In my first year in graduate school at Baylor University, I had the pleasure of taking a seminar in Robert & Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry with Dr. Mairi Rennie, of Oxford, visiting head of the Armstrong Browning Library. Based on her suggestions, I extended and finished my seminar paper, which was published in Studies in Browning and His Circle the following year.
I’ve selected an excerpt which I am pleased with, in its working with texts and the insight it helps to establish (one I capitalize on later in the paper), and also—quite intentionally—one that reflects my prejudice, at the time, about “Romanism.” I will point out that what I say in this excerpt is definitely true of Robert Browning’s attitude toward the Catholic Church: he was reputedly a vehement anti-Catholic through much of his life, and had been reared in a radical dissenting sect (developing such an infatuation with the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley in adolescence that he declared himself an atheist for a couple years). You will not fail to notice, though, that at the time I originally wrote this I reflexively adopted the same perspective. I am most grateful that I have been afforded the time and gracious opportunity to thoroughly reverse that attitude!
Here, then, an excerpt from “Tipping the Scales: Contextual Clues in Bishop Blougram’s Apology”:
“Healthy vehemence.” The first issue in unravelling Blougram is, of course, its dramatic form. Whether Browning’s use of the dramatic form is intended to insure an ultimate relativity of perspective or to engage the reader in an active, rather than passive, process of understanding, its immediate effect is to obscure whatever “truths” the poem may convey behind the limited and possibly suspect viewpoint of an artificial character. The speaker’s coloring of the facts of experience will, of course, depend on his reactions to that experience. It is especially interesting, then, that the narrator of the epilogue in Blougram characterizes Gigadibs’ final reaction to his dinner with Blougram as “healthy vehemence.” The idea of “health” becomes a key reason to believe that it is the later Gigadibs of the epilogue, not the early Gigadibs seen through Blougram’s eyes, nor Blougram himself, that is the intended protagonist of Blougram.
The image of “health” recurs in a later poem of Browning’s, “Confessions.” In this brief poem, a dying man recounts the view of life he derives from the memory of a secret love affair carried on in his youth. The ending, “How sad and bad and mad it was– / But then, how it was sweet!” is a typical Browning affirmation of the beauties of love when acted on courageously. The most intriguing image in the poem, however, comes in a passing phrase uttered by the speaker: “is the curtain blue / Or green to a healthy eye?” The speaker then gives his own perspective: “To mine . . . Blue.” The question and answer provide a key example of Browning’s use of literary and Biblical contexts.
The question concerning “blue or green” is a reference to the literal coloring of perception caused by jaundice. More specifically, it echoes the line “all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye” from Pope’s Essay on Criticism. A glance at the passage in which this line appears reveals the exquisite craftsmanship of the allusion: Pope is defending the truly original poet against overzealous critics, and says,
Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice,
Will needs mistake an author into vice;
All seems infected that the infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.
The plea, of course, applies equally well to the words of the dying man, whose description of the forbidden love affair gives the reader no real reason to believe it was an immoral encounter, and to Browning himself, whose critics persistently misread him. The important statement, however, for both the dying man and (by implication from Pope’s context) the poet, is “To mine, it serves for the old June weather / Blue above lane and wall.” The yellow cast of jaundiced perception would make the curtain appear green, but the speaker’s vision is healthy: he sees blue. It is those who censure him that are “infected” and “jaundiced.”
The charge of infected perception invokes a familiar Biblical context as well. Paul, defending the believer’s liberty against external laws, says, “Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure.” As is the case with Pope’s attack on “scandalously nice” critics, so Paul’s warning about fastidious religionists reverts the charge of immorality on those who do not have a fundamentally healthy perspective. In this context, the dying man speaking to his minister (“reverend sir”) is able to level a substantial critique against superficial moralisms; not only are they the product of a “jaundiced eye,” but they reflect a heart that is “defiled and unbelieving.”
The identification of “healthy vehemence” with spiritual and mental clarity also occurs in Browning’s paradigmatic religious poem, Christmas Eve. In the poem, the speaker moves through four major viewpoints: the Zionist chapel, his own initial position, Roman Catholicism, and higher criticism. In the end, the speaker rejects the mere dogma of Romanism and the mere data of criticism in favor of the most vehement expression of love for God, that of the Zionist chapel. The transformation of the speaker’s perspective, though, is not a mere intellectual assent or mystical abnegation of self: it is a healing. While the speaker “cannot bid / the world admit [God] stooped to heal / My soul,” he is certain that (like Paul and Mary Magdalene) “he named my name”; like the woman in Matthew 9:20-22, he leaps out to seize “the hem of the vesture” for healing and springs “at a passionate bound” back into the chapel. Having been healed, he is now able to make the affirmation “I choose here!”
The image of health in Blougram, then, should be taken as a serious indication of perspective. Indeed, Blougram himself argues from the premise that health equates with affirmation when he asserts that the early Gigadibs’ skepticism must force him to “keep [his] bed, / Abstain from healthy acts that prove [him] a man” in order to avoid making any assumptions. The argument is sound as far as it goes; Gigadibs’ apparent refusal to have any faith if he can’t have all faith is inconsistent with his own actions. Blougram is more consistent: he avoids such “healthy acts” as those represented by Napoleon and Shakespeare because he prefers to dine, / Sleep, read and chat in quiet.” However, as the later Gigadibs’ reaction of “sudden healthy vehemence” illustrates, Blougram’s self-justification undermines itself by demonstrating that he suffers from a “jaundiced eye” because he is “defiled and unbelieving.”