Robert Browning, ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church. Rome 15 — ’ (1845)
In 1844 Browning, in Rome, visited the church of Santa Prassede. Amongst the various artworks and relics (the church has on display what it claims is the actual pillar to which Jesus was tied to be flogged, prior to his crucifixion) he saw the tomb of Cardinal-Bishop Alain de Coëtivy, known in Italy as Cardinal Cetti. Browning was inspired to write a poem: ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’. On the 18th February 1845 he posted a copy of this to E O. Ward in England (‘I send you one poem as long as the two I promised ,’ he wrote: ‘I pick it out as being a pet of mine, and just the thing for the time — what with the Oxford business, and Camden Society and other embroilments.’) It was published in the March edition of Hood’s Magazine, and then collected in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845). John Ruskin later commented upon it in Modern Painters IV, praising Browning’s portrait of Renaissance Italy, ‘its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of The Stones of Venice [1851–3] put into as many lines, Browning’s being the antecedent work.’
Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews — sons mine . . . ah God, I know not! Well —
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
What’s done is done, and she is dead beside,
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,
And as she died so must we die ourselves,
And thence ye may perceive the world’s a dream.
Life, how and what is it? As here I lie
In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,
Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask
“Do I live, am I dead?” Peace, peace seems all.
Saint Praxed’s ever was the church for peace;
And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought
With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know:
— Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;
Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South
He graced his carrion with, God curse the same!
Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence
One sees the pulpit o’ the epistle-side,
And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats,
And up into the aery dome where live
The angels, and a sunbeam’s sure to lurk:
And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,
And ’neath my tabernacle take my rest,
With those nine columns round me, two and two,
The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands:
Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe
As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse.
— Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,
Put me where I may look at him! True peach,
Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize!
Draw close: that conflagration of my church
— What then? So much was saved if aught were missed!
My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig
The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,
Drop water gently till the surface sink,
And if ye find . . . Ah God, I know not, I! …
Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft,
And corded up in a tight olive-frail,
Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,
Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast …
Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,
That brave Frascati villa with its bath,
So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,
Like God the Father’s globe on both His hands
Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay,
For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!
Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black —
’Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else
Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off,
And Moses with the tables . . . but I know
Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp
Bricked o’er with beggar’s mouldy travertine
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me — all of jasper, then!
’Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve.
My bath must needs be left behind, alas!
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,
There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world —
And have I not Saint Praxed’s ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
— That’s if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf’s second line —
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
For as I lie here, hours of the dead night,
Dying in state and by such slow degrees,
I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,
And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,
And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop
Into great laps and folds of sculptor’s-work:
And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts
Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,
About the life before I lived this life,
And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests,
Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,
Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,
And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,
And marble’s language, Latin pure, discreet,
— Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?
No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best!
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.
All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope
My villas! Will ye ever eat my heart?
Ever your eyes were as a lizard’s quick,
They glitter like your mother’s for my soul,
Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,
Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase
With grapes, and add a vizor and a Term,
And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx
That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down,
To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask
“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, a-crumble! 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
— Ay, 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!
The expertly rendered admixture of piety and lasciviousness, the muddling of improving Biblical allusions and hedonistic Greek myth, the veil slipping (nepotistically appointed sons crowding round his death-bed: ‘nephews — sons mine . . . ah God, I know not!’), the Bishop’s love of luxury and the finer things in life, his petty rivalry with and point-scoring antagonism against Gandolf, even though the other is already dead — it’s all splendidly done. Sex (the Bishop’s love of fleshly pleasures, recalling the mother of his children, the dirty pictures he anticipates decorating his tomb ‘one Pan/Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off’) and aesthetic indulgence (the best marble for his tomb, not onion stone; that lump of blue lapis) are versions of one another, and, as Ruskin says, of a part with his snobbery about the best Latin. Gandolf’s ‘elucescebat’ is a sort of typo: it should be ‘elucebat’, ‘he was notable’ (from eluceo) — an appropriate legend to put upon a tomb. But in going for the showier, longer form of the word Gandolf has blundered, for elucescebat can actually only come from elucesco, ‘to shine, to dawn’ (so: ‘it was dawning…’). Ha ha!, as Nelson Muntz likes to say.
