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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES: THE
ETHICAL STATEMENT OF
ROBERT BRONNING'S POETRY

presented by
Judith Patricia Fabisch

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RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES: ETHICS IN THE POETRY
OF ROBERT BROWNING

BY

Judith Patricia Fabisch

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1991

é5é- Av»

ABSTRACT

RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES: THE ETHICAL STATEMENT OF
ROBERT BROWNING'S POETRY

By
Judith Patricia Fabisch

Charges of obscurity leveled at Browning are often based
more on a reading of the work through the screen of personal
prejudice than on the reality of who Browning was and why he
wrote. While Browning's poetry has been a frequent subject
of criticism, from the Victorians through the
deconstructionists, it is generally unsuited for any
particular "system."

Generally, three major elements enter into his
perception of Truth: "Intuition," reason, and revelation.
Intuition includes artistic sensitivity very close to. the
exercise of faith; sometimes the terms are synonymous. And,
while his negative characters often "reason" themselves away
from truth, none of his positive characters is stupid.
Often, they reason themselves to the place of faith.

Not a Kirkegaardian leap, however, this faith must be
based on revelation. Browning often expresses this in an
oral passing of the message, but the revelation may come in
a vision or an experience. Often it concerns the

Incarnation--the central Truth for Browning. Without

revelation central truths of Christianity are often missed,
i.e., the love of God. Clearly, that revelation for
Browning is the Bible; he illustrates from it, quotes it,
and applies its moral principles. He then combines the
three elements necessary to the apprehension of truth and
applies them to the problems of his age.

All men, according to Browning, are given enough light
to perceive Truth. If they reject it, it is only because
they choose to do so, because they desire something else
more. He firmly establishes the link between ethics and
Christianity in "Caliban on Setebos," and, while he never
seems to make a conscious effort to organize a "system," he
demonstrates it throughout the canon of his work,
summarizing and polarizing it in The Ring and the Book.

Browning requires his readers to engage in the
understanding that results in moral living--life
circumscribed by love. Browning's characters who apprehend
the truth make correct moral choices and allow the "others"
in their lives freedom to do the same and thus grow toward

maturity.

Copyright by
JUDITH PATRICIA FABISCH
1991

For my Father

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the people with whom I teach who granted me the
time necessary to complete this task, and to those who served as
encouragers-—especially those members of my committee who saw fit
to "nudge" me along the way.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1:
Browning and the end of the Twentieth Century

Chapter 2:
Ignorance: Speech Without Light, Knowledge Without
Revelation--Caliban, Rome and Tertium Quid

Chapter 3:
"True Things" by "Wrong Names": Authority and Light--
"Blougram," Two Lawyers, and "Holy Cross Day"

Chapter 4:

Manipulation and Deceit: Choosing Darkness--Human
Rights and Personal Loss
"Andrea del Sarto," Guido and the Duke of Ferrara

Chapter 5:

Knowing: Apprehending the Light — The Ethics of Virtue
"Saul," "Karshish," "Pompilia," and "The Pope"

Conclusions

Appendix
Bibliography

iv

36

70

107

144

176
181
191

INTRODUCTION

The life of Robert Browning has been as well documented
as that of any modern poet, and possibly more than most.
Societies of followers while he was still writing insured
that he would be amply commented upon, and a wife who was
even more popular than he insured that even the lives around
him would be closely examined. A simple perusal of the
shelves at nearly any library will reveal biographies by,
among others, individuals such as Altick, Armstrong, Cary,
Miller, Orr, Ward, and/or his cousin, Cyrus Mason. Still
others have demonstrated, with varying degrees of success,
his life and beliefs by compiling and editing his letters
and dissecting his work. It hardly seems necessary, or even
desirable, to rehearse what multitudes have done before.
This study will, therefore, focus on the ethical system of a
man who lived in an age which often fell far short of the
principles for which it is famed.

Robert Browning never made a pretense of being a
theologian. Nor did he consign himself to a set of
theologies prescribed by any specific church or religious
group. Ahead of his time, and certainly apart from others

who were writing when he did, he was an educated,

2

intelligent individualist of the highest order. And he
certainly did not classify the things he believed as
"doctrine" or "theology." What he did was translate his
faith into the words of his poetry, focusing on the
attitudes and problems which were evident to him in his era.
Part of his expression was the ethic which, for him, flowed
naturally from Christianity. He firmly establishes the link
between ethics and Christianity in "Caliban on Setebos,"
and, while he never seems to make a conscious effort to
organize a "system," he demonstrates it, albeit sometimes
negatively, throughout the canon of his work, particularly
that of the twenty-five or so years prior to the writing of
The Ring and the Book.

Browning was not a "religious" poet, but rather one who
was innately spiritual--his faith was composite with his
life, not a detached segment. Thus, we see an expanded
ethic, worked out in his "secular" poems as well as those
which have been labeled "religious." "My Last Duchess" and
"Andrea Del Sarto" become as much religious poetry as "Saul"
or "Karshish." That ethic is later brought into full focus
in The Ring and the Book. Published in 1869, it brought a
variety of character types together around one inquiry.
Here we need not speculate how various characters would
respond to a given situation--how a pope might react in a

priest's position, or how lawyers might have managed the

3
predicament of Guido—-we have the whole of Rome in our view
in a moment of time and around a common incident.

Faith and life for Browning were never static, but were
part of a process of growth which was to continue even after
death. Much of what we have chosen to use here was first
published in 1855, at his wife's urging and when his faith
seemed to be most lucid, and, ironically, just prior to Mrs.
Browning's deepest involvement in Spiritualism; some dates
as far back as 1842, showing evidence in "My Last Duchess."
"Caliban" reaches ahead to 1864, but brings into focus some
previously untouched issues of the time.

After The Ring and the Book, Browning's poetry seems,
according to some critics, to take a decided turn which they
interpret as a change in his belief system; but it is not
our purpose here to investigate that particular phenomena
which could be due to the loss of Elizabeth's influence, a
general decline of his poetic genius due to age, or the
critics' exegesis of the work through the screen of their
own interpretations of Christianity. What we are concerned
with is the poetry that flowed from the years of his
vitality. What he became in his later years can be the

subject of another study.

CHAPTER 1
BROWNING AND THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

When Robert Browning used the segment of Psalm 50:21,
"...thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as
thyself...," as the epigraph for "Caliban on Setebos," he
may well have been as much a prophet as he was a poet, at
least concerning the criticism that would follow him. Those
who critiqued his work insisted upon casting him, variously
and at length, in any of a number of roles ranging from
philosopher to theologian, from godly Christian to
unbeliever, as heretic, preacher, thinker, scientist, the
poet, or no poet at all. He was then either praised or
censured, depending upon the critic's sometimes rather
narrow theological and/or personal views, and particularly
by those writing before World War I, although the tendency
towards the same kind of criticism lingers in the present
much like a ghost who will not be exercised. Far fewer
critics were interested in viewing him as a poet than as a
theologian or a philosopher.

The 1890's alone produced a number of titles which seem
to deal with him in this manner. Among them we find such

works as: Faith and Doubt in the century's Poets,1 Browning

5
and the Christian Faith,2 Browning Poet and Man: A Survey,3
"Browning's Hebraic Sympathies,"‘ Christian Instincts and
Modern Doubt,B "Browning's Attitude Towards Christianity,"6

"7 no fewer than

"Tennyson and Browning as Spiritual Forces,
five articles on "Browning as a Religious Teacher,"a
"Browning's Philosophy,"9 several works on Browning as a
theologian,‘° "The Religious Opinions of Robert Browning,"11
"Browning's Theism,"‘2 and The Vision of Christ in the
Poets: Selected Studies of the Christian Faith as
Interpreted by Hilton, Wordsworth, the Brownings, Tennyson,
Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell.‘°

The fault seems to lie not so much with individual
Browning critics as it does with the narrow confines of
nineteenth century criticism in general; that Browning was
not the only target of such approaches is seen even here by
the inclusion of other poets in several of the titles.
Often, the work was read superficially, or with such a
jaundiced eye that the criticism was more of a commentary on
the belief system of the critic than on the work under
consideration. Improvement in the critical climate was not
rapid. W. 0. Raymond writes, hopefully, as late as 1950:

In the sixty years that have passed since Browning's

death, his poetic reputation has varied as widely as

in his lifetime. The pendulum of critical opinion

has again swung violently from one extreme to the

other. In particular, Browning has suffered, along

with Tennyson, from the general reaction inimical to

Victorianism and all its works which has

characterized the opening decades of the twentieth

century. There are signs that the nadir has been
reached, and that a juster and truer appreciation of

6

the Victorian epoch is at hand. But we are still in
the wake of that inevitable shift of literary
evaluation which marks the transition from one
generation to the next. The baiting of Victorianism
continues to be a favourite sport of modern writers;
and prevailing currents of present—day historical
and aesthetic criticism run counter to some of the
cherished ideals and standards in life and art of
our Victorian forerunners. Part of this censure is
wholesome, part is regrettable, but the winnowing of
our Victorian inheritance by the fan of time is yet
incomplete (Moment, 3-4).

Browning seems a particular target of that
"baiting," and regrettably, fifteen years later, in 1965,
Raymond's hopes had not been realized. Patricia Ball agrees
and laments:

As the mists clear and it becomes apparent that
Victorian poetry has been the victim of inept
criticism and obtuse reading, it becomes even
clearer that Browning in particular has suffered to
a crippling degree. It is scarcely too much to say
that he has not been critically considered as a poet
at all; in an age which prides itself on its
literary sophistication, comment on his poetry has
made the most naive assumptions about the
"intentions" which may be discerned in it and the
deductions which may be drawn from it (245).

Not all were in despair. In his 1970 review of the
Browning literature, Boyd Litzinger observes, hopefully:

There exists today neither a pro-Browning nor an
anti-Browning cult. The poet has recovered from the
twin ailments of extreme praise and blame, and the
time is nearer when objectively critical evaluations
can be made. And these evaluations will have to
take into consideration Browning's thought. If this
study has done nothing else, it has shown that many
critics have not been criticizing, but reacting.
The treatment of Browning as a thinker has often
been visceral rather than intellectual (164).

7
Unfortunately, even as late as 1975 we find critics such as
Roger Sharrock attempting to classify Browning's thinking
based on his use of history:

Browning certainly saw and felt, but he did not
think, or only within the precise limits of a
carefully prepared programme. That is why his small
stock of ideas changed hardly at all during his long
poetic career.

It is important to draw attention to the
limitations of intellectual interest in Browning
when one approaches his attitude to history. For
our present concern with historicism and the
correspondence between certain stances of Browning's
poetry and the insights of the German
historiographical traditions may lead us to detect
parallels where there are only accidental
similarities in a field where vagueness of
generalization makes similarity seem easy. (80)

Perhaps Browning, despite his interest in history, did not
use it as precisely as Sharrock would have preferred; the
remark is shallow in its perception, and is undoubtedly more
an indication of Sharrock's narrow-mindedness than it is of
Browning's. If historical accuracy is among the criteria
for all those poets who are considered able to "think," we
must perhaps reconsider the places we have given to Homer
and Virgil in our literature, not to mention Chaucer,
Shakespeare and Milton. Perhaps Mr. Sharrock should take
note of Philip Drew, who, speaking of those who object to
Browning's philosophical ideas, states:

There are also those who admit to an interest in

ideas but do not wish to encounter them except in a

clearly labelled work of philosophy, preferably in

prose. Again it is much safer for such people not

to read Browning's speculative poems. Or Paradise

Lost, or the Essay on Man, or Gulliver's Travels, or
Erewhon. (137-38)

8
And Mr. Sharrock should read only history books written by
scholarly historians. Browning used history as he used
personality and philosophy and religion, and any number of
other things. They were all building blocks for his poetry.
David Bergman notes of Browning's intentions:

His concern is with the "soul," a word redolent with
theological significance, and not with "character,"
personality" or even "mind," terms readily available
to him. History, the creation of a concrete
setting, has never been a major focus for Browning.
The man-in-the-street is not "worth study" if he is
not caught in a spiritually developing incident. It
is the dynamic of spiritual development that
interests Browning rather than the static portrayal
of personality. (774)

Norton Crowell remarks on Browning's reaction to the old
yellow book which he found in an Italian market stall and
from which he shaped The Ring and the Book:

His elation is not because he has such reverence for
the fact of or in the ancient book that he will
shape to his artistic needs, as Langbaum believes,
and certainly it is not because he has contempt for
the sordid and ugly truths that he finds in it, as
Cundiff affirms. The words, "Letting me have my
will again with these," explains his joy. He has
magnificent raw gold to shape, and his joy is that
of Michelangelo in beholding a splendid, unshaped
block of marble awaiting his chisel. Neither artist
creates the raw material, but each shapes and
fashions what is there into a new life (Glass, 212).

Fortunately, not all critics were so intolerant as
Sharrock, but neither did many see bright lights for the
future. P. J. Keating, in 1975, noted:

W. 0. Raymond wrote: "in the sphere of literary
criticism, as distinct from biography, there has
been no outstanding book written on the poetry of
Browning as a whole since 1910." If one places the
required emphasis on the phrase "as a whole", this
statement still remains true, for while the quality

9

of much Browning criticism over the past two decades

has reached a high degree of sophistication, this

has been achieved by an ever increasing

fragmentation. (316)
Keating later notes positively the work by Philip Drew,“
and, of course, Raymond himself and H. B. Charlton,15 but
collectively and not as overall assessments. Philip Drew
and P. J. Keating, both of whom have added significantly to
the criticism, were writing in the 19703; Boyd Litzinger has
continued his fine work, and Clyde de L. Ryals in the '80s
has remained objective. But the criticism still remains
sadly out of balance. The criticism of "Chesterton,...
[and] Santayana, whose views may once again be taken as
typical of two distinct schools of thought" (Keating 328)
seem to be repeated endlessly in their literary descendants.

The decade through which we have just passed posed what
seemed to be, at first, some developments with the advent of
criticisms such as deconstruction, feminist theory, New
Criticism, and the like. John Maynard, however, observes in
his survey of criticism covering the 1980's:

The more I think about what we have said and learned

about Browning recently, the more I am seeing

patterns that go right back to the century of

criticism--so much of it seemingly outdated and

overworn--since Browning's death. (5)
He notes Samuel L. Chell as stressing "the coherence of
internal experience and internal time in...a dramatic

monologue," comparing it with "stream of consciousness," and

reminiscent of the old defenses against Santayana. E.

10
Warwick Slinn's work has little to offer beyond what J.
Hillis Miller accomplished in The Disappearance of God, or
the work done by W. David Shaw. Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., in
a "Derridean investigation of difference in Browning"
investigates verbal structures (8).

What difference does it make? Why bother with a body of
criticism which has been governed mainly by wild swings of
emotion and current critical theory masquerading old
theories under new names? Why bother with a poet who has
been dead for nearly one hundred years and who addressed,
for the most part, the problems of his particular age, and
who is read mainly by scholars? And how do we even read him
at the end of the twentieth century? Can we cast new light
on a body of work which has been so widely misunderstood?

We owe it to scholarship, first of all. If those who
study literature can do no better than emotional assessment
of a poet as important to his age as Robert Browning, and in
an age which had such bearing on the century in which we
live, we must question our competence to make other
judgments of literature as well. We need to establish a
balance, to see Browning as he is, not as we wish him to be.

Upon reflection, we see that the Victorian age was not
as dissimilar to our own as it first appears. Few
generations have so little deserved their reputations as the
one in which Browning lived and wrote. High-collared,

pristine morality stood in contradiction to rampant

11
prostitution with all of its attendant evils and diseases.
An age famed for its "godliness" struggled with and gave way
to higher criticism and evolution, leaving its people a
Revelation without a Revealer, a Creation without a Creator
(Grier). With this concern, Philip Drew observes:

My impression is that this [Browning's reputation as

a philosopher] was due in part to the fact that

ethical studies in the nineteenth century were

strong in theory but were not particularly helpful

as a substitute for the regulative element of

Christian teaching. (136)

The industrial "revolution," which was supposed to be a boon
to all men, in fact put a far greater number of people into
the poor houses and onto the streets than it did into lives
of ease and plenty. Unwanted children were abandoned or
sold; others were stolen for "commercial" use, often working
twelve-hour days and dying without ever really having lived.
The atmosphere of change that had so disturbed the romantics
was not less unsettling to the Victorians.

But, the era was not the worst age that ever was. "It
was," as A. S. P. Woodhouse notes, "the seed ground of the
twentieth century.

It marked the beginnings of many of our specific

problems and more generally of that sudden

heightening of the tempo of change which has been

mounting ever since. (206)

The expansion (and decline) of the British Empire, two
world wars and several less global conflicts, a cold war

that spanned fifty years, the expansion of knowledge, and

improvements in communication and transportation have made

12
the consequences of modern living universal rather than
local. The nineteenth century was England's century.
Today, little happens in the smallest corner of the globe
that does not affect its entirety. The twentieth century
may well be simply the nineteenth writ large.

Modern technology has displaced far more people than
could be dreamed when mechanical weaving looms were
introduced to England. Countless thousands wander homeless
and hungry in almost every major city of the world. Because
of internal strife, some countries are experiencing
virtually a "national homelessness." Scientific "advances"
sometimes do more harm than good; medications meant to ease
pain sometimes cause death or deformity. Atomic wastes pose
hazards that few can or will tolerate in their communities.
The smog that hung over London now threatens to destroy the
planet; acid rain, holes in the ozone layer, destruction of
the rain forests and the extinction of countless species of
animals, concepts which Darwin could not begin to imagine,
are familiar to even the youngest of school children.

Children are still bought and sold, now, often before
they are conceived. Surrogate motherhood has become one of
the major legal issues of the last two decades of this
century. At the same time, pro-choice and pro-life
activists come to verbal and physical blows in the streets
as well as at the polls over the rights of women to rid

themselves of unwanted pregnancies. The diseases of

13

promiscuous sex have combined with those of drug users, and
the threat of AIDS is very real to many. Information about
it now confronts every even vaguely informed citizen from
all directions; its dying victims feel abandoned; gay rights
activists angrily march in public at every opportunity to
insist on action in this and other of their particular
concerns.

In an age of Democracy and communication, when the walls
of the cold war are literally tumbling, students are shot
down in China's Tienemen Square. Blacks and whites war with
each other and with themselves in South Africa. Hostages
are held in the Mid-East and chemical warfare is a
foreseeable possibility. Our scientific and technological
advancement seems to have little affected our moral climate
for good. We may well have out-Victorianed the Victorians.

Most assuredly, Browning speaks to an age for which his
own served as a foreshadowing just as he so clearly speaks
to the problems of his own. He seems to be able to rescue
his sense of balance when society appears totally
unbalanced, to maintain perspective when life seems to
contradict itself, and when little in the world make sense,
he retains the courage to ask the hard questions. Thomas
Collins enumerates some of those questions as he speaks of
Pauline and Paracelsus:

And because he is one step removed from his own

problems in Paracelsus, Browning can work out, with

a greater degree of objectivity, the moral dilemma
left unsolved in Pauline: What is man's

l4

relationship to God and to his fellow man; how can
unlimited aspiration be reconciled to limited
ability; how can man reach God without succumbing to
the fruitless idealism of Shelley; and how does one
serve the human race without being dragged down into
the quagmire of reality? (19)

For more than one-and-a-half centuries, Browning has
provided good reasons, for Christians and non—Christians
alike, to live morally in an immoral world. Philip Drew
applies this point to what he obviously considers a post-
Christian society:

Taken at its simplest level Browning's poetry

implicitly asks for the reader's assent to the

proposition that simple-hearted, straightforward,
loving, trustful behaviour is still possible and
still the best for man even in an age of fear,
doubt, casuistry and mistrust, a position which must

be respected in any debate on man's ethical

nature.... Browning's protracted struggles to

define, defend and generalize his intuitively-held
position touch his age and ours at every point. He

is bound in this to reflect the actual dilemmas that

confront all non-Christians who are unable to accept

Utilitarianism in its extreme forms. (137)

But Browning did more than deal with eithics; his poetry
is good poetry. Those who write poems not worthy of notice
are, simply, not noticed. A brief tour through the stacks
in even a modest library will reveal that Browning has most
certainly been noticed for more than 150 years. The body of
criticism surrounding his work at least equals that which
encompasses the work of T. S. Eliot, seemingly and only the

critics of Shakespeare and Milton outnumber those of the

Victorian poet.

15
Whatever the function of poetry in the human equation,
the need that it serves has not been suspended. Good poets
continue to find receptive audiences. Donald Hall, in
"Death to the Death of Poetry," writes:
Time, which reported The Waste Land as a hoax in
1922, canonized T. S. Eliot in a cover story in
1950. Certainly Time's writers and editors altered
over thirty years, but they also stayed the same:
Always the Giants grow old and die leaving the
Pygmies behind. After the age of Eliot, Frost,
Stevens, Moore, and Williams, the wee survivors were
Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, and Bishop. When the
survivors died, younger elegiac journalists revealed
that the dead Pygmies had been Giants all along—-and
now the young poets were dwarfs. Doubtless
obituaries lauding Allen Ginsberg are already
written; does anyone remember Life on the Beat
Generation, thirty years ago? (72)
At the same time, while we are granting a place to the new
"Giants," we must remember not to neglect their
predecessors. We seem to have yet another mentality that
displaces poets. When the dead Pygmies move into the ranks
of the Giants, some of the older Giants fade into obscurity
and are not allowed to return for a hundred years. While we
wouldn't dream of allowing Milton to replace Shakespeare, or
Shakespeare to replace, say, Spenser, when we begin reading
"Bishop" and "Ashbery," "Rich" and "Plath" (73), we seem to
forget that Browning and Tennyson and Eliot ever existed.
But, whatever the similarities between the ages, this is
not the Victorian age, this is the twentieth century.

Whatever the faults of previous generations of critics, we

cannot read through their eyes to correct what has been

16

written; we see through the experience of a century of
events. Not that we want to ignore all that has been said
before, but we must learn to read Browning in a new light,
hopefully forming fresh opinions less slavishly based on the
those of the critics who have gone before. We need to learn
to use the critics as a springboard of creative thought, not
as "square one" for a discussion that will only follow
itself in circles like some sort of bizarre board game that
can only end where it began. We need to see the work of the
critics as much a commentary on their own ages as it is a
reaction to the talent they are dealing with.

P. J. Keating, in 1975, found that many have asked the
same question and have found few answers:

Chesterton, James, and Santayana, remain the most
stimulating of Browning critics because they never
lose sight of this problem; they direct themselves
constantly to the question, why read Browning at
all? Most modern Browning criticism does not ask
this question (let alone try to answer it) because
it speaks invariably to and for itself: the old
Browning Society is not dead, but transformed and
reorganized on a vast, academic, international
scale. Readers who are on the outside are as
bewildered and uninformed as ever; Henry James is
still their best spokesman:

"I cling to the dear old tradition that Browning
is 'difficult'--which we were all brought up on and
which I think we should, especially on a rich
retrospective day like this, with the atmosphere of
his great career settling upon us as much as
possible, feel it as a shock to see break down in
too many places at once." (327-328)

The problem of "difficulty" may well be one of the
answers to Keating's and our question. Little in more

commonly read literature makes the kind of demands on the

17
reader that Browning's poetry does (perhaps along with that
of T. S. Eliot), but those very demands can challenge our
thinking and bring us to new conclusions. Those conclusions
can make the work usable, perhaps in a way that it never was
before, and possibly provide the shock that James was so
reluctant to accept.

First, of course, we must set aside our disbelief. Too
often we get so taken up with disputing the things we won't
believe that we are not able to hear what we might believe.
Michael Edwards notes:

The critic must be prepared to learn from the writer

(a truism, but we do not live in an age conducive to

the thought), and the fact that he may know

better...still leaves him the reader of the person

who has done the job. All writers may help us to

see, whatever lights they are using (66-67).

Browning's light was a spiritual one. To ignore that
fact ignores most of what he is about. A "dissenter" and
always fiercely independent, Browning writes, in a letter to
Julia Wedgwood dated July 28, 1864:

It is one of the facts of my experience that one

limits sorrowfully one's pretension to influence

other people for good: I live more and more--what

am I to write?--for God not man--I don't care what

men think now, knowing they will never think my

thoughts; yet I need increasingly to tell the truth-

-for whom? Is it that I shall be the better, the

larger for it, have the fairer start in next life,

the firmer stand? Is it pure selfishness or the

obedience to a natural law? (Curie, 33).

While this was written about the time of The Ring and the

Book, we see more of a direction of development than a new

thing. Philip Drew prefers to categorize Browning's work:

18

The Christian poems require, of course, a reasonable
acquaintance with Christian doctrine; I do not think
that Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day and 'Development',
for example, make much sense unless the reader
understands the direction of nineteenth-century
criticism of religious evidences. Similarly 'A
Death in the Desert' is in effect a reply to the
Wesen des Christentums of Feuerbach, which George
Eliot translated. While this information is helpful
and serves to clarify the argument, it is not
essential: The poem can be read, understood and
enjoyed by those who have never heard of Feuerbach,
just as Oliver Twist can be understood by those who
have never heard of the New Poor Law, or the old one
(125—26).

Part of the difficulty with this approach, of course, is
that it separates Browning's "Christian" poems from his
"secular" ones. Browning was not a "religious" poet, but
rather one who was innately spiritual--the difference being
that the first is merely a segment of life, a part that can
be separated from the whole. We can no more separate the
man from his poetry than we can separate him from his
humanity. Helen Gardner refers to T. S. Eliot in making
this same distinction:

Eliot very characteristically confuses the whole

issue by suggesting a quite different conception of

'religious poetry', as poetry in which the whole of

life is treated in a religious spirit.... This

opens the gates very wide, and suggests an even
wider opening if we are willing to allow that
religion and Christianity are not interchangeable

terms. (125)

We need not so much an understanding of doctrine as we do an
understanding of the Bible, an ability very clearly and

sadly lacking in much of modern scholarship. We do not need

a course in theology, but insight into the spiritual mind,

19
an understanding of the role of faith in the life of one
committed to godly living.

Of course, the writer, no matter who he is, will reveal,
at last, his own basic principles. The poet who is
convinced of the sanctity of life, for instance, will never
blatantly promote murderous behavior in his work. If he
writes about it at all, he will punish it. While Browning
seems, at first reading, to insist on the "objectivity" of
his monologues in particular, closer reading reveals
something quite different: We find the poet within the
poem. In "One Word More," he says:

Love, you saw me gather men and women,

Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,

Enter each and all, and use their service,

Speak from every mouth,—-the speech, a poem.

Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows,

Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving:

I am mine and yours--the rest be all men's,

Karshish, Cleon, Norbert, and the fifty.

Let me speak this once in my true person,

Not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea,

Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence:

Pray you, look on these my men and women,

Take and keep my fifty poems finished;

Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also!

Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things.
"You saw me.../Speak from every mouth." This time, he uses
not the mouth of one of his characters, but his own; the
speech has always been his, only his visage has been
changed. "Where my heart lies," he adds, "let my brain lie
also!" reflecting a belief that one cannot be successful in

separating conviction from practice, personality from voice

of the poet.

role

20
Michael Mason agrees:

The dramatic monologue in Browning's hands was at
once a naturalistic genre, and one that involved the
author's self-expression and, more fundamentally,
self-display. In the monologues between 1836 and
1855 the second aspect becomes increasingly
prominent. (266)

In his own "Essay on Shelley," Browning discusses

the

of personality in poetry. And although he later

changed his attitude toward Shelley, we have no cause

assume

which his essay sets forth.

For

and

He [the subjective poet] is rather a seer,
accordingly, than a fashioner, and what he produces
will be less a work than an effluence. That
effluence cannot easily be considered in abstraction
from his personality,--being indeed the very
radiance and aroma of his personality, projected
from it but not separated. Therefore, in our
approach to the poetry, we necessarily approach the
personality of the poet; in apprehending it we
apprehend him, and certainly we cannot love it
without loving him. Both for love's and
understanding's sake we desire to know him, and, as
readers of his poetry, must be readers of his
biography also.

to

that he ever turned away from the poetic principles

those who would argue that he was speaking of Shelley

not of himself, we would note that sauces work equally

well for goose and gander. Maynard agrees:

Despite his reticence as self-explainer, Browning's
own statements are not irrelevant. "The Essay on
Shelley," as Thomas J. Collins showed some years
ago, offers an elliptic but often stunningly useful
system of criticism for speaking of his [own] work
(19).

21
Maynard, earlier, notes that Browning often vacillated
between "an objective and subjective role for the poet," and
J. Hillis Miller makes a pertinent comment here:

His resistance to committing himself wholly to one

voice was so great that at the age of twenty, before

he had developed the theory of the dramatic

monologue, he could not bring himself to "lay bare

his heart" without persuading himself that he was

only pretending to be a Shelleyan poet, full of

anguish and nameless sin. Browning could not begin

to speak at all unless he convinced himself that he

was not speaking in his own voice. Only then would

the inner ice melt, and the interminable flow of

words begin, the garrulous rumble of his own

inimitable voice. (106)

While he may have "pretended" to be a Shelleyan poet, and he
may have "pretended" to be the characters in his poems, but
he never pretended to be a theologian, nor did he consign
himself to a set of theologies prescribed by any specific
church or religious group, but he did translate his faith
into the words of his poems. Thus, we see an expanded
ethic, worked out in his "secular" works as well as in those
which have been labeled "religious." "My Last Duchess" and
"The Statue and the Bust" become as much religious poetry as
"Saul" or "Karshish."

Drew, who does not see Browning as particularly
Christian, does, however, see his importance as an ethical
philosopher:

One of the functions of the ethical philosopher in a

time of doubt must be to supply men with motives for

practising what they intuitively know to be true.

