Robert Browning, ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ (1855)
‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ is a long poem: over a thousand lines of blank verse, the longest piece in Men and Women by far. But its premise and its core argument are simple — a bishop who doesn’t believe all the tenets of his faith attempts to justify himself. So why does it need to be so long?
Answers might include: it doesn’t, it’s too long (Browning got carried-away, enjoying himself with the voice he had created and its clever casuistry, and let it run on and on) — it’s as long as it is because the arguments it presents need a lot of space to develop themselves — it’s too long on purpose, as a way of undercutting the urbane persuasiveness of the bishop’s voice. Or some other thing.
The speaker of this dramatic monologue is an English Catholic bishop, modelled (Browning admitted as much) on Nicholas Wiseman, who as the poem was written had recently been made the first Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. This was a big deal in Britain at the time, and extremely controversial — there were riots, thunderous attacks in the newspapers and magazines, furious debate and condemnation. Catholic Emancipation had become a legal reality in 1829, but it was not until the papal restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850, which permitted the appointment of bishops and archbishops, that the full organisation of the church returned to Britain.
The scene of the poem is a supper, à deux: the Bishop and a young journalist called Gigadibs. The main courses have been eaten, the wine has been drunk. Blougram offers his guest another glass of wine, which Gigadibs refuses. The poem’s opening lines include this offer (‘No more wine? … a final glass for me, though’) and a reference to a particular contemporary talking-point. After Wiseman was made Archbishop of Westminster, some suggested that he ought to ‘claim’ Westminster Abbey and reconsecrate it as a Catholic basilica (this never happened, nor is it easy to see how it could have been effected, but it was hotly discussed at the time):
No more wine? then we’ll push back chairs and talk.
A final glass for me, though: cool, i’ faith!
We ought to have our Abbey back, you see.
It’s different, preaching in basilicas
And doing duty in some masterpiece
Like this of brother Pugin’s, bless his heart!
I doubt if they’re half baked, those chalk rosettes,
Ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere;
It’s just like breathing in a lime-kiln: eh?
These hot long ceremonies of our church
Cost us a little — oh, they pay the price,
You take me — amply pay it! Now, we’ll talk. [lines 1–12]
The reference to Pugin — that is, Augustus Pugin, the famous British architect, who had converted to Catholicism in 1834 — is to the church he designed and built, full of Gothic flourishes and touches: St George’s Cathedral, Southwark, completed in 1848 (Westminster Cathedral was not constructed until 1903; prior to that the Catholic Archbishopric of Westminster was based in Southwark). Blougram is being sarcastic when he calls this cathedral a ‘masterpiece’, since he clearly hates it: ‘chalk rosettes,/Ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere’ … all the Gothic curlicues and ornamentation for which Pugin was famous, the style known as ‘Gothic Revival’. St George’s does get hot in the summer, and (evidently) it suffered during its first few years from ‘new building syndrome’, lime dust left over from its construction still in the air and so on. We know this poem is set during the summer, because Blougram later notes the date: ‘Corpus Christi Day’, a moveable feast that generally falls in June. Indeed we can be more precise as regards the date: later in the poem Blougram refers to ‘this war’ (line 938), clearly the Crimean War — and in 1854 Corpus Christi Day fell on June 29th. So that’s when ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ takes place, the night of June 29th leading into the early morning of June 30th [this latter date, coincidentally, is my birthday]. Perhaps Blougram, has come from preaching in St George’s earlier in the day to take supper with his guest.
Anyway: after this opening verse-paragraph, Blougram cuts to the chase:
So, you despise me, Mr. Gigadibs.
No deprecation — nay, I beg you, sir! [13–14]
Why does Gigadibs despise Blougram? Because he considers him a hypocrite, a sell-out, somebody who performs one of the high offices of religious faith without actually or fully believing in that faith, so as to enjoy the luxurious trappings of a bishop’s life: palaces, servants, fine clothes, the delicious food and wine they have just now enjoyed. Blougram immediately qualifies his assertion: of course Gigadibs is too polite openly to despise the Bishop, having just enjoyed his hospitality: ‘if I say, “despise me,” — never fear!/I know you do not in a certain sense — /Not in my arm-chair, for example: here’. Blougram then imagines Gigadibs reporting on the evening to a third party at some later time: ‘“Blougram? I knew him … Dined with him once/And after dinner we began upon all sorts of talk! He’s no bad fellow, Blougram …”’
Blougram’s apology follows, apology in the classical sense — he’s not saying sorry for his worldliness and hypocrisy, he is justifying it: Ancient Greek ἀπολογία, “speech in defence of a position”. Back in 1975 R G Collins summarised the main ways critics have taken the poem:
Interpretations generally have followed one of three alternative patterns: (a) the speaker is a Victorian hypocrite, a vulgar priest, justifying his own materialism; (b) he is a shrewd casuist, who reveals the attitudes of the poet himself; (c) Blougram is a judicious apologist in the finer sense, who gives a brilliant lecture on practical religion and teaches a lesson to the presumptuous young rationalist who is his listener. The latter view, argued at considerable length by F. E L. Priestly almost thirty years ago [ie in the 1940s], has been the prevailing one since that time.
Let’s break down the argument the Bishop advances — though this will, I’m afraid, take a while. He starts with what is, I think a strong point: that compromised actualities are better than unrealised utopian aspirations. This is an argument with wider application than religion. Indeed, it’s one with which I am familiar in politics. So: to get elected in the UK, Labour has to compromise the purity of its ideological ambition. I have friends on the left for whom anything less than a perfect socialist state — from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs, a worker’s ideal republic, the elimination of all oppression, racism, sexism and homophobia, any compromise at all with capitalism, tradition, conservatism — is contemptible. I have friends who expend far more time and vitriol attacking the Labour Party than they ever do attacking the Tories. The contrary view is that, though a Labour government won’t bring about paradise on Earth, it can make things a little better in various ways; although that it can only do this if it gets elected. Me, I’d rather see Keir Starmer as Prime Minister than whichever Tory Brexit clodpoll the party throws-up as their next leader, and so I applaud Starmer moving the party away from Corbynism into the electable middle-ground. I have, as I say, friends who regard that middle-ground as literally fascism, and who loathe Starmer. It’s not that they actively want a Tory government. But what they do want, Love, the Beloved Republic, is a dream rather than a political contingency, and they can’t see, or don’t care, that it’s practically inachievable.
