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Ruskin, Pugin, and the Contemporary Context of “The Bishop Orders His Tomb”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert A. Greenberg
Robert A. Greenberg*
Affiliation:
Queens College, Flushing, N. Y.
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Abstract

When read in the context of the 1840's, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” is seen to be neither an explicitly anti-Catholic poem nor a simple historical construct. Much of its bent and many of its details had previously been expressed by so vigorously polemical a Catholic writer as Pugin; they appear again later in Ruskin's pages. Browning's concern rather—and this he shares with Newman, as well as Pugin and Ruskin—was to search out in the past the roots of his own age. The corruption of spirit that he discerns in the Renaissance he also recognizes as extending into his time. The ethos represented by Saint Praxed is dead; the modern world has begun; the qualities of the Bishop are the qualities of Browning's reader. The same historicizing of the past informs “My Last Duchess”, which dramatizes in the deadly embrace of the Duke and the Duchess the destruction of the old order at the hands of the new. The Duchess survives as a frozen portrait, Saint Praxed as no more than a confused and ineffectual memory. But despite the coherence of his analysis, and unlike Ruskin and Pugin, Browning refused to enter the lists with a programme of his own.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 84 , Issue 6 , October 1969 , pp. 1588 - 1594
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969

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References

1 Modern Painters, Vol. iv, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1904), vi, 449.

2 Contrasts... (London, 1841), p. iii. Further references will be to this the second edition.

3 For modern scholarship on the mixture of styles, see Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Cods, Bollingen Series, xxxvii (New York, 1953); Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Copenhagen, I960); Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Medieval Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies, iv (1933), 228–280.

4 New Letters of Robert Browning, ed. William C. DeVane and Kenneth L. Knickerbocker (New Haven, Conn., 1950), pp. 35–36.

5 Louis Bouyer, Newman (New York, 1960), pp. 239–240; Meriol Trevor, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud (New York, 1962), pp. 344–346.

6 Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Suppression of Monasteries, No. 26 (London, 1843), pp. v-vi. The letters cover the period 1528–55. Browning may have recalled a villainous act of the Abbot of Fountains: “... before our accesse to his monasterie he committede thefft and sacrilege, confessyng the same. At mydnyght causede his chapelaine to stele the sextens keis, and towke owte a jewel, a crosse of golde with stones. One Warren, a goldsmith of the Chepe, was with hym in his chambre at that owre, and ther stole oute a gret emerode with a rubie” (p. 100). Cf. the Bishop's “blue lump,” the lapis lazuli (II. 34–50).

7 Beginning with the next publication, No. 27, a Society disclaimer to this effect prefaced each volume. For a brief history of the Society, see Charles Johnson, “The Camden Society, 1838–1938,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th Series, xxii (1939), 23–38.

8 Gregory DLx, The Shape of the Liturgy (Westminster, Eng., 1954), p. xvi.

9 Trevor, p. 286.

10 “... as Romanism is taught Analytically at Oxford, it is taught A rtistically at Cambridge ... sculptured, painted, and graven”—quoted by James F. White, The Cambridge Movement (Cambridge, Eng., 1962), p. 142. The pamphlet drew considerable attention, running through at least four editions (p. 144).

11 Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford, 1967), pp. 190–192.

12 Denis Gwynn, Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin, and the Catholic Revival (London, 1946), p. 136.

13 Stones of Venice, i, in Works, ix, 436–440.

14 The anonymous reviewer was Richard Simpson, an editor of the Rambler; see Esther Rhodes Houghton, “Reviewer of Browning's Men and Women in the Rambler Identified,” VN, No. 33 (Spring 1968), p. 46.

15 Simpson's “fierce integrity... led him to inquire and speculate fearlessly in history and philosophy, without concern for... his more timid co-religionists” (Josef L. Altholz, The Liberal Catholic Movement in England, London, 1962, p. 28). The Rambler staff generally had “trust that even the most independent inquiry must lead to a truth that was essentially Catholic” (p. 5).

16 The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845–1846 (London, 1899), i, 134.

17 Wright, p. vi.

18 Boyd Litzinger, Robert Browning and the Babylonian Woman, Baylor Browning Interests (Waco, Texas, 1962), pp. 9, 18. Litzinger's record makes clear, however, that evidence for Browning's excessive anti-Catholicism dates from after 1846, that is, after his marriage and removal to Catholic Italy. Until then, there is an effort at balanœ—the speaker of “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” is set against Brother Lawrence, as the Monsignor in the final section of Pippa Passes is set against his unregenerate brother. As will be seen below, the same device of contrast underlies both “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” and “My Last Duchess.”

19 Apologia, p. 190; my italics.

20 Newman writes in 1843: “It is the compensation of the disorders and perplexities of these latter times of the Church that we have the history of the foregoing” (“Note D,” A pnlogia, p. 280). In the same year, Carlyle breathes life into Abbot Samson, while mocking the Tractarians: “O Heavens, what shall we say of Puseyism, in comparison to Twelfth-Century Catholicism? Little or nothing ...” (Pasl and Present, ed. Richard D. Altick, Boston, 1965, pp. 119–120).

21 Stones of Venice, I, Works, ix, 46, 47.

22 Modern Painters, IV, Works, vi, 449.

23 The Talisman, Everyman Ed., Chs. xi, xviii; pp. 135, 186.

24 By contrast, the Bishop's assimilation to God—“So, let the blue lump poise between my knees, / Like God the Father's globe on both bis hands” (11.47–48)—is self-aggrandizing, manifesting in religious terms the Christian sin of pride, and in historical, the Renaissance urge to master and possess. The related image is embodied in the bronze statuary cast especially for the Duke, showing the pagan god “Neptune ... / Taming a sea-horse” (11. 54–55). The Duke's manipulation of the curtain, which “none puts by / ... but I” (11. 9–10), is obviously of a parallel order.

25 Though they defy precise limitation, the several details of the portrait are suggestive. The subject wears about her a flowing “mantle” (II. 16–17); her “pictured countenance” is “earnest” and reveals “depth and passion,” and on her cheek a “spot / Of joy” (11. 7, 8, 14–15); the details are presumably integrated since the viewer's impression is total—“such a glance” (1. 12). Given the larger context, one wonders if it is with the image of the Madonna in mind (albeit with Renaissance touches: “faint / Half-flush that dies along her throat” [11. 18–19|) that Fra Pandolf has visualized her. There is the later association, unknowingly provided by the Duke: “the white mule / She rode with round the terrace” (11. 28–29), in Christian iconography a standard association with Mary, based upon Apocryphal accounts of the flight from Egypt: “L'âne, qui a l'honneur de porter la Vierge et le Sauveur, est blanc” (Louis Réau, Iconographie de l'art chrétien, Paris, 1957, ii, 275). If Browning is indeed invoking this further resonance, then he is also anticipating by almost three. decades the Pompilia-Madonna analogy, and in the Duke and the Duchess the deadly embrace of Guido and Pompilia. As to versions of the Madonna, Guido is as explicit as we could hope him to be: “Give me my gorge of color, glut of gold / In a glory round the Virgin made for me! / Titian's the man, not Monk Angelico” (The Ring and the Book, xi, 2117–19). For fuller discussion of the imagery relating Pompilia to Mary, and also of the parallel between the flights of Pompilia and Caponsacchi to Rome and of Mary and Joseph to and from Egypt, see Richard D. Altick and James F. Loucks, Browning's Roman Murder Story: A Reading of “The Ring and the Book” (Chicago, 1968), pp. 216–218,232 n.

26 Stones of Venice, iii, Works, xi, 74.