This is a work which can be done with particular

force by the poets; Browning takes up the challenge

with a will, and some at least of the stirring cries
to action which a hostile critic has represented as

22

declarations 'that the exercise of energy is the
absolute good, irrespective of motives or of
consequences' are justifiable as part of a serious
philosophical enterprise, that of providing men with
a motive for actually doing what they have decided
to be right.... The innumerable men and women in
love in his earlier poems...present to the moral
sense aesthetic reasons for deciding to act in a
certain way, or for evaluating the acts of others.
(139)

Despite Drew's reservations about Browning's religious
persuasion, the poet firmly establishes his link between
ethics, revelation and Christianity in "Caliban on Setebos."
Such poems as "Holy Cross Day" and "Rabbi Ben Ezra" point to
Judaism and not Christianity, but too much of his work
stresses the emphasis of the Incarnation for us to agree
that Browning was not Christian. The Ring and the Book, is,
of course, summary. Philip Keating's view adds to this
opinion:

Modern criticism, of course, tends to reject such
uses, but nonetheless the curious thing about so
many recent explications is that while they serve to
place The Ring and The Book in relation to Browning
and to Browning scholarship, that is all they do;
there is little outward expansion, virtually no
sense of Browning's culminating achievement having a
place in, or any kind of significance for, Victorian
or modern literature. This is not true of
Chesterton, nor indeed of Santayana, whose views may
once again be taken as typical of two distinct

schools of thought. Santayana was contemptuously
dismissive, finding that The Ring and the Book had
no 'structure' merely 'singular mechanical
division'. Chesterton on the other hand saw the
poem as 'the typical epic of modern times', and
offered two reasons for his view. First, its

'enormous multiplication of a small theme', this
being important because, 'The characteristic of the
modern movement par excellence is the apotheosis of
the insignificant'; and secondly because, 'It is the
expression of the belief, it might almost be said,
of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this

23

earth without possessing a point of view...it is the
epic of free speech.'(327)

Browning also often chose to write ironically, a
consideration that may well be as confusing to some of his
readers as his spiritual ideology. Clyde de L. Ryals'
comments:

For Browning does not offer a vision of the world
redeemed, as does Shelley, or of the world devoid of
values, as Byron so often does. On the contrary,
with Browning it is not a question of either/or;
rather, it is a matter of both/and. More than any
of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries
Browning is able to hold a view of the world in
which the most contradictory statements to be made
about it are alike true. In a word, Browning is an
ironist--the supreme ironist among English poets of
the nineteenth century. (24)

It may be that the James' estimation of the difficulty of
Browning's work, which we spoke of earlier, is simply
because he (along with, perhaps, Jones and Santayana) does
not understand irony. Ryals reports:

Everyone knows how Browning loved to dine out and be
taken not for a poet but for a successful financier,
how Henry James thought that the man he met in
society could not possibly be Robert Browning the
poet. During the later seventies and early eighties
Browning lived his irony as he had never before been
able to do. (43-44)

Later Ryals notes that irony was at least part of the reason
for Browning's success, and provides what may well be
another good reason for reading him:

It was his irony that permitted him to be among the
last topical of English poets and yet simultaneously
to be among the most fully grounded in the life of
his time. In sum, it was his irony that makes him
one of the most innovative and enduringly
influential poets in English. (46)

24
He also notes the ability of irony to allow Browning to
speak to his audience:

In that passage [the taming of the sea-horse in "My
Last Duchess") we are invited to see the statue as a
summarizing symbol of the speaker, this not by the
duke himself but the poet, who remains in his work
in spite of all disclaimers in the Advertisement to
Dramatic Lyrics that the utterances in these poems
are those "of so many imaginary persons, not mine."
The ironic mode of the dramatic monologue thus
allowed Browning the mutually enriching interaction
of the objective and the subjective, the dramatic
and the lyric modes. (39)

If Browning's irony allows him to transcend some of the
difficulties of an admittedly difficult age, it also allows
him to explore ways of meeting those difficulties. Through
it he is able to explore the area of possibility. Only
through irony and the exploration of possibility can
Browning have Cleon claim, immediately after expressing an
intense desire for a revelation from Zeus:

I cannot tell thy messenger aright

Where to deliver what he bears of thine

To one called Paulus; we have heard his fame

Indeed, if Chritus be not one with him--

I know not nor am troubled much to know,

Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,

As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,

Hath access to a secret shut from us?

Thou wrongest our philosophy, 0 king,

In stooping to inquire of such an one,

As if his answer could impose at all!

Michael Edwards, in discussing the art of poetry states,
"The Transfiguration or the passage through the figurative
to the new and the radiant-~the real--is its emblem. Art

faces east." He continues:

So the concern of art is surely not order but
possibility. I realize now that almost since first

25

writing a poem I have been impelled toward this
idea, and I am beginning to find it wherever I look-
-in the Catholic Pierre Emmanuel but also in
Baudelaire, in Tomlinson, in J‘abes. One finds it
back in the Renaissance in Sidney's theory that
poetry is "the divine consideration of what may be."
Aside from theory, a practice of both writing and
reading can convince one that literature is, deep
down, the contriving of possibility, and that a work
of literature seeks the possible in all its moves,
down to the least momentous. (71)

No discussion of Browning's irony can be complete
without a discussion of his ideas of truth, for it is
through his irony that he often aims at the discovery of
truth, and truth, itself, is often ironical. Frank Lockwood
is unhappy, at best, with what he understands of Browning's
view of the subject:

And we may as well admit at once that, considered
from the standpoint of speculative reason,
Browning's philosophy went to pieces upon just this
rock. Browning is an out-and-out philosophical
skeptic. He does not trust man's intellectual
powers, nor see any good ground to hope that man can
enter into sure possession of the world of reality
around him. He utterly discredits human knowledge,
and with rare subtlety and dialectical skill sets
about to undermine the edifice of pure reason. He
casts doubt upon the possibility of man's ever
rearing a safe structure upon the foundation of
intellect alone. (37)

Norton Crowell, in 1968, while disputing Lockwood's
view, repeated another commonly held fallacy toward
Browning's attitude in this realm:

Browning spent his artistic life in demonstrating
and proving that everything in life comes down
ultimately to interpretation and judgment by each
individual, for this is the only "truth" man has.
This is, indeed, what the work [The Ring and the
Book] is about: the test of each man in
interpreting and sifting truth from its matrix of
lies and distortions, and rendering a decision, even

26

though each man is peculiarly limited in judgment
and subject to error and thus barred from attaining
absolute truth. (Glass, 184-85)

What Crowell fails to see is that "what the work is about,"
indeed, what all of the dramatic monologues are about, is
showing how each speaker either decidedly avoids the truth,
justifying himself in either pride or a moral decision, or
makes an honest effort in discovering the truth, imperfect
as his knowledge may be. Samuel Chell observes in regard to
"Clean":

Like Browning's Duke of Ferrara, he chooses not to
stoop, and his understated parenthetical evidence
("gathered from a bystander") merely underscores a
towering and unbending hubris. But Browning's
philosophical Greek artist possesses wisdom and
self-insight that the Duke never needs reckon with.
The significant irony of the poem is not that Cleon
fails to see within himself what he most desperately
needs, [i.e., the truth] but that he sees much more
than he finally cares to admit. Because of this
insight Cleon must forcibly delude himself,
disorienting himself from the reality he seeks to
avoid. (71)

Both the Duke and Cleon suffer from pride. The Duke's pride
is in his possessions and his "nine-hundred-years-old name."
Cleon's pride has been evident from the first; not only does
he boast that his mind is almost unbelievably great and his
talent unsurpassed, he lives in a superior locale than even
Protus himself:

Cleon the poet (from the sprinkled isles,

Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea,

And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps
"Greece")--

27

Browning puts truth into the mouths of many of his
characters. Cleon and Karshish touch it, hold it for a
brief moment, and then reject it. David, in "Saul," and
Rabbi Ben Ezra see it and apprehend it. Sometimes it is the
"artist" who knows. Del Sarto and Lippo Lippi play games
with truth, but Abt Vogler says, "'t is we musicians know,"
and Browning writes in Book XII of The Ring and the Book,

This lesson, that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame

And human estimation words and wind.

Why take the artistic way to prove so much?
Because, it is the glory and the good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible

Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.

Not that he feels that all truth can be known at any one
time, or certainly by any one individual. The process of
life is, for him, a process of growth. We discover one
truth now, another greater, deeper truth tomorrow. Cleon
cries out, "Why stay we on the earth unless to grow?" And
it was because of Browning's attitude that mutability was
not for him the problem that it was for the Romantics. In
Fifine at the Fair he writes:

Alack, Philosophy!
Despite the chop and change, diminished or increased,
Patched-up and plastered-o'er, Religion stands at least
I' the temple-type. But thou? Here gape I, all agog
These thirty years, to learn how tadpole turns to frog;
And thrice at least have gazed with mild astonishment,
As, skyward up and up, some fire-new fabric sent
Its challenge to mankind that, clustered underneath
To hear the word, they straight believe, ay, in the
teeth
0' the Past, clap hands and hail triumphant Truth's
outbreak--
Tadpole-frog-theory propounded past mistake!
In vain! A something ails the edifice, it bends,

28

It bows, it buries...Haste! cry "Heads below"
friends--

to

But have no fear they find, when smother shall subside,

Some substitution perk with unabated pride
I' the predecessor's place!

Crowell observes, regarding this passage:

The truth that lasts man in his lifetime "does
well," he says; but in spite of this lesson each
generation seizes upon the latest discovery,
hypothesis, or theory--Browning surely had in mind
Darwinism, the higher criticism, and neo-
rationalism--as imperishable: "Yesterday's doctrine
dead, this only shall endure!" (Glass, 51)

Browning does not disqualify the intellect in the process of

discovering truth. Citing the Pope in The Ring and the

Book, Crowell first notes:

Nor

I do not believe that repetition of the abundant and
conclusive evidence of Browning's wholesome and
boundless respect for the intellect--when properly
used in wholeness with body and spirit--need occupy
us long. I should like, however, to cite the Pope's
clarion words on man's mind:

Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass
Wherein are gathered all the scattered points
Picked out of the immensity of the sky,
To re-unite there, be our heaven for earth,
Our known unknown, our God revealed to man"
Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole;
Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense.
(Glass, 190)

does Browning rely on intellect alone. Drew notes:

First Browning is repeatedly at pains to make the
point that crucial moral choices are not logical.
Just as a man's fundamental moral assumptions are
chosen for reasons which are ultimately alogical--
the final considerations may, for example, be
aesthetic--so when a man has a great decision to
make he will have to perform an act of trust, a
Kierkegaardian 'leap,"put faith to proof, be cured
or killed at once.’ In any philosophy that is not
completely reductionist something must be taken on
trust. Browning places enormous emphasis on the

29

importance of the act of trusting or believing where
we cannot prove. (140)

In other words, while human reason is important, it is not
the only, nor the ultimate criterion for belief. The
invisible, the things we often must take on faith, are often
the things that have greater importance. Cleon says,

It takes but little water just to touch

At some one point the inside of a sphere,

And, as we turn the sphere, touch all the rest
In due succession: but the finer air

Which not so palpably nor obviously,

Though no less universally, can touch

The whole circumference of that emptied sphere
Fills it more fully than the water did;

Holds thrice the weight of water in itself
Resolved into a subtler element.

And yet the vulgar call the sphere first full
Up to the visible height--and after, void;

Not knowing air's more hidden properties.

But, Collins notes,

Cleon thinks too much, and, as Browning shows in
Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, too great a reliance
on rationality is a dangerous thing. With his
highly trained intellect, Cleon has delved into the
fundamental problems of existence and discovered the
answer to the contradiction posed by the theory of
progress which, for the non-Christian, can only end
with the recession into death. His answer is that
there is no answer. The poem is an elucidation,
again in epistolary form, of the process through
which he has arrived at this negation, and his
resultant blindness to the Incarnation, which holds
the only possible solution to his philosophic
queries. (140)

But there is more. Knowledge involves responsibility,
and the responsibility of those who have access to and
acquire knowledge is to share it with others-—to teach.
Symons understands this spiritually:

The poet, in Mr. Browning's view of him, is God's
witness, and must see and speak for God. He must

30

therefore conceive of each individual separately and
distinctively, and he must see how each soul
conceives of itself. (5)

Mr. Ryals expands on this concept:

I do not mean that the great monologues of the
fifties and sixties are reducible to their moral
content, but I do say that they have more moral
design upon the reader than do the earlier
poems....Speaking in "One Word More" in his own
voice and out of his own experience of
unappreciation, Browning tells of the poet who like
Moses is both looked up to for guidance and

deprecated for it. It is a wearying business, but
"Never dares the man to put off the prophet." (40—
41)

Keeping in mind who Browning is and what he represents,
the reader must be prepared, then, to read Browning
holistically. One can no more get an idea of what his
poetry is about by reading, say, Sbrdello than he can get an
idea of what modern England is about by looking at a 1920
map of London. The part is not the whole, and yesterday can
give us no clear picture of the here and now, despite the
fact that each gives us important information. Patricia
Ball says it quite succinctly:

The first step towards a maturing criticism can be
taken if the Rabbi is never allowed out on his own;
that, is he should not stray from the company of, at
least, the Bishop ordering his tomb and the other
Bishop setting out his apology. Nor should Caliban
ever be overlooked. This assembly immediately
strikes a blow at the oversimplification of
Browning: where is "his attitude" in this group?
It calls attention at once to an essential factor,
the variety of his creation, and it hints, moreover,
that this variety is not just that of a fortuitous
crowd. (245)

Later, she goes on to say:

31

The answer, in brief, is Godot, not God. The common

factor that Browning sees is the blinkered human

mind which suspects that there is a landscape on

either side of the road, but never achieves more

than a glimpse, or perhaps bears some sound——music

or thunder--that aggravates the suspicion. (247)
Ignoring for the moment that Godot is representative of God
in an existential world, we admittedly see many of
Browning's characters "blinkered" and suspecting. But, Ms.
Ball goes too far with the analogy.

As Estragon and Vladimir wrest their sense of

themselves out of the fulfillment of each minute

with its dramas of broken boots, questions reaching

formulation, spasms of emotion, sudden encounters,

and play this off against the vast unformulated and

unknown, so Browning's bishops, aristocrats, lovers,

artists, and monks enact their scenes of self—

creation and combat the silence stretching on either

side. (247)
Browning's characters have no "questions reaching
formulation"; they already know the questions. They do not
"suspect" a landscape, but are fully aware of it and
decidedly choose to ignore it. Browning's characters are,
for the most part, justifying the actions they have already
taken. Karshish has already chosen not to believe Lazarus;
we see only the written record of that decision. He
reconsiders for a brief, brilliant moment, but the crucial
moment has already passed. Ferrara's very nature is to
boast of his power over his "possessions"; St. Praxed's
bishop has ignored for a lifetime the fact that he has

broken nearly every rule of his Church. These men are no

Estragons or Vladimirs who live in only the present moment,

32

reacting to only the present situation, simply and dimly
aware that Godot may someday come; these men look "Godot" in
the face and deny that he is ever expected. In contrast,
others, in other monologues are given mere fragments of
light and understand, at once, the whole. David, in "Saul,"
and Abt Vogler are such. Symons may have been the first to
decide that,

The perfection of the latter [Browning's poetry as

compared to that of Tennyson] consists in the

intensity of its expression of a single moment of
passion or emotion, one peculiar to a single

personality, and to that personality only at such a

single moment. To appreciate it we must enter

keenly and instantaneously into the imaginary

character at its imagined crisis. (11-12)

Patricia Ball picks up this thought, classifying the
dramatic monologue as "the moment of travail, an act of
birth; the speaker delivers his own being through his
speaking" (247). Karshish may wonder about Lazarus, but
this is not a crisis, and his being is not "delivered."

The duke's new bride (should her envoy fail to fully
communicate his conversation and depending on her desire for
"a nine-hundred-years-old name") will be in just as much
peril as was his last, and he will feel as justified as he
did earlier; everything in his domain is his possession,
with explicit implications for obedience. No excuses, no

correction would be allowed, because

-—E'en then would be some stOOping; and I choose
Never to stoop.

33
He has, of course, revealed himself to his audience, and has
obliquely confessed murder, but he feels no guilt.
I Langbaum takes the monologue another step from
understanding when he contends that:

When we have said all the objective things about
Browning's My Last Duchess, we will not have arrived
at the meaning until we point out what can only be
substantiated by an appeal to effect--that moral
judgment does not figure importantly in our response
to the duke, that we even identify ourselves with
him. (Poetry, 82)

But, to insist that Browning's monologues serve little other
purpose than to get his audience to sympathize with the
speakers leaves him with a very large body of work with very
little objective. Such a conclusion, again, implies only
shallow reading. Nearly every teacher of an introduction to
literature course has experienced the amusement of
demonstrating to novice Browning readers that it is the
Duke, and not his wholesome bride, who is at fault.
Identification with the villain accomplishes nothing.
Langbaum further argues that,

If we allowed indignation, or pity for the duchess,

to take over when the duke moves from his account of

the murder to admire the life-likeness of the

portrait, the poem could hold no further surprises

for us; it could not even go on to reinforce our

judgment as to the duke's wickedness, since the duke

does not grow in wickedness after the account of the

murder. He grows in strength of character, and the

arrogance and poise which enable him to continue

command of the situation after his confession of

murder has threatened to turn it against him.
(Poetry, 85)

34

But the duke does grow in wickedness, and while he does grow
in strength of purpose, we see no development so positive
as strength of character. He contrives another marriage
quite deliberately based on the same premise as the first:
If she doesn't conform, she too will become nothing more
than an object of art, hidden behind a curtain to be viewed
only with the duke's permission. His first duchess has
become an object lesson, a threat, a warning of premeditated
murder.

The bishop realizes that his tomb will be made of
crumbling stone, but assumes no guilt and finds no ease; he
seems rather to finish his life in a combined state of
frustration and self-justification, realizing only that his
ungrateful sons will not even pretend to grant his wishes.
Whatever his potential for realization of the truth of his
wrongdoing, he sinks back into gloating:

"Do I live, am I dead?" There, leave me, there!
For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude
To death--ye wish it--God, ye wish it!

Stone--
Gritstone, acrumble! Clammy squares which sweat
As if the corpse they keep were oozing through--
And no more lapis to delight the world!
Well, go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,
But in a row: and, going, turn your backs
--Aye, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers--
Old Gandolf—-at me, from his onion—stone,
As still he envied me, so fair she was!

He is still more interested in keeping up appearances than

he is in facing the truth. If he approached a crisis, he

35
never recognized it for what it was. Each of the characters
we have discussed above, in fact, has approached a moment of
truth and passed it, long before speaking, without even
recognizing it. Not one of them is any more aware of
himself after he speaks than he was before.

Certainly readers of Browning's work will be more aware
of themselves and their choices if they exercise the
patience to forego judgment until they have finished reading
and the discernment that gives understanding to irony.
Browning is not for all readers. Some should concentrate on
history or philosophy or theology. But for those who are
willing to explore the possibilities of difficult times and
difficult situations, Browning may provide surprising

insight-~even one hundred years after his death.

CHAPTER 2
IGNORANCE: SPEECH WITHOUT LIGHT, KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT

REVELATION--CALIBAN, ROME AND TERTIUH QUID

"Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as
thyself" (Psalm 50:21) reads the epigraph to "Caliban on
Setebos," and with it, Browning sets one of the touchstones
for the poem's interpretation. Going far beyond being
merely a reaction to Darwin or Paley, as it is often
perceived, it reaches, as well, past the critics who insist
that Browning rejects reason and contends for intuition as
the consummate source of religious belief.1 In "Caliban" he
is concerned not only with the particular that man often
creates a God with an astonishing resemblance to himself,
but also with the perception that without the revelation of
the Scriptures, man has little other choice.

If Browning's concern with man's speaking from his own
interests and imagination is reflected in Caliban, it is
even more pronounced in The Ring and the Book, where he
devotes nearly one—fourth of the text to the two halves of
Rome and Tertium Quid, individuals who have little, if any,
real knowledge of the case, but an abundance of interest in

using it to forward their own interests. As we see the

36

37

dramatic arguments unfold, we find that the poet uses the
Bible somewhat differently here than in "Caliban," but the
essential issues of speech without knowledge and
"knowledge" without reliable testimony are the same. Here
we are involved with more than just the fantasies of a
monster in a cave, even though essential issues of human
rights and eternity are at stake; here we are concerned, as
well, with the immediate issues of life and death. Altick
and Loucks note that:

The elemental drama of the Bible is felt everywhere

in The Ring and the Book: reminders of man's

temptation and fall, his propensity for violence and

intrigue, his longing for love and aid, God's

response in terms of grace incarnate, human

sacrifice by way of atonement, and final redemption.

(198)
To be understood properly, "Caliban" should be read in the
framework of both the Bible and Shakespeare's The Tempest,
expanding somewhat the view of Arnold Shapiro:2

Reading "Caliban" in the light of the psalm [Psalm

50] and the play, one realizes that they not only

help to clarify Browning's purpose: they provide

almost a complete context for the poem. ("Psalm,"

55)
And we should read it in reference to Browning's other
works, particularly The Ring and the Book, which serves as a
summary of his moral/ethical system. Earlier, in Chapter
One, we noted, that Patricia Ball supports the holistic
reading of Browning as she writes:

The first step towards a maturing criticism can be

taken if the Rabbi is never allowed out on his own;

that is, he should not stray from the company of, at
the least, the Bishop ordering his tomb and the

38

other Bishop setting out his apology. Nor should
Caliban ever be overlooked. (245)

But, unfortunately, she either does not believe her own
advice, or she feels that Caliban is a trustworthy
character, although neither Shakespeare, Browning, nor
Caliban himself, could rely on him without supervision.
Shakespeare's Prospero indicts:

thou didst see to violate
The honor of my child (Tempest, I.ii.347-48)

Browning's Caliban accuses himself:

Because to talk about Him, vexes--ha,
Could He but know! and time to vex is now,
When talk is safer than in winter-time.
Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep.
(17-20)

Ball declares, just a few pages later, while comparing
Caliban to Waiting for Godot and after confining the bishops
to each other's company:

If the poem is taken with no preconceived notions
about his probable motives for writing it; if that
is, it is read without the handicap of "Rabbi Ben
Ezra" having been arbitrarily chosen as the pole
star of Browning's imaginative heavens, then it
stands forth with its own claims to be the more
positive luminary and the better guide to those
heavens. The poem shows Browning moved by the
spectacle of the natural man, the human creature
with his bare resources making what he can of his
situation. Irony remains an essential ingredient in
this interpretation too, but the motive is
exploratory and the impulse empirical rather than
critical. Caliban would settle well beneath the
Becket tree. His life is passed waiting for
Setebos. (248)

Ms. Ball had best beware. Caliban manipulates and uses

those who do not understand him well. His life is spent not

39
waiting for, but avoiding, Setebos. He hides in a cave to
escape detection, and while Vladimir and Estragon wait, they
seem to have no real expectation that Godot will ever come;
Caliban nearly chews through his upper lip in terror at the
mere suspicion that Setebos may appear on the scene.

Caliban, whether Shakespeare's or Browning's, and
whatever his motives, usually behaves best in the company of
others, and Browning's Caliban can be understood best when
he is compared to other Browning characters, even those who
are most like himself.

As with much other Browning scholarship, many of the
critics, like Caliban and the first three speakers in The
Ring in the Book, seem to have built their analyses around
their own interests rather than the reality of the work.
William Harrold reflects a popular view of The Ring and the
Book when he says:

It is known from the beginning that the narrators

are not so much interested in moral or ethical

elements as in seeing the story to their own

advantage. It is evident that Browning's view of
truth extends beyond the matter of right and wrong

to factors motivating the decision of the person who

is judging. (168)

What he fails to express, however, is that while the speaker
may not be interested in moral or ethical elements--indeed,
is often not even aware that ethical issues are involved--,
Browning himself is vitally concerned about these issues.

In the first book of the poem he places the "facts" before

his readers for the very purpose of helping them to evaluate

40
in later books each speaker's presentation of "truth" and to
help uncover the underlying bias which either prevents the
truth from appearing or presents it more clearly than
before. Sue Lonoff demonstrates her awareness of Browning's
moral intent when she states:

Browning...deals not only with the facts of his

murder case, but also with metaphysical and moral

issues--that is, with the ways in which man, in his
fallen state, may nonetheless attain spiritual
insight and approach The Word beyond mere words.

(149)

Acknowledging that most of the speakers do not achieve that
insight, she adds, "The foolish, misinformed, or vicious
speakers claim to speak truly but obscure the truth with
lies and 'barren words'" (149).

Leslie Thompson shows some awareness of the moral intent
of the poem, but misses the point as she writes:

It should be noted, however, that the greatest evil

is not Guido's murder of Pompilia and her family.

Rather it is the gradual attrition of spiritual

sensitivity symbolized by Guido's crime. (324)

Guido's crime not only symbolizes spiritual
insensitivity, it candidly reveals the fundamental self-
centeredness of the human race and its basic unwillingness
to abide by any revealed system, whether it be established
moral code or truth, which interferes with that selfishness.

Although we are cautious of Peter Timko's statement on
the role of intuition in "Caliban," an issue which we will

discuss later, his contention of the importance of

revelation to the understanding of Browning's work is

41
significant. Speaking of Browning's intent in "Caliban," he
writes:

He is indicating how lack of faith in man's

intuitive recognition of God and his ignoring the

doctrine of revelation, through which means God
revealed Himself to man, are the real enemies to

true faith. (143)

Caliban has "knowledge" of God without the revelation of the
Bible; the two-halves of Rome and Tertium Quid speak of
innocence and guilt in The Ring and the Book without the
light of factual information. While they sometimes come to
the right conclusions for the wrong reasons, more often they
come to half-truths, which are really no truths at all, skip
right past the truth without recognizing it, or come to a
conclusion which is exactly the opposite of truth; none
investigates to discover what he can truly know about the
case.

In The Ring and the Book we find three speakers who are
much like Caliban in their perceptions. Half-Rome, Other—
Half—Rome, and Tertium Quid, like Prospero's slave,
manufacture the "facts"; each draws from bits of gossip and
imagination, and each is motivated by envy and a need to
further his own cause.

Half-Rome's sympathies are evident from the first few
dozen lines. Physical comfort and the spectacular are his

first concerns:

This way, while fresh folk go and get their gaze:
I'll tell you like a book and save your shins.
* t * 'k

If this crush

42

Make not its priests ashamed of what they show

For temple—room, don't prick them to draw purse

And down with bricks and mortar, eke us out

The beggarly transept with its pit of apse

Into a decent space for Christian ease,

Why, to—day's lucky pearl is cast to swine.
(II.3-4, 8-14)

As far as Half-Rome is concerned, the Comparini are guilty,
and he makes no effort to hide his feelings. He sees the
shocking nature of their wounds as proof of his allegations
and justification of Guido's crime:

Pietro the old murdered fool
To the right of the altar, and his wretched wife
On the other side. In trying to count stabs,
People supposed Violante showed the most,
Till somebody explained us that mistake;
His wounds had been dealt out indifferent where,
But she took all her stabbings in the face,
Since punished thus solely for honor's sake,
Honoris causa, that's the proper term.
A delicacy there is, our gallants hold,
When you avenge your honor and only then,
That you disfigure the subject, fray the face,
Not just take life and end, in clownish guise.

(II.20-32)

He doesn't even much care if he is believable. In his
eagerness to provide still more titillation, he repeats an
anecdote about the positions of the bodies on the chancel
steps, then adds a spicy fiction of his own:

't is said the body turned
Round and away, rolled from Violante's side
Where they had laid it loving-husband like.
If so, if corpses can be sensitive,
Why did not he roll right down altar-step,
Roll on through nave, roll fairly out of church,
Deprive Lorenzo of the spectacle,

43

Pay back thus the succession of affronts
Whereto this church had served as theatre?
(II.42-50)

As he looks for more "scandal" to add to the strength of his
case, he unwittingly reveals that he really has little
information based on reality:

No sooner whisper ran he was arrived

Than up pops Curate Carlo, a brisk lad,

Who never lets a good occasion slip,

And volunteers improving the event.

We looked he'd give the history's self some help,

Treat us to how the wife's confession went

(This morning she confessed her crime, we know)

And, maybe, throw in something of the Priest--

If he's not ordered back, punished anew,

The gallant, Caponsacchi, Lucifer

I' the garden where Pompilia, Eve-like, lured

Her Adam Guido to his fault and fall.

Think you we got a sprig of speech akin

To this from Carlo, with the Cardinal there?

Too wary he was, too widely awake, I trow.

(II.158-171)(Italics added)

More subtly than the serpent that he speaks of, Half-Rome
has added to his "knowledge," implications of the original
sin to Pompilia and Caponsacchi, and seems to be bothered
not at all that his accusation is based solely on
conjecture. He has altered the nature of that sin from the
eating of forbidden fruit to the committing of adultery, and
shifted the blame wholly to Eve, thus implying that Guido
was more victim than victimizer, and that he may even have
acted with some naivete in the situation.

Before line 200, well within the first tenth of the
poem, we find the unintentional disclosure that much of the

story is conjecture, as we read:

[Olne sees indeed

44

Not only how all it was and must have been,
But cannot other than be to the end of time.
(II.184-186)(italics added)

All of this, of course, has had a design. William Harrold
notes of Half-Rome that, "The purpose of his entire speech
has been to set up the Guido murder as a warning to his
wife's lover" (169). The suspicious husband tells his
listener in the last lines of the discourse:

[Flor where's the Canon's corpse?

All which is the worse for Guido, but, be frank--

The better for you and me and all the world,

Husbands of wives especially in Rome.

The thing is put right, in the old place,--ay,

The rod hangs on its nail behind the door,

Fresh from the brine: a matter I commend

To the notice, during Carnival that's near,

Of a certain what's-his-name and jackanapes

Somewhat too civil of eves with lute and song

About a house here, where I keep a wife.

(You, being his cousin, may go tell him so.)
(11.1525—1536)

Other-Half—Rome is no less partial. Often using
emotional language designed to lead the reader to a
sentimentally compassionate view of Pompilia rather than to
reveal the truth, we find the book beginning with heart-
rending phrases like, "Little Pompilia, with the patient
brow / And lamentable smile on those poor lips" (III.2-3),
and,

To speak and right herself from first to last,

Right the friend also, lamb-pure, lion-brave,

Care for the boy's concerns to save the son

From the sire, her two-weeks' infant orphaned thus.