This is essentially Blougram’s argument. He has compromised — with wordliness, with politics, with his conscience — but he has at least achieved something. Gigadibs has the luxury, being a nobody, of not needing to compromise on anything, leaving him the self-satisfaction of an untainted because unrealised grand vision. This, as I say, seems to me an important, still current argument: a political, ideological as well as religious, position. I’m not sure who else, apart from Browning, has articulated it in literature.
So, drawing comfortable breath again,
You weigh and find, whatever more or less
I boast of my ideal realized
Is nothing in the balance when opposed
To your ideal, your grand simple life,
Of which you will not realize one jot.
…
The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s,
Is — not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be — but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means: a very different thing!
No abstract intellectual plan of life
Quite irrespective of life’s plainest laws,
But one, a man, who is man and nothing more,
May lead within a world which (by your leave)
Is Rome or London, not Fool’s-paradise.
Embellish Rome, idealize away,
Make paradise of London if you can,
You’re welcome, nay, you’re wise. [78–99]
Punning allusion, in that last line, to Wiseman’s name. Next Blougram offers a simile — at some length (he elaborates it in lines 99–149, and returns to it in lines 221–70 and refers back to it throughout the whole poem): life, he says, is like a ship travelling across the ocean. Our lots in life are cabins, restricted in size:
A simile!
We mortals cross the ocean of this world
Each in his average cabin of a life;
The best’s not big, the worst yields elbow-room.
Now for our six months’ voyage — how prepare? [99–103]
Gigadibs, says Blougram, is like the passenger who, in resolving to make his cabin as finely-appointed as possible (furniture, a piano, a marble bath, complete sets of Balzac’s novels and Greek classics, a large canvas by Antonio Allegri to hang on the wall) ends up with nothing: — for as he comes to board the ship, the captain stops him, ‘screws his face up’, insists there’s no way he can ship all this stuff and chucks it all in the sea. So Gigadibs ends up in a bare cabin (has to sleep on ‘utterly naked boards’) and, chancing to see Blougram’s ‘snug and well-appointed berth’, is envious and bitter. But all that Blougram has done is brought a realistic, rather than dream-fantasy, amount of luggage with him.
Why a six-month voyage, specifically? That’s long enough to get an 1854 passenger from London to Australia. Why Australia? This, I think, is a specific reference. 19th-century New South Wales (the Victorian term for the whole continent) was settled largely by transported convicts, many of whom were Irish. This meant that it had — among its white population — a much higher proportion of Catholics than was the case in the UK. Indeed, by the time the poem was written the Church of England had already been disestablished in Australia: the Church Act of 1836 provided for equal funding of Protestant and Catholic churches and established legal equality for Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians. It’s not exactly that Oz was a Catholic country: it was then, and remains today, a majority Protestant nation. But being a Catholic was a much more common and a legally much freer business down under than it was in Britain. In the run-up to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850 Wiseman published a pamphlet that was widely circulated: An Appeal to the Reason and Good Feeling of the English People on the Catholic Hierarchy (1850). In the face of hostility to the idea of officially sanctioned Catholic bishops and archbishops — protests, vandalism of Catholic properties, Wiseman and the Pope Pius IX burnt in effigy instead of Guy Fawkes — Wiseman hoped to calm the situation, assuring English people that there was no ‘Popish plot’, no conspiracy to undo the Reformation or seize power. All that was being asked for was that Catholics in Britain be allowed the hierarchies of their church, so as properly to order their own affairs. And one main argument Wiseman gives in this pamphlet as to why this should be allowed is: it has already happened in Australia:
This boon to the English Catholics … has been granted to Australia, and is about to be granted to other colonies, without complaint from any one; and it looks like a reproach to the mother-country to withhold from it what had been granted to its daughters.
I think this is relevant to ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, not least because the poem comes back to Australia for its conclusion. I’ll return to this.
After his ship analogy, Blougram says: if you like what you see — the luxury, the power — why not get some of your own? ‘Why won’t you be a bishop too?’ You won’t, says Blougram, because ‘you don’t believe, you don’t and can’t’ in ‘any revelation called divine.’ [153] Gigadibs, it seems, is an atheist, a rationalist. ‘No dogmas nail your faith’ says the Bishop, in a sly allusion to Luther nailing up his 95 these to that church door (because, for a Catholic like Blougram, Protestantism is a kind of unbelief, an infidelity) — and ‘like the honest man you are’ this means you couldn’t pretend to accede to all the things a Bishop must profess.
Blougram doesn’t believe every tenet of his faith, although this doesn’t mean he’s an absolute atheist. He believes some of the articles of his faith; just not all of them. But he also doesn’t believe that these gaps in his credence, these places where he falls away from full dogma, should disqualify him from enjoying the position, the status and trappings, of his bishopric.
We’re not yet a quarter of the way through the poem, and yet it reads as though it’s coming to a conclusion — certainly it’s coming to its most famous, most often quoted, lines. ‘And now what are we?’ Blougram says, amiably: ‘unbelievers both.’ Sometimes, he says, he feels more secure in his faith, but then something comes along and shakes it. But also, vice versa:
Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides —
And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature’s self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again —
The grand Perhaps! We look on helplessly.
There the old misgivings, crooked questions are —
This good God — what he could do, if he would,
Would, if he could — then must have done long since:
If so, when, where and how? some way must be —
Once feel about, and soon or late you hit
Some sense, in which it might be, after all.
Why not, “The Way, the Truth, the Life?” [182–97]
A beautiful sunset or flower might incline one towards God again, when a loved-one’s death or a passage from pagan Euripides (editors and annotators make heavy-weather of this, but it’s clear enough that Browning is referring to the famous ‘there are no gods; they’re just the fables of miserable poets’ passage at the end of the Herakles) might make one doubt, until faith and doubt dance round and round your soul. ‘The grand Perhaps!’ is, the annotators tell us, Rabelais, at once the rumbustious novelist of earthly pleasures and a churchman (he was curate of Saint-Christophe-du-Jambet in Maine and of Meudon near Paris) whose death-bed last words were: je m’en vais chercher un grand Peut-être; tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée. I am going to seek a grand Perhaps; close the stage-curtain, the farce has finished.’ Actually I think it’s more likely that Browning is thinking here of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) — for Blougram is surely much more like Julien Sorel, who wears the clerical noir (as acolyte of the Abbé Chélan, and student at the Besançon seminary) and even perhaps aspires to the cardinal’s rouge, though he himself has no deep religious beliefs. Accepting his sentence of death by guillotine at the novel’s end, Sorel says: ‘Ainsi, dans trois jours, à cette même heure, je saurai à quoi m’en tenir sur le grand peut-être.’