Still: I think it misunderstands this poem to see it as a straightforward satire on religious hypocrisy. There is, it’s hard to deny, a degree of Protestant anti-Catholic disdain about it; but there’s something else here. The Bishop’s incapacity to imagine death as anything other than a kind of diminished, continuing life, as if his human body will grow slowly fossilised, petrified into a stone version of itself, whilst his consciousness continues to reside, speaks to his vitality: ‘by such slow degrees … stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,/And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop/Into great laps and folds of sculptor’s-work.’
Even on his deathbed, he is a man of extreme aliveness and energy, and he cannot think outside of that. Though much of this poem reveals him as venal, petty, self-indulgent, lustful and avaricious, there is — appropriately, given its literally sacramental character — something genuinely mysterious and wondrous about him imagining his postmortem self observing the eucharist being offered up to future congregants:
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
As the Bishop’s body is miraculously metamorphosed into stone, so the bread of the wafer is miraculously changed into the body of Christ. Life is a flame, and the Bishop cannot conceive of that flame being altogether snuffed out. Then again, he can’t — as he really ought, being a Bishop — make that other imaginative leap, and conceive of death as a passage into a wholly other kind of life, because he is too mired in his own self, his own ego, his existential inertia. Still, there is magic in these lines: the murmurous plosives of blessed mutter of the mass, the silky sibilance of that steady taste, strong stupefying incense-smoke. Any Catholic will tell you that even a bad priest can be a vehicle for grace: it is the grace itself, rather than the character of the individual priest, that is the crucial thing.
One thing I’ve never been sure about, with this poem. When the Bishop says:
And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests,
Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,
Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes
… he’s mixing-up Praxed, after whom the church is named, and Christ, who delivered the sermon on the mount. But he’s also mixing up Praxed’s gender: for Santa Prassede was a woman, not a man. Is this the Bishop’s error? Or Browning’s? It could be either, though it seems a strange thing for the Bishop, whose church this is, to get wrong. But then, it would be a strange thing for Browning to get wrong too: he visited the actual church, and its altarpiece is a painting of Saint Praxed herself:
The name, at any rate, has a long e: Praxēd — though that’s not hitherto how I’ve been pronouncing the poem’s title (I shall amend my pronunciation going forward).
Saint Praxedes or Praxedis — in Greek the name is Πραξηδίς — is a Christian saint of the 2nd century. She and her sister, Saint Prudentiana, assisted fellow Christians during a period of Roman persecution under Emperors Marcus and Antoninus II: they buried the bodies of the dead, distributed food and eventually were martyred themselves for refusing to worship the pagan gods. But we can see from their names that the two sisters embody two different approaches to life: Sister Prudence the more contemplative life, inward and considered; Sister Praxed (her name comes from πρᾶξις, which means ‘work, deed, doing, action’) the more outward, active, engaged. Like Rachel and Leah, they embody these complementary versions of Christian living: the life contemplative (for instance, sealed away in a nunnery) and the life active — out in the world, doing good works. As to whether it is faith or good works that saves us: this was a major fault-line between different branches of Christian faith, and one of the issues at stake in the whole Oxford movement, Camden society kerfuffle.
What really interests me, in relation to this poem, is the semantic field of πρᾶξις as a word. Did Browning know (it’s very possible he did) that as well as meaning ‘act, action, activity, deed, doing’, Ancient Greeks used praxis to mean ‘business dealing’, ‘success’, the collection of debts? And also that it was a euphemism for sexual intercourse? All these things seem to speak to the life the Bishop, in this poem, has led.