(III.28-31)
Harrold finds some sympathy for Other Half-Rome:

[Hlis intuitive, emotional interests make him seem
more congenial and humanitarian. Although his

45

humane interests may be sentimental and not wholly
worthwhile, he at least shows concern for suffering
people apart from his own needs. Instead of basing
his opinions on moral judgments, he describes
Pompilia in the image of the Romantic literature
which he has read. He depicts the deathbed scene
for its theatrical effect and includes the whole
family as one innocent group. (170)

What Harrold forgets to mention is that it is very important
to the speaker that Pompilia be found innocent, and probably
better for his case that Pietro and Violante are found
innocent as well; as one who stands to benefit from the
Comparini estate, he understands the implications of their
guilt, and he is no more humanitarian or concerned than the
speaker who precedes him. Langbaum makes an astute
observation regarding Other Half-Rome's perceptions:

The speaker of The Other Half-Rome is so much

concerned with the melodramatic surface of the

story, and so little with its moral meaning, that he

makes no moral distinction between Pompilia and the

Comparini, characterizing the parents along with the

daughter as innocent lambs ravaged by the

Franceschini wolves, Guido and his family. (Poetry,

117)
Even though he supports Pompilia's cause, which Browning has
assured us is the right one, he is no more objective than
his counterpart, and is involved in a lawsuit over money
from the Comparini estate, a suit which depends upon
Pompilia's proven innocence:

I who have no wife,

Being sensitive in my degree

As Guido,--must discover hurt elsewhere

Which, half compounded-for in days gone by,

May profitably break out now afresh,

Need cure from my own expeditious hands.

The lie was that, as it were, imputed me
When you objected to my contract's clause,--

46

The theft as good as, one may say, alleged,

When you, co-heir in a will, excepted, Sir,

To my administration of effects,

--Aha, do you think law disposed of these?

(III. 1669-1680)
He has come to the right conclusions regarding the innocence
of Pompilia, but for totally selfish reasons.

Tertium Quid bows and scrapes to impress the nobility to
whom he speaks. Superbly living up to the implications of
his name, he is so confident of his ability to present an
unbiased case and so convinced of his own superior
intelligence that he makes no case at all for either side
and bores his listeners to distraction, often reduced to
calling, "Prince!" or, "Highness!" to regain the attention
he has lost. They seem hard pressed to decide which is more
tedious: his attitude or his argument.

Her Excellency must pronounce, in fine!

What, she prefers going and joining play?

Her Highness finds it late, intends retire?

I am of their mind: only, all this talk talked,

'T was not for nothing that we talked, I hope?

Both know as much about it, now, at least,

As all Rome: no particular thanks, I beg!

(IV.1622-1630)
He is absolutely correct in his statement about his
listeners being as informed as all of Rome. Having been
told "all," they know nothing. He is not particularly
disturbed, however, by their inattention. Not only does he
consider the populace of Rome "rabble," but, when he fails
to impress his immediate listeners, he also dismisses them

as obtuse:

(You'll see, I have not so advanced myself,

47

After my teaching the two idiots here!)
(IV.1629-1630)

He has, of course, in these last two lines, displayed his
real purpose in speaking, and his knowledge of his failure.
His "noble" audience is neither interested in his wisdom,
nor in sharing it with others, and his final argument, his
climactic issue, about the needless torturing of nobility
has fallen on deaf ears. He will not "advance" because of
his enlightening lecture on this occasion. Harrold comments
on Tertium Quid as a balance for the two halves of Rome:

In depicting Tertium Quid as a balance for the

triangle, Browning created him as a Roman citizen

who has great confidence in his own qualifications

and abilities. A nobleman with cultivated speech

and a good deal of refinement, he sneers from his

conservative privileged position at the opinions of

the common people represented in Books II and III.

In feigning an attempt at rational judgment, he

sifts the facts and questions to determine what they

mean, seeing both good and evil where the others saw
either evil or good. But his cold objectivity makes

him a failure in the search for truth. (170-171)

More realistically, his overgrown sense of self-importance
has robbed him of any real ability to distinguish right from
wrong, and he has bored, nearly to death, the nobility he
was trying so desperately to impress.

Caliban's mind is simpler, and his cause is more basic.
Often motivated by his own repressed sense of culpability,
he is mostly interested in sensual pleasures, deluding the
authorities in his life, Setebos and Prospero, and

circumventing retribution for disobedience. If he can place

his god on the same level as himself, he can justify his

48
actions, at least privately. "So He," appears eight times
in the poem, seven of them after Caliban has described his
own cruel actions or feelings of frustration.

All four speakers are concerned with the physical rather
than the moral issues involved. Half-Rome criticizes the
church for its inability to accommodate comfortably the
crowds which have come to see the bodies. A short while
later he takes pains to point out what he seems to consider
one of the church's most valuable possessions, but shows no
indication of appreciating its aesthetic value:

Just at this altar where, beneath the piece

Of Master Guido Reni, Christ on cross,

Second to naught observable in Rome,

That couple lie now, murdered yestereve.

Even the blind can see a providence here.

(II.32-36)
The twisted "providence," apparently, has something to do
with the coincidence that the artist and the murderer share
the same first name, and that the speaker considers Guido
Franceschini, the murderer, to have been the victim, as was
the crucified Christ.

Animal and fish imagery appear frequently throughout the
four narratives. Half-Rome observes, at one point, of
Violante:

She who had caught one fish, could make that catch

A bigger still, in angler's policy:

So with an angler's mercy for the bait,

Her minnow was set wriggling on its barb

And tossed to mid-stream.
(II.268-272)

49

Images of cat's claws, owls, badgers, foxes, sheep and
wolves cavort through the lines of Half-Rome's story.
Harrold suggests:

The world of raptorial creatures, traps, and prey

subtly suggests for the overpoem Browning's interest

in the growing nineteenth-century concept of life in

which God and spiritual values have disappeared

leaving man devoid of nobility and free will. (183)

Tertium Quid becomes one of Browning's prime examples of
this kind of life, and is not at all aware of the nature of
true nobility. At the same time totally obsessed with
social class, appearance and influence. He denigrates
everyone other than himself and uses people in general for
his own advancement. He admires wealth:

Excellency, by your leave
How did you get that marvel of a gem,
The sapphire with the Graces grand and Greek?
(IV.257-259)

But his language deteriorates into more negative animal
imagery when he talks about those involved in the case.
"Worm, and fly, and foot of the free bird" transform the
stone, and the fishing imagery reappears:

They baited their own hook to catch a fish

With this poor worm, failed 0' the prize, and then

Sought how to unbait tackle, let worm float

Or sink, amuse the monster while they 'scaped.

(IV.702-705)
Caliban is totally engrossed with physical responses to

his world and transposes nearly everything into animal

imagery. He even mentally transforms Miranda into a four-

50
legged serpent. William Butts comments that even the
drudge's actions suggest animal behavior:

The intimate tone of whispering that the brackets
suggest, the speech consisting of a string of vivid
images, the grossly sensual pictures he describes
contrasted with awkward attempts at abstraction--all
these reflect closely, as if in capsulated form, the
mind followed throughout the poem. The [opening]
segment is a crash course in Caliban--it prepares
the reader for accepting Caliban's statements as
those of a limited mind speaking from immediate
experience only. When first seen, Caliban looks
like a delighted pig wallowing in mud, more of an
animal granted the ability to speak than an early
man. (27)

Whether or not Caliban is "primitive" man is not the point;
but he does represent the mind of collective man--as do the
Roman speakers--thinking of God without revelation, and as
such, the imagery that Browning puts into his musings is
important. Without a true picture of God, without the
vision of special creation, man is reduced to animal status.
William Butts notes in regard to Caliban as a collective
mind:
Comparing the opening segment with the closing only
reinforces the approach that throughout "Caliban"
the human mind and its relation to ideas are being
satirized, not Caliban. We may feel amused at the
advancement of his ideas, the crudeness of his
logic, or the odd flights of his imagination, but
Caliban the person deserves our pity and respect.
(27)
While we can certainly understand Caliban as representing
the composite human mind, we are also forced to the

conclusion that we can respect Caliban only as much as we do

others who are as mean-spirited and cruel as he is, only as

51
much as we can understand those who return malice for love,
only as much as we can defend those who return the loving
kindness of Prospero and Miranda with attempted rape--which
we must do if we consider Browning's Caliban to be the same
creature as Shakespeare's Caliban.

All of the speakers have received some revelation
outside of themselves, however. The two halves of Rome and
Tertium Quid have heard, of course, gossip. And Caliban
heard what his mother relayed to him. But the evidence of
oral revelation is too easy to reject or mutate into
something it was not meant to be. Caliban and his Roman
counterparts often misinterpret the information available to
them. Half-Rome chooses "Molinism" or "Molinists" as his
catchword.

Robert Langbaum feels that the actual doctrine is not
important.

Whatever Molinos' actual doctrine, Molinism in

Browning stands for an anti-dogmatic, an empirical

and relativist, a psychological and historical

approach to religion. Faith in the report must be

replaced by faith in the thing; and the thing, the
unformulated but perceptible truth, "God's God in

the mind of man," is a step ahead of formulated

truth, "man's God." (Poetry, 130)

But, as Rita Maria Verbrugge suggests, "When Browning uses a
name or term some thirty times, it can be assumed that he is

doing more than just name-calling" (231). After carefully

citing his qualifications and interest for pursuing the

study along proper lines, she repeats Norton B. Crowell's

52
observation that, "Like Milton, he gives every evidence of
knowing what he is about" (203).:3
Altick & Loucks briefly approach the issue of Molinism,
but fail to pursue its full meaning either in the
seventeenth century or in the poem, and they fail to follow
their own assertion to its final conclusion:

Browning's partial misrepresentation of historical
Molinism need not concern us here. It is enough
simply to define this seventeenth-century heresy as
the belief that contemplation of God is the sole
requisite for salvation. Such quietism was at once
alien to the activist Browning implying as it did
that virtuous conduct and the valiant snatching of
belief from the jaws of doubt are supererogatory,
and attractive to him in that it rejected dogma,
ritual, and other external grounds and expressions
of faith in favor of private illumination. (322)

This, according to Verbrugge, was the doctrine held by
Miguel de Molinos. It was short-lived, and Molinos was
eventually condemned and imprisoned (233). She goes on to
explain that still another tenet circulated at the time:

Molinism refers to the belief held by the dedicated,
learned priest and theologian, Luis de Molina, born
in 1535. His ideas, expressed in his Cbncordia
Libri Arbitrii cum Gratiae Donis (with editions
appearing in 1595, 1609, 1705)4 deal with the
problem of reconciling grace with free will,
foreknowledge, and providence. The work takes the
form of a commentary on several portions of the
Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. According
to Molina, God's grace can become useful for
salvation only when man, using his free will,
chooses to cooperate with God's plan. God's grace
might not achieve its desired result in man because
of man's failure to cooperate. Yet Molina does not
repudiate Thomast [sic] predestination, for he
acknowledges that God sees infallibly what man in
his free will is going to do and on that basis
predestinates the just to glory. Luis de Molina
provoked extensive discussion by his theological
expressions, but he and his ideas were never

53

declared heretical by the Roman Catholic Church.
(233)

Browning's poem becomes a both/and use of the Molinistic
doctrines, rather than an either/or conversion. Verbrugge,
more specifically, deduces that Browning incorporated into

his work:

1) the emphasis on the unrestrained freedom of the
will along with the simultaneous responsibility to
choose in order for grace to be effective, and 2)
the nominal ambiguity of the theologies resulting
from the heresy spread about by the case of Molinos
in the 1680's. By references to a heresy and a
legitimate doctrine, and by the seemingly
indiscriminate or ambiguous use of the terms
involved, Browning manipulates the subject... (235)

He, consequently, can put "Molinist" theory into the mouths
of his untrustworthy characters as well as those who we
realize are speaking truth. Thus, according to Harrold:
Half-Rome joins Guido and the lawyers in suspecting
almost everyone of being a Molinist. The Other
Half-Rome, Pompilia, and Caponsacchi barely mention
it, but do not condemn it. And in Book X the Pope
is clearly tolerant of Molinists. By the
contrasting, one sees that Molinism comes to
represent the individualist's search for truth that
may seem radical and heretical to conservative
persons of various types. (170)
While the person interested in truth may "seem" "radical" or
"heretical" or "conservative," the person interested in
truth is interested in truth and finds the beliefs of others
of little personal concern. Those whom Harrold finds
"conservative" are often not so much orthodox or traditional

as they are intolerant and narrow. Afraid to step away from

the crowd themselves, they frequently view those who do as a

54
threat to their personal "systems," and often imply that
those who have followed light other than their own are
radical and brewers of unrest.

Caliban is certainly not a conservative, but he too is
confined--by his own thinking. He has the oral revelation
of his mother, Sycorax, who believed in life after death and
special creation, neither of which can be inferred from a
natural theology. He rejects the first, partially because
such a belief would hold him accountable for his actions,
and partially as a frantic wish for relief from the distress
of this life—-he would rather cease to exist than admit that
much of his situation is the result of his own conduct.

'Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop.

His dam held different, that after death

He both plagued enemies and feasted friends:

Idly! He does His worst in this our life,

Giving just respite lest we die through pain,

Saving last pain for worst,--with which, an end,

Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire

Is, not to seem too happy.

(250-257)

Since Setebos reflects Caliban's own vexatious nature,
and was created by "the something over Setebos," he, like
Caliban, must be in a vulnerable position. Unable to attain
the more comfortable world of his master, Setebos creates "a
bauble-world" to torment and thus ease his frustration. If
the Quiet had made all things, Caliban implies, surely he

would have created for his creature a body that would have

made him at least more physically comfortable, if not more

55
appealing, and certainly he would have made him less
vulnerable to his enemies.

His dam held that the Quiet made all things
Which Setebos vexed only: holds not so.
Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex.
Had He meant other, while His hand was in,
Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick,
Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow,
Or overscale my flesh 'neath joint and joint,
Like an orc's armour? Ay,--so spoil His sport!
He is the One now: only He doth all.

(170-178)

John Lammers credits Caliban with convincing logic in his
rejection of these doctrines, and allows probability to
stand for reason, as he writes:
Browning ridicules Caliban by letting him foolishly
but quite logically reject these doctrines which
offer him hope and the possibility of eternal
happiness. Caliban reasons convincingly that God
and Satan must be the same, since God could have
made man impervious to injury but did not: "Who
made (mankind) ... weak, meant weakness He might
vex," Caliban concludes; and he rejects the
possibility of an afterlife with the logical
deduction that a life of "pain" would most probably
end with "last" and "worst" pain and not be followed
by an afterlife. (113)
Nowhere does Caliban even mention the concept of two
separate beings, a devil and a god, and Sycorax "held" that
Setebos performed both functions--he feasted and plagued,
but "probably" is conjecture, not a logical deduction, and
Caliban's rejection of an afterlife is, more likely, another
indication that on some level he is aware of his own evil
and wishes to avoid the consequences. In his comparison of

"Caliban" to Paradise Lost, Lammers suggests that Caliban is

unaware of his manipulative nature:

56

By not letting Caliban refer directly to any of

these Satanic qualities within himself but instead

project them into Setebos, Browning suggests that a

final, "devilish" step in the "Paradise Lost"

syndrome is that Caliban, like Milton's devils,
unknowingly anthropomorphizes his own ugliest and
most tragic qualities into his concept of God in
order to keep from having to face the fact that
those qualities are actually within himself.
Setebos is indeed a perfect anthropomorphic
projection of Caliban except that Setebos does not
anthropomorphize, and this very exception suggests
that anthropomorphizing is a psychological defense
mechanism so deeply seated in Caliban's subconscious
that he cannot project it into his conscious mind in

any way. (103)

He may be right. Even the most intelligent of Browning's
speakers, i.e., Cleon and Karshish, are seemingly unaware
that they have reasoned away the thing they most desire. We
have no reason to think that Caliban would be any more
astute.

The evidence of personal observation is of little value
to the two halves of Rome and Tertium Quid. Although each
seems almost greedy to "know," what he really wants is
something to support his case. And observation serves
Caliban poorly, as well, even more poorly than does oral
revelation. His subjective vision sees Prospero's tolerance
as enslavement. He is convinced that Setebos favors
"Prosper" for no apparent reason, and provides no clues to
gaining that favor. At the same time, he ignores that his
own act of preventing the she-tortoises from laying their
eggs is motivated purely by spite and is deserving of
punishment.

What Prosper does?

57

Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He!
There is the sport: discover how or die!
(216-218)

The limits of his vision lead him to other
misinterpretations, as well. Caliban's world is only as big
as his island, and he has little or no vision of the world
outside of its confines.

All need not die, for the things 0' the isle

Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees;

Those at His mercy,--why they please him most.
(219-221)

Caliban has experienced the love of God through Prospero
and Miranda, but he ignores the lesson and exhibits gross
cruelty:

Put case, unable to be what I wish,
I yet could make a live bird out of clay:
Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban
Able to fly?--for there, see, he hath wings,
And great comb like the hoopoe's to admire,
And there, a sting to do his foes offence,
There, and I will that he begin to live
Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns
Of grigs high up that make the merry din,
Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not.
In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay,
And if he, spying me, should fall to weep,
Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong,
Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,--
Well, as the chance were, this might take or else
Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry,
And give the mankin three sound legs for one,
Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg,
And lessoned he was mine and merely clay.
Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme,
Drinking the mash, with brain become alive,
Making and marring clay at will? So He.

(75-96)

58
Later, when he fantasizes again on another "Caliban" that he
has snared--"a sea-beast, lumpish," he administers a kind of
captivity that Prospero would never have imagined:
Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame,
And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge
In a hole 0' the rock and calls him Caliban;
(164-166)
His treatment of his imagined mate is little better, and
demonstrates clearly his lack of the concept of love:
A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch,
Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye,
And saith she is Miranda and my wife.
(158-160)
Peter Timko feels that Caliban lacks the evidence of love
that he needs:
The Quiet does, however, share one quality with the

other two, and herein lies the key to the poem: the
Quiet, like Caliban and Setebos lacks goodness or

love . . . . Caliban will always continue to see
evidence of Divine power; he will never see evidence
of Divine Love. His Christ must always remain a

Setebos, and his God always a Quiet, both of whom
must be feared. (149)

But, as we have demonstrated, Caliban has seen evidence of
Divine love. It has been demonstrated to him by Prospero
and Miranda, who cared for him with tenderness. Caliban,
however, only imagines himself wronged and does not see the
relationship between his actions and their consequences. The
text of The Tempest reveals his slanted perspective:
When thou cam'st first,

Thou strok'st me and made much of me, wouldst give me

Water with berries in't, and teach me how

To name the bigger light, and how the less,

That burn by day and night, and then I lov'd thee

And show'd thee all the qualities 0' th' isle
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.

59

Curs'd be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest 0' the' island.

Pros. Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have us'd thee
(Filth as thou art) with human care, and lodg'd thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst see to violate
The honor of my child.

Cal. 0 ho, 0 ho, would't had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.

(Tempest I.ii.332-351)

Thus, instead of leading him to love, the limits of his
understanding of experience lead him only to fear.

When .. when .. well, never try the same way twice!

Repeat what act has pleased, He may grow wroth.

You must not know His ways and play Him off,

Sure of the issue.

(222-225)

Caliban rejects the little truth he has received about
Setebos from his mother, and the confines of his own
prejudice prevent him from comprehending what truth is
discernable through his experience. It is highly unlikely
that he would accept the evidence of a written revelation if
it were given to him, and without that revelation he will
never know his god. Shapiro comments:

God, in Psalm 50, criticizes those who hate

instruction (v. 17). Caliban's only teaching is to

use his cruel action to prove his mastery. ("Psalm,"

58)

Without the light of the revealed Word of God, Browning

implies, man cannot know the person of God, and only those

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who apprehend the light they have already been given will be
given this additional illumination.

Trinity is not discernable without special revelation.
How Caliban arrived at "Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos,"
remains a mystery. His trinity is either superfluous, as he
names only two "divine" beings in the poem, Setebos and the
Quiet, or he includes himself in that trinity. The second
possibility is the more likely, albeit on a subconscious
level: Not only does Caliban model his god after himself,
but he imagines himself ruling a world which he has created,
a world in which he is far more whimsical and cruel than the
Setebos he has conceived. His "Caliban" can fly, and has
some attractive features, i.e., a "comb like the great
hoopoe's." And, he has a sting, but Caliban demonstrates
none of the other attributes of a god. In elevating himself
to the level of Setebos, or rather bringing Setebos to his
own level, he has made himself equal to God, except by
degree of power, which is part of the reproach of Psalm 50.

Without revelation, Caliban cannot know the eternality
of God. In fact, he has completely confused the issue.
While holding that "All need not die," as we noted earlier,
he decides that Setebos will eventually be conquered by the
Quiet and die, or at least fall into a sleep from which he
will not waken.

Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend,

Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime,

That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
And conquer Setebos, or likelier He

61

Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die.
(279-283)

Timko comments on Caliban's view of the nature of God and
man:

The basic questions in the poem are those concerning
the nature of God, His relationship to human beings,
and His method of revealing Himself to these human
beings. Related to these, of course, is the
question of man's immortality; what can one deduce
of a future life in the light of the relationship of
God and man? . . . .But unlike Butler and Paley, he
makes no ethical or moral connection between pain
and pleasure and virtue and vice, and in this
respect, as Browning indicates, he is much more
logical than they. (146)

But Caliban has no real logic. His thinking is flawed and
totally self-centered. He does not want to be held
responsible, and he can only model the intentions of Setebos
after his own, petty, mean-spirited self. Shapiro observes:

Browning opens his poem with a Caliban who is
determined to use his speech to "vex." He will let
"the rank tongue blossom into speech"; but since he
hopes his speech will be overheard by no one, this
tongue can only engender blossoms that grow in the
dark. Totally reflexive, Caliban's speech reverses
that of the righteous, which is used to praise God
[in Psalm 50]. He attempts to deceive Setebos. He
slanders Prospero, Miranda, and Ariel. Planning
punishments for innocent creatures that have not
harmed him, he gives his mouth to evil. Even his
logic is faulty: how can he "vex" if no one
overhears? ("Psalm," 58)

We might add, that as soon as Caliban is conscious of the
approaching storm, he assumes that he has vexed Setebos and
cowers, trembling. While doing so, he unintentionally
reveals that he is, at least subconsciously, cognizant that
his mean-spirited behavior displeases his god.

Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!

62

'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,

Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month

One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!

(292-295)

Neither is Setebos very powerful as gods go. Far from
omnipotent, he is helpless in the volition of the Quiet, and
he is subject to Prospero's magic powers. For this reason
Caliban feels compelled to acquiesce to Prospero's commands.
Shakespeare's Caliban grumbles about Prospero,

I must obey. His Art is of such pow'r,

It would control my dam's god, Setebos,

And make a vassal of him (Tempest, I.ii.372-74).

Nor does Caliban endow Setebos with any greater power in
Browning's work. One of the reasons that Setebos is so
cruel, according to the brute, is that he is unable to
change his own miserable situation:

'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:

He hated that He cannot change His cold,

Nor cure its ache.

(31-33)
Caliban never considers that if Setebos could create the sun
which warms the earth, he could certainly warm his own
habitat and adapt to it, unlike the fish, which Caliban
imagines as longing for warmth, like himself, but unable to
adapt to the change in temperature. Reducing the power of
Setebos increases his own opportunity for autonomy.

Without revelation, Caliban is unable to discern either
God's omniscience or his infinity. In fact, he prefers

things that way. He could not even pretend to hide from a

god who possessed such qualities.

63

And talks to his own self, howe'er he please,

Touching that other, whom his dam called God.

Because to talk about Him, vexes--ha,

Could he but know! and time to vex is now.

When talk is safer than in winter-time.

(15-19)
But, his conviction on this point is weak. Setebos is less
likely to overhear in the summer, when he is comfortable,
than in the winter; and Setebos has spies which give him, if
not infinity, at least a far greater access to knowledge
than is available to his creation:

(What, What? A curtain o'er the world at once!

Crickets stop hissing; not a bird--or, yes,

There scuds His raven that has told Him all!

It was fool's play this prattling!

(284-287)

Caliban's god is as unstable, undependable and
inconsistent as is Caliban himself. Immutability is a
concept that enters the thought of our pseudo-theologian
only negatively. Freedom to him means doing what he
pleases, when he pleases. He speaks for an imaginary
squirrel and urchin of Setebos:

"Because he did so yesterday with me,

And otherwise with such another brute,

50 must he do henceforth and always."--Ay

'Would teach the reasoning couple what "must" means!

'Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He.

(241-245)
The moment he thinks no one is watching, Caliban hides in a
cave as much to wallow in the mire as to contemplate his
"spiritual" world, which is capricious at best. What really
matters to him is that he is being defiant of both Setebos

and Prospero. Jeff Karr, in speaking of Caliban, focuses on

64
Martin Esslin's evaluation of Waiting for Godot and notes:°
The fact that Browning's poem addresses this turning
point [the powerlessness of man to effect his own
salvation] is evident in the obsession of many
modern writers with the rule of chance in a universe
where man seeks salvation. For instance, in The
Theatre of the Absurd part of Martin Esslin's
discussion of Waiting for Godot centers on a
quotation from St. Augustine: "Do not despair: one
of the thieves was saved. Do not presume: one of
the thieves was damned." The reference is, of
course, to the thieves who were crucified with
Christ. The implication seems to be that on the
basis of two chance remarks--one conciliatory, the
other sarcastic--made in a moment of extreme agony,
the eternal fate of these two men was settled....The
same sort of Cain and Abel tension appears in
"Caliban Upon Setebos" and presupposes the existence
of a fickle and inscrutable Deity. (44)
If "Caliban" is a satire, as Karr, himself, states just five
lines later, then it is not the poem which "presupposes,"
but the speaker, Caliban, "who speculates about the nature
of God and arrives at conclusions"--and it is his ideas that
Browning is ridiculing. Secondly, in moments of extreme
agony, men do not make "chance remarks." Mr. Karr has
obviously not studied the physiology of cross-hanging, which
creates a great deal of difficulty in the breathing process,
among other things. Anything said by a person who is dying
by hanging from a cross is of consummate importance and will
reveal the very essence of the soul. Neither these two men
nor Christ engaged in idle chatter during those hours. If a
Cain and Abel tension appears, it is the same tension which
the first murderer and his brother experienced, that of

acquiescence to God's authority or of choosing rebellious

65
independence. Caliban's behavior is so capricious and
undisciplined that he cannot conceive of the God who says of
himself, "For I am the Lord, I change not" (Malachi 3:6).
Only his fear has little hope of change.

'Conceiveth all things will continue thus,

And we shall have to live in fear of Him

So long as He lives, keeps his strength: no change

(241-243)

Caliban not only chooses to rebel against all authority
in his life, i.e., Prospero and Setebos; he refuses to try
to discover the will of Setebos or even to believe that it
is possible to discover that will, despite the fact that
Prospero seems to have done very well in this area. He is
thus condemned and can only lament his destiny:

'Conceiveth all things will continue thus,

And we shall have to live in fear of Him

So long as He lives, keeps his Strength: no change,

If He have done His best, make no new world

To please Him more, so leave off watching this,--

If He surprise not even the Quiet's self

Some strange day,--or, suppose, grow into it

As grubs grow butterflies: else, here are we,

And there is He, and nowhere help at all.

(241-249)

Without revelation, Caliban can have no concept of the
holiness of God, and he cannot know, as we have stated
earlier, of the special creation of God, nor can he begin to
guess at the redemption that God has provided in Christ.
Among others, Lammers attempts to offer evidence that
Browning relied heavily on intuition for much of his

spiritual knowledge:

First, Browning seems to have believed that the
"story" of Christ can be intuited by a person living

66

in any historical time and that it actually

"happens" in the mind of the person who accepts his

intuition as true. Thus the "story" is timeless and

"mental." David in "Saul" "visualizes" the Christ

story--"See(ing) the Christ stand"--and it "happens"

for him long before the time of Christ; John in "A

Death" says that to him the "story.../...is, here

and now" long after it has actually happened; and

Cleon visualizes the story of Christ, though it does

not "happen" for him because he does not accept his

intuition as true. Browning also suggests through

David, John, and Cleon that one's own words, if they

are a projection of his deepest spiritual desires,

can be a description of Christianity and his own

intuitive Christian revelation from God. (115)
Mr. Lammers forgets that David, in the Bible, fills the role
of prophet as well as that of Israel's king, and thus has
divine license to see the Christ. The first prophecy of a
Messiah occurs in Genesis 3:15 and is repeated and expanded
upon hundreds of times before this moment in the life of
"the sweet Psalmist of Israel," who certainly knew the
Scriptures and had the ability to interpret them. John
"sees" because the experience is still as real to him as it
was in the moment that it occurred; Cleon and Karshish have
heard the message from others in a post-resurrection world.
Lammers says that "Browning thus ridicules Caliban by
suggesting that he could but never actually will intuit the
Christ story since he has put his faith in logic and not the
pursuit of truth." Caliban has already rejected the light,
the revelation, that he has been given; and on that basis,
the likelihood of his receiving more is remote. The "story"
of Christ is always revealed by others, and Caliban's

allegories can no more supply him with redemption's message

67
than can be known to any others using "intuition" as their
source.
In pointing out some of the imagery that Browning uses
in "Caliban," Lammers notes:

The "sloth's skull" image serves as an allegory of
Christ's death and resurrection--and not simply as a
symbol of His death--if we read one of its lines as
a double entendre, and the crucifixion contest and
several other apparent double entendres that we will
discuss in "Caliban" suggest the validity of this
approach. When Caliban says that the "dead sloth"
was "too hard for one to kill," he means that the
sloth was too tough to be killed by Caliban (the
"one"); but it sounds as if he is describing a major
paradox of Christ: He was made "dead" by the
crucifixion but ultimately was "too hard for (any)
one to kill." Daringly comparing Christ to a dead
sloth, this brief allegory thus suggests the
humiliation of Christ, the ugliness of the
crucifixion, and the fact of the resurrection. (105-
106)

Lammers, at times, seems to take the allegory concept a bit
far, much like St. Augustine in his fourth century
interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan, but,
the point here is that this is Browning's allegory, not
Caliban's, and the possibility of Caliban's knowledge of
what he was doing is remote. As we address the question of
intuition, we note that Timko follows many of his
predecessors in asserting:
Immortality cannot be inductively arrived at from
experience, and, more important, God cannot be seen
in the wing of an insect, the eye of a bird, or one
little mess of whelks.
The last point touches upon the crux of the poem,
for Caliban's whole outlook is governed by a strict
denial of intuitive faith; this fact, as much as any

scale of evolution, accounts for his "primitive"
theology. (147)

68

To the contrary, most of Caliban's theology has been formed
almost entirely through intuition. He does question that God
exists. His division of the acts of creation, his lopsided
trinity, his fish who desires warmer waters in which to
swim, and his denial of the oral revelation of Sycorax are
all the result of his "intuition"; certainly, he has no
proof or evidence on which to base his contentions. Timko
feels that "Caliban rejects immortality simply because he
cannot see any basis for it from his own observation" (147).
While giving Caliban temporary credit for being more logical
than Butler and Paley, he certainly cannot be convinced that
Browning means for the brute to possess anything that
resembles real logic. All of his thinking, in this respect,
is "intuitive." His unwillingness to accept the revelation
available, the light given him, is what has led him amiss.