Red-and-black is also a card game, and the opposing colours are relevant here, because Blougram turns straight to chess, and its white-and-black squares, in what are probably the poem’s most famous lines:
All we have gained then by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,
For one of faith diversified by doubt:
We called the chess-board white — we call it black. [209–212]
A bishop is a cleric in the church, but also the name of a chess-piece — one that moves diagonally rather than foursquare up or along. Lots of verbal game-play in this poem, but a larger points about games and play too: for we could not play chess at all on a board that was simply a single white square. This diversity, the alternations of white and black, are the predicate for the whole of the game, the interplay and fun, the intellectual stimulation, the interaction with the other — a game in which bishops take their place alongside pawns.
Blougrams adds another way of describing his checkerboard faith-and-doubt religion: waking/sleeping.
I say, faith is my waking life:
One sleeps, indeed, and dreams at intervals,
We know, but waking’s the main point with us,
And my provision’s for life’s waking part.
Accordingly, I use heart, head and hand
All day, I build, scheme, study, and make friends;
And when night overtakes me, down I lie,
Sleep, dream a little, and get done with it,
The sooner the better, to begin afresh.
What’s midnight’s doubt before the dayspring’s faith? [245–54]
What’s interesting here is the inversion: we might expect ‘I dream of faith’ (think of Matthew Arnold’s ‘land of dreams,/So various, so beautiful, so new’ lapped by the ‘Sea of Faith’) ‘and my dream is challenged by day-time logics of science and rationality’. But it’s the other way around for Blougram: his faith is daylight; his doubt creeps into him as he sleeps.
The bishop then speaks of his Catholicism as something he was born into (‘Well now, there’s one great form of Christian faith/I happened to be born in’ 301–2). Of course merely being born a Catholic doesn’t mean that one becomes a bishop, and Blougram does concede that his pursuit of that calling has been more than mere inertia. He chose it, because he enjoys what it brings: he likes that it ‘exalts’ him over his fellow men; that people kiss his hand (‘of course, the Church’s hand’ — but his hand too) and kneel before him. ‘Thus I am made, thus life is best for me’ he says. Then he returns to the ship-voyage simile to say that he’s made the best of the situation into which he was placed by God, and that he would have done the same if he’d been born without the opportunities he happened to have, which enabled him to rise to his present high position. If he had been born lowly, he would have made the best of that:
My business is not to remake myself,
But make the absolute best of what God made.
Or — our first simile — though you prove me doomed
To a viler berth still, to the steerage-hole,
The sheep-pen or the pig-stye, I should strive
To make what use of each were possible;
And as this cabin gets upholstery,
That hutch should rustle with sufficient straw. [353–61]
Then Browning gets more personal. Part of the Protestant anti-Catholic prejudice (shared to some extent by Browning himself) was that Roman Catholics are credulous and foolish, believing all manner of pseudo-miraculous nonsense: statues of the Virgin Mary that move, clotted holy blood re-liqueifying inside vials, the power of saint’s relics, visionary apparitions and various other mumbo jumbo. Do the more intelligent Catholics believe all this stuff too? Wiseman was a brilliant scholar (he had to give up his academic work when he became a Bishop and Cardinal), an eloquent and learned individual. Could such a sharp-witted man really believe in statues of the Madonna moving their eyes and all the rest? Let’s ask him: if he replies ‘no, I don’t’ then he would be doing a Blougram, confessing that his Catholic faith was chequered with unbelief. Whereas if he says ‘yes I do’ then he’s revealing himself as a credulous fool — or perhaps as a liar, saying so only to avoid the former situation. So what did Wiseman think about miracles?
Putting out of the question the hypothesis of unknown laws of nature (which is an evasion from the force of any proof), I think it impossible to withstand the evidence which is brought for the liquefaction of the blood of S. Januarius at Naples, and for the motion of the eyes of the pictures of the Madonna in the Roman States. I see no reason to doubt the material of the Lombard crown at Monza; and I do not see why the Holy Coat at Trèves may not have been what it professes to be. I firmly believe that portions of the True Cross are at Rome and elsewhere, that the Crib of Bethlehem is at Rome, and the bodies of Saint Peter and Saint Paul also … I firmly believe that the relics of the saints are doing innumerable miracles and graces daily, and that it needs only for a Catholic to show devotion to any saint in order to receive special benefits from his intercession. I firmly believe that saints in their lifetime have before now raised the dead to life, crossed the sea without vessels, multiplied grain and bread, cured incurable diseases, and stopped the operation of the laws of the universe in a multitude of ways. [Wiseman, Lectures on Catholicism in England (1851), 298]
We can see that Browning was aware of this passage in the words he puts into Blougram’s mouth.
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: [374–80]
Fool or knave. Unlike Wiseman, Blougram’s position is: I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, so — no comment. I think this illustrates a problem with the poem, here. The situation is that Browning can’t believe in statues of the virgin moving their eyes and so can’t believe that Wiseman believes it. That Wiseman might be genuine in his belief in popular miracles is not a position the poem can comprehend. So Browning styles his bishop as aiming for a kind of excluded middle.
Fool or knave?
Why needs a bishop be a fool or knave
When there’s a thousand diamond weights between?
So, I enlist them
These ‘diamond weights’ (a term from the business of cutting gemstones) are the many gradations Blougram insists exist between absolute belief and absolute unbelief. When Spinal Tap’s David St Hubbins said ‘I believe everything I read, and I think that is what makes me more of a selective human than someone who doesn’t believe anything’ Michael McKean (who co-wrote the film and played the character) was just being funny. But Blougram takes the point seriously.
Blougram now goes to the third of his ‘checkerboard faith-and-doubt’ analogies. Back in the Renaissance, Blougram says, everyone believed; it was taken for granted. No-one would even think of asking whether you believed. By the middle of the twentieth-century, though, the default position will be atheism; that people will automatically assume that you’re don’t believe in God unless you specifically say otherwise. But, says Blougram, where we are now, in the mid 1850s, there’s an (as we might say nowadays) schrodinger’s-cat quality to belief and unbelief. A figure such as Blougram both believes and disbelieves.
