Book X the Pope admits the relative failure of Christianity and

i its alleged exception from historical or rational proof. He
I agonizes, seems to waver, yet recovers each time to press on with
i an even more wholehearted determination, encouraged by an invincible
I instinctive hope and energy. At the same time both the Pope and
i

I Browning acknowledge that a definitive resolution is nowhere in

1 sight.
[ Book X is in itself an image of this cyclic process. The
' Pope ends his monologue where he began it. He began with Guido's
fate already decided; twenty-one hundred lines later he ratifies
his decision with a stroke of his pen and a tinkle of his bell.
In the meantime he has actually analyzed himself rather than the
Old Yellow Book. His judgment concerning Guido has remained the
same; yet in the role of admitting to at least hypothetical doubts
regarding the innocence and guilt of the participants in the murder
case, he gained an entree into the real and deeper doubts of his
soul. These more critical uncertainties were anaesthetized, as ft
were, by his certainty regarding Guido and removed to the psycho¬
logical distance at which they could be dispassionately and less
painfully exposed. By looking theoretically at his doubts and dis¬
cussing them, without attempting to refute them, the Pope can con¬
trol and, when necessary, dismiss them with a vigorous act of his
 310

win accompanied by an optimistic manifesto. He is thus able to

maintain a relatively efficient modus vivendi on the practical
level of daily life, where a minor but energetically exercised
decision can partially compensate for the never-answered basic
questions,
We have mentioned Browning's ability to create in Book X an
intense psychological suspense in the absence of narrative or plot
suspense. As early as Book I we are told that the Pope will not
grant Guido's appeal, and we are frequently reminded of this out¬
come throughout Book X. Yet to read the "educated man's" remon¬
strance, the Pope's response to the sacrilegious "Quis pro Domino"
of Guido, his brief message of command and his final meditation on
the murderer's chances of salvation (X.1949-2128), is to experience
one of the great suspenseful climaxes of world literature. Per¬
haps it would be more accurate to say that Browning, rather than
eliminating plot-suspense, has created it synthetically as an
articulated redundance of the far more real but only partially ad¬
mitted deeper questionings which afflict the Pope's soul. Inno¬
cent's oft-repeated fears, doubts, and denials of doubt about the
not-doubtful murder case, apply more often than not to the reality
of God and Christianity. The Pope literally "protests too much,"
but thereby succeeds in establishing the illusion of suspense and
ambiguity concerning his immediate decision which reflects the
deeper crisis within him.

Inseparable from the poet's success in maintaining this am¬

bivalent interest and suspense was the daring with which throughout
the poem he exploited to the full the various contradictory facets,
both positive and negative, of the Pope's representational identity,
and yet revealed him as a thoroughly credible human being and an ef-
 311

fective spokesman.
It does not seem too presumptuous to suggest that the Old
Yellow Book provided the same kind of psychological support for
Browning that it imaginatively provided for Browning's Pope, since
he is the poet's most fully developed alter ego. Under the guise
of rationalizing a judgment about which there was never any real
doubt, Browning created in The Ring and the Book an extended per¬
sonalized forum for safely objectifying his own particular prob¬
lems. Book X, with its magisterial speaking character, provided
an artistically exciting natural climax to a revealing subjective
process. Browning's doubts were never assuaged for long, but
never would he be inspired to employ as remedy a more distinguished
example of his poetic art.
 CONCLUSION

Beginning with the obvious but heretofore seldom discussed

fact that clerics, especially Catholic priests, friars, bishops,
and popes, make up perhaps the most significant single group of
Browning's immortal character creations, I have in this dissertation
first briefly investigated the poet's biography and general poetic
practice in order to discover some of the reasons why he consist¬
ently found these characters congenial and useful for his poetic
purposes; and second, I have analyzed and discussed at some length
his clerical characters as they appear in individual poems.
In the first chapter I pointed to the beginnings of Browning's
religious attitudes and interests in the clergy, and to the probable
sources of his information concerning the churches and its ministers
Catholic and Protestant. My method was to investigate the educa¬
tion of the poet and his wife--their reading, family, friends, ac¬
quaintances, correspondents, and places they visited—in order to
discover their relationships to clerical persons, places, things,
and sources of information. Despite a brief adolescent indulgence
in Shelleyan atheism. Browning remained until his death a loyal and
rather typical English Dissenter, with an intense and emotional al¬
legiance to a staunchly Protestant but non-denominational Christian¬
ity. I discovered that the years of love and marriage with Eliza¬
beth Barrett Browning deepened rather than altered the poet's orig¬
inal religious sentiments.
Browning was first introduced to the strange world of Roman
Catholicism in his father's extraordinary library, and his lifelong
reactions, as both his earliest and his latest poems demonstrate,
were marked by a distinctive combination of fascination and distaste