None of the speakers, Caliban or the four in Rome, is
interested in any kind of justice, much less God's justice.
Caliban fears for himself; each of the Roman orators is
concerned for a personal cause. Real evidence is the last
thing they want to see. Caliban wants to wallow in the mire
free from fear of discovery; Half-Rome wants either his
wife's suspected lover to go away or license for vengeance,
Other-Half-Rome wants his part in the inheritance, and
Tertium Quid wants the prestige that only his "intellect"
can bring. Caliban is like the characters in Godot only in

that he sees no real purpose for life. The others have

69
chosen simply not to think about it. Human rights,
responsibility to God, and merited justice bear no
significance to their goals. Revelation, the truth, would

bring only guilt and ruin.

CHAPTER 3
"TRUE THINGS" BY "WRONG NAMES": AUTHORITY AND LIGHT--

"BLOUGRAM," TWO LAWYERS, AND "HOLY CROSS DAY,"

In July of 1845, Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert
Browning: "[Blut it seems to me clear that they [the
dissenters] know what the 'liberty of Christ' means far
better than those do who call themselves 'churchmen'; and
stand altogether as a body, on higher ground" (Kenyon I,
145).

Browning's reply, dated August 4, was not only
enthusiastic, but provides some interesting insight into his
denominational inclinations:

Can it be you, my own you past putting away, you are

a schismatic and frequenter of Independent

Dissenting Chapels? And you confess this to me--

whose father and mother went this morning to the

very Independent Chapel where they took me, all
those years back, to be baptised--and where they
heard, this morning, a sermon preached by the very
minister who officiated on that other occasion!

(147)

Neither, however, was willing to grant across-the-board
acceptance, even to the dissenters. A year later, he agreed
totally with her written response to a conversation between

the two on the previous day ("what you express now, is for

us both"):

70

71

Still you go quickest there, where your sympathies
are least ruffled and disturbed--and I like, beyond
comparison best, the simplicity of the dissenters..
the unwritten prayer, ..the sacraments administered
quietly and without charlatanism! and the principle
of a church, as they hold it, I hold it too, ..quite
apart from state-necessities..pure from the law.
Well--there is enough to dissent from among the
dissenters--the Formula is rampant among them as
among others--you hear things like the buzzing of
flies in proof of a corruption--and see every now
and then something divine set up like a post for men
of irritable minds and passions to rub themselves
against, calling it a holy deed--you feel moreover
bigotry and ignorance pressing on you on all sides,
till you gasp for breath like one strangled. But
better this, even, than what is elsewhere—-this
being elsewhere too in different degrees, besides
the evil of the place. (Kenyon II, 427-8)

Browning, apparently, was quick to discern that
"institutionalization," any system which placed men in
authority over other men, was bound to corrupt. Often it
was not the system itself which was the problem, but the men
who misused it for their own purposes.

Later, poems such as "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St.
Praxed's" and "An Epistle" frequently brought charges of
anti-Catholicism or anti-Semitism against Browning. But
again, Browning seldom, if ever, pronounced such broad
judgment. Holistic reading of his work shows general
disenchantment with ecclesiastical "authority" and those who
should "know," but he is often very positive about
individual exceptions to what he seems to see as the general
trend of religion as an institution. Each individual must
be measured on the basis of his or her own words and

actions. If he condemns Karshish, "the picker-up of

72

learning's crumbs," he lauds Rabbi Ben Ezra who urges,
"trust God: see all, nor be afraid." While he condemns the
Bishop who orders his tomb as materialistic and self-
serving, he shows a pope in The Ring and the Book who is
aware of himself as totally human and subject to error.
Charles T. Phipps, S. J. notes of the figures who represent
Church authority in The Ring and the Book:

Indeed, except for Caponsacchi's later self, the

distant and almost Olympian Pope, and Fra Celestino,

the clerics of The Ring and the Book 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 fraternity. To remain faithful to

God and self within the ecclesiastical milieu of The

Ring and the Book requires heroic sanctity, but an

entirely self-made, self-discovered sanctity. The

Church, society, convention, and tradition are

unable to assist--are, in fact, positive hindrances.

("Caponsacchi," 715)

Saul, King of Israel, blinded by pride, does not
understand a right relationship to God, while the shepherd
boy, David, future ruler of the kingdom, experiences a
vision of the Christ. Abt Vogler, the musician, "creates"
in an unforgettable moment of communion with spiritual
forces, while Cleon, "of these latter days, with greater
mind/ Than our forerunners," dismisses as untenable the
testimony of "Paulus" and "certain slaves," who present the
very hope he himself has just outlined as most desireable.
Browning's "negative" characters, however, those learned

gentlemen who either reason themselves away from religious

truth or flatly deny it, greatly outnumber those who are

73
able or willing to apprehend the significance of the insight
that they do have.

"Bishop Blougram's Apology," the lawyers in The Ring and
the Book, and Church authorities in "Holy Cross Day"
represent a substantial share of the evils Browning saw
among those who, by reason of position or education, were
part of the system which often was involved in the
administration of religious or ethical principles.

In the light of Gigadibs' questions, Blougram adopts a
defensive attitude, not only toward his lifestyle, but
toward his essential belief system. He justifies his
rationalizations and calls them faith; his "apology" is both
ecclesiastic and secular. Dominus Hyacinthus De Archangelis
and Juris Doctor Johannes-Baptiste Bottinius, lawyers in a
case over which the Church in the person of the Pope has
final authority, totally lose sight of their moral purpose,
to protect the rights of their respective clients, as they
egocentrically focus on personal ambition. The authorities
in "Holy Cross Day" insist on a ridiculous outward
conformity to a system that only supports their private
greed and lechery, and in a faith in which they, apparently,
no longer have any real conviction.

Few of Browning's poems have caused more controversy
than "BishOp Blougram," but the good Bishop is a most
complicated character. While he apparently accepts the

basic tenets of the Christian faith, he has not only lost

74
the focus of his "religious life," but retains no vestige of
desire to return to the life of self-denial and service to
which he once pledged himself. Luxurious living is only one
of his flaws. He is unable to bring himself to complete
acceptance of the dogmas of his religion, nor does he have
the moral strength to deny them.

Ellen F. Shields feels that "Blougram exemplified many
of the characteristics that non-Catholics found most
objectionable in the Roman Church" (24), while Robert G.
Laird asserts:

His frequent sympathetic use of nominal Catholics as

major characters in so many of his monologues

suggests that he was more critical of the
institution than he was of individual Catholics or

of the religious reality beneath the outward

trappings of the Church. (302)

But "Blougram" is not about Catholics. It, and many of
Browning's other "Catholic" poems, is about the "nominalism"
that institutionalization breeds. Rupert E. Palmer, Jr.
points to Browning's broader focus when he observes:

Browning explained his treatment of the Church as a

result of his having lived chiefly in Italy, where

Catholic examples were ready to his hand, and said

that, if he had lived in England, he would probably

have used Anglican examples. (110)

Again, Shields argues: "In creating Bishop Blougram,
Browning assigned himself an exceptionally difficult task as
special-pleader" (24). Clyde de L. Ryals, on the other
hand, maintains:

Browning remained aware of the conflict between the

old religious and the new positivist world-views
and, more importantly, of the impossibility on his

75

part to take either side or bring them into accord.

In this respect he was not unlike, say, Matthew

Arnold, who was well aware of wandering between two

worlds. He was different from Arnold not in

recognizing these conflicts but, in a large body of

his work, presenting them ironically so as to

transcend them. It was his irony that allowed

Browning, unlike most of his contemporaries, to rise

above mere argument or special pleading for this or

that cause. (46)

Whether he was a "special pleader" or not, Browning
never wandered. His irony may allow some of his readers to
avoid moral decisions, as it does for many of the
personalities in his work, but Browning's position was
always clearly on the side of what he perceived as truth.
His irony lay in the character's perception of truth, brief
though it may have been, and then in the almost calculated
denial of that very cognizance.

C. R. Tracy seems to have assumed a balanced perspective
on the work when he notes that "Bishop Blougram, then, is
not the portrait of an individual, but an amalgamation of
traits taken from two of the leading English Catholics of
the times" ("Blougram," 425). He also notes that this is
not the real point:

Browning's real purpose was to comment on the

problem of faith in a sceptical world, and he

carried it out by devising for his mouthpiece the
figure of a representative Catholic having some
obvious resemblance with a well-known Catholic of

the times. (425)

But he, too, misses the essence of the work. Blougram's

"faith" is not really faith, at least not as Browning

defines it. In an August 1846 letter to Elizabeth Barrett,

76
Browning presents the essence of his criteria for belief:
"Those are my own feelings, my convictions beside--instinct
confirmed by reason" (Kenyon II, 434).

"Blougram" is not about faith, at least not the Bishop's
faith. He has few convictions, and if he has any
instincts, they are overshadowed by the need to hold
officially endorsed doctrinal renderings. When faced with
"incredible" reports, he hedges:

I pine among my million imbeciles

(You think) aware some dozen men of sense

Eye me and know me, whether I believe

In the last winking Virgin, as I vow,

And am a fool, or disbelieve in her

And am a knave,--approve in neither case,

Withhold their voices though I look their way

(374-380)
"Blougram" is about defending a system of religion which
provides its authorities with the structure they need to be
personally comfortable and powerful. Bishop Blougram
believes many things only because such belief is expedient.
Shields touches this briefly when she states:

Both men [Newman and Blougram] resort to the

authority of the Church in deciding which matters

they are to believe. Blougram argues that even
though it might not be true "about the need of trial

to men's faith" (1. 737), he will not decrassify

[sic] his faith by eliminating those doctrines

concerning which he has "doubts." (23)

If, in the process he should do some real good, if someone
like Gigadibs should come to genuine faith, so much the

better, but certainly that is not Blougram's main purpose.

Blougram is much more interested in converting Gigadibs "to

77
a new respect for his host" (Shapiro, "Blougram," 248). Nor
is the journalist's conversion Browning's main purpose.
Palmer feels that Gigadibs is the main issue of the poem:

It seems to me that this final portion is completely

of a piece with the monologue proper and that,

however Browning may have used the device elsewhere

(in "Sludge," for instance), he here uses it

primarily to show the effect of Blougram's talk upon

Gigadibs. This effect I conceive to be central to

the meaning of the poem. (113)

Rather than as a focus, however, Gigadibs functions as a
foil for the self-serving Blougram--a demonstration that
little light can be enough, in contrast to Blougram's
opportunity for much light which proves to be darkness. As
Arnold Shapiro observes: "Browning calls his poem Bishop
Blougram's Apology not "The Transformation of Gigadibs"
("Blougram," 245).

"Blougram" is doubly ironic. Gigadibs' soul searching
may be the unexpected result of the evening's oration, but
Browning has given us no reason to believe that Blougram is
any less self-deceived than, say, the Duke of Ferrara. He
defends his love of luxury unabashedly, and arrives at no
moment of revelation or deeper insight into his own
behavior. Palmer suggests that the poem is merely "a
straight-forward presentation of the views of a very complex
man," and the speaker's "moral character" is "ambiguous," so
that we, not the poet, judge him, but that leaves no grounds

to evaluate any of the personalities in Browning's

monologues (115-116). Blougram offers self-justification,

78
not an apologetic; change is not one of his options because
he will not admit to any need for it.

Browning offers two keys to interpretation of this work
in his epilogue to Blougram's discourse. Forced to defend
himself, "[TJhe great bishop rolled him out a mind / Long
crumpled, till creased consciousness lay smooth" (978-9).
Blougram's chief intention was to soothe his own conscience.
David R. Ewbank rightfully observes:

A convinced man does not expend time and energy

demolishing the opinions of a man he considers to be

a second-rate, arrogant dandy... That threat is to

Blougram's own peace of mind, and a barrage of words

descends upon Gigadibs--who protests occasionally

but, for the most part, plays abstractedly with his

plate--before peace is, temporarily, restored. (260)

In addition, he has rendered Gigadibs powerless, his main
objective. Shapiro closely echoes Ewbank when he asserts,
"If Gigadibs is as insignificant as the bishop implies, why
should he care what Gigadibs thinks?" ("Blougram," 247-48).
As he finishes his discourse, Blougram mocks:

Go write your lively sketches! be the first

"Blougram, or The Eccentric Confidence"--

Or better simply say, "The Outward-bound."

Why, men as soon would throw it in my teeth

As copy and quote the infamy chalked broad

About me on the church-door opposite.

You will not wait for that experience though,

I fancy, howsoever you decide,

To discontinue--not detesting, not

Defaming, but at least--despising me!

(961-970)

F. E. L. Priestley feels that Blougram grants Gigadibs

full license to publish what he has heard:

He is now free to publish to the eager world the
startling revelations that the Bishop, though not

79
necessarily granting the good things of this world
pre-eminence, does not despise them and actually
enjoys good food, works of art, and a position of
eminence; and that he, like most theologians,
distinguishes between faith and knowledge,
recognizing the activity of the will in belief.

(146)

But Gigadibs would never dare to print an account of the
Bishop's manifesto; he would never be believed. Laird
notes:

And not only does the Bishop prevent Gigadibs from

speaking out during the interview, of course, but he

also makes it impossible for the journalist to

report anything about it later in print. (304)

Having thus eased his mind, Blougram goes on to inwardly
boast:

"On the whole," he thought, "I justify myself

On every point where cavillers like this

Oppugn my life. (996-9)

Much like Beckett who is tempted to do the "right thing
for the wrong reason" in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the
Cathedral, Browning sees that motivation may be more
important than actual deed. Blougram never notices that
there is a difference. "He said true things, but called
them by wrong names" (996).

The dichotomy of Blougram's life has often distracted
critics from his biggest problem. While he believes in God,
his opportunistic approach has turned the rest of his
religion into pretense. Julia Markus understands this

concept, but argues that Browning essentially agrees with

the Bishop:

80

There was much to object to in the "great Bishop,"
and Browning in his portrait of Blougram points out

his political conservatism, his excessive
worldliness, his casuistry. But he is a man who has
made faith work in his life. Once he is "back on

Christian ground" in his "Apology," Blougram can say
along with Browning:

You call for 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.

(601-607)(l94)

Blind faith is no faith at all for Browning. For him, faith
that lacks the sustenance of reason and revelation is no
better than wishful thinking. But Blougram has lost sight
of faith. Laird agrees, as he states:

While there is much to suggest that Blougram is, at

heart, a true believer, there is also evidence that

at this stage in his life his belief has become a

static, rather than a dynamic one. (304)
Real faith in all that he professed would have enabled
Blougram to live according to his light, or the revelation
that he has. Instead, he has used his "free will" to choose
a life of luxury and power rather than one as the humble
shepherd of those he has been appointed to lead. "Reason"
serves only his material purposes. He sees the majority of
the adherents of his religion as dull-witted:

I pine among my million imbeciles (374)

Your taste's worth mine; but my taste proves more wise

When we consider that the steadfast hold

On the extreme end of the chain of faith

Gives all the advantage, makes the difference

With the rough purblind mass we seek to rule:
We are their lords, or they are free of us,

81

Just as we tighten or relax our hold.
[Italics added](752-58)

As Bishop, Blougram rules, and he craves power. Humility
and self denial have no place in the fittings of his cabin.
Even his analogy of the ship board cabin ignores that
depiction of the more menial herder of sheep, which more
accurately should portray his life.

Had his exposure to truth been less, he might have been
excused. Maintaining that Blougram's character is admirable
and that he lives according to his light, Whitla grants, if
on no other grounds than that of his elevated position in
the Church, that the prelate does indeed have access to
special knowledge.

By virtue of his office, the bishop shares the

prophetic faculty which has been given to the

Christian Church; he is living in the light of the

Christian revelation, and that has illuminated his

life and has restored his blinded vision. (49)

Prophetic faculty, however, does not guarantee a godly life
or spiritual vision. Browning would have been well-aware of
the eleventh chapter of John, which gives an account of
Caiaphas, high priest at the time of Christ's crucifixion:

And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high

priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know

nothing at all, Nor consider that it is expedient

for us, that one man should die for the people, and

that the whole nation perish not. And this spake he

not of himself: but being high priest that year, he

prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation;

And not for that nation only, but that also he

should gather together in one the children of God

that were scattered abroad. Then they took counsel
together for to put him to death. (John 11:49-53)

82
Caiaphas was later responsible for sending Christ to Pilate,
who had the power to pronounce the death penalty (John
18:28).

Laird, however, who sees both Blougram's cognizance and
deficiency, observes:

At the same time, the poem is also a criticism of

Blougram for his failure to live according to what

he himself feels to be important, for his refusal to

accept the Pauline view of interior revolution, and

for the rationalization of his acceptance of the

good things of this world which his position in the

hierarchy provides him. (309)

Blougram is satisfied with outward appearances; he doesn't
care in the least about the inner man.

If "Gigadibs" means "a fool who will do anything for
money" as suggested by Turner,1 he seems not to remain a
fool. Whitla feels that "[t]he encounter was more than a
little embarrassing, leading the 'literary man' to play with
his spoons and range the olive stones about the plate's
edge" (44). But those diversions are just as likely to have
been the actions of a man deeply engrossed in the private
thoughts to which this kind of encounter gives birth.

Whitla sees Gigadibs as he is at the beginning of the
poem, but fails to give him credit for a unique ability to
sort through Blougram's barrage of rhetoric for whatever
fragments of truth he might be able to find:

Gigadibs is at best a third-rate journalist, tempted

into writing of his encounter with the great

Blougram as the high point of his literary career.

He is the model of all things dull, scarcely clever

enough to see his own limitations. Counter-
balancing Blougram's prophetic faculty is Gigadibs'

83

spiritual blindness. He has never experienced

revelatory brightness; he despises faith and

distrusts the bishop. Instead of being a leader of

men, Gigadibs is a slave to a morality which has no

basis in his reason, to his reason which cannot be

adequately followed in his experience, and to his

experience, which is limited by his own

circumstances. (49-50)
Gigadibs deserves credit for the ability and willingness to
change. This "model of all things dull" does experience
"revelatory brightness," and "He did not sit five minutes"
(1006). We can assume that before the bishop was finished
speaking, Gigadibs already felt twinges of the "sudden
healthy vehemence" which he acted upon within a few days
(1007)[italics added]. "It was just such a new beginning,"
Laird notes, "..., that Blougram had maintained was
impossible; one could only make the best of what already
was" (303).2

Tanzy not only fails to see Blougram's failure--he
remains static--, but very nearly places Gigadibs back into
the world from which he came.

Clearly something unexpected has happened. Not only

has Blougram successfully defended himself but the

conversation has had good results....Gigadibs has

been brought to throw off his grandiose ambitions

and to work in the world that is. (266)
Instead, he changes the world that was for a new world. The
journalist "throws off" his country, his profession, and his
way of life as he rejects the kind of faith that the bishop

has represented. Laird agrees, and sees Gigadibs' potential

for future development:

84

[Gigadibs] is not converted to the Bishop's faith,
indeed does not even choose to remain in the society
which has produced both him and Blougram, but runs
off to Australia to search for some form of
Christian faith in what he may consider an
environment more congenial to its growth. (117)

The victory is not, as Priestly argues, Blougram's (147),
but Gigadibs', through his own apprehension of the small
light given to him. Laird summarizes the experience:

Browning's final concern in the poem is to
demonstrate how the Spirit works in mysterious ways,
how it can pierce clouds of pride, hatred,
sensualism, hypocrisy, and doubt to bring about its
effect--a humble, active belief in the power of
Christ to remake man closer to His image--through
the most unlikely means. Although he is interested
in how men conspire within themselves to block out
the light of God, Browning's principal thesis in
this poem is how that light cannot be withstood when
it appears in all its brightness, and thus how it is
possible for the least of men to become the
greatest. (309)

We would argue that the light Blougram offered was very
weak, and really seems not to be the poem's central thesis,
but it was light enough to make Gigadibs seek a stronger
one. Whether he read "The Apocalypse of St. John the
Apostle," as Laird suggests (306), or the "Gospel of John,"
he has turned to a source more reliable by far than his
worldly dinner partner.

Laird feels that "Blougram," and other of Browning's
monologues suffer from an inability to enable a speaker
fully realize himself:

Whatever advantages the dramatic monologue had for

Browning, it had one essential weakness: it could

not show a character coming to understand and thus

able to act upon the inevitable conclusion to which
his whole line of argument has led him and his

85

reader....[Y]et the tragedy in most of Browning's

monologues is that the speakers are cut off before

they can become aware of the answer provided in what

they have said. (303)

He forgets, however, poems such as "Saul" and "Abt Vogler,"
which argue strongly against such a negative conclusion.
But even they are transcended by the ultimate irony of
"Blougram": The Bishop, who has rambled on for some 970
lines, is essentially the same when he concludes his oration
as he was when he began--he never understands or even sees
his own weaknesses; Gigadibs manages to come to his moment
of truth without ever speaking a word.

While speaking of The Ring and the Book, William E.
Harrold defines the role of diction in much of Browning's
poetry, but we can easily apply the same standards to the
bishop and his journalist:

Except for the Poet, who as clown-deceiver and maker

of language controls all varieties of speech, the

characters who are purest use simplicity of diction,

much emotive terminology, less self conscious style,

and imagery that is spiritual because of its deep

roots in human consciousness (such as light-

darkness). Those characters who are grosser and
impure are most likely to use newly coined images,
abstract, scientific phrasing, labored metaphor,
strained and cold allusions, classical oratory,
reason-based argument, heated bias, and tortuous
weighing of facts in their relativistic framework.

(154)

Certainly the poet uses Gigadibs to carry simplicity to its
farthest extreme; Blougram unquestionably meets many of the

criteria for those characters exhibiting less noble

integrity. "Che che, my dear sir, as we say at Rome," he

86

quips (45). Certainly his whole argument is an attempt to
"rhetorically" justify his actions, and he overplays and
misuses the metaphor of the ship's cabin. His biases are
profuse; he insults Gigadibs on the basis of rank in life:
"I am much, you are nothing; you would be all," he tells the
reporter (84). And he refers to the laity as "imbeciles"
(374). His torturous arguments about faith and disbelief
confuse most readers, and undoubtedly even himself. Their
purpose is to cover his real fear:

No: for concede me but the merest chance

Doubt may be wrong--there's judgment, life to come!

With just that chance, I dare not. Doubt proves right?

This present life is all?--you offer me

Its dozen noisy years, without a chance

That wedding an archduchess, wearing lace,

And getting called by divers new-coined names,

Will drive off ugly thoughts and let me dine,

Sleep, read and chat in quiet as I like!

Therefore I will not. (476-484)

In an effort to cover all of his options, he can
wholeheartedly commit himself to nothing.

And certainly the attorneys in The Ring and the Book, as
well, with their almost totally egocentric perspectives, are
prime examples of Harrold's observation. Despite Browning's
obvious jests--jealousy and gluttony are the conspicuous
preoccupations of the two legates--the reader's discomfort
begins early in their arguments. Harvey Feinberg focuses on
the source of that uneasiness:

A close study of both the defense and prosecution

lawyers, Archangelis and Bottinius, leaves the

reader strangely edgy: though the word "truth" is
used 317 times in The Ring and the Book, the word's

87

simple meaning seems entirely absent in these two
books.3(78)

Archangelis, Guido's advocate, is distracted, at best,
by the preparations for a party for his son. He betrays his
self-indulgent nature early, and Feinberg points to
Browning's special use of a character so given over to
gluttony in every area of his life:

Browning slyly chuckles at--and accuses--
Archangelis: the word "animal life" triggers the
procurator's own essentially animal nature, his
blind bundle of appetites, and sets off another food
revery. To underscore how far bombastic creatures
like Archangelis are from Browning's perception of
truth, the poet has the lawyer betray himself:....

Our stomach...I mean, our soul--is stirred
within....(VIII. 1386)(80)

Browning's attitude seems stronger than Feinberg first
indicates, however. He has made Archangelis a matter of
outright ridicule, and food and greed dominate the lawyer's
language.

Archangelis is cognizant of Guido's guilt from the
start, but, as Lee Erickson notes, his purposes are other
than winning his case:

Archangeli[sl, on the other hand, is shown conceding

Guido's guilt in advance but persevering in

embellishing his Latin with choice phrases and

arguments about honor in hopes of drawing attention

to himself and gaining a promotion. (231)

Crowell, more concerned with the Procurator's ambition than
his appetite, notes how fully Browning loathes a character

who is so blatantly insensitive to truth:

Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, the Pauperum
Procurator, is a special object of Browning's

88

detestation. Truth, to this pompous jurist, is what
will further his ambitions. He regards the case as
merely a splendid opportunity to outfox the Fisc and
to parade his superior mastery of Latin and the law.
To him it would be better to lose the case than to
pass up the opportunity to gird at the Fisc's bad
Latin and so miss the laughter of the Court. (Glass,
215)

Crowell underestimates Archangelis' motivation, however;
his concern goes beyond making Bottinius look the fool. His
concern is with a secured future as a judge. Feinberg more
correctly defines the derivation of Archangelis' maneuvers:

And so Archangelis in his defense fixes a jealous
eye on his rival Bottinius (who in VIII. 232 he
fears will get the next judgeship), anticipating his
rhetorical strokes like a chess master and
responding within the narrow context of legal
argumentation. Never is there a semblance of vital
faith in his own words, faith springing from a
conviction of truth. (81)

Instead, we find rhetoric pushed to its limits and almost
total oblivion to any ethical standard. Feinberg (83) notes
the startling similarity between the arguments of
Archangelis and those of the guilty, and desperate,
Franceschini:
Archangelis--

The Gospel checks the Law which throws the stone,

The Church tears the divorce-bill Gospel grants.

Shall wives sin and enjoy impunity?

What profits me the fulness of the days,

The final dispensation, I demand,

Unless Law, Gospel and the Church subjoin

'But who hath barred thee primitive revenge,

Which, like fire damped and damned up, burns more
fierce?

Use thou thy natural privilege of man...(VIII. 706-14)

Franceschini--

No, I appeal to God,--what says Himself,

89

How lessons Nature when I look to learn?
Why, that I am alive, am still a man
With brain and heart and tongue and right-hand too-
Nay, even with friends, in such a cause as this,
To right me if I fail to take my right.
[Italics added](V. 1535-40)

Whether the similarity of argument is any indication of the
level of Archangelis' own desperation, we have no way of
knowing, but we can certainly be aware of the depths to
which he has fallen as he echoes the offensive Count.

Archangelis may have merely exceeded the bounds of good
taste in pursuing an intrinsic desire for promotion, but his
arrogant greed is less forgivable as he feeds on the
misfortune of the Comparini. Feinberg remarks:

In the final irony, the procurator plans a surprise
gift for his wife that evening:

The wife should get a necklace for her pains,
The very pearls that made Violante proud,

And Pietro pawned for half their value once,--
Redeemable by somebody...(VII. 1780-84)(81)

And if we condescend to his greed, then we must finally
abandon any hope for true generosity in the lawyer when we
realize that even this "gift" is laden with ulterior
motives:

Can I but coax the good fat little wife

To Tell her fool of a father the mad prank
His scapegrace nephew played this time last year
At Carnival! He could not choose, I think,
But modify that inconsiderate gift

0' the cup and cover (somewhere in the will
Under the pillow, someone seems to guess)
--Correct that clause in favor of a boy

The trifle ought to grace, with name engraved,
Would look so well, produced in future years
To pledge a memory, when poor papa

Latin and law are long since laid at rest--

90
(VIII. 1768-79)

The person most impressed with Archangelis' crafty
behavior is, of course, Archangelis. Harrold's observation
captures the substance of this character's existence:
"Pride in ability to impress through cleverness is capped by
the irony of his line: 'Pray God I keep me humble'" (93).

No matter how distasteful we find Archangelis, he is no
worse than his opponent. Norton B. Crowell seems to miss
the significance of Bottinius' nature when he states:

Dr. Bottinius's desire to find "Truth rare and real,

not transcripts, fact and false" conveys no contempt

for truth, but rather a desire to seize the essence

of the truth through intuitive appreciation. He

yearns for "truth," but it is whatever will impress

the court with his acumen and so win his case [sic].

(Glass, 197)

Later, Crowell seems to contradict himself when, in an echo
of his evaluation of Archangelis, he says:

To this unprincipled lawyer, truth means only fame

and profit. He represents one of the lowest views

of truth in all of Browning. (Glass, 223)

Bottinius would like to give the impression that he truly
"yearns for truth." We agree that Browning, indeed, conveys
no contempt for truth, but his Roman lawyer not only holds
truth in contempt, he has lost any conception of what truth
really is in the irony of his character. He is ethically
responsible for truth, makes verbal commitment to it, and
then ignores it in favor of his own interests. Gordon W.

Thompson points out:

It is consistent with Browning's practice of making
his greatest fools and villains speak the greatest

91

truths ... that the most significant speech on Art
in The Ring and the Book is delivered by the lawyer,
Bottini. In the midst of all his blather about
oratory, he refers to artists, utters some inanities
about them, and then, surprisingly, says that true
artists do not merely reproduce the "thing
required," ....The rest of Book IX clearly shows
that Bottini has no conception of the significance
of what he has just said, but in many ways he has
outlined the heart of Browning's theory of Art--a
higher perception enables the artist to see to "the
main central truth" of a subject, a truth not
perceived in the model by the ordinary man, but
visible in the work of Art....When one has a higher
perception he is, in effect, an artist, and this
vision, not one's talents, distinguishes the artist
from the ordinary mortal. (83)

Browning's approach is also a way of demonstrating that, at
least on some level, the speaker is aware of truth and
rejects it. Many of his speakers, unfortunately, have
become so accustomed to their own double tongues that even
they no longer listen to themselves.