Had I been born three hundred years ago
They’d say, “What’s strange? Blougram of course believes;”
And, seventy years since, “disbelieves of course.”
But now, “He may believe; and yet, and yet
How can he?” All eyes turn with interest. [414–18]
Open the box: find out which kind of cat Blougram is. Not so fast, says Blougram. We still have five hundred blank-verse lines to go!
Why does the poem need to be so long? The arguments, from this point on, get less compelling, or so I think. There’s a long digression (digression is the wrong word, since Blougram is still advancing his argument; but the poem gets much slacker at this point) on politics and literature. Blougram puts words into his Gigadib’s mouth: you think I should have put my energies and ambitions into some other career, one which would not have been compromised by my lack of faith. He gives two examples of possible careers, by way of showing that this approach wouldn’t work. First: ‘Is it Napoleon you would have us grow?’ [436]. Blougram’s objection to this is that Napoleon only achieved what he did, in politics and war, because he had faith. The bishop calls this ‘his star’ ‘ — his crazy trust/God knows through what or in what? it’s alive/And shines and leads him, and that’s all we want.’ Want, there, in the sense of lack — Blougram doesn’t have it. It is not possible, the bishop insists, to ‘be a Napoleon and yet disbelieve’. But this is a strange argument. Maybe Napoleon was indeed moved by an intense self-belief, and by a single-mindedness that meant he ignored the costs of his advancement (what Blougram, turning grisly, calls ‘the blown-up millions — spatter of their brains/And writhing of their bowels and so forth’). But Napoleon is not the only model for political success. There are, surely, lots of paths by which people become eminent in political or military arenas without the insanity of self-faith that Napoleon manifested (‘why, the man’s mad’).
Fifty lines of this and then we get another possible path Blougram could have followed. Instead of being a bishop he could have been: Shakespeare! That is, could have put his energies into literature, and written poetry, Blougram has two objections to this. The first is the obvious one that he, Blougram, is not Shakespeare. Nobody is. To this Blougram comes up with his own refutation: do the best you can, aim as high as you can, that’s enough: ‘the trying shall suffice;/The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life:/Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate’ [493–4]. This is, we can imagine, Browning advising himself: keep going, old chum. Maybe you’re not Shakespeare, but aim high, do the best you can, and fate will see you right.
But Blougram has another, odder objection to this point. Yes, Shakespeare wrote ‘Hamlet, Othello’ and so on: but what did he do with this literary achievement? The truth is, he abandoned it for a dull and conventional life as a Stratford burgher:
He leaves his towers and gorgeous palaces
To build the trimmest house in Stratford town;
Saves money, spends it, …
- his Stratford house, a coat of arms,
Successful dealings in his grain and wool — [513–51]
It’s hard to follow the logic here. Obviously Shakespeare did do this. Once he’d made enough money from his plays he retired and lived-out his last days in provincial obscurity. But just because Shakespeare did this doesn’t mean that all poets and artists must do the same, surely. His decision does not bind later artists. As to why Shakespeare did this: well, that’s an interesting question. We don’t know for sure, but it’s likely that the stuff we tend to think preeminently the most important part of his life — the plays, the poetry, the writing — were simply not the most important part of his life as Shakespeare saw it. Shakespeare was no Romantic. He was a practical-minded man, who wrote plays to earn money, and who genuinely valued the small-scope status and provincial respectability, for which he opted, in his latter years: purchasing his own coat-of-arms and so on.
But how does this relate to the larger questions of Browning’s poem? Napoleon is chosen as an example because he was a kind of proselytiser — for Napoleonism, not Christianity, and using his military command rather than evangelists, but precisely as interested in spreading the word, converting the globe to Napoleon as were the followers of the early church to converting the globe to Christ. Shakespeare is invoked because Gigadibs is a Romantic, or post-Romantic, in a literary sense, and thinks of great art as, in a sense, religion. This is why Blougram makes the responses he makes, I think: in effect he’s saying ‘Napoleonism was a kind of religion, or at least too much like one for me to pursue it’ and also ‘literature — by extension, art — is not a religion, despite what you may think. And that’s why it’s not a valid parallel.’
From here the argument makes a knight’s-move: to the claim that there isn’t such a thing as ‘pure faith’ anyway. Blougram imagines Gigadibs telling him: ‘It’s not worth having, such imperfect faith … Whole faith, or none’ [597–9]. To this he returns: but there’s no such thing as faith without doubt: ‘I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists./The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say’. This is doctrinally orthodox: it’s Hebrews 11:1 (‘faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’) and John 20:29, where Jesus tells Thomas: ‘because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.’ But Blougram goes beyond any scriptural justification when he claims that pure faith would actually be intolerable for human subjectivity:
Pure faith indeed — you know not what you ask!
Naked belief in God the Omnipotent,
Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much
The sense of conscious creatures to be borne.
It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare.
Some think, Creation’s meant to show him forth:
I say it’s meant to hide him all it can,
And that’s what all the blessed evil’s for.
Its use in Time is to environ us,
Our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough
Against that sight till we can bear its stress.
Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain
And lidless eye and disemprisoned heart
Less certainly would wither up at once
Than mind, confronted with the truth of him. [647–61]
This sounds like a ground of actual faith, an apophatic definition of God by what He is not that nonetheless asserts the existence of God. Blougram, in other words, has said something with which many theologians might agree. We cannot define God; God is always infinitely greater than anything we can conceive. The closest we can come is the, as it were, shape of the absence of the God we cannot apprehend directly. Negative theology.
But what’s clear from this is that it’s not just that Blougram is unsure of God, he’s actively scared of God’s existence, of what certainty about God’s existence would mean to him: that torturous image of himself staked out under the midday desert sun, his eyelids cut off, the top of his skull removed. It’s horrible, and made more horrible by the fact that the sun here is God.
