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It is a literary "dodge" to reach the reader's sympathies by drawing the blackguard in order to find the hero; one good deed in that world of unreality wipes out all the unworthiness of a lifetime, and the reader puts down the tale with a longing to fall on the neck and wring the hand of the very next hiccupping Tommy he encounters. As Bishop Blougram says:
"But, bishop, you're " The big man raised his hand. "Not a word, for tonight I feel like Browning's Bishop Blougram who 'rolled him out a mind long crumpled, till creased consciousness lay smooth. It does me good to rub out the wrinkles occasionally. Now tell me, looking back at the last few years in St. Marys, do you appreciate what you've done?"
The nineteenth century is not precisely the age of the martyrs, or, if we are to find them, we must in general turn to politics and to science; Bishop Blougram does not pique himself on a genius for martyrdom; if he fights with beasts, it is on this occasion with a very small one, a lynx of the literary tribe, and in the arena of his own dining-room over the after-dinner wine.
Having now come perforce to the inevitable verge of Hamlet, I hasten to declare that I can advance no pretension to compete with the claim of that "literary man" who became immortal by dint of one dinner with a bishop, and in right of that last glass poured out for him in sign of amity by "Sylvester Blougram, styled in partibus Episcopus, necnon the deuce knows what."
When the time arrives for a beatific vision Blougram will be ready to adapt himself to the new state of things. Is not the best pledge of his capacity for future adaptation to a new environment this that being in the world he is worldly? We must not lose the training of each successive stage of evolution by for ever projecting ourselves half way into the next.
'I have just obtained permission, by special revelation, to proceed with it. His leisure hours he spent in the writing of edifying novels, the composition of acrostics in Latin Verse, and in playing battledore and shuttlecock with his little nieces. There was, indeed, only one point in which he resembled Bishop Blougram his love of a good table.
But Browning's intellectual interest is great in seeing all that a Blougram can say for himself; and as a destructive piece of criticism directed against the position of a Gigadibs what he says may really be effective.
Bishop Blougram sleek, ecclesiastical opportunist was not insensible to the superior merits of "rough, grand, old Martin Luther." In Browning's nature a singularly keen, exploring intelligence was united with a rare moral and spiritual ardour, a passion for high ideals.
And he abandoned the discussion. "It seems to me," pursued Mr. Candish, only half conscious that Mrs. Fenton had come to his aid, "that Bishop Blougram represents the most dangerous spirit of the age. His paltering with truth is a form of casuistry of which we see altogether too much nowadays." "Do you think," asked a timid feminine voice, "that Blougram was quite serious?
The clever sophistry of Bishop Blougram shows well enough how one can juggle with theology; and, after all, theology is chiefly some one man's insistence that everybody else shall make the same mistakes that he does."
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