The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning. Edward Berdoe
death, is engaged in giving directions about a grand tomb he wishes his relatives to erect in his church. He has secured his niche, the position is good, and he desires the monument shall be worthy of it. Mr. Ruskin, in Modern Painters, vol. iv., pp. 377-79, says of this poem: “Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages – always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art, with which we are specially concerned, there is hardly a principle connected with the mediæval temper that he has not struck upon in these seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his” (here the writer quotes from the poem, “As here I lie, In this state chamber dying by degrees,” to “Ulpian serves his need!”). “I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit – its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I have said of the central Renaissance, in thirty pages of the Stones of Venice, put into as many lines, Browning’s also being the antecedent work.” It was inevitable that the great period of the Renaissance should produce men of the type of the Bishop of St. Praxed’s; it would be grossly unfair to set him down as the type of the churchmen of his time. As a matter of fact, the Catholic church was undergoing its Renaissance also. The Council of Trent is better known by some historians for its condemnation of heresies than for the great work it did in reforming the morals of Catholic nations. The regulations which it established for this end were fruitful in raising up in different countries some of the noblest and most beautiful characters in the history of Christianity. St. Charles Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, whose connection with St. Praxed’s Church is noticed above, was the founder of Sunday-schools, the great restorer of ecclesiastical discipline and the model of charity. St. Theresa rendered the splendour of the monastic life conspicuous, leading a life wholly angelical, and reviving the fervour of a great number of religious communities. The congregation of the Ursulines and many religious orders established for the relief of corporeal miseries – such as the Brothers Hospitallers, devoted to nursing the sick; the splendid missionary works of St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier – all these, and many other evidences of the awakening life of the Catholic Church, were the products of an age which is as often misrepresented as it is imperfectly understood. There were bishops of St. Praxed’s such as the poet has so inimitably sketched for us; but had there been no others of a more Christian type, religion in southern Europe would have died out instead of starting up as a giant refreshed to win, as it did, the world for Christ. The worldly bishop of the poem is an “art for art’s sake” ecclesiastic, who is not at all anxious to leave a life which he has found very satisfactory for a future state about which he has neither anxiety nor concern. What he is concerned for is his tomb. His old rival Gandolf has deprived him of the position in the church which he longed for as a resting-place, but he hopes to make up for the loss by a more tasteful and costly monument, with a more classical inscription than his. The old fellow is as much Pagan as Christian, and his ornaments have as much to do with the gods and goddesses of old Rome as with the Church of which he is a minister. In all this Mr. Browning finely satirises the Renaissance spirit, which, though it did good service to humanity in a thousand ways, was much more concerned with flesh than spirit.
Notes. —Basalt, trap rock of a black, bluish, or leaden-grey colour; peach-blossom marble, an Italian marble used in decorations; olive-frail == a rush basket of olives; lapis lazuli, a mineral, usually of a rich blue colour, used in decorations; Frascati is a beautiful spot on the Alban hills, near Rome; antique-black == Nero antico, a beautiful black stone; thyrsus, a Bacchanalian staff wrapped with ivy, or a spear stuck into a pine-cone; travertine, a cellular calc-tufa, abundant near Tivoli; Tully’s Latin == Cicero’s, the purest classic style; Ulpian, a Roman writer on law, chiefly engaged in literary work (A.D. 211-22). “Blessed mutter of the mass”; To devout Catholics the low monotone of the priest saying a low mass, in which there is no music and only simple ceremonies, is more devotional than the high mass, where there is much music and ritual to divert the attention from the most solemn act of Christian worship; mortcloth, a funeral pall; elucescebat, he was distinguished; vizor, that part of a helmet which defends the face; term, a bust terminating in a square block of stone, similar to those of the god Terminus; onion-stone == cippolino, cipoline, an Italian marble, white, with pale-green shadings.
Blot in the ’Scutcheon, A. (Part V. of Bells and Pomegranates, 1843.) A Tragedy. Time, 17 – . The story is exceedingly dramatic, though simple. Thorold, Earl Tresham, is a monomaniac to family pride and conventional morality: his ancestry and his own reputation absorb his whole attention, and the wreck of all things were a less evil to him than a stain on the family honour. He is the only protector of his motherless sister, Mildred Tresham, who has in her innocence allowed herself to be seduced by Henry, Earl Mertoun, whose estates are contiguous to those of the Treshams. He, too, has a noble name, and he could have lawfully possessed the girl he loved if he had not been deterred by a mysterious feeling of awe for Lord Tresham, and had asked her in marriage. But he is anxious to repair the wrong he has done, and the play opens with his visit to Thorold to formally present himself as the girl’s lover. Naturally the Earl, seeing no objection to the match, makes none. The difficulty seems at an end; but, unfortunately, Gerard, an old and faithful retainer, has seen a man, night after night, climb to the lady’s chamber, and has watched him leave. He has no idea who the visitor might be, and, after some struggles with contending emotions, decides to acquaint his master with the things which he has seen. Thorold is in the utmost mental distress and perturbation, and questions his sister in a manner that is as painful to him as to her. She does not deny the circumstances alleged against her. Her brother is overwhelmed with distress at the sudden disgrace brought upon his noble line, and confounded at the idea of the attempt which has been made to involve in his own disgrace the nobleman who has sought an alliance with his family. Mildred refuses to say who her lover is, and weakly – as it appears to her brother – determines to let things take the proposed course. Naturally Thorold looks upon his sister as a degraded being who is dead to shame and honour, and he rushes from her presence to wander in the grounds in the neighbourhood of the house, till at midnight he sees the lover Mertoun preparing to mount to his sister’s room. They fight, and the Earl falls mortally wounded. In the chamber above the signal-light in the window has been placed as usual by Mildred, who awaits Thorold in her room. He does not appear, and her heart tells her that her happiness is at an end. Now she sees all her guilt, and the consequences of her degradation to her family. In the midst of these agonising reflections her brother bursts into her room. She sees at once that he has killed Mertoun, sees also that he himself is dying of poison which he has swallowed. Her heart is broken, and she dies. Mildred’s cousin Gwendolen, betrothed to the next heir to the earldom, Austin Tresham, is a quick, intelligent woman, who saw how matters stood, and would have rectified them had it not been rendered impossible by the adventure in the grounds, when the unhappy young lover allowed Thorold to kill him. Mr. Forster, in his Life of Charles Dickens (Book iv. I), says: “This was the date [1842], too, of Mr. Browning’s tragedy of the Blot in the ’Scutcheon, which I took upon myself, after reading it in the manuscript, privately to impart to Dickens; and I was not mistaken in the belief that it would profoundly touch him. ‘Browning’s play,’ he wrote (November 25th), ‘has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely, true, deeply affecting, full of the best emotion, the most earnest feeling, and the most true and tender source of interest, is to say that there is no light in the sun and no heat in blood. It is full of genius, natural and great thoughts, profound and yet simple and beautiful in its vigour. I know nothing that is so affecting – nothing in any book I have ever read – as Mildred’s recurrence to that “I was so young – I had no mother!” I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception like it. And I swear it is a tragedy that MUST be played; and must be played, moreover, by Macready. There are some things I would have changed if I could (they are very slight, mostly broken lines); and I assuredly would have the old servant begin his tale upon the scene, and be taken by the throat, or drawn upon, by his master in its commencement. But the tragedy I never shall forget, or less vividly remember, than I do now. And if you tell Browning that I have seen it, tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a