Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and science

facilitate his comparison of biblical criticism with Roman Catholicism and

Dissent:

This time he would not bid me enter

The exhausted air-bell of the Critic.

Truth's atmosphere may grow mephitic

When Papist struggles with Dissenter,

Impregnating its pristine clarity,

• One, by his daily fare's vulgarity,
  Its gust of broken meat and garlic;


• One, by his soul's too-much presuming
  To turn the frankincense's fuming
  And vapours of the candle starlike
  Into the cloud her wings she buoys on.
  Each, that thus sets the pure air seething,
  May poison it for healthy breathing -
  But the Critic leaves no air to poison;
  Pumps out with ruthless ingenuity
  Atom by atom, and leaves you - vacuity. (897-913)

The "air-bell" is a glass bell-shaped apparatus that was used in experiments
on the processes of combustion and respiration, most momentously by
Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier in the second half of the eighteenth
century. By placing a living organism (or burning matter) in the bell, the
gaseous transactions between it and the enclosed air can be contained and
observed. The poem figures both the "Dissenter" and the "Papist" as
distinctive organisms that, in asserting their complementary modes of
Christianity, pollute the eternal realm of "Truth's atmosphere." The former
exhale the honest and abject reek of ordinary mortal life, a "gust of broken
meat and garlic," while the latter respire the cleansing fumes of incense and
candles, which offer to transcend such intimations of mortality. Browning's
metaphor builds on the ancient analogy of the breath with the spirit, which
can be traced back both to the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximenes
(C.587-C.527 BC), who claimed "our soul... being air holds us together
and controls us, 17 and to the Bible, which maintains that God breathed the
soul into the original human body (Wisdom 15: 11). The Dissenters and the
Roman Catholics inflect the divine spirit, the ground of their respective
modes of Christianity, with their physical - and thus finite - nature. In the
late eighteenth century, experiments with the "air-bell" established that all
such forms of combustion (including animal respiration, as Laplace and
Lavoisier proved) exchange oxygen in the air for irrespirable carbon
dioxide: the distinctive "poison" that "sets the pure air seething" in the
poem. "When Papist struggles with Dissenter," the heated expulsion of