But the poem shifts, in a couple of lines, from this terrifying sublimity to a remarkable banality. Belief in God, says Blougram, is like one of those sneezes we feel building up inside us, but which never actually turns into a full sneeze. We’ve all that that experience, of course, and its triviality is a striking way of talking about something as momentous as belief in an omnipotent omniscient Cosmic Creator and Judge:
Threatening the torpor of the inside-nose
Nigh on the imminent sneeze that never comes. [671–2]
The sneeze that never comes. Has anyone else metaphorised religious faith this way? The Qu’ran insists that God is closer to us than our jugular vein, but this is a different kind of image. Not that it’s random, I think: according to Genesis God created Adam from dust and then breathed life into him via his nostrils — that juxtaposition of nose-breathing and dust almost implies a sneeze, don’t you think? Is Browning here riffing, in a sly, ironic way, upon Exodus 15:8? ‘At the blast of Your nostrils the waters were piled up, The flowing waters stood up like a heap; The deeps were congealed in the heart of the sea.’ Douglas Adams has one of the alien species of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy base their creation myth on a sneeze:
The Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being known as the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids live in perpetual fear of the time they call ‘the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief.’
Adams is sort-of mocking religious storymaking with this, but he’s also, sort-of, not. There is something all-encompassing about a sneeze; something that takes over the whole body, puts the sneezer in a kind of trance state: it’s a dervish phenomenon. Conceptualising the whole cosmos as a gigantic divine sneeze speaks to its epiphenomena — all those stars, scattered across the sky — but also to a sense of its abjectness, its fallen-ness: the Hebrew Bible imagines us made from dust, the Jatravartids as from divine slime. But I’m getting away from Browning.
You can excuse me getting distracted because by this point the poem has begun to repeat itself: lines 676–806 return us to the earlier argument that earlier in history (now Blougram posits ‘back/Six hundred years’) everyone believed, and now fewer people do. And he reverts to the idea of the winking statue of the Virgin Mary (699) and the liquefying of vials of holy blood (728). He reiterates his refusal either to refuse or deny the, in 1854, brand-new Papal dogma of the immaculate conception. But we’ve had this all earlier in the poem. He addresses the notion that he should care about more than his ‘creature-comforts’, the trappings of the metaphorical ‘cabin’ aboard the ship sailing to Australia. Then there’s a long disquisition that seeks to ‘deduce’ the moral schema attributed to divine revelation (‘All prohibition to lie, kill and thieve,/Or even to be an atheistic priest!’ 822–23) to material practicalities. Take chastity: Blougram claims to have read ‘in a French book ’t other day’ a non-religious justification for sexual modesty and continence. Browning doesn’t say which book, but scholarship has tracked it down: Balzac’s Physiologie du Mariage (1829):
Il est reconnu que si l’homme a primitivement cherché l’ombre des cavernes, la mousse des ravins, le toit siliceux des antres pour protéger ses plaisirs, c’est parce que l’amour le livre sans défense à ses ennemis. Non, il n’est pas plus naturel de mettre deux têtes sur un même oreiller qu’il n’est raisonnable de s’entortiller le cou d’un lambeau de mousseline. Mais la civilisation est venue, elle a renfermé un million d’hommes dans quatre lieues carrées ; elle les a parqués dans des rues, dans des maisons, dans des appartements, dans des chambres, dans des cabinets de huit pieds carrés ; encore un peu, elle essaiera de les faire rentrer les uns dans les autres comme les tubes d’une lorgnette. [Balzac ‘Méditation XVII: Théorie du Lit’, Physiologie du Mariage]
It can be understood that when primitive man searched-out shady caves, mossy ravines, caverns roofed by silicates, in which to hide his lovemaking, it was because indulging such pleasures delivered him over defenceless to his enemies. No, it is no more natural to put two heads on the same pillow than it is reasonable to twist your neck with a shred of muslin. But civilization came, it enclosed a million men in a space of four-square-miles; it penned them in streets, in houses, in apartments, in bedrooms, in eight-foot-square closets; a little longer it will try to make them fit into each other like the tubes of a telescope.
Here’s Blougram’s version of the same logic: that pudeur was a matter of rational self-protection rather than any divine injunction:
Philosophers deduce you chastity
Or shame, from just the fact that at the first
Whoso embraced a woman in the field,
Threw club down and forewent his brains beside,
So, stood a ready victim in the reach
Of any brother savage, club in hand;
Hence saw the use of going out of sight
In wood or cave to prosecute his loves:
I read this in a French book t’ other day. [825–33]
Then there’s a difficult passage. This is how the following lines first appeared, in Men and Women (1855):
Men are not gods, but properly are brutes:
Something we may see, all we cannot see.
What need of lying? I say, I see all,
And swear to each detail the most minute
In what I think a man’s face — you, mere cloud:
I swear I hear him speak and see him wink,
For fear, if once I drop the emphasis,
Mankind may doubt there’s any cloud at all. [864–71]
I’m not sure I understand this, and tracing the textual evolution doesn’t make it clearer. Originally, for that first line, Browning wrote ‘Men are not Gods, but, if you like, are brutes’; that’s what was set in in proof, which Browning then altered to ‘Men are not gods, but properly are brutes’: the line as it was actually printed. But in later editions of the poem he changed it again, to ‘Men are not angels, neither are they brutes’ which means something quite other. And the cloud, brought-in rather abruptly, in which Blougram sees ‘a man’s face’ gets revised, in later editions, to ‘a Pan’s face’ which is, again, quite different. Blougram now claims to have seen a face in the clouds (a secular man’s face, a pagan Pan’s face), where Gigadibs, looking in the same direction, just sees a regular cloud. But the former, in reporting what he saw, feels he must embellish it — adding that the cloud spoke and winked at him — because otherwise the general populace will refuse to believe there even was a cloud at all. What? It’s common to see faces in clouds, extremely uncommon to claim to hear them speak and wink. Why would shifting your report from the former to the latter, here, make the wider population more likely to believe you? It’s a metaphor, of course; Browning isn’t talking about actual clouds. But I find it a little hard to see its application to the world of faith.
We are, finally, in the closing sections of the poem. Blougram can’t believe that Gigadibs doesn’t want to be a bishop. ‘In truth’s name, don’t you want my bishopric,/My daily bread, my influence and my state?’ [903–04]. He puts this down to the fact that ‘you’re young’ but adds: ‘you must be old one day’. He talks of his wealth and power, dukes petitioning him to kiss his ring, and (since Gigadibs is a writer) he adds that he’s also had time and culture for a little writing of his own:
Suppose we die to-night: well, here am I,
Such were my gains, life bore this fruit to me,
While writing all the same my articles
On music, poetry, the fictile vase
Found at Albano, chess, Anacreon’s Greek.
