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Fra Lippo Lippi, Browning's Naughty Hierophant

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Fra Lippo Lippi, Browning's Naughty Hierophant FRA LIPPO LIPPI, BROWNING'S NAUGHTY HIEROPHANT By Joseph A. Dupras FRA LIPPO LIPPI, by mixing insults with affability, indignation with deference, self-righteousness with self-pity, and impenitence with confession, avoids arrest and professional embarrassment for his sportive sexuality and Bohemian sensibilities. Attempting to change the guards' perceptions ("Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk!" (vol. i, line 3) and win their sympathy, Lippo establishes a disarming fellowship of arrested development with them and identifies himself primarily as a painter from whom they should expect abnormal values. His clerical appearance falsifies his real character, which he insists they recognize so that their own blend of carnal sensations and immature artistic awareness will license his behavior. Lippo disrobes the "beast" (80) who cannot "subdue the flesh" (74), as he admits himself being, in hope that such creative stripteasing and sprezzatura will arrest the arresters. Fortunately for him, his auditors are susceptible enough to impulses of doing as one likes to disregard "the morality of [an] event [that] is indefensible" (Goldfarb 61); his methodical confirmation of them as his kindred souls undresses another spurious authority not enti- tled to enjoin his fleshliness. Moreover, the watch, being party to his ventures, vicariously satisfies a need to snatch a grace outside moral and social restraints, but imagined to be within art's reach. In awakening the police to greater artistic consciousness, Lippo tempts them with an idealized, barrierless profession partaking of holiness. He gains interpretive advantage by exploiting their naive- te, their torpor, and even their vain aspirations. 113 114 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES However, what Lippo (with his boys-will-be-boys attitude) wants the night watch to notice differs from what Browning ex- pects readers with a greater ethical bent to apprehend, which David Sonstroem refers to as "a countervailing or moderating force to Lippo's mesmeric charm" (734). As Lippo becomes too familiar (even I'm already on a first-name basis with him), readers are perhaps not alert enough to his designs against interpretive accuracy and to his continued distortions of religious principles that fre- quently comprise the core of Browning's poetics. The monologue propagates an attractive but self-incriminating, naughty artistry that cannot gainsay moral accountability. Nevertheless, a reader who excessively tightens the interpretive screw against Lippo's life and art risks joining a homiletic alliance, the members of which, as Browning and Lippo know, are legion. "Fra Lippo Lippi," in typical Browning fashion, pushes even the most careful interpretive titans toward a dangerous, multifaceted hermeneutics; amusement, ethical standards, and critical privilege compete for our prized souls in a contest forcing us "to apprehend Lippo not only by sympathy, but also by judgment that does consider 'logical and moral correct- ness'" (Healy 58, quoting Langbaum 86). Browning's poem is so celebrated for its depiction of an artist's coming to maturity amid societal and religious prejudices that it has become one of those "things we have passed / Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see" (301-02). We demand more of ourselves as interpreters than Lippo demands of himself as (ir)religious painter only if we care to see an inherent sacrilegiousness in his imagination and artistry. He repudiates on justifiable artistic grounds a technique that does not respect accuracy and realism: Thus, yellow does for white When what you put for yellow's simply black, And any sort of meaning looks intense When all beside itself means and looks naught. (201-04) Nevertheless, he uses the same strategy himself to (dis)color moral issues of a conventionally black or white nature.1 Warning that context can distort the intensity of any meaning, the persona does become the poet's mouthpiece in calling for greater perceptiveness toward a knotty text, which can be made to seem "naught." An aesthetically-progressive reader will probably concur with Lippo BROWNING S NAUGHTY HIEROPHANT 11 5 about the shamefulness of "paint[ing] soul, by painting body / So ill" (199-200). But this same reader is prone to a moral achromatop- sia in adopting artistic spectacles that tend to distort shades of meaning in Browning's ethical spectrum. By identifying the world's "meaning" as exclusively sensual ("meat and drink," 314— 15), Lippo altogether annuls moral scruples, limits intensity and goodness to self-gratification, and vulgarizes "higher things" (309). His "hunger-pinch[ed]" (126) impulse to possess and reproduce such "meaning" conflates passion and genius. Restricting "higher things" to "the same truth" (309), that is, "simple beauty and naught else" (217), he turns even religious art into ethically "care- less" (294), obscene craftsmanship.2 The "soul" of