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'Andrea del Sarto' is in its way the whole problem of the artist-ideal, the weak will and the inner failure, in all times and guises; and at the other end of the gamut, nobody will ever need again to set forth Bishop Blougram's attitude, or even that of Mr. Sludge the Medium.
"Oh, nothing pays, of course," was Fenton's reply, "but it is more or less amusing to see people make fools of themselves." The president of the club, at this moment, called the assembly to order, and announced that Mr. Fenwick had kindly consented "Readers always kindly consent," muttered Fenton aside to Mrs. Staggchase to read, Bishop Blougram's Apology, to which they would now listen.
Is Bishop Blougram's Apology a poem at all? some literary critics may ask.
Beneath all lay a greater matter, Emerson's grasp of the forms and conditions of progress, his reach of intellect, which could afford fair play to every one. His lecture on The Conservative is not a puzzling jeu d'esprit, like Bishop Blougram's Apology, but an honest attempt to set up the opposing chessmen of conservatism and reform so as to represent real life.
A nineteenth-century sceptic's exposition of his Christian faith is the paradoxical subject of Bishop Blougram's Apology, and it is one which admirably suited that side of Browning's genius which leaned towards intellectual casuistry.
I suppose Robert Browning must have thought so, because he makes the reading of it, in that odd rich poem, Bishop Blougram's Apology, the sign, together with testing a plough, of a man's conversion, from the unreal life of talk and words, to the realities of life; though I have never divined why he used this particular chapter as a symbol; and indeed I hope no one will ever make it clear to me, though I daresay the connection is plain enough.
Alongside this perversion of the lyric, he created a looser and freer form, the dramatic monologue, in which most of his most famous poems, Cleon, Sludge the Medium, Bishop Blougram's Apology, etc., are cast. To these new forms he added the originality of an extraordinary realism in style.
He immediately asked why Forster should suppose him hostile to the Roman Church. Forster and Duffy replied almost simultaneously, by referring to "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which had just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical and self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on Cardinal Wiseman.
If any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the best examples of this general idea in Browning's monologues, he may be recommended to notice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. As a whole, these apologies are written in a particularly burly and even brutal English. Browning's love of what is called the ugly is nowhere else so fully and extravagantly indulged. This, like a great many other things for which Browning as an artist is blamed, is perfectly appropriate to the theme. A vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. But the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that every now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which are like a burst of birds singing. Browning does not hesitate to put some of the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written in the English language into the mouths of such slaves as Sludge and Guido Franceschini. Take, for the sake of example, "Bishop Blougram's Apology." The poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet's works. It is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician grossness of a grand dinner-party
Browning, in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," breaks this first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to humanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism of Browning.
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