Neither lawyer seems particularly concerned with either
the fate or reputation of his client. Harrold not only
places both, quite correctly, on the side of Guido, but
feels that they are extensions of something far larger than
mere personal greed:

Their bias is the most exaggerated of all the pro-

Guido characters, since they make no real attempt to

be fair... They represent an institution strained to

the breaking point with corrupt practices,

distortion of language, faulty communication,

twisting of rational processes, and absence of real
concern for humanity. Neither seems to have been in
personal contact with his client. The essence of

the attorneys' personalities seems to grow on stalks

of pride and they are willing to use the intellect

in any way conceivable to defend their honor. In
their cases, too, intellect is divorced from emotion

Not

utte
Refe
port

Wool

Not
he e

the

more

twis

92

to the point that it is fitting they become
caricatures of wholesome personalities. (139)

only is their intellect divorced from emotion, it s
rly divorced from any relationship to fact, as w
rring to the painter and the figures he sets ou
ray, which Bottinius has earlier described,
ford notes:

[Hle sorts, refines, defines, selects and fuses them
into a single composite image.... Which seems fair
enough until, reading on, we discover that by this
argument Bottinius has licensed himself to
manufacture a totally fictional version of
Pompilia's character....[and] equips her with a
wholly imaginary pre-marital sex-life and describes
her behavior, in marriage, in terms perfectly
compatible with sexual infidelity. (183)

satisfied with this gargantuan defamation of charac
laborates. Feinberg equates the lurid description
narrater himself:

Pompilia's alleged promiscuity becomes permissible
because it is undiscriminating ("first come was
first serve," Bottinius tells us, and the lawyer's

crude and lascivious character peeks out from all
the flower-and-spice metaphorical rhetoric for a

moment)....Bottinius is not content with this moral
jawbreaker. Now he somersaults the other way as
well....Now Pompilia is "laudable" precisely because

her promiscuity is selective, relishing the "man of
mark," Caponsacchi. Clearly for Bottinius honor is
nonexistent, even the fraudulent honor of
Franceschini and Archangelis....All three
[Franceschini, Archangelis and Bottinius] are alter
egos of the same mentality: unbridled, godless
appetite. (84, 85, 86)

Honor may be nonexistent for others, but Bottinius
than willing to claim it for himself, warped

ted "honor" as it is. But honor is not all tha

eems
ell.
t to

John

ter,

with

is
and

t he

93
wants. He has interests which transcend Pompilia's
innocence. Crowell summarizes:

Bottinius condemns the monk's sermon root and branch
and especially reprehends his attack on the law as
proving that he cares not a fig for truth. In one
of Browning's most successful passages of sustained
irony the lawyer proves the monk's charge while
attempting to disprove it. He recounts how the
Monastery of the Convertites, where the court
consigned Pompilia after her capture at Castelnuovo,
is now seeking to claim her estate, under the law
granting a monastery rights to the property of
sinners dying within its walls, and the court, while
condemning Guido, neglected to pronounce Pompilia
innocent. Bottinius has been retained to represent
the claimants: (Glass, 223)

It follows that Pompilia, unrelieved
By formal sentence from imputed fault,
Remains unfit to have and to dispose
Of property which law provides shall lapse:
Wherefore the Monastery claims its due:
And whose, pray, whose the office, but the Fisc's?
Who but I institute procedure next
Against the person of dishonest life,
Pompilia, whom last week I sainted so?
(XII. 699-707)

And the reader has come, finally, to irrefutable evidence
that Bottinius is more than subconsciously aware of his own
duplicity.
Harrold teams him with a character we have seen earlier:
Bottini shares with Tertium Quid the irony of
pretense of justness. Tertium Quid favors the
Count, and Bottini reveals himself as an insensitive
artist who miscolors the white of Pompilia's purity
and stains her innocence, even after purporting to
paint it by his acceptance of her defense. (140)
The two lawyers, impelled by their own self-interests

and position to total insensitivity to others, are pictures

of much of what Browning saw in the institutional Church.

94
Harrold extends this thought, accurately, to nineteenth

century society in general:

In The Ring and the Book the institution, which
symbolized the powerful machinery of society, was a
gross embodiment of the objective consciousness
which the poet saw leading to depersonalization,
lack of sincere passion, and a corruption of
communication that could be described as a form of
sound and fury. The spiritual problem that resulted
in the nineteenth century from the clash of science
and religion left the major poets searching for a
serious solution. It was even more serious because
of a dearth of pertinent myths, a cultural
phenomenon which bridges this schism with that
between science and the arts. What Browning most
successfully attained was an objectivity without
abstraction, for it was not so much the objective,
external aspects of life that he felt were damaging
but the way man comprehends them and responds to
them. Thus both the morality of experience and the
poetry of experience alike are characterized by a
balance of the subjective and the objective, but the
objectivity must be one that is felt, not
abstracted. (190)

If "Bishop Blougram" has received extravagant, albeit
conflicting, attention at the hands of the critics, "Holy
Cross Day" has suffered more from neglect. Any attempt to
reconstruct Browning's canon through a review of the indexes
for the past twenty years might totally miss this
historically based work, and earlier criticism is primarily
located in handbook material. Any mention at all in more
general articles seems more aimed at proving the writer's
awareness of its existence than an attempt at analysis.
Barbara Melchiori, who stands nearly alone in dealing with

the poem in any depth, offers, as part of the reason for the

95
poem's lack of pOpularity that it "lacks the perfection" of
some of his other work:

It is, rather, an experimental poem: an experiment

in irony, an experiment into that investigation of

the plurality, or apparent plurality, of truth which

was to lead Browning on to The Ring and the Book.

It is above all an extraordinary texture of

ambiguities, which, even when exploited for their

value as irony, are fundamentally the expression of

an awareness of underlying plurality. (90)

Predated by the exquisite ironies of "My Last Duchess,"
"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," and "The Bishop Orders
His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church," and published in the same
volume with "An Epistle...of Karshish, the Arab Physician,"
"Bishop Blougram's Apology," and "Cleon," to name a few, one
finds it difficult to conceive that Browning would publish
an experiment apparently gone so awry. Perhaps he felt that
the poem had no problems and that his readers simply did not
follow him correctly. Melchiori notes, "It would seem,
however, that he never allowed this thought to worry him
unduly" (108). "Holy Cross Day" may have been an attempt to
see how far he could push an ironic theme, a possibility we
will discuss later.

Whatever its shortcomings, however, the poem clearly
illustrates some of the major problems that Browning saw in .
ecclesiastical authority: Not only does the Church use
intimidation in the guise of evangelism, but it morally

exceeds the bounds of its own jurisdiction, even if, as in

this case, it is the Catholic Church in Rome. Not

96
necessarily an invective against the Roman church, "Holy
Cross Day" is a portrait of authority which fails to
correctly understand its mandate and then compounds its
failure by not realizing just how offensive it has become in
the process.

Browning's carefully constructed prose preface to the
poem is a masterpiece of irony. To the uninitiated the
actions of the Bishop seem completely justified, but the
entire entry is misinterpretation. Melchiori notes:

But Browning knew his Bible well, and the irony of

these quotations lies in the contexts from which

they are uprooted. One and all, these Biblical
references are taken from passages (in the New as
well as in the Old Testament) which teach the
supremacy of the Jewish race, and its final triumph.

(92)

The institution which glibly quotes Scripture out of
context to suit its own purposes is not likely to be more
sensitive to human nature. The entire Inquisition operated
on the premise that people could be forced into faith and
often ignored those concepts which would have made that
faith attractive to others, i.e. humility and love.
Accepting "conversions" at surface appearance, the
authorities are sanctimoniously unaware of the strong
undercurrent of rancor present in the Jews whom they drove
to the church. Convinced of their own superiority, they

never notice the insult of "settle your thumbs.‘" They

apparently are also unaware of the strengthening effect

97
which persecution often has on the current beliefs of those
who are being afflicted.

Not only is the Church callous to its victims, it
displays no personal interest in those who supposedly become
part of their persuasion. One individual, who has been
shaved four times as evidence of his "conversion," has
escaped recognition by the authorities for so long that even
his companions are becoming nervous:

Lo, Micah,--the selfsame beard on chin

He was four times already converted in!

Here's a knife, clip quick--it's a sign of grace-—

Or he ruins us all with his hanging face.

(39-42)

Micah's "hanging face" was certainly the evidence of his
regrown, dark beard, not as Melchiori suggests, dark
evidence that they were "being struck with terror at the
approach of God's judgments" (102). The conversions here
were faked; if the Jews had any real sense of impending doom
based on what they were being told, their conversions would
have been genuine. We cannot forget the air of sarcastic
flippancy that dominated their conversation on the way to
the service. The only terror they might have experienced
was that of sitting through yet another heretical sermon.

If the faked conversions were lies, a Jewish compromise
with truth, it was not a compromise entirely without
Biblical precedent. Although Daniel's companions were

willing to risk death rather than compromise their faith

(Daniel 3), Jewish midwives lied to the Egyptian king about

98
the birth of male Jewish children and received God's
blessing (Exodus 1:16.17), and Naaman asked the prophet
Elisha for permission to bow in the house of Rimmon when his
master worshipped there (II Kings 5).

Even apart from personal conviction, they can hardly be
blamed for their reluctance to follow the belief system of
those whose lives were so offensive. Melchiori feels that
Browning was, perhaps, unnecessarily severe with the Roman
clergy:

Browning, who in "Fra Lippo Lippi" could show so

much sympathy with the Friar's amorous escapades

(though never with the Church that enjoined celibacy

in its priests) is here decidedly hard on the

Bishop. Even worse things are glanced at. "What, a

boy at his side, with the bloom of a lass" suggests

that the Bishop, too, may have had his

eccentricities and reminds us of the "the bloom and
fleeting folly of Don Applecheeks", the apotheosis

of all such "boys" in Cardinal Pirelli; while the

lines "which gutted my purse" recall the Bishop who

ordered his tomb in St Praxed's and who was also a

thief. (103)

If Browning, through the Jews, is hard on this Bishop, it is
because he feels such criticism is justified--indeed, it is
one of the points which he wishes to make here. Fra Lippo
Lippi's circumstances are entirely different: He is not
using young boys, and has no pretensions for leadership or
inclinations to parade his "religion" before others. Phipps
discusses the blatancy of this kind of morality as it occurs
in The Ring and the Book:

The articulate spectators, Half-Rome and Other Half-

Rome, as well as Caponsacchi, discuss in detail the

current toleration of clerical immorality. In
Caponsacchi's case, the authorities seem more

99

disturbed by his change of garb than by the charges
of adultery. ("Caponsacchi," 716)

Browning is equally hard on St. Praxed's Bishop. Not only
does he accuse the man of thievery, he places a supposedly
celibate priest in the company of several of his sons.
Although Bishop Blougram, discussed earlier, does not seem
to include young boys in his excesses, and he offers nothing
that even hints at thievery, we must keep in mind that he,
too, is given to the kind of luxuriant living that easily
leads those of his ilk into such disasters.

But we have no license to make unjustified assumptions.
Of the lines, "Whose life laughs through and spits at their
creed! / Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed"
(101-2), Ms. Melchiori says:

Some of the Nonconformist preaching against the

Scarlet Woman that Browning must have heard as a boy

has crept into the Rabbi's invective here. (109)
We have just heard of the Bishop's eccentricities with young
boys, of personal greed which sent the clergy to
moneylenders, and of excessive opulence in the Church. The
lines really give no license for the addition of a "Scarlet
woman." Unfortunately, Ms. Melchiori gives no examples of
what she might be referring to in particular. Earlier, she
reports of the line, "Men I helped to their sins help me to
their God" as a reflection of:

Browning the Protestant who is writing, for while

the first meaning of help is simply "assist", there

is the underlying sense of "serve at table",

bringing us back with a deliberately ironic effect
to the doctrine of transubstantiation and the idea

100

of partaking of the body of Christ in the Mass.
(104)

This view also goes too far, and it ignores the context of
the line, which offers evidence that the speaker has merely
financed his tormenter's misbehavior:

It got to a pitch, when the hand indeed

Which gutted my purse would throttle my creed:

And it overflows when, to even the odd,

Men I helped to their sins help me to their God.

(57-60)

Again, Browning never praised or condemned men in
generalized groups. Each man stood or fell as an
individual, as he sought and apprehended truth. Melchiori
seems to think that Browning changed his attitude toward the
Jews as a group midway through the poem. She notes first:

The two scenes of the Jews hurrying to church and

the rats crowding after the Pied Piper were clearly

linked in Browning's mind, showing a vital lack of

sympathy and suggesting again that his only aim at
this stage was to write a piece of colourful
description. The rats, swine, wasps, frogs, worms,

and fleas, all used as figures for overcrowding in

stanza iii, are equally unsympathetic. (100)

But these are terms the speaker is applying to his own
group--to analogize the way they are being treated by their
tormenters. The words have nothing at all to do with
Browning's view of them. Of stanza ix, she notes:

From this point onward the Jews are no longer seen

as dirty, vulgar, and cheating, but as God's chosen

race, suffering persecution, but sustained by the

promise of a final vindication and triumph. (103)

Browning never viewed Jews as "dirty, vulgar, and cheating."

And he was not given to such whimsical turnings as are

101

described here. One needs to appreciate the cynical humor
the Jews maintained toward their own trying situation and
the insight they had into the lives of those who were
attempting to force their conversions. They were making fun
of themselves and their situation, and while they were well
aware of their own shortcomings, they did not paint
themselves as "dirty, vulgar, and cheating." Some of the
"doomed black dozen" (31) were those who had been caught
stealing, but the entire group is not pictured as corrupt.
If anyone here is repugnant, it is the Bishop who
masquerades in front of an audience to whom he was supposed
to minister.

This does not say that Browning had no desire for the
conversion of the Jews as a people, but Jews were not the
only ones he desired to see converted, as Melchiori implies
(111), and his idea of "conversion" was quite different from
common definition, certainly other than that held by the
organized church. Browning's desire was that all men live
by the light they are given, and has little to do with which
chapel or church they attended or failed to attend. We need
look no further than Men and Women for evidence that his
desire was for universal conversion of this kind: Karshish
was a Muslim Arab, Gigadibs was an agnostic, and presumably
an Englishman, Saul and David were Hebrews, and Cleon was a
poet and Greek. If we look ahead to Dramatis Personae, we

find that he fully accepted Rabbi Ben Ezra's faith as well

102
as that of the German Catholic Abt Vogler. Later, the Pope
in The Ring and the Book presents a creed which has more
often than not been compared with Browning's own.

Melchiori apparently fails to understand Browning's
intended meaning when she reports on his February 1888
letter to Furnivals:

[Iln Holy Cross Cay, Ben Ezra is not supposed to

acknowledge Christ as the Messiah because he resorts

to the obvious argument "even on your own showing

and accepting for the moment the authority of your

accepted Lawgiver, you are condemned by His

precepts--let alone ours." (105)

In the light of his assertion, Browning is simply using the
argument of Romans 1 and 2, in which Paul tells the Jews to
whom those chapters are directed that they, as well as all
men, will be judged by the same standards-—the light which
they have been given. Melchiori's response is puzzling:

I feel very certain that Browning here is defending

his own words and not those of the Rabbi, especially

as he used the phrase "Ben Ezra is not supposed to

acknowledge", and that the inconsistency that

Furnival seems to have noticed in the poem is

therefore a real one [underline added]. (105-6)

Despite Ms. Melchiori's feelings, Browning is the one who
has invented Ben Ezra's poem, as she herself has attempted
to prove. Browning's defense is, therefore, a defense of
what he means the Rabbi to say. And he means the Rabbi to
say, "Even if I accepted your premise..."

Whether the Rabbi's poem originates with the Rabbi or

with Browning, we have an expression of what Browning felt

the Rabbi might say. J. Hillis Miller notes:

103
Browning's inability to speak directly in his own
voice, the neutrality and pliability of his spirit,
link him to a certain aspect of the romantic
tradition...Browning carries just about as far as it
can go the Keatsian notion of the chameleon poet
who, having no nature of his own, is able to enter

into the nature of things around him. (106)

As in The Ring and the Book, Browning took an historical
event, in this case the annual sermon, and a historical
figure, here Rabbi Ben Ezra, and molded them to his own
purpose. Furnival's letter, of course, is lost to us, which
is perhaps even more reason that we dare not allow him to
become the ultimate critic. Again, if Browning's readers
should misunderstand, it is Browning, himself, who will be
least disturbed.

In the prose preface to the poem, the Bishop's secretary
uses Christian texts out of context and so disproves the
very actions he seeks to justify. The multiple irony of the
poem is that Ben Ezra also uses Christian, or New Testament,
texts to demonstrate how corrupt those who should be
following Christ have become. If Browning uses "Protestant"
arguments, it could be weakness on his part, but it might
also be an attempt to show that the Jew is more alert to
Christian sensitivities than Christians have been in
presenting their "good news" to Israel.

"If" Christ were the Messiah, the Rabbi reasons, the

activities of the Roman "Devil's crew" would most certainly

be an embarrassment to Him.

104
But the Rabbi sees beyond the present day to the future
unification of Israel and the Church, a concept which he
supports from Jeremiah 3:17-19, a Hebrew Scripture,6 but
which is equally New Testament in concept. Romans 4:9-10
and 16-17 discuss forgiveness outside of Jewish law. Even
more explicitly, Romans 11:26-27 reads in regards to the

Jews:

And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written,
There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and
shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is
my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their
sins.

And Galatians 3:28—29 tells believers of the relationship
between Jews and Gentiles:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither
bond nor free, there is neither male nor female:
for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be
Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs
according to the promise.

While the Hebrew and New Testament perspectives may be
slightly different, certainly the end is the same. The
failure of the poem is not, as Melchiori says, in the idea

that

Having raised so many questions, having seen so
clearly the sophistries and ironies underlying
established beliefs and traditional interpretations
of the Scriptures...Browning lets the reader down
wholly in the end. We are brought up sharp against
this inconsistency: that the clear-sighted Browning
could so deliberately close his eyes to and turn his
back on his own conclusions, to fix his gaze on that
incongruous procession of converted Jews which has
no meaning as a culmination to the poem, and is
perhaps one of the main reasons why "Holy-Cross Day"

has been left aside so often as unsatisfactory.
(112-113)

105

Melchiori does not state what conclusions she sees as
Browning's own, nor does she explain what she refers to as
"the questioning of fundamental doctrines" (112), but these
are not the paramount cause of the poem's failure.

Browning's most successful monologues are those in which
the speaker comes to realization of truth for himself, or at
least speaks the truth and rejects it on one pretext or
another. In "Holy Cross Day," the speaker comes to the
right conclusions, but for the wrong congregation. Rome
must ultimately understand Ben Ezra's poem before she can
reach Ben Ezra's heart, and she has effectively guaranteed
that she will never even hear it, much less understand.

Browning may have become tangled in his own ironies,
thus robbing the poem of some of its meaning, but his
essential message remains. Whether we are talking about a
defensive Bishop in England, two self-centered lawyers in
Rome, or a corrupt Roman clergy, the authority created by
institutionalization quickly loses focus of purpose and
adopts a dehumanizing attitude toward the very people it was
established to serve. The apprehension of Truth for
Browning, the apprehension of God, is an individual matter,
and, as Miller aptly notes, "then there is no need for
temples, priests, and the other trappings of organized
religion" (156). If this seems a familiar "Protestant"
position, it has parallel in Hebrew scriptures. Israel in

the land and under the authority of priests and Levites

106
almost always degenerated to idolatry and/or legalism. The
minor prophets stand out as individual exceptions to the
general trend; Daniel, Amos, and Habakkuk are every bit as

singular as Caponsacchi, Pompillia and Pope Innocent XII.

CHAPTER 4
MANIPULATION AND DECEIT: CHOOSING DARKNESS
HUMAN RIGHTS AND PERSONAL LOSS
"ANDREA DEL SARTO," GUIDO, AND THE DUKE OF FERRARA

While Browning may be generally critical of the
insensitivities and corruptions of the institution, he never
grants amnesty to the individual, situation notwithstanding.
Regardless of environment, each individual bears total
responsibility for personal deeds or reactions to
circumstances. J. Hillis Miller extends this concept and
summarizes:

Browning believes that each man, except perhaps the

poet himself, has a permanent node or center of

existence, and that this unchanging selfhood
persists though all the vicissitudes of his life.

If this is the case, then every action of a man,

however insignificant, will reveal all of him, if we

can understand it...God is equally present in every

part of the universe from the fretful midge up to

the greatest star; in the same way a man's permanent

selfhood is equally present in his least gesture and

his most decisive acts. (125)

In some cases, like "Karshish," and "Clean," those
actions seem to involve transactions only between the
speaker and God, but, overwhelmingly, most of Browning's

characters are intimately absorbed in relationships with

others: Andrea Del Sarto and Lucrezia, Guido and Pompilia,

107

108

and the Duke of Ferrara and his previous mate name only a
few. These, some of Browning's most negative characters, in
desperate efforts to convince both their audiences and
themselves that they are morally justified in their
treatment of others, not only prove their culpability but
also demonstrate that their moral transgressions have cost
them the very things they hoped to gain. In their moral
failures they violate the basic rights of the persons for
whom they are responsible, often to the point of death.
Each is ultimately responsible for his own dilemma, but none
accepts responsibility for his actions.

Evil, according to Browning, has its purpose. He writes
of The Ring and The Book in a letter to Julia Wedgwood,
dated November 19, 1868:

I was struck with the enormous wickedness and

weakness of the main composition of the piece, and

with the incidental evolution of good thereby,--good

to the priest, to the poor girl, to the old Pope,

who judges anon, and, I would fain hope, to he who

reads and applies my reasoning to his own experience

which is not likely to fail him. The curious depth
below depth of depravity here--in this chance lump
taken as a sample of the soil--might well have
warned another from spreading it out,—-but I thought
that, since I could do it, and even liked to do it,

my affair it was rather than another's. (143)

But while he understands that evil may have some positive
effects, he never condones or excuses it. He demonstrates
clearly that in addition to any good it may cause, it

seriously limits those who commit it and abuses those who

are its victims. Interestingly, Browning does not insist on

109
the "incidental evolution of good" in the case of either Del
Sarto or Ferrara.

Andrea Del Sarto has not only stolen money from King
Francis I, he has neglected his own parents to the point of
death and pandered his art to meet Lucrezia's demands. If
he ever possessed moral freedom, it has disappeared along
with his creative abilities, and he no longer has the moral
stamina even to attempt to moderate his wife's behavior,
thus both were "lost." He tentatively blames Lucrezia

should you let me sit

Here by the window with your hand in mine...

I might get up to-morrow (13, 14, 18)
then God

How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead;

So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!

I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie (50-52)
before he finally decides that he is living in penance for
his actions. Stephan C. Brennan notes of Andrea's attitude:

Of course the rejection of free-will is an easy

rationale, for the omnipotent deity is seen as the

agent responsible for all acts. This philosophy
informs our reading of this entire section, which is

Andrea's attempt to blame his failure as an artist

on forces outside himself....His statement has a

built in fallacy, for the "let it lie!" is itself an

assertion of his own will. (38)

We cannot know when Andrea's weaknesses first began to
manifest themselves, but we can be reasonably assured that
Guido's avoidance of responsibility is a life-long habit.

Rather than assuming his position as eldest son and managing

the family estate, he took refuge in the church. When he

110

failed there, he tried to marry for money, another misspent
effort. If the church failed Pompilia, it also failed
Guido--but in his case, rightly so. When he tried to take
refuge in the Church and in his rank to avoid assuming
responsibility for his marriage and his crimes, the church
denied his petition--first by not allowing his divorce:

Your plan for the divorce is all mistake.

It would hold, now, had you, taking thought to wed

Rachel of the blue eye and golden hair,

Found swart-skinned Leah cumber couch next day:

But Rachel, blue-eyed golden haired aright,

Proving to be only Laban's child, not Lot's,
Remains yours all the same for ever more.

(V.1309-15)
Nor did it, according to him, punish Pompilia
"sufficiently." If it had, he would not have had cause to

take the action that he took, and he considered the wrongs
against him multiple. His position as husband, his rank,
his association with the church should all have entitled him
to more. Margaret Doane notes that Guido feels "that his
rank should allow him to act as he pleases" (56) and
narrates some of his grievances:
The Count sees Pompilia only as an object to be
manipulated; he is incensed that he has been
"defrauded of all bargained for" (XI. 1213) by a
pair of fools and their nullity daughter. (XI. 1192,
1113) (58)
And, of course, Guido feels that his apprehension as
murderer is not his fault, either. Doane comments on
Guido's view of the role of fate:
Pompilia would not have been able to reveal her

murderer if the Count had killed her outright; even
though he purposefully stabbed her in the most

111

painful locations, she lived long enough to name him

and turned his "plausibility to nothingness" (XI.

1689). He does not find himself cruel, but rather

the victim of a cruel destiny. The Count compares

his palms--bloodied by murder--to the bloodied palms

of the crucified Christ and appeals to the Pope for

a "little indulgence to rank, privilege." (XI. 1778)

(60)

Guido's motivations are obvious: He is the totally
egocentric man. In the light of Guido's consistent whining,
Richard D. McGhee's remarks about the count's ability to
make a commitment seem somewhat puzzling:

Guido is, by his own confession at any rate, no

hollow man. He has within him the capacity for

making a commitment to something, but it must be
something with certainty. Doubt has made him choose
life in the body as more certain than life in the

spirit. (96)

We have, of course, no way of knowing McGhee's definition of
a "hollow man," but Guido appears to make no commitment to
anyone or anything outside of himself. His certainties
include titles, not people; money, not human kindness and
decency; deception, not honesty; and Law, not personal
integrity. If "doubt has made him choose life in the body,"
it may be because one of the certainties he does have is
that life in the spirit will be more miserable than the life
he has lived in the flesh. Filled with himself, he seeks
only his own personal good, no matter what the cost to
others. And, of course, he can do no better than attribute
to others the same motivations he finds in himself.

The Duke of Ferrara shifts blame, of course, to his

"Last Duchess." His pride is so immense that he seems, at

112

first reading, not even to understand that he has committed
a crime. It prevents his "stooping" and also his
understanding of humanity and of his own evil nature.
Professing an inability to speak on some subjects, he
proceeds to babble his crime in a prideful burst of rhetoric
and does not even perform the "execution" himself. Unlike
Guido, he is apparently in no danger of punishment from
either the state or the church--his rank has protected him
as he has expected it to. He does have some interests at
stake, however, and uses almost his entire monologue to
shift the blame and justify his own actions. Clyde de L.
Ryals notes how the duke uses rhetorical finesse to present
his suit:

There is no compulsion upon the duke to reveal--to,

of all people, the envoy from a prospective duchess-

-how he came to do away with his previous duchess.

Yet at a moment when he is swept up into song he

tells all and, furthermore, attempts to justify it.

(38)
If the lady had been wanton or mean-spirited, or even merely
ugly, the murder may have had some rational basis, but, as
Ryals goes on to note:

We the readers see, just as undoubtedly the envoy

sees, that there can be no justification for the

murder (if that is what it is) of a kind young lady

whose only apparent error was that she was not

sufficiently haughty to be (in the duke's mind)

Duchess of Ferrara; yet at the same time we

perceive-—as presumably does the envoy, for he makes

no demur--that the duke is a fascinating character,

bigger than life and disdainful of the merely
ordinary. (38)

113

The point in each of these three monologues transcends
whether or not the speaker knows what is morally correct.
For each speaker, the point is personal psychological
control--manipulation of the "audience." For each speaker,
moral failure is a choice. John P. McGowan notes that the
point where this becomes evident is often early, the first
point of contact with the speaker (100).

Andrea Del Sarto has lost control of his art, his wife,
and ultimately, the course of his entire life. Stephan C.
Brennan not only understands this, but he sees that Andrea's
whole purpose in speaking is to establish some sort of
reason and significance in his situation:

Both Langbaum and Shaw view Andrea's intention

throughout to be the transfer of blame to Lucrezia,

a reading which necessitates, especially for Shaw,

seeing in the poem a subtle and extensive system of

conscious irony on Andrea's part. But Andrea's
purpose is really more general--to find any workable

and tolerable view of his situation. (35)

Paul A. Cundiff notes that "Andrea is one of the least
deceived husbands in all literature" (32). And as we look
at the poem, we find that he is deceived about little else,
as well. His "admissions" are numerous. He knows that
Lucrezia does not belong to him; she is, as Altick has put
it, "public property" (23), "My face, my moon, my
everybody's moon,/ Which everybody looks on and calls his"
(29-30). Of the less-than-perfect art of his

contemporaries, he admits, "There burns a truer light of God

in them" (79). And, he sees of his own art: "All is

114
silver-grey/ Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!"
(99-100). Of Raphael's picture he says, "its soul is right"
(113), clearly understanding by implication that his own
work lacks that essential element. He wishes that Lucrezia
could have "given me soul" (118). Cundiff sees this as an
admission on Andrea's part:

In spite of a long-established pattern of critical

thought, Andrea refers to himself, not Lucrezia, as

the one in need of a "soul," and clearly the word

"soul" implies a personal deficiency in aspiration

and pride, not a total lack of either. (28)

He understands that Lucrezia's shortcomings have been,
in large measure, his own fault as he tells her, "Nay, Love,
you did give all I asked, I think--/ More than I merit, yes,
by many times (120-121). Essentially, because of his moral
weakness he has limited her ability to make correct moral
choices. He cannot lay the blame to her for his lack of
accomplishment. He knows that without "will" he has lost
the moral battle; he is merely half a man:

Beside, incentives come from the soul's self;

The rest avail not. Why do I need you?

What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo?

In this world, who can do a thing, will not;

And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:

Yet the will's somewhat--somewhat, too, the power--

And thus we half-men struggle. (134-140)

Roma King, Jr. notes the admission, but feels that Lucrezia
has degraded her husband:

His strange, almost abnormal devotion to a woman who

has so degraded him cannot have been other than

devastating to his art. Yet, he realizes clearly

that she is not wholly the cause of his failure.
(15)

115

His failure is caused by the sum of his choices. If she has
degraded him, it is because he has allowed it. Morality is
personal, and Brennan realizes that the problem is the
painter's own inability to exercise moral judgment. He
comments on the necessity of understanding this section of
the poem as a personal moral struggle:

In these early reveries, Andrea is clearly trying to

assert that he has the ability to do great work but

not the moral force to resist Lucrezia. This

reading is essential in order to understand the

conclusion of the poem. (42)
Andrea knows that he panders his art, uses it to

...let smiles buy me! have you more to spend?

While hand and eye and something of a heart

Are left me, work's my ware, and what's it worth?

I'll pay my fancy. (223—226)
He freely admits that he stole from Francis and that he
would not change what he did:

I regret little, I would change still less.

Since there my past life lies, why alter it?

The very wrong to Francis!--it is true

I took his coin, was tempted and complied,

And built this house and sinned, and all is said.