his art is naturalism, infusing even a religious subject with physical inten- sity; the "soul" of his monologue is double entendre, making even an apology caustic and indecent. He revels in eroticism, assuming that such open defiance extenuates his profane artifices. Yet Browning determines Lippo's spiritual apostasy, dares to test "belief in a great moral purpose . and none of the lower incitements" as constitut- ing artistic excellence ("Essay on Shelley" 1: 1004), and challenges readers to rate the monologist's "grey beginning" (392) as the "neutral mood" of "a cheat" ("Essay on Shelley" 1005). Lippo rejects as simplistic the Prior's conventional notion of art as a morally potent medium because he sees the priesthood as still bogus or duplicitous, despite its access to spiritualized artistry, and sees Christianity's failure to uplift humankind — even "after the passion of a thousand years" (157). Since the cloister is a rat hole of carnality, Lippo appropriately "put[s] the front on it" (141) by indiscriminately portraying a gallery of rogues and clerics. The less inspiring his art is in terms of ethical worthiness, the more realisti- cally it represents the morally base Carmelites. Just as the art excludes moral service, so the artist reads religious subjects pro- fanely. Consequently, untroubled that his works do not "instigate to prayer" (316), Lippo reduces religious iconology to banalities: Strikes in the Prior: 'when your meaning's plain 'It does not say to folk — remember matins, 'Or, mind you fast next Friday!' Why, for this What need of art at all? A skull and bones, Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or, what's best, A bell to chime the hour with, does as well. (317-22) Il6 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES Whereas the Prior intends religious art to convey ethical doctrine directly and emphatically, Lippo would demystify moral norms to coincide with an artistry that just as reductively celebrates the sensations of a material soul that can afford not to hear the plainer meaning of Catholic practice. Both men are mistaken about iconographic technique, the former diminishing graphic precision, the latter inflating it. Despite the Prior's sexual hypocrisy and narrow perspective on "the mark of painting" (176), he hits the religious mark by identifying Lippo's art as "devil's-game / . catchfing] men with show, / With homage to the perishable clay" (178—80). Lippo, unlike Browning, believes he can "paint it all plain out,"3 sufficing the eye without saving the soul (see The Ring and the Book 12.863), because his creativity is disemburdening (144) to suit a world without moral encumbrances. Readers who still prefer his style, which approaches "soul" physiognomically, to the Prior's defunct medieval semiology remain virtually undisturbed that Lippo arrogantly would rather fry bigger fish than prepare the Lord's way. Other readers, either less morally lenient or more sensitive to Browning's conviction about good art having to arise from a "proper moral aim" ("Essay on Shelley" 1004), seem or- dained to experience a troubling moral/aesthetic affinity with Lippo (one similar to Browning's with Shelley, including the same oppor- tunities for whitewashing). As the monologue proceeds, Lippo's sentiments sorely test an upright reader's defense of a faith that should transcend corrupt institutions. Having already decided that meaning is only mundane and pri- vate, he easily disarms the worldly-wise guards by rationalizing away moral scruples and averting a horny dilemma. With sexually suggestive archetypes and rhetorical ploys, Lippo's apology ma- nipulates their unreconciled sensual and ethical concerns; as he "interprets] God" (311), he creates the Creator in his own image, blurs distinctions between conscience and convenience, and warps Scriptural lessons to fit sexual inferences: The old mill-horse, out at grass After hard years, throws up his stiffheels so, Although the miller does not preach to him The only good of grass is to make chaff. What would men have? Do they like grass or no - May they or mayn't they? all I want's the thing Settled for ever one way. As it is, BROWNING S NAUGHTY HIEROPHANT 117 You tell too many lies and hurt yourself: You don't like what you only like too much, You do like what, if given you at your word, You find abundantly detestable. For me, I think I speak as I was taught; I always see the garden and God there A-making man's wife: and, my lesson learned, The value and significance of flesh, I can't unlearn ten minutes afterwards. (254-69, my emphases) Whereas the police probably fail to grasp Lippo's Biblical allusion to grass (Isaiah 40:6) and perhaps his sexually symbolic use of the horse and miller, they surely appreciate the way he remorselessly favors indulgence, thus avoiding their psychosexual quandary (em- phasized anaphorically by "you"). He blasphemously transforms God's loving remedy for Adam's loneliness into sexual procure- ment.4 Furthermore, if they have any carnal knowledge, they would likely endorse his regard for gratified concupiscence.
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