Victorian Poetry

DANIEL BROWN

their breath makes the air "mephitic," filling it with the waste gas carbon
dioxide (which Priestley observes was often termed mephitic air or acid). 18
Browning's analogy presents the poisonous "struggles" between the
Dissenting churches and Roman Catholicism as a natural excrescence of
these human institutions. Moreover, the Dissenters' chapel and St. Peter's
"miraculous Dome of God" (529) are open both to the purifying, uplifting,
divine spirit and the sinful, self-poisoning, human spirit. They are, then,
open air-bells, analogous to the respiration apparatus that Henri Victor
Regnault and Jules Reiset presented to the world in 1849; Regnault and
Reiset were the first scientists to both feed oxygen to the bell chamber and
remove the carbon dioxide produced by the captive animal. 19 The mixture
of eternal spirit and mortal breath in the open air-bells of the Catholics and
Dissenters is sanctioned by the peculiar nature of Christ as God Incarnate:
"He himself with his human air" (432).

While the Catholics and the Dissenters make the air "mephitic" with
their exhalations, "the Critic leaves no air to poison." The poem presents
the "laboratory of the Professor" (1243): the "air-bell" of his lecture theatre
that is not only hermetically sealed but also equipped with an air-pump
that draws out all air, leaving only a vacuum. This mechanism appears in
Joseph Wright's painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
(zy6y—68). Wright depicts the dramatic moment when a scientific demon-
strator, having pumped out the air from a glass chamber holding an almost
asphyxiated bird, is about to restore it to the vacuum, though probably too
late to save the animal. The biblical critic in Browning's poem is, like the
demonstrator in Wright's painting, charged with a crime of vivisection, a
spiritual asphyxiation. The lecturer, with "his cough, like a drouthy piston"
(893), is the mechanism that extracts all air, all breath and spirit from the
"air-bell," thus suffocating and desiccating all about him. The parallel that
Browning's analogy draws of the biblical critic to the vivisecting scientist
highlights the broadly scientistic approach that they share.

IV

The scientific knowledge of air advanced greatly in the decades that
separate Browning's "Christmas-Eve" from Gerard Manley Hopkins's
poem "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe," which was
composed in 1883. Hopkins's "world-mothering air" (GMH 1 , 124) is not
only the medium supporting both physical and spiritual life but also the
medium through which sunlight passes. By analogy, the Virgin Mary
figures as the medium through which "God's infinity" (18) assumes the
finite human form of Christ: God's "light / Sifted to suit our sight"

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