(245-249)

And, while he only obliquely allows his guilt for the death
of his parents ("Some good son/ Paint my two hundred
pictures-—let him try!)(255-256), the very fact that he
needs to defend himself at all against the charge at this
time indicates that the guilt is very real and refutes
Cundiff's assertion that,

To use his comments about his parents to show that

Andrea was an unnatural son or to tie them in with

Andrea's pampering of Lucrezia as evidence he
cheapened his art in any way is to ignore, it seems

116

to me, the integrity of the paintings which Browning

saw and the contemporary praise of Andrea which

Browning's source material provided him. On taking

a wife, Andrea, like most men in his social class,

had been required to discontinue or forego financial

support of his parents; and, though entitled to a

higher station in life because of his recognized

superior talents, he had accepted the imposition of

a much lower station without regard for professional

approbation. (28)

This view grants an unwarranted dismissal of Del Sarto's
moral responsibility and leaves the lines without purpose in
the poem. Clearly, had Lucrezia been "pampered" less,
Andrea would have been in a more favorable position to tend
to his filial duties. Morality is not a case of law or
tradition, as we have seen in the case of Guido and as
demonstrated by Caponsacchi in The Ring and the Book, but of
responsibility towards dependent others.

Del Sarto finishes his monologue with the most damning
evidence of all. After allocating one of the four walls
surrounding the New Jerusalem for himself to paint in
company with "Leonard, Rafael, [and] Agnolo," he sees that,

So--still they overcome

Because there's still Lucrezia,--AS I CHOOSE.

(Emphasis added)(265-266)

Everything that has ever been denied him and will ever
be denied him is because of his moral character--his choice
of Lucrezia and all of the implications of that choice, the
theft from Francis, the death of his parents--and he knows

that he would repeat the behavior if given the opportunity.

He has committed, in Browning's world, the unforgivable sin.

117
Mario L. D'Avanzo ties this work in with Browning's essay on
Shelley, and notes that:

If it is the subjective (or visionary) poet that

Browning reveres in Shelley, according to Browning's

biographers, then Andrea's tragedy involves a

willful failure to pursue his inner vision, which we

assume he carried "on the retina of his own eyes"

briefly at Fontainebleau. (525)

Joshua Adler sees Andrea Del Sarto as a deplorable
character, but remarks, "Andrea's one redeeming feature,
absent in the Duke [of Ferrara], is that at least he knows--
and even seems partly to deplore--that he is living in a
moral twilight" (225). But the fact remains, he has
deliberately chosen that twilight and will do nothing to

change it. George Steiner, in Real Presences, says,

The archaic torso in Rilke's famous poem says to us:

"change your life". So do any poem, novel, play,
painting, musical composition worth meeting. The
voice of intelligible form, of the needs of direct
address from which such form springs, asks: 'What

do you feel, what do you think of the possibilities
of life, of the alternative shapes of being which
are implicit in your experience of me, in our
encounter?’ The indiscretion of serious art and
literature and music is total. It queries the last
privacies of our existence. (142)
Andrea Del Sarto's "flawless" art could not be complete
because he could not it allow to query the privacies of the
relationships of his life. He was not weak because he
yielded to Lucrezia; he yielded to Lucrezia because he was

weak. He makes that admission once:

Too live the life grew, golden and not grey,
And I'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt

118

Out of the grange whose four walls make his world.
How could it end in any other way?
(168-171)

Guido, too, needs to find control, but he is less
interested in deceiving himself than he is in avoiding the
guillotine. His most immediate concern is his jailers, but
it becomes very clear that he actively hates the good, and
is meant as a foil for the poem's virtuous characters like
Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and the Pope, and as such, notes
James F. Loucks,

It is central to Browning's purpose that we see

Guido as utterly depraved, and that such depravity

has this moral utility: that it can generate its

opposite in lives like Caponsacchi's. But for such

a man as Guido there is no possibility of grace.

("Guido," 40-41)

Julia Wedgwood hoped for more indulgence toward the
villain, but Browning refused to yield to her wishes. He
wrote:

Who commits the wickednesses that undeniably are?

Last, I hold you are wrong even in your praise--that

is, wrong in thinking that whatever you count white

in Pompilia and Innocent could have come out as

clearly without the black? (Curle, 176)

Guido never even attempts to deny that he committed the
murders. Rather, he attempts, through two monologues, to
"justify" his actions on the basis of law and social
privilege. J. Hillis Miller comments on the implications of
Guido's attitude:

For Browning, as for Arnold, there is nothing

"intermediate" between man and God, no "series"

leading from one to the other and guaranteeing the
truth of man's speech and law. Guido claims that

119

every act of his, even the murder of Pompilia and
her foster-parents, is justified by law, and
therefore good. Here he is damnably wrong, and
betrays his failure to know intuitively the truth
which guides Pompilia and Caponsacchi, and is
expressed "obliquely" by the poem. (153)

Browning intended Guido's opportunities for "knowledge"
to be evident. In an undated letter to Julia Wedgwood,
written approximately February 22, 1869, he says:

Why, I almost have you at an unfair disadvantage, in
the fact that the whole story is true! How do you
account for the "mere brutal hacking Pompilia to
pieces" in a nobleman thirty years long the intimate
of Cardinals: is this the case of a drunken
operative that kicks his wife to death because she
has no money for more gin? But I won't begin and
tell my own story over yet another time,—-I am too
glad to get done with it. We differ apparently in
our conception of what gross wickedness can be
effected by cultivated minds,--I believe, the
grossest--all the more, by way of reaction from the
enforced habit of self denial which is the condition
of men's receiving culture. Guido tried the over-
refined way for four years, and in his rage at its
unsuccess let the natural man break out. (italics
added)(Curle 175)

Guido, in effect, had tried acting other than what he
essentially was--and quite unsuccessfully. Because he
failed to understand the fundamental components of the role,
he could not play the part. He finally reverted to his own
basic character. Not that he didn't have the opportunity to
perform better, but that the will to such performance was
not in him. Norton B. Crowell notes of Guido's failure:

The Pope finds Guido guilty because he was tested

fairly and he elected failure; he did not even seek

success. He was granted

A solid intellect: the wit to seek,

Wisdom to choose, and courage wherewithal
To deal in whatsoever circumstance

120
Should minister to man, make life succeed.
Oh, and much drawback! what were earth without?
(X. 403-407)(Glass, 216)
Later, Crowell notes that "Guido's... fault lies simply in
his refusal in good faith to find the truth, to make the
moral choice (Glass, 217). M. Whitcomb Hess goes beyond
that, however, asserting:
His tremendous egoism has wrought in him such self-
deceit that it is literally true to say he knows not
what he does. But what is more he is not concerned
about knowing. He gropes in a growing tangle and
twilight of his own motives and he refuses the only
thread that can lead him out of the maze. And thus
his refusal of truth is also the negation of his
freedom. (252)

The Duke of Ferrara, however, is the apparent master of
control in Browning's poetry. William E. Harrold observes:
There are no stanzaic divisions to interrupt the
smooth forward movement. His speech seems more like
a planned lecture which he delivers when he takes
the envoy on tour. He is sure of what he is to say,

and thus can speak without interruptions. (49)
Speaking in couplets, he adds even more to the appearance of
mastery. His need, of course, is control of the envoy so
that he may find a new duchess. The very fact that he must
manipulate suggests that he is in trouble. Hal Blythe and
Charlie Sweet, arguing that the duke is impotent suggest:
Viewed from a psychological perspective, the Duke is
a man so preoccupied with power that he fails to
recognize he is, in fact, powerless. (17)

Ferrara's knowledge is important here. At first

reading, the duke's monologue seems so arrogant, so filled

121

with self that it seems as if he hasn't a suspicion that he
might be wrong. McGowan's observation is helpful here:

The Duke's great care about what he says suggest

[sic] that there exists something behind speech that

he is determined not to reveal. And the assumption

is usually that the hidden is hidden for a

reason....The Duke's monologue creates a world, like

the lie, in which everything is ordered completely

in relation to the sensibility and desires of the

speaker. (101)
In spite of the duke's "great care," he does reveal, as we
have pointed out earlier, "I gave commands;/ Then all smiles
stopped together" (45-46). He reveals another piece of
intelligence, also:

Even had you skill

In speech--(which I have not)--to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark"-—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,

--E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. (35—43)
Despite his protest that he lacks skill in speech, he
obviously feels that he speaks quite well and then admits a
ruthlessness almost more shocking than the fact of the
murder itself: The duke never even told his "last duchess"
how she had offended him because he chose not to lower
himself! She may not even have known that she offended at
all; she may have died without warning.

Ferrara's pride in his "art" is significant in his
psychology. Sanford Pinsker notes that "As the Duke would

have it, works of Art are 'wonder(s),' especially when they

122
serve to increase the distance between an aristocratic
'collector' and the Great Unwashed" (71). But distance is
only part of the problem. The duke needs more than that, he
needs control. John P. McGowan notes that the theme recurs
often in Browning:

Turning people into things to negate the threat

their humanity poses is a recurrent strategy of

control for several Browning characters....The logic

of dehumanization is, ultimately, the logic of

murder. The other who cannot be manipulated must be

murdered or else that other will destroy the world

the speaker has constructed. (101-2)

For Browning, the speaker's relationship to art is often
important. Harrold's observation that "The Count's weakness
as artist and appreciator of art indicates his lack of moral
strength" (163) can be extended to others we have mentioned
earlier, as well: The two halves of Rome, Tertium Quid, the
lawyers, and certainly Andrea Del Sarto.

Harrold notes the similarities between Pompilia in The
Ring and the Book and the duke's last duchess, and then he
goes on to describe a connection between Fra Pandolf,
painter of the duchess, and Andrea Del Sarto:

In a sense Fra Pandolf painted a saint and portrayed

the relationship between body and soul. The

painter's real interest was in capturing the essence

of the Duchess's good qualities. He was the type of

artist that Andrea del Sarto admired in Leonardo da

Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo because they all

could paint "soul." (46)

And thus we discover that the two women shared another

similarity--their husbands could not tolerate soul.

123

Life is a series of choices, and every choice has a
consequence. Some, unquestionably, are less significant
than others--whether to wear blue or green--, but some make
an eternal difference. Most choices are dependent upon
previous choices (I cannot choose to wear green if I have
not previously chosen to purchase something in that color).
When the choice for evil, for darkness, has been made, it

too is dependent upon previous choices, and may well

determine subsequent actions. The consequence of darkness
is often more darkness. Finally, a choice will be made
which will determine an irreversible course. Miller notes

this principle in the formation of self:

Only after a crucial decision, action, or experience
does a man surround himself irrevocably with a tight
net of circumstances. Then he becomes himself once
and for all. Until now the man has been, in a
sense, free, free as the shapeless sea.
Henceforward he is fixed, trammeled in the results
of his choice and act. Liquidity has been poured
into a mold:

How the world is made for each of us!
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moment's product thus,
When a soul declares itself--to wit,
By its fruit, the thing it does!
("By the Fireside" 241-245)(126)
A few lines beyond this Browning writes, completing Miller's
thought: "I am named and known by that moment's feat;/
There took my station and degree" ((251-252).
If a course of darkness comes at a moment in time, so

does a course of light--salvation. Loucks feels that

124
salvation, according to Browning, is something quite
different from this:

Browning's view of salvation, enunciated in "Rabbi

Ben Ezra" and elsewhere, is that salvation is not an

event but the outcome of a lifetime's testing of the

soul's mettle. ("Guido," 37)

Elsewhere? To the contrary, it seems that "Rabbi Ben Ezra"
is the clear exception. Cleon, filled with his own pride
has never been tested until he hears of Paulus. Karshish
doesn't wonder until he comes face to face with Lazarus.
Abt Vogler's meeting with the divine comes in a moment of
extemporizing. Saul never really hears the David who, in a
moment of pure rapture, comes to Messianic vision.

In an earlier chapter we have argued that the monologue
is often merely a record of a decision already made; it now
becomes the record of the fixing of a man's destiny. This
is the importance of the turning away of Karshish and Cleon,
and this is the importance of the decisions of Andrea, Guido
and Ferrara. They may no longer change direction--their
souls have irrevocably declared themselves.

Andrea Del Sarto feels that he is doing penance for his
sins through his indulgence of Lucrezia. Brennan notes:

Lucrezia's promiscuity has become part of a penance

that he must bear in order to balance the scales of

a just God, while his artistic mediocrity, caused by

his inability to escape the confines of his prison

of love, has become an operation of his free

will....He sees himself as a whole man with a unity

of power and will and feels that his crimes are
perfectly balanced by his penance. (48-49)

125
In claiming to be a whole man, he rejects his earlier
confession. He discards any trace of objectivity.

Andrea has lost much. Because of his thievery he has
suffered a loss of his honor--in fact could not leave home
without embarrassment:

I dared not, do you know, leave home all day,

For fear of chancing on the Paris lords.

The best is when they pass and look aside;

But they speak sometimes; I must bear it all.

(145-148)
And he has lost his art ("I am judged./ There burns a truer
light of God in them)(79-80). He has painted "to order" so
that he might meet Lucrezia's demands:

I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear,

Treat his own subject after his own way,

And shut the money into this small hand

When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?

(5-9)
Steiner categorizes Del Sarto's work:

Only trash, only kitsch and artifacts, texts, music

which are produced solely for monetary or

propagandistic ends do, indeed, transcend

(transgress) morality. Theirs is the pornography of

insignificance. (145)

Altick, too, recognizes the moral implications of Andrea's
compromise when he says, "Candid about his art as about his
place in Lucrezia's life, he recognizes that he is
deliberately prostituting the unique talents he does
possess" (29). While Steiner somewhat overstates his case,
we must note an interesting parallel between the two

comments: Both discern the moral quality inherent in "art

for money."

126
Again referring to the essay on Shelley, D'Avanzo notes
that "Browning makes clear that great moral purpose and
sympathetic instinct produce great art":

Certainly, in the face of any conspicuous
achievement of genius, philosophy, no less than
sympathetic instinct, warrants our belief in a great
moral purpose having mainly inspired even where it
does not visibly look out of the same. Greatness in
a work suggests an adequate instrumentality. (532)

But more than Andrea's art has been pandered. Pandering
has become the tenor of his whole life. King notes:
Here everything is reduced to a mart where the lover
makes debts which Andrea must pay, where Lucrezia
barters her love, and where Andrea pays for her
smiles with second-rate paintings. The climaxing
line, "I'll pay my fancy," suggests the ironic state
of Andrea's existence: the delight which he finds
in his relationship with Lucrezia is capricious, not
real, and even for that he pays dearly. (27)
Finally, he realizes that he has also lost Lucrezia.
McGowan points out:
Andrea has painted his wife countless times, but
still cannot make her be what he wants her to be.
Looking at her, he wishes he could turn her into a
work of art....But the poem reveals how...she keeps
stepping out of the frame within which he would
enclose her. (102)
But his loss goes even beyond that. He may be beginning to
feel trapped by his marriage to this promiscuous beauty.
The monologue begins with a plea to "not...quarre1 any
more." Andrea does not give in to Lucrezia's demand,
whatever it has been. Several times in the poem he refers

to walls:

There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top;
That length of convent-wall across the way

127

Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
(41-43)

Morello's gone, the watch-lights show the wall,
The cue-owls speak the name we call them by.
Come from the window, love--come in, at last,
Inside the melancholy little house
We built to be so gay with. God is just.
King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights
When I look up from painting, eyes tired out,
The walls become illumined, brick from brick
Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold,
That gold of his I did cement them with!
(209-218)

In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance-—

Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,

Meted on each side by the angel's reed,

For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me

To cover--the three first without a wife,

While I have mine! So--still they overcome

Because there's still Lucrezia,--as I choose.
(260-266)

Additionally, his reference to "fetters" immediately
precedes one of his laments on Lucrezia's insensitivity to
his art:

I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie!

This chamber for example--turn your head--

All that's behind us! You don't understand

Nor care to understand about my art,

But you can hear at least when people speak:
(52-56)

And just before he pleads with Lucrezia to put her friend
off until "tomorrow," he fantasizes:

Only let me sit
The grey remainder of the evening out,
Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly
How I could paint, were I but back in France,
One picture, just one more--the Virgin's face,
Not yours this time! I want you at my side
To hear them--that is, Michel Agnolo--
Judge all I do and tell you of its worth.

(226-233)

128
But, he knows that he can't return to France, and perhaps he
realizes, too, that Lucrezia is no longer a fitting model
for the Virgin; she has strayed too far.

Finally, and of course very closely related to his
relationship with Lucrezia, he may have surrendered his
potency, his very life force. Altick speaks of Andrea's
"moral inadequacy which is manifested both in his weakness
as a man and in his failure as an artist" (18), and later of
"a flicker of sexual passion not wholly spent" (19). Andrea
speaks of "we half-men," and A. L. Semans suggests: "The
creative fountains have dried up in him" (752).

Content to sit by the window holding hands and dreaming
of Lucrezia curling up "inside" his "bared breast," he gives
no hint of sexual passion. King, too, notes: "Actually, he
is surprisingly passive and physiologically undemanding...
The half-hour over, he states complacently: 'You love me
quite enough, it seems to-night'"(16).

King also notes that "Andrea habitually speaks
professionally, detachedly of the human body. It is as
model that he refers most often to Lucrezia" (17), and
"Andrea himself suffers from emotional sterility, reflected
both by his 'faultless' paintings (contrasted with the
'soulful' works of his contemporaries) and by his relations
with Lucrezia"(18).

Mario L. D'Avanzo notes that Andrea is an "anatomically

precise painter ignoring the spiritual dimensions of his

129
art" (524). Perhaps he has been forced, also, to ignore the
spiritual dimensions of his relationship with his wife. His
"hour" with her seems to yield much less than she yields to
her lover ("Ah, but what does he,/ The Cousin! what does he
to please you more?")(242-243).

Separated from everything on earth that he longs for, he
may be coming to the realization that he has lost still
more. Miller suggests:

What has happened to the desire of created things to

embody God in time and space, to express the

infinite in the finite? In building a private world
around themselves man and beast have gradually cut
themselves off from. God, until, in the end, they
cannot even remember that there is anything but
their own petty circle lotted out of infinite space.

Within that narrow sphere they revolve endlessly,

like animals in a cage, and ultimately their lives

may stagnate for want of fresh air, as Andrea del

Sarto suffocates in the circle of his own

perfection. They may become fatally at ease, not in

Zion, but in their own "nest-like little chamber"

["Ferishtah's Fancies," C 939]. God seems to have

condemned man to exclusion from God. (139)

The consequences of Guido's crimes were more immediate,
if not more obvious. Certainly, the loss of those he
killed. And while the Comparini were not of the most
sterling character themselves, the loss of any life is a
tragedy. They may have been conniving, but they were
certainly capable of affection, which they proved in the
earlier treatment of Pompilia. Warm though weak, they could
have proved interesting as in-laws, at the least.

The greatest tragedy, at least for Guido personally, was

the loss of Pompilia, who could have been his redemption

130
both practically and morally. Her warmth and life could
have breathed soul into a household which had evidently long
struggled to find any meaning in life beyond simple
survival. Her innate spirituality could have taught this
family, reared nearly in the vestibule of the church, the
meaning of relationship with God.

Guido lost the honor he was supposedly trying to save.
His pride seemed to know no bounds, and like the Duke of
Ferrara, lineage, title, and money were very nearly all to
him: "My name I sell," he boasts (V, 505). And, when all
was said and done, the money was more important than
anything else. In the spectacle which he created, he
destroyed the family name, made mockery of his title, and
did nothing to improve the family fortunes. Richard D.
McGhee notes: "While making the point that he 'was poor who
should be rich,' Guido reveals himself as the monster on
exhibit, 'a show to crawlers vile'" (l. 174) (91).

And, he lost his own life in a public execution, along
with those who assisted him in his crimes. He nearly lost
it to those who "abetted" him because his greed persuaded
him not to pay them for their assistance. Had he not been
arrested when he was, he never would have had the
opportunity to tell "his side" of the story. That may, in

the long run, have been far less dishonoring to his name.

131

All of these things, however, are more or less obvious.
The question of Guido's ultimate harm is the one that we
must consider here.

The 1970's generated so much critical writing in
response to Robert Langbaum's "Is Guido Saved? The Meaning
of Browning's Conclusion to The Ring and the Book," that
Guido's eternal fate appeared to be nearly an obsession, and
a matter to be decided by a jury composed of the academic
community.1 But we find the belief systems of so many
individuals are circulated in the dispute that one of the
main difficulties is to discover from what Guido may or may
not have been saved.

By his own admission, Langbaum argues against Browning's
intent in the poem: "The most conspicuous piece of external
evidence--the exchange of letters...with Julia Wedgwood--
tells against my argument that Guido is saved" ("Guido,"
292). And while he makes a valiant attempt to "diminish its
force," we must hold Browning's design in mind. Whether he
wrote the letter to Julia "in pique" or not, no evidence
suggests that he failed to tell her the truth.

Regarding Browning's "Secondary Source" and his letter
to Furnivall, Langbaum grasps at negligible evidence.
Browning quotes "fact," the "Secondary Source" itself, and
not the poem:

The fact is that the two ecclesiastics passed the

night preceding his execution with Guido: and

knowing as he did the innocence of his wife, what so
likely as that, in his last utterance of despair,

132

her name, with an appeal to it, should suggest
itself? ("Guido," 294)

Far less clear than his statement to Julia Wedgwood, this
allusion offers no decisive resolution--as many of
Browning's allusions do not.

Whether or not he uses the "Secondary Source" in Book
XII grants no license for the assumption that he uses it in
this particular segment, especially since many of the
speakers of Book XII are unreliable. Altick & Loucks
particularly note the account of Guido's execution:

To the very last, Guido affects the saintliness he
never possessed, and does it so convincingly as to
impress the case-hardened letter writer who
describes his execution:

He begged forgiveness on the part of God,

And fair construction of his act from men,
Whose suffrage he entreated for his soul,

...--then rose up, as brisk

Knelt down again, bent head, adapted neck,

And, with the name of Jesus on his lips,
Received the fatal blow. (XII. 174-89)

In his extremity he still was determined upon
playing a sanctified role, in this case that of St.
Stephen, who was stoned as he called upon God and
said, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" (Acts 7:59).
The performance won the sympathy of the crowd. "So
died the man," writes the witness, "and so his end
was peace." (XII. 205) The epitaph is from Psalms
37:37: "Mark the perfect man, and behold the
upright: for the end of that man is peace." It is
fitting that Guido should be commemorated by words
of Scripture which are, once more, misapplied. (225)

What Langbaum and several other of the critics seemingly
ignore is that Browning wrote about people apprehending or

rejecting the truth in its own context--i.e., the context of

133

each individual's situation. Ben Ezra and David understand
truth as Hebrews; Abt Vogler understands as an artist;
Karshish and Cleon long for truth, touch it, and reject it,
each in the framework of his own time and culture.
Browning, however much a Protestant, and whatever his
personal beliefs about heaven and hell, is writing about
Guido, a Catholic living in seventeenth century Rome, and as
such, would have applied the seventeenth century Catholic
consequences that Guido and the others in the poem would
have expected for the unrepentant, all of Pompilia's hopes
for his salvation aside. That consequence cannot be merely,
as Langbaum forcing his own relativist view insists, that
Guido must be saved from a hell that "is really purgatory,
where God remakes the soul. But assignation to even so mild
a hell 'must not be'"(297). Earlier, he argues:

For me, one of the strongest arguments in favor of

redemption is that Guido's second monologue is

superfluous if its only function is to elaborate

what is sufficiently established without it--that

Guido is utterly evil...Guido's second monologue, I

would add, resembles Browning's great dramatic

monologues elsewhere in that the self-understanding

is inadvertent. ("Guido," 290-91)
Far from being superfluous, Guido's second monologue
demonstrates that, given a second chance, he would prove no
better than he was in the first, even though he was
convinced of the certainty of death and damnation. Vivienne

J. Rundle labels the speech as Guido's "extra chance to

seduce the reader" (105). Clarence Tracy remarks: "The

134

truth for Browning is always one and his truth-tellers do
not need to repeat themselves" ("Mind," 14). Whether the
self-understanding is inadvertent or not (and Browning gives
us few monologues where self-knowledge is the speaker's
conscious goal), he does not comprehend it when it comes.
His "fundamental sincerity" in the second monologue
(Langbaum, "Guido," 291 n) is exactly the point--he believes
he is right! Like Ferrara, he knows what he has done but
feels justified in having done it. Unlike Ferrara, he
recognizes the good that he has destroyed and at least
admits that it was good. Given the opportunity, Guido would
repeat his crime, as might Ferrara, but for a different
reason--he still hates.

Guido's opinion, "Twelve hours hence, I may know more,
not hate worse" (258) Langbaum interprets:

After my death, says Guido, I shall not hate worse

than I do now. In other words, I am in hell right

now; after death I shall be--and this is important

for Browning's scheme of salvation--the same person

I am now. ("Guido," 298)
The line may just as reasonably be interpreted, without
stretching meaning, to infer that Guido hates now just as
much as he will ever be capable of hating. "But," Langbaum
asserts, "the Pope, as Guido claims to see it, is thrusting
him into hell. The Pope, who ought to be a shepherd,
thrusts this 'shuddering sheep, he calls a wolf, / Back and
back, down and down to where hell gapesl'" (405-06)("Guido,"

298). "Shuddering sheep" is a term that Guido, an

135

unreliable speaker, applies to himself. The shepherd's job
is to recognize and kill the wolves--no matter what their
masquerade, and the wolf in sheep's clothing is scarcely
liable to purposefully identify himself correctly. As
things stand, Guido maintains the wolf imagery far too
clearly for the reader to be fooled, and refers to his
"sheepskin-garb," betraying his own disguise. If "[tlhe
Pope is a thief who hates wolves as competitors in
plundering the sheep" as Langbaum says, then Browning puts a
bad light on the Pope, whom he clearly favors.

Guido's program is more basic than almost any other
Browning character: Just before his execution, he cries:

Sirs, my first true word, all truth and no lie,

Is--save me notwithstanding! Life is all!

I was just stark mad,--let the madman live

Pressed by as many chains as you please pile!

Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours,

I am the Granduke's--no, I am the Pope's!

Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ--Maria,--God,...

Pompilia will you let them murder me?

(italics added) (XI. 2412-19)

Guido himself gives us the basis on which we are to judge
his arguments--everything he has said to this point has been
a lie! The only truth for him is that he does not want to
lose his life. Langbaum notes that the count calls out "in
psychologically ascending order," and feels that this is
"the sign that he has arrived at true moral insight"
("Guido," 290). After prostituting himself to every last

person he can think of who might have power to save him from

his fate, we have no reason to believe that his appeal to

136
Pompilia is anything more than what can be, for him, the
ultimate harlotry.

While Langbaum maintains, "If it matters that Guido had
time for confession, then the confession must have been
efficacious" ("Guido," 293), he fails to note that "time for
confession" and actual confession are not the same thing.
Guido gives no indication that he is repentant or even
remotely sorry for what he has done, except as it involves
the forfeiture of his own life. Loucks terms the count's
attitude as "defiant exposure of his own depravity and lack
of contrition" ("Guido," 47).

For Guido to find salvation in Miltonic terms in "Evil
be thou my good" because he "shows himself to be
fundamentally Christian just because he portrays himself as
voicing the devil's philosophy" (299) is to imply that Satan
in Paradise Lost will ultimately be saved. Belief is not
equivalent to salvation, and Browning was most certainly
aware of the James 2:19 passage which tells us, "the devils
also believe, and tremble."

Boyd Litzinger claims that Guido's monologues prove that
Browning's belief system opposed eternal punishment:

The inescapable conclusion is that Browning's

eschatology, unlike Dante's and Milton's, does not

include a hell. Despite frequent references to
hell, devils, saints, and evil warring against good,

there is no place of eternal punishment. (72)

Litzinger bases his conclusion, however, on weak evidence--

that of one poem. First, he sees The Ring and the Book as

137

culmination of a trend apparent in Pippa Passes and
"Apparent Failure," which he subsequently excuses because of
the circumstances of the poems. Secondly, he sees Guido's
second monologue as a movement toward illumination. He
notes of Guido's confession, "Also the folly for which I
slew her! (XI. 176):

For the first time Guido admits--it is an admission

from which he will retreat and to which he will

return in the end--that he killed Pompilia because
of her virtues. (297)

Admitting a motive for murder, even if that admission
includes the recognition of the other's virtue, does not
admit repentance, nor does it remove the rationalizations
necessary to make the deed seem a defense of honor.
Instead, Guido blames God for his situation and arrogantly
reaffirms his justification:

I am one huge and sheer mistake,--whose fault?
Not mine at least, who did not make myself!
Someone declares my wife excused me so!
Perhaps she knew what argument to use.

Grind your teeth, Cardinal: Abate, writhe!
What else am I to cry out in my rage

Unable to repent one particle

O' the past? (XI. 932-43)

Langbaum argues that "Guido sees that since God made him,
there must be a place in God's scheme even for him ("Guido,"
303):

I who, with outlet for escape to heaven,
Would tarry if such flight allowed my foe

To raise his head, relieved of that firm foot
Had pinned me to the fiery pavement else!

So am I made, "who did not make myself."

(How dared she rob my own lip of the word?)
Beware me in what other world may be!--
Pompilia, who have brought me to this pass!

138

All I know here, will I say there, and go
Beyond the saying with the deed. Some use
There cannot but be for a mood like mine,
Implacable, persistent in revenge.

(XI. 2089-2100)

Having a place in God's scheme does not mean heaven.
Milton's Satan has a place in God's scheme, but he is
excluded from eternal bliss. Litzinger, too, claims that
God's use for evil in this world insures Guido's salvation
(73). He says, however,
But if I imagine that heaven correctly, it will be
strictly zoned and segregated. With the timid
lovers of "The Statue and the Bust," Guido will be

somewhat isolated; he will not share the company of
God's chivalry who "Burn upward each to his point of

bliss." He will certainly not hobnob there with
Pompilia and her rescuer, most assuredly not with
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.... [This

world's villains and failures] will never be damned

even though, like Guido, they never repented. (74-

75)

Of the approximately twenty-seven references to hell in
Browning's work, as listed in Molineux, thirteen are found
in The Ring and the Book.2 Some of those latter references
are made by unreliable speakers, i.e., Half-Rome, Other Half
Rome, and Tertium Quid, who alone mentions it six times.
Guido, who is normally regarded as an unreliable speaker,
can be trusted here. He is forecasting his personal
expectations, albeit on a subconscious level, and clearly
refers three times to his expectation of hell: once as

Count Guido Franceschini and twice as Guido. In addition to

actual mention of hell, the imagery of the Satan as serpent

139
is clearly evident, thus incorporating the concept of hell
as damnation, especially in Guido's first monologue.