312
 313

j Throughout his life a vast and mostly undisciplined reading seems

to have been the almost unique source of Browning's information
concerning Catholic clerics. His only significant direct associa¬
tion with a Catholic priest was his long and irregular friendship
with Francis Sylvester Mahony ("Father Prout"), who, while an ex¬
tremely erudite man, was hardly a typical priest. During his
j residence in Italy, Browning and his wife limited their social
circle almost exclusively to the omnipresent English and American
travelers and expatriates, and had little acquaintance with Catho¬
lics, Italian or foreign. Influenced by his wife. Browning's in¬
terest in the cause of Italian unity remained always keen and
I shaped his increasingly critical attitude toward both the Church
and its contemporary Pope.
This biographical survey indicated that Browning's relations
with Catholics, clergy or lay, and their situations were mostly
indirect, and that as a result he remained essentially an outsider
observing an alien scene—yet always with the true artist's sensi¬
tivity and basic appreciation of this curious scene for its deeply
human interest.
In the second chapter, which was in effect a full statement
of my "thesis," I indicated that within each of the five interest-
areas into which the bulk of Browning's poetry may usefully be
placed--namely, the historical-grotesque, art and artists, casuistry
and special pleading, love and marriage, religion and philosophy--
two significant and related elements are at work. First, each
group of poems, at whatever point of Browning's career they were
written, exhibits an identical basic view of life in which optimism
and pessimism remain locked in an endless conflict that is essen¬
tially cyclic and irreconcilable. Browning is the reputed optimist
more in spite of than because of his "philosophy of the imperfect."
 314

Throughout his poetry he experiences, or reasons to, imperfection;

but then mightily affirms that despite the evidence all will some¬
how work together for good if man will but act energetically and
not ask useless and paralyzing questions. I illustrated the per¬
vasiveness of Browning's alternating dissatisfaction and resigna¬
tion to the eternal dilemma which he affirms life to be in a sampl¬
ing of selected poems from each of the five groups I had delineated
A second fact, immediately pertinent for this dissertation,
was that within each of these five interest-areas, in addition to ai
consistent view of and attitude toward reality, we find what I have:
chosen to call the Browning clerical phenomenon--that is. Browning
in each instance achieved his fullest, most mature expression of
his philosophy in a poem which features a magnificently drawn
clerical character. These characters appealed to Browning, I be¬
lieve, because they provided him with a complex and ready-made
ironic situation marked on both the personal and societal levels by^
sincerity and hypocrisy which are revealed in the tension between
an alternating commitment to a transcendent ideal and actual per¬
formance as a human being struggles with himself and with his en¬
vironment.
Then, in the major part of the dissertation, I presented an
analysis of how in specific poems Browning exploited the opportuni¬
ties which the clerical character and situation offered. In
Chapter III, I surveyed and briefly discussed Browning's minor
clerical characters and minor clerical poems--that is, all Brown¬
ing's clerics except the five major ones whom I discussed later.
I pointed out that Browning's use of the clerical character devel¬
oped from incidental ornamentation, through simple caricature and
early minor masterpieces such as Pippa's Monsignor and the monks
of the "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," to the theme-strength-
 315

( ening clerics of The Ring and the Book; after which Browning's
I clerics reverted to their earliest function as mostly peripheral
I grotesquerie. Certain errors and anachronisms showed how Brown-
ing manipulated history and historical context, sometimes un¬
consciously, sometimes purposefully, but almost always with happy
poetic results. To throw light on the poet's creation of his
great clerics, I distinguished three methods or modes by which he
j employed his minor clerics: as characters interesting in them-
I selves, as meaningful narrative devices, and as personae.
I In subsequent chapters I discussed and evaluated Browning's
; employment of the clerical character and his situation in his five
I major portraits. In "The Bishop Orders his Tomb" both the ironic
structure and the imagery achieve their full potential only when
they are understood in relation to the professional identity of
the sensuous dying Bishop. Browning exploited the fact that Fra
Lippo Lippi was a truant friar, not only to present an ironically
sympathetic portrait and thus create an effective spokesman for
his own aesthetic theory, but also to paint an impressive "charac¬
ter study" of the early Renaissance--a study which deserves John
Ruskin's famous words of praise much more than does "The Bishop
Orders his Tomb." Bishop Blougram was Browning's major contempo¬
rary cleric. The poet deftly employed him to expound some of his
own most sublime religious sentiments; at the same time he iden¬
tified him with the two most controversial Catholics of the day,
and embellished him with the trappings of a Renaissance prince-
bishop. What results is an ambiguous tour de force in which the
poet seems alternately to imply ridicule and admiration both for
the Bishop and what he stands for. By pointing out these ironic
subtleties in the light of the Bishop's identity as Catholic bish-
 316