But you — the highest honour in your life,
The thing you’ll crown yourself with, all your days,
Is — dining here. [911–18]
The ‘Albano fictile vase’ (fictile means: moulded out of clay or earth — not turned on a potter’s wheel) is a famous Etruscan vase, discovered in the Alban hills some seventeen miles outside Rome. It was acquired by the British Museum in 1817, and can be seen there to this day. This is what it looks like:
It’s a funerary urn. Chess we’ve had before. Anacreon is a little dig at Wiseman, I think, whose pre-clerical scholarship had much to say about classical culture, but who never did and never would write about a poet so bacchanalian and amatory as Anacreon. But it’s also, I think, a meta-textual move. I’d say that Browning has in mind Anacreon’s fourth ode, in which the poet recommends concentrating on the pleasures of the now, rather than fretting about religion or the future. Here’s an 1820s school-text interlinear translation of that ode:
Then we learn, near the end of Browning’s poem, a little more about Gigadibs himself: he’s ‘thirty years of age’ [944] and has published a couple of articles for Blackwood’s Magazine: an article on Hamlet’s soul, and what Blougram sarcastically calls a ‘lively lightsome article’ about the misery of London’s urban squalor, a piece Blougram ‘took/Almost for the true Dickens’ called ‘The Slum and Cellar, or Whitechapel Life/Limned After Dark’. Blougram congratulates Gigadibs on this, ‘success I recognize and compliment’, and promises to write him a letter of introduction that will open doors to editors who will pay much more than the £10 he earned for these earlier pieces, magazines in ‘Dublin or New York’ — Catholic journals in other words: The Dublin Review had been founded in 1836 by Wiseman himself (it was, later in the century, renamed The Wiseman Review). Gigadibs’s Dickensian uncovering of the misery and squalor of Whitechapel makes Blougram ‘laugh’. Browning again is poking at Wiseman here, I think. In his pamphlet, quoted above, An Appeal to the Reason and Good Feeling of the English People on the Catholic Hierarchy (1850), Wiseman addresses the Protestant-British fear that re-establishing a Catholic Archbishop in Westminster was some kind of power-grab. Westminster, Wiseman says, is indeed a centre of British power, the site of Parliament and filled with many other magnificent buildings. But that’s not the Westminster Wiseman has his eye on:
For there is another part which stands in frightful contrast, though in immediate contact, with this magnificence. Close under the Abbey of Westminster there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and courts, and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity, and crime, as well as of squalor, wretchedness, and disease; whose atmosphere is typhus, whose ventilation is cholera; in which swarms a huge and almost countless population, in great measure, nominally at least, Catholic; haunts of filth, which no sewage committee can reach, dark corners, which no lighting-board can brighten. This is the part of Westminster which alone I covet, and which I shall be glad to claim and to visit, as a blessed pasture in which sheep of holy Church are to be tended, in which a Bishop’s godly work has to be done, of consoling, converting, and preserving. And if, as I humbly trust in God, it shall be seen, that this special culture, arising from the establishment of our Hierarchy, bears fruits of order, peacefulness, decency, religion, and virtue, it may be that the Holy See shall not be thought to have acted unwisely, when it bound up the very soul and salvation of a chief pastor with those of a city, whereof the name indeed is glorious, but the purlieus infamous — in which the very grandeur of its public edifices is as a shadow, to screen from the public eye sin and misery the most appalling.
Browning is, I think, nodding at this passage in his poem. Wiseman, we may believe, was genuine in his desire to help indigent Catholics in central London; but Browning I suppose believed he wasn’t sincere, and that passages like this are mere cant — and that’s how he writes Blougram, ‘laughing’ at Gigadibs’ ‘Slum and Cellar’.
But wait: in his last words in the poem Blougram dares Gigadibs to write-up and publish a true-account of everything he, the bishop, has been saying:
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! [961–70]
This seems reckless: such an article would destroy Blougram’s reputation, surely. Unless the bishop means this as a joke. Does ‘men as soon would throw it in my teeth’ mean: people already attack and mock me on the flimsiest pretexts, your essay would just be more of the same, I can take it? Or does it mean: people would not use your article as ammunition against me, any more than they would take as gospel some chalk-scrawled anti-Catholic grafitto? Presumably the former, but it’s strangely phrased.
This has been a long, over-long post (working in such detail through so long a poem) and we’re almost done. But though Bishop Blougram has finished speaking, the poem is not over. Browning adds a 34-line coda. The poem is no longer a dramatic monologue. Now we get a kind of commentary on what has gone before, and a summary of What Gigidibs Did Next. First:
Over his wine so smiled and talked his hour
Sylvester Blougram, styled in partibus
Episcopus, nec non ….
With Gigadibs the literary man,
Who played with spoons, explored his plate’s design,
And ranged the olive-stones about its edge,
While the great bishop rolled him out a mind
Long crumpled, till creased consciousness lay smooth. [971–79]
I love this image of Gigadibs fiddling with the cutlery and ranging olive-pips around the edge of his plate (though I wonder, in my pedantic way, if this was something Browning used to do in Italy, rather than something an English diner was likely to do in the 1850s: were olives really part of the English diet back then, the way they are today?) There’s a splendid Michael Frayn essay from the 1960s called ‘The Receiving End’ which begins:
This is an extract from my long poem ‘The Rime of the Wedding-Guest’: My intention is that it should be recited or rather murmured, simultaneously with the recitation of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ as a sort of accompanying ostinato.
The poem that Frayn writes goes like this:
I see … I see … Yes, yes … I see …
Oh really …? Is that so …?
I see … I see … Good Lord …! Good God …!
You didn’t …! Did you …? How fantastic …!
Of course … Oh naturally …
Fantastic … No …! Incredible …!
An albatross …! Blow me …!
It’s a good gag, and the essay is hilarious. But Browning got their first.
The styling of Blougram’s title as in partibus reflects the pre-1851 logic: Catholic Bishops, before the restoration of the hierarchy, could not legally name themselves after British locations, and so took overseas locations: Wiseman from 1840–1850 was Bishop of Milopotamos (a location in Crete).