Why, scarce your back was turned,
There was the reptile, that feigned death at first,
Renewing its detested spire and spire
Around me rising to such heights of hate
That, so far from mere purpose now to crush
And coil itself on the remains of me,
Body and mind, and there flesh fang content,
Its aim is now to evoke life from death,
Make me anew, satisfy in my son
The hunger I may feed but never sate,
Tormented on to perpetuity--
My son, whom dead, I shall know, understand,
Feel, hear, see, never more escape the sight
In heaven that's turned to hell, or hell returned
(So, rather, say) to this same earth again,--
Moulded into the image and made one,
Fashioned of soul as featured like in face,
First taught to laugh and lisp and stand and go
By that thief, poisoner and adulteress
I call Pompilia, he calls...sacred name,
Be unpronounced, be unpolluted here!

(italics added)(V. 1946-1966)

While the images in his second monologue are less
extended, they unquestionably indicate a belief in hell as a
place, and that place as one of punishment.

Those windle-straws that stare while purblind death

Mows here, mows there, makes hay of juicy me,

And misses just the bunch of withered weed

Would brighten hell and streak its smoke with flame!

(XI. 147-150)

Oh, Cardinal, the deep long sigh you heave

When the load's off you, ringing as it runs

All the way down the serpent-stair to hell!

(XI. 1606-08)

Margaret Doane marks a later passage in Guido's speech
as indicative of "Guido's hOpe that he is saved, that he has
touched God's shadow and will be healed" (62):

I have gone inside my soul
And shut the door behind me: 't is your torch (The

140

Makes the place dark: the darkness let alone Cardinal
Grows tolerable twilight. (XI. 2291-4) and
Abate's)

This passage is so reminiscent of Belial's speech in Book II

of Paradise Lost as to demand direct comparison.

"This horror will grow mild, this darkness light,
Besides what hope the never-ending flight
Of future days may bring, what chance, what change
Worth waiting, since our present lot appears
For happy though but ill, for ill not worst,
If we procure not to ourselves more woe."

(II, 220-25)

Both Guido and Belial are trying to make the best of what
they see as inescapable torment, each hoping, at last, to
become accustomed to his tenebrous environment, to make the
adjustment which makes darkness seem more light.

More significantly, the Pope, normally considered
closest to Browning's own voice and reliable, indicates that
hell exists as a place of punishment. He elaborates on the
absolutely horrendous nature of the crime and the deserved
end of all those who participated in the murders.

The courtier tries his hand on clownship here,

Speaks a word, names a crime, appoints a price,--

Just breathes on what, suffused with all himself,

Is red-hot henceforth past distinction now

I' the common glow of hell. And thus they break

And blaze on us at Rome, Christ's birthnight eve!

O angels that sang erst "On the earth, peace!

To man, good will!"--such peace finds earth today!

After the seventeen hundred years, so man

Wills good to man, so Guido makes complete

His murder! what is it I said?--cuts loose

Three lives that hitherto he suffered cling,

Simply because each served to nail secure,

By a corner of the money-bag, his soul,--

Therefore, lives sacred till the babe's first breath

O'erweights them in the balance,--off they fly!
(italics added)(X. 779-794)

141
Again, while this does not prove that Browning himself
believed or disbelieved in a literal hell, it does indicate
that the hell which exists in this poem, and at least for
the evil Guido, was real and inescapable.

In a note comparing Guido to Shakespeare's Iago,
Litzinger adds: "Perhaps the only real difference between
the two scoundrels is that Guido snivels" (75). And perhaps
that, too, is the only real difference between Guido and
Ferrara.

We have earlier noted that Pompilia and the duchess
seemed to have much in common. With her charismatic
personality, her appreciation of beauty and her gracious
manner, the duchess would have graced any estate. The duke,
however, was so taken with his own importance that he could
not realize that she was exactly what he needed to elevate
his "nine-hundred-years-old name." In addition to the loss
of the joy which she could have brought into his house--the
lady was a exceptional!--he lost the opportunity to enhance
the very thing he said he was trying to protect.

The loss of reputation suffered by the duke becomes more
evident when we realize that he was now negotiating for a
mere "countess" because he had imprudently soiled his
"name." That the duke is aware of his blunder, at least on
some level, is pointed out by Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet:

The monologue itself is in effect an airing of dirty

laundry, an action not appropriate to his position.

We remember Ferrara claims he chooses "never to
stoop," but he is willing to marry below his

142

position, and ultimately he raises the emissary to

equal rank ("Nay, we'll 90/ Together down, sir").

(18)

But regardless of the duke's cognizance, he undergoes no
change and is perfectly capable of repeating his behavior;
in fact, repetition is likely given the duke's unwillingness
to "stoop." Already he refers to the prospective bride as
"my object" (53). McGowan notes the nature of the portrait:

The portrait of the last Duchess functions both as

an example and a warning: an example insofar as the

new wife should be like the portrait (a dead thing)

in offering no resistance to the Duke's whims and a

warning insofar as the new wife will be, like her

predecessor, reduced to a portrait if she does not

act like one. (102)

Browning gives us no indication of Ferrara's ultimate
fate, but we can be fairly confident that the duke will
remain his arrogant self while on earth. Certainly he has
experienced no change which would warrant him the salvation
afforded other Browning monologuists.

Salvation in Browning, then, is evidently the
willingness to apprehend truth, to change. Miller notes a
passage from "A Death in the Desert":

For "progress" is "man's distinctive mark alone,

Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are,

Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." (C391) (140)

He goes on to say:
The evil in Blougram, Sludge, or Guido [or Del Sarto

or Ferrara] derives in part from the fact that they
are so intensely themselves, and are willing to be

no more than themselves. Accepting their
limitations, they become examples of grotesque and
funguslike excrescence, deviation, idiosyncrasy.

Affirming themselves as unique persons, they

143

simultaneously affirm themselves as outside the
truth. (146)

Not only do Browning's characters accept their limitations,
they choose to live within them. They choose darkness,
which hangs over their speech like a cloud. Del Sarto's
"grey" world is all that he can bear, and Guido's,
I have gone inside my soul

And shut the door behind me: 't is your torch

Makes the place dark: the darkness let alone

Grows tolerable twilight. (XI. 2291-4)
Ferrara hides his last duchess behind a curtain so that her
"spot of joy" and her "blush" will not be evident. He

admires Neptune, whose kingdom is dark. Their choice of

darkness, of untruth, can only insure their bondage.

CHAPTER 5

KNOWING: APPREHENDING THE LIGHT - THE ETHICS OF VIRTUE

"SAUL," "KARSHISH," "POMPILIA," AND "THE POPE"

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

(Matthew 5:8)

Browning's catalog of decadent characters is populated
with an amazing display of ecclesiastic and highborn
aristocracy. Bishops, dukes, and counts "excuse" their way
through crimes for which commoners are put to death.
Physicians, philosophers, artists, and the "religious" often
are unable or unwilling to understand what seems
unmistakable to simple musicians. And a king is crucified
by his own melancholy while an unassertive shepherd boy
walks on the wings of rapture from his vision of the coming
Messiah.

The poet does not, however, hesitate to isolate from
this elite group those individuals who refuse to be caught
up in the system. The Pope is as fully sensitive to
spiritual truth as any of Browning's characters, and

Giuseppe Caponsacchi breaks out of the carnal mold into

144

145
which he has been placed by both the Church and his own
nature.

But some of Browning's most interesting personalities
begin with little potential. David, although anointed by
Samuel as King of Israel, is more practically a youngest
son, a keeper of sheep and almost pathetically ignored by
his family except as an errand boy. Pompilia has every
excuse imaginable to become an urban, female Caliban, and
yet she climbs to spiritual insight that might well be
envied by those who are significantly more advantaged. Even
Lazarus, whose priorities have been totally reordered by the
sight of heaven, only waits,

patient to the last

For that same death which must restore his being

To equilibrium, body loosening soul

Divorced even now by premature full growth.

(205-208)

The characters we will discuss have several things in
common: With the exception of Lazarus, each overcomes what
seems to be more than adequate cause to dismiss the
sometimes fleeting insights of "faith;" each combines faith
with reason; each realizes the limitations of the flesh and
the vacuity of convention; and each has a set of values
centered around love.

Often, in Browning, a person's "advantages" seem to
become the greatest barriers to success. Had Andrea Del

Sarto not taken so much pride in his technical perfection,

he may have striven for and attained the spiritual qualities

146

in his painting, and in his life, that were so painfully
lacking. Were Bishop Blougram less elevated in office, he
may have been less bound to "justify" his extravagant
lifestyle to both himself and a relatively insignificant
reporter. A poorer and less powerful Duke of Ferrara may
have been able to see beyond his rather tasteless choices of
work by unknown artists into the souls of others in his
life, sparing his unfortunate duchess. May have, but not
likely. More probably, their talent or power or wealth
allowed them to express what they truly were. Guido,
product of aristocracy, product of the Church, is one of
Browning's biggest failures as a man. His pride in his
"position" allowed his poverty to overwhelm him. Charles T.
Phipps, S. J. notes of Guido's failure:

Man can not plead obstacles as excuses for moral

failure since the very obstacles are intended to

call forth the redeeming effort. The Pope recalls

how Providence had provided Guido with a salutary

combination of advantages and obstacles, aspirations

and frustrations, which made his life "trial fair

and fit / for one else too unfairly fenced about."

(X. 426-27)("Pope" 719)

David's position as shepherd is consistent with his
position within his family. When Samuel came to anoint one
of Jesse's sons, David was considered so unimportant that he
was not even summoned for scrutiny until the prophet ran out

of options among seven brothers and insisted that there must

be more.

147

At this point in his life, the young man had done what
was necessary to care for his sheep, "slew both the lion and
the bear" (1 Samuel 17:36), but he knew nothing of his
coming victory over Goliath, nothing of the "ten thousands"
(18:7) of Philistines that would be credited to his military
prowess, nothing of the special relationship that would
exist between him and the king's eldest son, Jonathan, and
nothing of his marriage to Michal, Saul's daughter.

What he did know was that he had been anointed by the
prophet and that could be dangerous. Even Samuel had been
afraid: "If Saul hear it, he will kill me" (16:2), he said
when ordered by God to perform the ritual. J. H. McClatchey
overlooks one of the causes of the prophet's apprehension
when he notes Samuel's absence:

Yet Abner's presence is a Browning subtlety too

easily overlooked, for it is Abner, not the prophet

Samuel, who greets David. Surely it is Samuel who

ought to be with the king in his mental and

spiritual crisis? ("Saul" 71)

Mr. McClatchey goes on to cite biblical references to
Abner's relationship to Saul, but he fails to note that by
the time that David is called upon to soothe the king with
music, Samuel has already pronounced the repercussions of
Saul's disobedience: "Because thou hast rejected the word
of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee from being king" (1
Samuel 15:23). Shortly later, we are told, "And Samuel

came no more to see Saul until the day of his death" (I

Samuel 15:35).

148

At the very least, David had to contend with the
jealousy of his brothers, who had each been passed over for
anointing. Soon after the incident of the poem and just
before the slaying of Goliath, when David came to the valley
of Elah, his oldest brother accused,

Why camest thou down hither? and with whom hast

thou left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know

thy pride, and the naughtiness of thine heart; for

thou art come down that thou mightest see the

battle." (17:28)

Surely, it is logical to assume that some of this feeling
exhibited itself earlier, before David was first summoned by
Saul.

Critical controversy has flourished over the success or
failure of "Saul" as a poem, over Saul's regeneration or
lack of it, and over whether Saul or David is the subject.
Victor A. Neufeldt correctly identifies Browning's subject,
but sees a conclusion that is neither plausible scripturally
nor probable poetically.

The poem, in fact, focuses on neither David or Saul

as a character, but rather on David's insights and

on the significance of these insights to Saul as a

symbolic representative of mid-nineteenth-century

man.... However, it is precisely on this point that

the poetic conception is flawed by inconsistency,

and the impact of the poem diminished as a result.

How does one reconcile the regeneration of a passive

and silent Saul with Browning's insistence upon

active involvement and constant striving?

Logically, the poem demands Saul's regeneration at

the end, but aesthetically and emotionally one is

left wondering. (51, 52)

All of Browning's characters, from Caliban to Ben Ezra, are

given enough light by which to walk. Not all choose to

149

follow that light. To insist upon the regeneration of Saul
on the basis of David's insight is to insist on the
regeneration of Guido on the basis of Pompilia's purity or
the Pope's perception. While each opened the way for
regeneration to occur, it did not because the receivers
refused the message. Saul's silence was as powerful a
statement as Guido's hate, and his salvation would be
inconsistent with the biblical version, with which Browning
was unquestionably aware.

David's humble rank within his family and within the
kingdom of Israel, the danger of his position as anointed
king, and Saul's depression were reasons enough for him to
refuse the assignment much less be open enough to receive
the kind of revelation we see in "Saul." And yet we see
Saul, the reigning king, chosen by God himself, unable to
comprehend what an insignificant shepherd boy spells out
explicitly.

Like "Saul," "An Epistle...Of Karshish, the Arab
Physician" is about neither the speaker nor the object of
his attention. "Karshish" is about the response of this
letter writer to Lazarus, whose knowledge is experiential.
Joseph Dupras notes that

The possibility of further significance to Lazarus'

behavior eludes Karshish because as a physician

subservient to Abib he is content to prove only what
he knows already. (10)

150

He is unwilling, in other words, to reach beyond his grasp,
to investigate more than superficially what must surely
change his life. He desires what Lazarus has, but he does
not want to be what Lazarus is, nor does he want to make the
kind of commitment that Lazarus has made. Until he resolves
the tension between his curiosity about "God's handiwork"
(2) and the limitations of his own intellectual prejudices,
Karshish will remain unenlightened. In spite of his
longing, expressed in the post script of his letter to Abib,
nothing has prepared him to anticipate a God of love and all
that such a God requires of his followers.

If anyone can claim a disadvantaged life as excuse for
lack of spiritual sensitivity, Pompilia is the paradigm.
Contrary to all models for successful upbringing in any age,
this clearly disadvantaged child ("I am just seventeen years
and five months old")(VII. 1) has established for herself a
set of values to make even the good Pope Innocent stand in
awe. M. Whitcomb Hess notes the circumstances of her
spiritual development:

She is beyond all conventional props of family,

descent, education, or even age. Her birth, the
result of "the careless crime of an unknown
man...and a woman known too well," should have put

an ineradicable blot on her soul; and her rearing by
the lying, scheming Violante, her foster mother,
should have completed the ruin, with marriage at
thirteen to a middle aged roue only the final
chapter. But none of these things have the least
power to touch her purity. And like Caponsacchi,
the reader is left reverent and wondering. (254)

151

Additionally, when she turns to the Church, she is cold-
heartedly turned back to her husband; even Caponsacchi is
tempted at first to reject her pleas for help. At risk are
her reputation, her child, and ultimately her life. She
loses the first almost immediately. Less than a year later
she gives her deathbed testimony. Paul Zietlow remarks of
her options for security:

Pompilia can hOpe for asylum only in the home of

parents who publicly denied their parentage. She

finds temporary and ineffectual shelter there, but

only after she has been released from incarceration

among strangers in the Convertite monastery, a

refuge for fallen women to which the court consigned

her. (200)
At the very least, she could have been excused behavior like
that of her birth mother, or she could have out-schemed
Violante in an effort to compensate for her treatment. She
does neither. Nor does she demonstrate the faintest
suggestion of bitterness, but remains as loving as if she
had the most privileged upbringing of any child in Italy.

The Pope, perhaps, has less reason than any to step out
into such brittle territory. As head of the Church, neither
his faith nor his decision would be questioned, and to free
Guido would be the most popular culmination for both the
case and for his own rule, which was drawing to a close by
way of his age. He chooses otherwise:

...shall I too lack courage?-—leave

I, too, the post of me, like those I blame?

Refuse, with kindred inconsistency,

Grapple with danger whereby souls grow strong?

I am near the end; but still not at the end;
All to the very end is trial in life;

152

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. 1298-1306)
He refuses to yield to the passivity that has gripped not
only the Church, but seemingly all of Christianity. Charles
Thomas Phipps, S. J., notes the ultimate danger of such
ennui.

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 illusive

assurance. ("Pope" 719)

He knows that faith is not a "group process," but that each
soul must deal with it on an individual basis, applying it
to individual trials. All must accept their "hindrances,"
the "danger whereby souls grow strong," as part of the
package of life and not view them as excuses to avoid moral
responsibility.

The school of Browning criticism which maintained that
his faith was based solely on intuition seems finally to be
weakening and near death. Each of his spiritually sensitive
characters uses faith along with reason to gain insight.
When one facility or the other is flawed, we invariably find
failure. Caliban's faulty reasoning and Guido's self-
justification are each as large a problem as Cleon's lack of
faith. William 0. Raymond points out that the question goes
much farther, however:

Something much larger is involved. The primary

warrant of their faith lies for them in its potency
as a creative, spiritual power operative in the

153

depths of their own personal experience and in the

lives of the disciples of Christ throughout the

ages. ("Pope" 329-330)

Were reason enough, Blougram would have flourished. Were
emotion enough, Violante would have been a paragon of
spiritual insight and her resolutions would have worked
perfectly. Even Andrea Del Sarto could have been successful
if he could have applied what he knew. Raymond partially
explains the balance between revelation and "intuition"
necessary to Browning's view of faith:

What he does deny is that the historical character

of the events of the life of Christ recorded in the

New Testament can be demonstrated by reason, in the

sense that the events in the life of Napoleon are

matters of factual knowledge. But this is
accompanied by an unswerving faith in the revelation

of the Incarnation and "Christ's cross and passion"

within the spiritual experience of humanity. (Moment

610)

Saul, of course, used neither faith nor reason. As
noted earlier, he remains passive throughout the entire
poem, emitting only a groan as David touched sensitive
chords, not on his harp, but in Saul's spiritual
consciousness: "As the Levites go up to the altar in glory
enthroned" (60) Here, at the very point of his disobedience
to God, is where Saul fails: Pride overcomes reason and the
desire for freedom. He will not repent and, thus, he cannot
be forgiven. He will not take the one action that will
grant him release. Vineta Colby sees him as a depiction of

a more modern phenomenon:

Saul is a mid-nineteenth-century melancholiac, as we
meet him in numbers of Victorians, critically ill

154

but not insane, suffering all the more because of

his consciousness of suffering, a tragedy of wasted

potential rather than of total destruction. True,

we do not see him restored. The ambiguity of his

recovery is I think, deliberate, because Browning

and his readers could everywhere witness the

uncertainty of a permanent cure for melancholy. (95)

If Browning was "deliberate," it was in his choice of the
biblical Saul as an example. The poet did not "create"
Saul, but reflected the recurring despondency and paranoia
caused by his self-willed departure from God. The exact
form of his torment is not specified, as Elizabeth Barrett
Barrett noted in her letter to Browning (McClatchey, "Saul"
63),1 but his subsequent behavior reveals significant clues
as to the nature of his problem: This is the same man who
alternately plotted David's death and then repented to the
extent of calling him "son."

David, by comparison, who at this time in his life was
living in obedience, finds in his music the very truth that
evades Saul. Colby observes:

Why music should be superior to painting or poetry

only Browning dared to explain. Free of perishable

materials, free of discipline and the restraints of
logic and form, improvised music comes as close to
divine creative as man can aspire...Browning
believed artists must lose themselves if they are to
avoid these traps [self-consciousness, self-doubt,
and self-pity], by merging individual self with
universal spirit. (97)

And music works to relieve Saul, but not completely, and not

permanently. S. S. Curry, early in the history of Browning

criticism, notes:

Art is necessary to the higher spiritual development
of man. Caliban can never be lifted from his puddle

155

and made to stand with shining face and throbbing

heart before the great Saul, without the harp and

song. Caliban's low conceptions of Deity can never

be corrected without the awakening of his ideals and

his imagination and his feelings. (50)

Harvey Feinberg notes that for Browning, "Art is
aesthetics and ethics at once, beauty is finally spiritual,
and in the words of the ancient Greek maxim, 'All beauty is
goodness'" (96).

But David does not rely on "harp and song" alone.
Indeed, he begins there, but the words to his song are a
progression of the joys of life, the blessings of God,
designed to bring the monarch out of his despair. He
combines the facilities of his reason and the graces of his
art. Ironically, as he approaches the moment of his
revelation, David stops singing and begins to speak. Glenn
Everett notes the balance in David's observations:

Browning's David understands that he need but open

his eyes, look around and within, and see "in the

star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and

the clod" (l. 250) evidences of God's perfection...

at the very moment that he has realized the

imperfection of things in this world, he has

conceived the possibility of perfection somewhere.

(275)

We have no Caliban here! And David's ability to "see" has
given him further vision. He "realizes both his capacity
for love and his very being to be mere shadows of their
perfection in God" (Everett 275). His epiphany is blinding,

even in its approaching brilliance, but Saul does not

comprehend: "See the King--I would help him but cannot, the

156
wishes fall through," David sighs (296). But that knowledge
does not slow him; it only makes him more acutely aware of
the power of love and the ultimate meaning of the
incarnation.

'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh,
that I seek

In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. 0 Saul, it shall
be

A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to
me,

Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: A Hand like
this hand

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the
Christ stand!

(308-312)

One can scarcely avoid a comparison of this prophetic
vision of David with the vision of Karshish.

The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?

So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too--

So, through the thunder comes a human voice

Saying, "0 heart I made, a heart beats here!

Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!

Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,

But love I gave thee, with myself to love,

And thou must love me who have died for thee."

(304-311)

For more than three hundred lines, the Arab physician
has vainly attempted to reason through his encounter with
the risen Lazarus, citing medical examples and weighing
psychological "evidence," hoping to convince himself and
Abib that this was only a curious meeting with a madman.
One must wonder at how willing Karshish is to arrive at an
unbiased version of the truth, however, when he seriously

misquotes the story of Christ's crucifixion--a story that

Lazarus undoubtedly knew well, and which he would have been

157

most careful to recite correctly. Richard Altick notes, in
a comparison of Karshish and the apostle Paul,

The whole significance of the Karshish-Paul

similarities resides in the fact that, in crucial

respects, Karshish was not like St. Paul. For one

thing, Paul perceived truth not through the senses

and the intellect, but through intuitive experience

marked, we are told, by a lifelong series of

ecstatic visions (Galatians 2:2, 2 Corinthians 12:1-

9; Acts 16:9 ff.). His knowledge of the divinity of

Christ and of all that implies was gained by means

which Karshish, committed to the supremacy of the

reason, was unable, or at least refused to avail

himself of. In terms of Browning's constant

exaltation of the lessons of the soul over those of

the mind. where Paul was strong, Karshish was weak

[sic]. (495)
While Altick's point is essentially valid as far as Karshish
is concerned, he neglects to consider Paul's reasoned
arguments in places like Antioch (Acts 13), Lycaonia (Acts
14), Philippi (Acts 16), and in Berea and Athens (Acts 17).
Athens is particularly important, because there he
"disputed" not only with the Jews and religious people, but
with the "Epicureans, and...the Stoicks" (17:16-34), the
intellectuals of his day. Paul's vision in Acts 16:9
indicated only a direction for him to go; what follows that
passage is an account of his activities and cannot be
considered "ecstatic vision."

Paul's original vision, in Acts 9, was of the risen
Christ--a counterpart to Karshish's experience with the
risen Lazarus--but he chose to believe rather than

attributing his experience to sunspots or an "undigested bit

of beef." Karshish's explanation of Lazarus is "madman."

158
Paul understands the ethereal to be real; Karshish sees the
real and discounts it.
Of all Browning's characters, Pompilia is the most
perfect example of the virtue of purity. Kay Austen says:

Though God's strength and intelligence are evident
in mankind, the Pope finds the love which He
expressed in the Incarnation only in Pompilia's
limitless love and sacrifice. Repeatedly invoking
Pompilia as the personification of early Christian
heroism and perfect faith, the Pope indicts the
faithlessness of his time. (299)

From the beginning she showed a natural aversion to the
evil that Guido represented, and her only anger is expressed
when he confronts her and Caponsacchi at Castelnuovo:

She started up, stood erect, face to face

With the husband: back he fell, was buttressed there

By the window all aflame with morning-red,

He the black figure the opprobrious blur

Against all peace and joy and light and life.

"Away from between me and hell!" she cried.

(VI. 1497-1504)

Pompilia lay dying, her parents were dead, and she would
never hold her child again: Guido had humiliated and shamed
her beyond any fragment of human decency. Few would have
dared to suggest that she forgive him, especially with
events so current, but then, no such suggestion was
necessary. Intuitively, she knew, and she did not resist.
Hess suggests:

But Pompilia's forgiveness of Guido so far from

condoning his sin only throws into sharper relief

the length of this toilsome journey up to truth.

For the ability to see God in the mud and scum of

things and to find in waste and desecration itself a
symptom of the divine belongs only to the pure in

159

heart, or, that which is the same thing, the free in
will. (254)

True virtue gave to Pompilia a freedom that many never know,
the freedom to release both herself and others from the
bondage of hate and resentment.

Harrold notes that she is drawn to Caponsacchi by
intuition, actually creating within her monologue a
spiritual marriage (144), and she "intuitively trusts the
words of only certain people, like Tisbe, Fra Celestino, and
God, representing the facts of childhood and spiritual
knowledge" (145). He links her lack of education and her
poverty with her freedom from "binding reason," but does not
indicate why he thinks her choice of Caponsacchi violates
reason:

But Pompilia, poor and unlearned, also was free of

custom and binding reason. In leaving her husband,

she broke the bonds of convention. And in appealing

to Caponsacchi for help, she exhibited a higher type

of elective affinities than that demonstrated by

many of Browning's characters, for she recognized in

the priest a soulmate on a level of love higher than

the physical. (151)

Surely, in the face of the treatment she had received from
other Church authorities, seeking Caponsacchi's assistance
was the only avenue remaining open to her, and thus the most
reasonable action she could take once she had noted his
attention and in light of Guido's actions to draw their
attention to each other.

Her escape, even apart from her choice of Caponsacchi,

was most certainly a reasoned action. While she was

160

responsible for no one but herself, she was ready to endure
anything Guido was capable of delivering. Once she was
responsible for her child, she knew her nightmare must end.
She appeals:

The way to end dreams is to break them, stand,

Walk, go: then help me to stand, walk and go!"

(VI.807-808)
In a curious admixture, she even reasons her position in
faith, aware that she does not "know" all that is necessary
to reconcile the present, at once limiting and expanding
both reason and faith:
Could we buy a wish

Have what we will and get the future now,

Would we wish ought done undone in the past?

So, let him wait God's instant men call years;

Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,

Do out the duty! Through such souls alone

God stooping shows sufficient of His light

For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise.

(VII. 1821-1828)
And, perhaps, knowing that we do not know is the greatest
wisdom of them all.

As head of the Church, the Pope's considerations are,
ethically, to be other than personal, all of the personal
interest decisions of other popes aside. Innocent's major
ethical preoccupation in the case, amid all of the private
goals involved for the other principal characters, is "what
is right in the eyes of God" (Erickson 238). More clearly

than any other individual in the poem, he operates on a

distinct balance between faith and reason.

161
Like Pompilia, he understands that the future is
affected by the present, and that we are often powerless to
see the links clearly. And like her, he believes that we
must trust that outcome to God. Raymond condenses the
argument and observes that Browning is acutely aware that
such a change had not yet taken place:

Pope Innocent XII is represented as hearing
"whispers of time to come" when, as he declares, an
age of doubt will "shake this torpor of assurance
from our creed." As Christianity shattered the
beliefs of paganism, so it may be needful to shatter
faith in an infallible Christian record to avert the
danger of substituting the historically conditioned,
and therefore relative, conception of God's love
enshrined there, for its absolute
content....Browning takes pains to point out that
Pope Innocent would have been repelled had he
foreseen the ruthless iconoclasm that the age of
reason was to let loose upon the world. (Moment 619)

If he thought doubt would do the next age good,
'Tis pity he died unapprised what birth
His reign may boast of, be remembered by--
Terrible Pope, too, of a kind,--Voltaire.

(XII. 771-774)

Only Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and God know absolutely the
truth about Castelnuovo, despite the judgment of the earlier
court. John Woolford describes the Pope's verdict in the

light of this uncertainty:

The Pope knows the truth about the 'Roman Murder-
Story' in the same way he knows the truth about the
Incarnation; indeed, the two events are, for him,
made perfectly equivalent by Caponsacchi's self
sacrifice (193):

How can man love but what he yearns to help?

And that which men think weakness within strength,
But angels know for strength and stronger yet--
What were it else but the first things made new,
But repetition of the miracle,

The divine instance of self-sacrifice

162

That never ends and aye begins for man?
(X. 1652-8)

While Langbaum insists the Pope "does not weigh argument
against argument," nor does he rely on "logic" (120-121),
others, such as Norton Crowell and Isobel Armstrong maintain
the strength of the Pope's intellect. The Pope, allowing
for the importance of the rational but limiting its sphere,
says of Pompilia:

Everywhere

I see in the world the intellect of man,

That sword, the energy his subtle spear,

The knowledge which defends him like a shield--

Everywhere; but they make not up, I think,

The marvel of a soul like thine, earth's flower

She holds up to the softened gaze of God!

(X. 1008-1014)
Crowell's response to these lines is both balanced and
insightful:

Everywhere in Browning is the same sentiment:

life's supreme ornament is the beautiful soul. But

as Browning elevated the soul to a supreme position,

he did not degrade the intellect correspondingly....

Browning devoted a vast amount of artistic energy

from Paracelsus on to show that neither mind nor

heart must predominate, but rather that they must

work in harmony--always. (Glass 192-193)

Mindless faith, for Browning, was no more operative than
pure reason. Neither, of itself, can satisfy the
requirements of the soul.

Israel wanted a king so that it would be like "all the
nations" (I Samuel 8:5); it wanted the "conventional." Saul

was that first king, anointed by Samuel, and he began well.

Handsome, tall, humble, spirit-filled (I Samuel 9-12), he

163

was the kind of man who would make any Hebrew mother proud.
By I Samuel 13, however, we find the new king overstepping
the boundaries of his power and performing for appearance,
convention, rather than obedience to God as revealed through
the prophet, offering a sacrifice that was part of the
office of priest. By chapter fourteen we find his eldest
son, Jonathan, in jeopardy of death for eating a bit of wild
honey; Saul had foolishly committed his troops to fasting
until the enemy was defeated. Shortly after, he failed to
carry out the direct command of God when he allows Agag,
king of the Amalekites to live (I Samuel 15). Continually,
throughout the book of I Samuel, we find his imagination
limited by his narrow vision.