op, I believe that I have made possible a definitive interpretatior

of the poem. The celibate cleric, Canon Giuseppe Caponsacchi, is
Browning's most sublime exemplar of the love of man and woman.
Written in the decade following the death of his wife. The Ring
and the Book provided Browning with the opportunity to idealize
and immortalize his love for Elizabeth. Browning's creation of
his Pope Innocent XII illustrates the poet's technique as it oper¬
ated in its most impressive form, and must be considered a master¬
piece of religious poetry. Here the poet combined history and
contemporaneity, identifying his character with both the histori¬
cal Pope Innocent and the contemporary Pope Pius. At the same
time the re-created Pope became the poet's most revealing personal
spokesman, as well as a Catholic defender of Browning's version of
Protestant thought.
Browning's eclectic creative process is apparent in all his
clerical characters. The present and the past, personal sympathy'
prejudice, and experience are all carefully combined and manipu¬
lated by his uniquely-bent imagination into the magnificent por¬
traits that are his glory. Browning discovered that clerical
characters, more than any others, provided his imagination with
more and better opportunities for exercising its distinctive tal¬
ents. No other group of characters was more weighted with his¬
torical stereotypes than Catholic clerics, or more spontaneously
the object of representational affirmative or negative reactions.
Browning also early realized that no group of characters was more
capable of embodying the subtly controlled ironic meanings which
he constantly sought to communicate to his readers.
Concentrating upon a single typical element in the works of
a prolific master poet can often provide us with a helpful point
 317

of entry into a representative selection of his complete works—a

fact true of Browning's clerical characters since they occur at
all points of his career and in his minor as well as his major
works. We thus discern certain patterns and relationships in
Browning's employment of these characters—which reached a climax
in the great clerics, from "The Bishop Orders his Tomb" to The
Ring and the Book. After these clerical masterpieces, the poet
lost interest as he concentrated more and more upon argumentative
and didactic poetry.
Even within the great monologues the poet's interest evolved
from a rather exclusive fascination with the character of the dying
Bishop at St. Praxed's to a broader interest in the more socially
conscious and reform-minded clerics of The Ring and the Book.
Where he at first satirized individual personages or local institu¬
tions, he gradually turned his critical eye and pen expressly to
the whole fabric of Roman ecclesiasticism. Browning was not a
bigot, nor can he simply and justly be labeled anti-Catholic, as he
has been by many critics. He was always willing to give credit
where he thought credit was due. He could respect the convictions
of others, but found it impossible to tolerate what he considered
hypocritical infidelity to those convictions. He could enjoy the
art and liturgy which Catholicism nourished, along with the flam¬
boyant grotesquerie and joie de vivre which so mark its Italian
forms, and admire the religious needs it satisfied in others. Yet
he could be a pungent critic of the authoritarian excesses which he
more and more came to believe were inevitably associated with it.
He was sometimes inaccurate or anachronistic in his strictures, but
always honestly so.
In fine. Browning was enthusiastically pro-Protestant, and
 318

this sentiment he embodied in an essential affirmation. But

this did not at all imply simply anti-Catholic bigotry. He was
a sincere critic of Catholicism, who occasionally erred or mis¬
judged because of his emotional pre-conditioning, and because he
lacked first-hand information and experience. For Browning was
above all a man of his times, a middle-class nineteenth-century
English Dissenter, in whom subjectivity and objectivity, despite
vigorous protestations to the contrary, were often inevitably
mixed.^
In Browning's clerical characters the poet's distinctive
techniques operate at their visible best. So conditioned by his
unchanging emotionally-weighted attitudes and yet monumentally
convincing. Browning must forever bewilder as well as fascinate
the interested historian and psychologist, while at the same time
he will never cease to entertain the appreciative reader.

Perhaps the most enlightening discussion of Browning's typi¬

cal and mostly unconscious attitudes and how they influenced his
composition is the essay which accompanies Donald Smalley's 1948
edition of Browning's Essay on Chatterton,
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Willoughby, John W. "Browning's 'Johannes Agricola in Meditation,

The Explicator, XXI (September, 1962), item 5.

Wilson, David Alec. Carlyle on Cromwell and Others. London:

Kegan Paul & Co., 1925.

[Wiseman, Nicholas Patrick Stephen Cardinal]. "The Present Catho¬

lic Dangers," The Dublin Review, XLI (December, 1856), 441-

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