Then the coda gets judgmental. We’re told that Blougram ‘believed, say, half he spoke’, and that the half he didn’t believe he ‘shaped/For argumentatory purposes’: stuff that ‘crossed his mind, amusing because new’ [980–5]. He’s also presented as rather self-satisfied, content with what he has said: ‘“On the whole,” he thought, “I justify myself/On every point where cavillers like this/Oppugn my life”’. The last few lines of the poem tell us what Gigadibs did: struck by Blougram’s use of the phrase ‘Outward-bound’ as a possible title for his essay, he decides to take it literally. Here are the very last lines of the poem:
Something had struck him in the “Outward-bound”
Another way than Blougram’s purpose was:
And having bought, not cabin-furniture
But settler’s-implements (enough for three)
And started for Australia — there, I hope,
By this time he has tested his first plough,
And studied his last chapter of St. John. [1008–14]
Browning critics bicker over whether that last line means he has studied the last chapter of John’s gospel (John 21, in which Christ appears to the disciples and instructs them to ‘feed my sheep’), or that he has given up reading John’s gospel altogether, in order to concentrate on farming and feeding his family, his wife and child (the three of them, mentioned). My sense is that this last line suggests that Gigadibs had been working on another article for Blackwoods on John’s Gospel, but that he’s put aside all such merely intellectual labour to work practically in the world, which decision the poem (with its ‘I hope’) endorses.
To recap: the claim — presumably articulated by Gigadibs before the poem begins, is that it’s wrong, ‘despicable’, for a man who doesn’t believe all the tenets of his church to occupy the position of bishop in that church. It’s hypocrisy, deceit, dishonourableness. We can intuit from what Blougram says a more specific thing Gigadibs asserted or implied: ‘if you can’t support all the specifics of your faith, you should resign your bishopric and go and do something else instead’ — since a significant portion of Blougram’s apology involves him considering and dismissing alternate careers, in politics or the arts.
It is of course relevant that Blougram is a Catholic, since these accusations speak to English Protestant anti-Catholic prejudice. Browning might, I suppose, have written ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ about an Anglican Bishop (or a Rabbi, or an Imam) and still touched on many of the issues the poem engages: the balance of doubt and faith, the merits or demerits of public compromise and so on. But he didn’t, because in addition to these questions he wants to explore specific questions of Catholic dishonesty. A key ground of Anglicanism is the idea that it is Catholicism reformed: purged of the superstitions and mummery and irrational ritual that had accreted around the original Christian revelation, a return to a purer form of faith. As far as that goes, it was often assumed (by Protestants) that, though the foolish and simple-minded might believe all these things — winking statues of the Virgin, vials of blood liquefying, miraculous visions, selling indulgences — more intelligent Catholics surely weren’t so gullible, and so either had to deny part of their faith or else to lie about it. In 1864 (in a review published in Macmillan’s Magazine) Charles Kingsley, Anglican and author, attacked Cardinal Newman as a hypocrite, a dishonorable liar. Newman had been an Anglican cleric, but had resigned his position and converted to Catholicism in 1845. To Kingsley it was inconceivable that so learned and intelligent a man could believe all the things he now claimed to believe. So he was lying. Indeed, so far as Kingsley was concerned, a Trumpian disregard for truth was characteristic of Catholics in the main. Kingsley’s actual words were ‘Father Newman informs us that truth for its own sake need not be, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue of the Roman clergy.’ Newman fought back, first with a pamphlet (Mr Kingsley and Dr Newman: a Correspondence on the Question whether Dr Newman teaches that Truth is no Virtue, 1864) and then with his splendid spiritual autobiography, which in its title takes the same term as Browning’s poem: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Newman’s is one of the most important books about religion of the nineteenth-century, but it’s in the future where Browning’s poem is concerned.
So to the (implicit) condemnation by Gigadibs, Blougram says the following:
First he makes the ‘compromise’ point: that a compromised actuality — in religion (as , I suggest, in politics)— achieves something even if it’s a compromised something, where an uncompromising extremism, an unachievable utopian fantasy, achieves nothing. This, it seems to me, is an interesting argument. Blougram elaborates upon this point — the need to make accommodations with the restrictions and awkwardnesses of reality, rather than retreating to a private fantasy world — with his simile of an ocean-going ship.
Then he makes a different point: that religious faith is inevitably comprised of belief and doubt. His examples here are: the chessboard’s white and black squares; life as a diversification of waking and sleeping; and (later) the chronological development from universal faith to a future state of universal doubt which leaves the 1850s person halfway along this development with a strange mixture of the two.
Then Blougram says: I was born a Catholic, so a Catholic is ‘what God made me’ [354]. He says he has to make the best of this state of affairs, not seek to change it.
Then he makes a more subtle, or perhaps casuistical, argument: it is false to insist upon an absolute either/or, an exclusive dyad, in questions of faith. The choice is not ‘believe everything’ or ‘believe nothing’; in fact there are a thousand positions in between. So it’s not dishonesty to refuse to pick a side, it’s being truthful to the complicated reality much more a function of excluded-middles and schrodinger’s-felinity. I’m not sure this true, but maybe it is.
Then the bishop pauses this specific argument (he comes back to it later) to rehearse the impracticability of two notional alternatives to the life he has led: he could, he says, not have been a politician (Napoleon) or an artist (Shakespeare).
After this lengthy section, Blougram returns to this question of the excluded middle between faith and infidelity. To Gigadib’s ‘whole faith, or none’ [599] Blougram says that the former would be insupportable, or at least insupportable to most people: the naked eye of God scorching down upon our poor human bodies, lidless and open-skulled, pinned to the desert ground. The poem has already conceded that there are people — we might call them extremists — who do inhabit this totality of fidelity (the specific examples given are Luther in religion, and Napoleon in politics/war). But Blougram isn’t such a person, and neither are you or I. It’s simply not how we’re made (made by God). Such belief can’t be forced: it’s like a sneeze one feels building within one that never arrives.
Then for several hundred lines the poem replays some of these arguments a second time: the historical shift in attitudes to belief, the repudiation of all-or-nothing dyads of faith, the need sometimes to embellish or exaggerate (a critic would say: to lie) about matters of religion in order to bring the larger population along with you — I think that’s what’s being advanced in the passage [864–71] about the man’s face, or Pan’s face, seen in the cloud. Finally he exhorts Gigadibs to try the Blougram way himself: be a bishop, embrace the life of compromise and enjoy the perks. But, in what amounts to a kind of twist, Gigadibs doesn’t do so. Instead of following Blougram’s lead, or condemning him in print, he chooses a third option: emigration, and a life of honest toil in Australia.