David, on the other hand, seems to have an amazing sense
of the balance between propriety and initiative. He seems
almost unaware of his own anointing as future king of
Israel, and certainly makes no move to claim the throne, but
seems unafraid of the despondent King Saul. Indeed, shortly
after this incident we find David "reaching beyond his
grasp" as he translates the power given to him by God to
kill "both the lion and the bear" into the skill to deliver
Israel from Goliath, "this uncircumcised Philistine,"
Goliath (1 Samuel 17:34 ff).

While Browning had no commitment to details of the
biblical account, he certainly did not write without an

awareness of the events that surrounded the two principals

164
in "Saul." Neufeldt remarks of Browning's choice of
subject:

The choice that enabled Browning to complete "Saul"

and make this affirmation involved a return to the

past, to a time when man believed in a harmony of

microcosm and macrocosm based on the idea of the

Incarnation. It was his attempt to counteract what

J. Hillis Miller has called the "gradual dissipation

of the medieval symbolism of participation."2

Finding the absence of God in this world

intolerable, Browning felt compelled to go out into

the empty space between man and God to create new

connections between man and his creator, so as to

break down the sense of absence, of reference at a

distance. (59)

But God is always the one who bridges the distance between
himself and man. "David realizes," says Everett, "that he
has not gotten to this point himself, but that God has taken
him there" (277). Man, in reaching beyond his grasp, is
merely preparing himself to be found by God. The
Incarnation was God's idea--the best that man could come up
with was a separation so immense that he, himself, was
unable to tolerate it.

Convention, the eye of the other, is always a hinderance
to imagination. Karshish, throughout the entire poem, is
much more concerned with what Abib will think of this
strange report than he is with examining the facts without
bias:

Thou laughest here! (38),

I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush (65)

His case has struck me far more than 't is worth.

So, pardon if--(lest presently I lose
In the great press of novelty at hand (70-72)

165
(dost thou mind?) (169),
--but why all this of what he saith?

Why write of trivial matters, things of price

Calling at every moment for remark? (278-279)
The closing of his final paragraph, however, is his final
appeal for "conventional" acceptance from his teacher: "The
madman saith He said so: it is strange" (312); and he turns
away from any real consideration of the claims he has
witnessed. Altick, again, notes in his comparison of
Karshish with Paul the Apostle:

The poem, like so many others among Browning's best

dramatic monologues, focuses on the Great Moment,

the supreme crossroad, in a man's life. Paul, an

unbeliever, was journeying toward Damascus; and in

an instant, through the agency of God, "there fell

from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received

sight forwith, and arose and was baptized" (Acts

9:18)... But the crowning difference between the

two episodes is that, faced with a divine revelation

almost as plain as that which visited Paul,

Karshish, the stubborn empiricist, refused to accept

it. The scales did not fall from his eyes--at least

within the period covered by the poem. (496)
Mr. Altick misses the point slightly when he misquotes
scripture here. What he omits is the physical blindness
that afflicts Paul after his vision on the road, and "he was
three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink"
(Acts 9:9). He believed immediately upon the occasion of
the vision; the spiritual scales were removed from his heart
at once. Only when Ananias put his hands on Paul (then

known as Saul) three days later, did the scales fall away

from his eyes, proving the validity of his spiritual

166
experience. Then he received the ritual of baptism, a
physical indication of his spiritual state.

Frank Lockwood finds Lazarus unable to cope with his
state, a condition that would not have left a very good
impression on anybody, much less the skeptical Karshish, and
certainly not what Browning intended to convey:

Lazarus, after his recovery from the tomb, knows too
much. He has had a vision of how things proceed
behind the veil, and the revelation has all but
blasted his human understanding. There seems to be
utter lack of adjustment between his open-eyed
vision of absolute truth, as it had been made known
to him while his spirit existed apart from the body,
and the requirements of human action and judgment.
(45)

When we look more closely at Lazarus, however, we see
quite another picture. He is not upset by things that
normally devastate others: "Should his child sicken unto
death, why look I For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness,
/ Or pretermission of the daily craft!" (158/160). Things
that most people don't even notice anger, and sometimes,
infuriate him:

While a word, gesture, glance from that same child

At play or in the school or laid asleep,

Will startle him to an agony of fear,

Exasperation, just as like. Demand

The reason why--"'t is but a word," object--

"A gesture"--he regards thee as our lord

Who lived there in the pyramid alone,

Looked at us (dost thou mind?) when, being young,

We both would unadvisedly recite

Some charm's beginning, from that book of his,

Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst

All into stars, as suns grown old are wont.
(162-173)

167

Lazarus, of course, has seen the other side of death and
knows that for him and those who believe it holds no threat
of peril. He was far more interested in the spiritual lives
of those around him than he was in their physical well-
being. He was not concerned in the least with the reaction
of others to his insight; their opinions were not eternal.

Pompilia's fear of death appears to be no greater than
that of Lazarus, much to her credit: She does not have the
reference to personal experience that he does. Nowhere do
the differences between her and Guido appear so sharply as
in the comparison of their final lines. Guido is frantic
with fear:

Life is all!

I was just stark mad,--let the madman live

Pressed by as many chains as you please pile!

Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours,

I am the Granduke's--no, I am the Pope's!

Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--God,...

Pompilia will you let them murder me?
(XI. 2413-2419)

If his pleading is not "conventional," it is at least
common. Pompilia's speech, in contrast, nearly rings with
anticipation:

He is ordained to call and I to come!

Do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for God?
Say,--I am all flowers from head to foot!
Say,--Not one flower of all he said and did,

Might seem to flit unnoticed, fade unknown,

But dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree
Whereof the blossoming perfumes the place

At this supreme of moments!

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

........................ Through such souls alone

168

God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise.
(VII. 1797-1803, 1826-1828)

If she is "intensely subjective and personal," as
Harrold asserts (156), she neither pities herself, nor does
she seek pity from others. Woolford notes that she really
only desires to make one point:

Hence, urged to detail the more spectacular

aftermath of the marriage, her sadistic persecution

by Guido and his household, she refuses to do so, in

a gesture complementing her failure to describe the

murder....Her parents were guilty and are punished,

she, now her child is born, asks no more of life,

and ends by denying that Guido was, in any real

sense, the child's father. (203)

Sue Lonoff makes an observation about the responses of
Pompilia and the pontiff in The Ring and the Book:

One way of assessing the moral worth or

worthlessness of Browning's speakers is to weigh the

effect of public opinion upon their words and
actions. The saintly Pompilia is unconcerned with

the impression she makes on the world. The Pope,

aware that the Roman populace favors a last-minute

pardon of Guido, is guided by his faith and his

innate sense of justice. (157)

And the Pope is more aware than anyone of the confines
of convention and the penalties for ignoring it. In an
office filled with ceremony and tradition, he has chosen to
daily read the "History.../ Of all my predecessors, Popes of
Rome" (X. 3, 6). In addition to conventions, this reading
has made him acutely aware of the fallibility of his office,

and more personally, of himself. He is also acutely aware

of the responsibility of his judgment to, "think, speak,

169
act, in place of Him-- / The Pope for Christ" (X. 167-168).
Crowell remarks on the Pope's search for resolution:

The Pope's magnificent soliloquy is almost wholly
devoted to the nature of truth, man's limited
capacity to seize it, and the injunction placed upon
him to judge in spite of the limited vision which
mortality grants him. The scandalous schism among
the popes of the early church, when pope damned pope
and was in turn damned by his successor, he finds
instructive. When forced to make momentous
decisions, he turns to the sobering chronicle of
papal error and duplicity as a reminder of the great
truth that no man is infallible (Glass, 215):

Which of the judgments was infallible?

Which of my predecessors spoke for God?

And what availed Formosus that this cursed,

That blessed, and then this other cursed again?
(X. 150-153)

He is not interested in creating an "image" for himself,
nor is he interested in personal advancement. He has no
vendettas to retaliate, and he owes no favors. His shock at
the record of his predecessors has left him only with the
determination to do what he considers right in the eyes of
God.

Love made manifest is always one of Browning's prime
concerns and serves as the ultimate evidence of a
character's relationship with God. David reacts to Saul's
touch:

And oh, all my heart how it loved him! but where was

the sign?
I yearned--"Could I help thee, my father, inventing
a bliss,

I would add, to that life of the past, both the

future and this;

I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages
hence,

170

As this moment,--had love but the warrant, love's
heart to dispense!"
(232-236)

But more important, it is the realization of the sacrificial
nature of Divine love which leads David to his vision:

See the King-—I would help him but cannot, the
wishes fall through.

Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor
to enrich,

To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would--
knowing which,

I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak
through me now!

Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst
thou--so wilt thou!

So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest,
uttermost crown--

And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up
nor down

One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no
breath,

Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins
issue with death!

As thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be
proved

Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being
Beloved!

(296-306)

During his ecstasy, he cries to Saul:

O Saul, it shall be
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like
to ma:

Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever.
(309-311)

W. David Shaw comments on David's understanding and
Browning's intent:

The principle of perfect Love has its empirical
analogue in David's love of Saul. And just as
Browning must actively involve the reader in the
pressure of David's speculations, so David perceives
that God's truth is not something he can receive
passively, but rather an aid to his own activity.

171

He must co-operate with God for the redemption of
Saul,...(279)

While we may disagree concerning the redemption of Saul, we
can wholeheartedly assent to Browning's insistence on an
active reception of God's truth. The problem here is not
with David, but with Saul, who is only able to groan and
then stare briefly into David's upturned face.

The vision of Karshish was also a vision of love. He
uses the word four times in the final nine lines of his
letter and the word "heart" twice, but can only dismiss it
as "strange."

Crowell comments on the state of Lazarus, connecting it
to The Ring and the Book:

If one recalls the condition of Lazarus in the

"Epistle of Karshish" after his return from the

grave, one knows that the man who rose from the

dead, with the truth of eternity burned into his
brain, was the old Lazarus in name only. His mind,

his heart, and his values were all profoundly

altered by the dazzling vision; and when Browning

breathed life in the old dead volume he found in

Florence, the new book was altered in like degree.

(212)

Lazarus has realized that ultimate love is concerned with
spiritual well-being and not necessarily with the physical
state. Although Karshish envisions a God of love, he is
unable to envision anything beyond physical circumstances.
Crowell echoes an earlier point regarding the condition of

the Arab:

The tragedy of Karshish is not that he is an
intellectual, but that he has atrophy of the spirit

172

so that the infinite moment of divine revelation
passes him by. (Soul, 25)

Pompilia, of course, has the normal concern of a mother
for her child, but her love extends beyond those "normal"
limits. Zietlow remarks on the Pope's real admiration for
her character:

At the climax of his revery on Pompilia, the Pope

locates her glorious ascent to new law and new

service in her attempt to save Caponsacchi from

Guido. (212)

And with his own sword [thou didst] stay the upraised

arm,

The endeavour of the wicked, and defend

Him who...was there

For visible providence

(X. 1083-1086)
The consequences of this kind of love are the same as the
consequences for Divine love. Those who are willing to give
of themselves entirely often find the entire price required.
J. Hillis Miller approaches this concept from a different
perspective:

The sanctity of Pompilia and her pure love for

Caponsacchi are incompatible with continued earthly

existence. Her direct insight into God makes her

too good for this World. (152)

The Pope, faced with contradictory testimony, public
opinion in favor of Guido, lethargic and overconfident
Christianity, and corrupt systems of control within both
the government and the Church, must make a decision based on
the highest moral principle he can ascertain. He chooses

love.

The work 'i the world, not man's but God's; leave man!
Conjecture of the worker by the work

173

Is there strength there?--enough: intelligence?

Ample: but goodness in a like degree?

Not to the human eye in the present state,

An isoscele deficient at the base.

What lacks, then, of perfection fit for God

But just the instance which this tale supplies

Of love without a limit? So is strength,

So is intelligence; then love is so,

Unlimited in its self-sacrifice:

Then is the tale true and God shows complete.
(X. 1356-1367)

Without love, he says, any work is incomplete.

Altick & Loucks provide a summary statement of the
Pope's qualities, but their observation begs for extension.
The Pope proves that association with a human
institution does not necessarily entail abuse of the
tools of mind and tongue, callousness, or service to
self. Although the deficiencies of the church in
general may be fairly typified by the nest-
feathering clergymen who populate the poem, a rare
individual man, gifted with the wisdom and humane
vision denied the generality, may rise above the

institution within which he works. (59)
Each of the positive individuals we have discussed is a
"rare individual." David, Lazarus, Pompilia and the Pope
all see life with spiritual eyes, eyes concerned not with
self but with the "others," not with the physical but with
the intangible, not with the present, but with the effect
that the present has on the future. Their spirituality is
manifested in love, not brought about because of it,
resulting in even further insight and greater love. They
are "the pure in heart," and they have seen God in the

present through faith; they will see Him in the future in

the flesh. Like Pompilia, they rise.

174

Returning, for a moment to Shaw's comment regarding
David and Saul, picking up nearly where we departed, he
makes an extension of his principle of the active perception
of truth:

He [David] must cooperate with God for the

redemption of Saul in the same way that the

skeptical reader must abandon his neutrality, and
make a conscious effort to respond to Browning's

rhetoric if he wants to understand the poem. (279)

We must here move to the closing lines of The Ring and
the Book. If we view it as a summary statement of
Browning's earlier work, we can look there, also, for keys
to response to all of his work. The poet says, speaking

directly to his audience,

So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.

And save the Soul! .........................
(XII. 862-864)

Browning's intent, then, is not passive, nor does he intend
his readers to remain so. He has spoken truth in art,

Because, it is the glory and good of Art,

That Art remains the one way possible

Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.

(XII. 838-840)

Reason, revelation, and faith must all work together
then, in order for the individual fully to apprehend truth,
which in turn, must be expressed in love. The decision
Browning requires of his readers is whether to turn away

with the reasonable sanity of the longing Karshish, or rest

in the madness of Lazarus; whether to tremble with Guido or

175
rise with Pompilia; whether to remain in the darkness and
despair of Saul, or appropriate David's perception of active
love; or at last, to walk with the calm assurance of Pope
Innocent XII that in the time of testing the best choice has
been made based both on knowledge of the facts and love and
that God will handle the results. "Ultimately," says David
Bergman, "the reader is asked to be concerned with the
condition not of his personality, but of his soul" (786).
And the reader must decide for himself where real madness

lies.

CONCLUSIONS

The charges of obscurity which have been leveled at Browning
for nearly 150 years are often based more on a critical reading
of the work through the screen of personal prejudice than on the
reality of who Browning was and why he wrote. Browning read
through any "system" is not Browning. While we may see some
feminist elements, some use of linguistic principles, and
occasional passages which fit into other critical schools,
Browning's poetry is as unfit for analysis according to a
particular critical theory as Browning the man was unfit for
inclusion in a particular system of religion. He did not even
write according to the conventions of his age. Vineta Colby
understands the individuality and the mission which drove the man
and often alienated his readers:

Rare was the critic, or the reader, who could welcome a

poet so determined to deflate the solemnity of

conventional poetry, to challenge its mission of soothing

and consoling and offering noble truths, demanding

instead that poetry pose unanswerable questions. (98)

As a "dissenter," he often was at variance even with the
churches which he did attend. The corruption which the
"institution" often fostered through individuals who either had

lost sight of their original commitment, or who merely used the

176

177
institution for their own purposes was a source of frustration
to him, and he clung fiercely to his autonomy.

Generally, three major elements entered into his perception
of Truth: "Intuition," reason, and revelation. Intuition included
an artistic sensitivity which was very close to the exercise of
faith; sometimes the terms are synonymous. For Browning, the
"artist" was the one most often in the position of being
sensitive to the kind of understanding which made the whole more
than the sum of its parts and which surpassed the understanding
of those who were, or should have been, much wiser. Thus we
have Abt Vogler and David understanding while Cleon and Karshish
miss the point all together. Pompilia, with no education but
great sensitivity, understands faith, while Guido with all of the
opportunity the Church could afford and no sensitivity, doesn't
begin understand that he has totally missed the mark.

But, Browning does not discount reason. While his negative
characters often "reason" themselves right out of the truth, none
of his positive characters is stupid. Pompilia is almost as
unschooled as Caliban, but she uses the simple reasoning power
she has to best advantage while he goes forward on an incredible
interpretation of physical experience. The Pope, of course, is
the prime example of reason and faith. When the capacities of
the first have been exhausted, the second must take over. Often,
as in the case of Pompilia and the Pope, the speaker reasons
himself to the place of faith: Some things cannot be known and

must simply be trusted.

178

Far from being a Kirkegaardian leap, however, this faith must
be based, as must reason, on the third element: revelation.
Browning often expresses this revelation in a "word of mouth"
passing of the message. Caliban hears from Sycorax--and rejects;
Cleon hears from "certain slaves" about Paulus and the Christ--
and rejects; Karshish hears from Lazarus--. Sometimes the
revelation comes in a vision, as in the case of David. Sometimes
it comes in an experience, as with Abt Vogler. Often, as in the
case of Cleon, Karshish, and David, the revelation concerns the
Incarnation--the central Truth for Browning. "Caliban"
demonstrates that without revelation central truths of
Christianity are often missed, i.e., the love of God. Clearly, that
revelation for Browning was the Bible. Not only does he
illustrate from it, but he quotes it and applies its principles.
His sensitivity as an artist to the principles of faith, the
rational powers of his educated mind and the revelation of
scripture were Browning's requirements for the resolution of his
belief structure, and the application of that structure--ever
striving and growing--to the problems of his age. J. Hillis
Miller expresses, most nearly, what Browning seemed to be
striving for:

On earth man is in a sense already in heaven, for in

heaven he will pursue the same dynamic motion in a

different sphere. Imperfection and incompleteness are

closer to God than anything finished, for God himself is

in a way incomplete. Though he is perfect, he is

constantly adding new perfection to that perfection.

God is not temporal, but the driving motion of time is a
perfect image of his explosive eternity. (154)

179

All men, according to Browning, are given enough light to
perceive Truth. If they continue to walk in darkness, it is only
because they choose to do so, because they desire something
else more than they desire Truth: Del Sarto desires Lucrezia,
Ferrara desires image, Cleon desires wisdom. Perhaps Browning's
lack of concern with those who considered him obscure was based
on a belief that those who did not understand his poems were in
that position because they, like his negative characters, "would
not" understand.

Beyond understanding, however, Browning requires yet one
more thing from his readers--change. Philip Drew perceives:

Browning recognizes that human nature is mixed, that

individual moral decisions help to define that nature and

that the command to "act up to our truth perceived" is

therefore not a complacent conventional motto, but a

direction to a moral life of continual self-questioning

and strenuous effort. (140-141)
And that moral life is circumscribed by love. No Browning
character who apprehends the truth ever limits the moral rights
of any other person, but rather allows the other the freedom to

question and grow: Lazarus relates his experience, but he does

not force his opinions.

Browning's poetry, then, is not an end in itself. Yes, he
means for his readers to perceive the truths he unfolds; and he
means for his readers to act on those truths. Beyond that,
however, he means for his readers to continue, in all the

situations of their lives, applying the principles he sets forth,

180
both perceiving and "speaking the truth in love" (Ephesians 4:15),
for as long as they are able.

Browning used a seventeenth-century pope to speak to the
needs of the nineteenth century, communicating finally that a
faith which is not challenged often becomes no faith at all.
Doubtless, he felt that his words would, likewise, reach to
centuries which he would not see:

What if be it 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?

No wild beast now prowls around the infant camp:

We have built wall and sleep in city safe:

But if some earthquake try the towers that laugh

To think they once saw lions rule outside,

And man stand out again, pale, resolute,

Prepared to die,--which means, alive at last?

As we broke up that old faith of the world,

Have we next age, to break up this the new--

Faith, in the thing, grown faith in the report--

Whence need to bravely disbelieve report

Through increase faith i' the thing reports belie?
(X.l846-1862) 62

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

Notes

Chapter 1

Armstrong, Richard A. Faith and Doubt in the
Century's Poets. London: James Clarke,
1898.

Berdoe, Edward. Browning and the Christian
Faith London: George Allen, 1899.

Cary, Elizabeth Luther. Browning, Poet and
Man: A Survey. New York and London:
Putnam's, 1899.

Cohen, Mary M. "Browning's Hebraic
Sympathies." Poet-Lore, 3 (1891) : 250-
254.

Crauford, Alexander H. Christian Instincts
and Modern Doubt. New York: Thomas
Whitaker, 1897 : 228-241.

Dods, Marcus. "Browning's Attitude Towards
Christianity." British Weekly, June 25,
1891.

Everett, Charles Carroll. "Tennyson and
Browning as Spiritual Forces." New
World, 2 (1893) : 240-256.

Hutton, Richard Holt. "Robert Browning as a
Religious Teacher." Good Words, (1890) :
87-93.

Jacobs, Joseph. "Browning as a Religious
Teacher." Abstract of article in the
Jewish Quarterly Magazine, Apr. 18, 1890
: 249-256.

181

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

182

Jones, Henry. Browning as a Philosophical
and Religious Teacher. Glasgow: James
Maclehose, 1891.

Rickaby, John. "Browning as a Religious
Teacher." Month, 68 (1890) : 174-190.

Von Glehn, Marian. "Browning as a Religious
Teacher" Jewish Quarterly Review, 2
(1890) : 230-249.

Huntington, Arria S. "Browning's
Philosophy." Memorial Meeting of the
Syracuse Browning Club, p. 55-59.
Syracuse, N.Y.: C. W. Bardeen. 1890.

Massingham, II. W. "Browning as a
Theologian--A Note." Time, 1 (1890)
90-96.

Mundy, E. W. "Browning as a Theologian."

Memorial Meeting of the Syracuse
Browning Club, 21-23. Syracuse, N. Y.:
C. W. Bardeen. 1890.

Strong: A. H. The Great Poets and Their
Theology. Philadelphia: American
Baptist Publication Society, 1897.

Orr, Alexandra. "The Religious Opinions of
Robert Browning." Cbntemporary Review,
60 (1891) : 876-891.

Royce, Josiah. "Browning's Theism." The
Boston Browning Society Papers:
Selected to Represent the Work of the
Society from 1886-1897. New York and
London: Macmillan, 1897.

Stuart, Charles M. The Vision of Christ in
the Poets: Selected Studies of the
Christian Faith as Interpreted by
Milton, Wordsworth, the Brownings,
Tennyson, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell.
New York: Eaton & Mains, 1896.

Drew, Philip. The Poetry of Robert Browning:
critical Introduction. 1970.

Charlton, H. B. "Browning's Ethical Poetry."
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 27
(1942) : 36-69.

183

Chapter 2

Fairchild, Hoxie N. 1830-1880, Christianity
and Romanticism in the Victorian Era.
Vol. IV of Religious Trends in English
Poetry. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1957.

Raymond, William O. The Infinite Moment and
Other Essays in Robert Browning.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1950.

Hood, Thurman, ed., Letter to F. J.
Furnivall, April 25, 1884. Letters of
Robert Browning Collected by Thomas J.
Wise. New Haven, Conn., 1933.

Crowell, Norton B. The Triple Sbul:
Browning's Theory of Knowledge.
University of New Mexico Press. 1963.

Paris, 1876. References will be to this
edition which reproduces the 1595 text.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd.
Garden City. N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1961,
19-22.

184

Chapter 3

Loucks, James, ed. Robert Browning's Poetry.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
1979, 160 n.

Laird's note here reads:

This is the clear implication of the 'cabin of
life' simile, and Blougram says as much in lines
345-7. This cabin image is clearly one which
Blougram himself finds acceptable, since he
presents it before he begins to argue on
Gigadibs's apparent premise that unbelief is the
only possible state for an intelligent man in the
mid-nineteenth century (172 ff).

Feinberg here refers to Altic and Loucks, p.
121.

Loucks notes: "Get ready to bite your thumbs,
an insulting gesture" (202 n 9).

Melchiori's endnote refers the reader to
DeVane, A Browning Handbook, p. 261.

My thanks to Dr. Albert M. Lewis, Rabbi of
Temple Emanuel in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for
this distinction.

185
Chapter 4

1. The critical discussion apparently involved
at least six articles in the 70's, and took
the following major turns, though other
commentary was made at later dates:

Langbaum, Robert. "Is Guido Saved? The Meaning of
Browning's Conclusion to The Ring and
the Book." Victorian Poetry, 10 (1972) :
289-305.

King, Roma A. "Robert Browning: A Review of
the Year's Research." Studies in
Browning and His Circle 1 (1973) : 19.

Loucks, James F. "Guido 'Hope?': A Response
to 'Is Guido Saved?'" Studies in
Browning and His Circle, 2 (1974) : 37-
48.

Litzinger, Boyd. "The New Vision of
Judgment: The Case of St. Guido,"

Tennessee Studies in Literature, 2 0
(1975) : 69-75.

Doane, Margaret. "Guido is Saved: Interior
and Exterior Monologues in Book XI of
The Ring and the Book." Studies in
Browning and His Circle 5 (1976) : 53-
64.

McGhee, Richard D. "'The Luck That Lies
Beyond a Man': Guido's Salvation in The
Ring and the Book." Browning Institute
Studies 5 (1977) : 87-104.

2. Other mentions of hell in Browning's work
should also be noted in their rough context.
Where editions with numbered lines have been
unavailable, I have included the Cambridge
edition reference number supplied by
Molineux.

"Heretic's Tragedy" C.281

Lo,--petal on petal, fierce rays unclose;
Anther on anther, sharp spikes outstart;
And with blood for dew, the bosom boils;
And a gust of sulphur is all its smell;
And lo, he is horribly in the toils

186

Of a coal-black giant flower of hell!
CHO:--What maketh heaven, That maketh hell.

"The Statue and the Bust" 67-69

"If I spend the night with that devil twice,
May his window serve as my loop of hell
Whence a damned soul looks on paradise!"

"Red Cotton Night-cap Country" C.752

O unimaginative ignorance

Of what dye's depth keeps best apart from worst
In womankind!--how heaven's own pure may seem
To blush aurorally beside such blanched
Divineness as the women-wreaths named White:
While hell, eruptive and fulinginous,

Sickens to very pallor as I point

Her place to a Red clout called woman too!

"A Camel-Driver" C.937

Forgiveness? rather grant
Forgetfulness! The past is past and lost.
However near I stand in his regard,
So much the nearer had I stood by steps
Offered the feed which rashly spurned their help
That I call Hell; why further punishment?"

"The Return of the Druses" C.212

Even so!
I find (ye prompt aright) your father slain!
While most he plotted for your good, that father
(Alas how kind, ye never knew)--lies slain!
(Aside.)(And hell's worm gnaw the glozing knave--with
me,
For being duped by his cajoleries!
Are these the Christians? These the docile crew
My bezants went to make me Bishop o'er?)

From The Ring and the Book:

187

"The Other Half-Rome" III.1337-42

Each had a prompt defence: Pompilia first--
"Earth was made hell to me who did no harm:

I only could emerge one way from hell

By catching at the one hand held me, so

I caught at it and thereby stepped to heaven:
If that be wrong, do with me what you will!"

"Tertium Quid" IV. 245-53

And then the sudden existence, dewy-dear

O' the rose above he dungheap, the pure child
As good as new created, since withdrawn

From the horror of the pre-appointed lot

With the unknown father and the mother known
Two well,--some fourteen years of squalid youth,
And then libertinage, disease, the grave--

Hell in life here, hereafter life in hell:

Look at that horror and this soft repose!

IV. 600-11

You fled a hell of your own lighting-up,

Pay for your own miscalculation too:

You thought nobility, gained at any price,

Would suit and satisfy,--find the mistake,

And now retaliate, not on yourselves, but me.

And how? By telling me, i' the face of the world,
I it is have been cheated all this while,
Abominably and irreparably,--my name

Given to a cur-cast mongrel, a drab's brat,

A beggar's by-blow,--thus depriving me
Of what yourselves allege the whole and sole
Aim on my part i' the marriage,--money, to wit.

IV. 741-49

Rather did rage and hate so work in him,

Their product proved the horrible conceit

That he should plot and plan and bring to pass

His wife might, of her own free will and
deed,

Relieve him of her presence, get her gone,

And yet leave all the dowry safe behind,

188

Confirmed his own henceforward past dispute,
While blotting out, as by a belch of hell,
Their triumph in her misery and death.

IV. 785-800

Circumvallated month by month, and week

By week, and day by day, and hour by hour,
Close, closer and yet closer still with pain,
No outlet from the encroaching pain save just
Where stood one saviour like a piece of heaven,
Hell's arms would strain round but for this blue gap.
She, they say further, first tried every Chink,
Every imaginable break 1' the fire,

As way of escape: ran to the Commissary,

Who bade her not malign his friend her spouse;
Flung herself thrice at the Archbishop's feet,
Where three times the Archbishop let her lie,
Spend her whole sorrow and sob full heart forth,
And then took up the slight load from the ground
And bore it back for husband to chastise,--
Mildly, of course,--but natural right is right.

IV. 870-880

Mother 0' the babes we all breathe blessings on,--

Was caught in converse with a negro page.

Hell thawed that icicle, else "Why was it--

Why? asked and echoed the fools. "Because, you
fools,--"

So did the dame's self answer, she who could,

With that fine candor only forthcoming

When 't is no odds whether withheld or no--

"Because my husband was the saint you say,

And,--with that childish goodness, absurd faith,

Stupid self-satisfaction, you so praise,--

Saint to you, insupportable to me.

IV. 1583-1598

No, they must have her purity itself,

Quite angel,--and her parents angels too

Of an ages sort, immaculate, word and deed:

At all events, so seeming, till the fiend,
Even Guido, by his folly, forced from them
The untoward avowal of the trick 0' the birth,
Which otherwise were safe and secret now.

Why, here you have the awfullest of crimes

189

For nothing! Hell broke loose on a butterfly!
A dragon born of rose-dew and the moon!

Yet here is the monster! Why he's a mere man!
Born, bred and brought up in the usual way,
His mother loves him, still his brothers stick
To the good fellow of the boyish games;

The Governor of his town knows and approves,
The Archbishop of the place knows and assists:

"Half-Rome" II. 1367-68

One master-squeeze from screw shall bring to birth
The hoard i' the heart 0' the toad, hell's
quintessence.

190

Chapter 5

l. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth
Barrett Barrett 1845-1846, ed. Elvan
Kintner (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.

Press, 1969), I, 173.

2. J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God
(New York, 1965), 5.

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