The coda to the poem, in which we learn this, implies that Blougram has in effect just thrown a bunch of arguments at the wall, irregardless of whether he really believes them, just to see which might stick. And I suppose it’s true that some of the arguments he advances are more persuasive than others. But I also think that there is a thread that runs through them all. Blougram’s actual apology is a defence of compromise, as a needful and, in its way, truthful way of living life; and to this he opposes a dyad of fanatical extremism and a narcissistic retreat from the business of living into a hermetic dream-world.
I’m not sure that compromise, as a quality, has ever been fully theorised or discussed; or if it has I don’t know by whom. If position A is ‘don’t murder people’ and position B is ‘murder whomever you like’ then, clearly, there aren’t a thousand diamond points of compromised intercalations (what might the compromise here even look like? ‘kill a few but not many’? ‘torture almost to death but hold back at the last moment’?). A is the correct choice. But not every situation is so clear-cut. I suppose you might take a Kantian position that one must always tell the truth and never lie, but most people believe that there are intermediary positions here: from the ‘white lies’ of politeness and social courtesy, to the principled stand that (to use one of Kant’s specific examples) if a friend hides in your house, and the man who is looking to kill your friend asks whether they are there or not, it’s not only OK but morally imperative to lie and say they’re not. Indeed, it can be argued that no situation is as clear-cut as moral absolutists like to claim. Free speech absolutists don’t really think people should be free to shout fire in a crowded theatre. Thou-shalt-not-kill comes with a string of exceptions (don’t kill except when you must: let’s say, when the Russian army invades your sovereign nation and the only way to defend it is by fighting back).
It is a question, I suppose, of how much this poem is about Catholicism, and how much it is about a wider questions of faith and doubt, of public compromise and private inconsistency. It clearly is about Catholicism to some degree, since the context out of which it was written was what Protestants called ‘the Papal Aggression’ of the early 1850s. Still, though this was a fiercely contested matter 1850–51, by 1854 (when the poem is set) and 1855 (when it was published) matters had calmed somewhat. In 1850 Punch magazine ran one of the most ferocious anti-Wiseman lines, accusing him of all manner of crimes and foul ambitions, and publishing a string of anti-Wiseman cartoons. Here he is, like Guy Fawkes, filling the cellars of British democracy with a bunch of destructive Catholic ‘bombs’, each one with the name of a possible future Catholic bishopric.
Here he is again, assisted by Cardinal Manning, breaking-and-entering the Anglican Church:
There are plenty more. Thackeray, as Punch-contributor, wrote some swingeing anti-Papist stuff (Richard Doyle, the most famous of the Punch cartoonists at this time, was a Catholic, and resigned his position in protest at all this). But even Thackeray, by the mid-50s, was starting to mellow. ‘After making a great noise myself,’ he wrote to his friend William Allingham in 1856, ‘I begin to wonder why we have made so much to-do about the Cardinal. Why shouldn’t he come and set up a winking Virgin in the Strand?” [Richard Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–51 (1997), 479]
So perhaps Browning’s poem is less specifically tied to the anti-Catholic hysteria of the initial scare, and is a more considered meditation upon the place of compromise in spiritual and public life, the extent to which such compromise indexes hypocrisy and mendacity as opposed to flexibility and an acknowledgement of the chequered nature of existence. This would make the poem about, in a sense, Liberalism. Ian Dunt’s How To Be A Liberal (Canbury 2020), though unrelated to Browning, makes some Blougramesque points about our current global situation: all around us, he says, nationalism and ‘populism’ is on the rise. Its appeal is based on a number of lies.
The first lie is that you do not exist as an individual, Nationalism claims that society is comprised of two groups, who are in perpetual conflict with one another the people and the elite. In reality neither of these groups exists. There is no such thing as the people. Individuals do not compose a homogenous mass. They have different values, interests and eccentricities. They are not singular, but plural … the second lie is that the world is simple. This lie proceeds logically from the first. If the world is split between two groups, instead of being a vast network of individual and organisational interests, it follows that all that is wrong is the result of the elite and all that is right is the result of the people. The notion of complexity is thereby eradicated from existence. [Dunt, 10]
Dunt’s book is a lengthy, eloquent defence of liberalism as the opposite of this view although, despite covering many issues, Dunt doesn’t really talk about compromise. Surely, though, compromise is an essential Liberal — and liberal — value. Or is compromise a dirty word?
I’m conscious that, having started this blog by complaining about how long Browning’s 1000-line poem is, I’ve now spent 10,000 words talking about it. Maybe that’s why the text is so long — that it is engaging more than just a religious (much more than just a Catholic) concern. Does that mean that I’ve worked my round to an agreement with the ‘view, argued at considerable length by F. E L. Priestly almost [eighty] years ago’ that ‘Blougram is a judicious apologist in the finer sense, who gives a brilliant lecture on practical religion and teaches a lesson to the presumptuous young rationalist who is his listener’. I don’t know that I have, though. Clearly this poem has engaged me deeply — I would hardly have written at such length about it otherwise. But though there’s lots here to chew on, the fact remains. Something is missing. Blougram is a venal, selfish man, more concerned with his own comfort and prestige than anything else. Maybe things are complicated in the world, maybe life is a chequerboard of faith and doubt, of achievement and failure, of happiness and unnappiness — but that doesn’t mean it should be. Maybe a simpler faith would be better. This is to say that, apart from in the poem’s coda (which strikes me, I must say, as an excresence, as something of a failure of nerve on Browning’s part) the glory of this text is that, unlike the Apology of Socrates, or the Apology of Newman, it doesn’t have to assert, or come down on one side or the other. It’s a poem, not a treatise; a psychological portrait not a truth-claim. And what makes it so potent is that its psychological portrait is of a man for whom treatises and truth-claims, and all their complicating ramifications for life as it is lived, are a central concern.
It is the materiality of the dramatic monologue, its novelist specificities, that really make this work. In his own, also lengthy, account of the poem Roma A King claims that its ‘diction is primarily conceptual … Blougram’s nouns are mainly abstract’ [King, 92]. This seems to me flat wrong. The poem is full of the physicalities of Blougram’s life: from the fine wine he is drinking and the food he is digesting as he speaks, to the books he reads, the art-objects he admires. His mode of arguing relies not on abstractions but similes — the ocean-going ship, the chess-board, the face-shaped cloud. And this is fitting, because part of the work’s critique of its speaker is that he is too attached to the physical world, that he’s insufficiently spiritual.
