E510607A. Casa Guidi Windows.
The Athenæum, 7 June 1851, pp. 597–598.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 306–309.
From the windows of her abode—the Casa Guidi, in Florence—Mrs. Browning witnessed several of those demonstrations, both popular and despotic, which commenced in Italy, as in Europe generally, during the eventful “’48.” The theme of her poem—as its title, thus explained, suggests—is, the late struggle for Italian freedom with especial reference to its developement in Tuscany.
It is not only as regards its local and historical interest that Italy is presented in the pages before us. Though fraught with the spirit of English strength and insight, they are Italian in their style. Fervid, unrestrained, and imaginative, they might have been delivered by an improvisatore in a Florentine thoroughfare to an audience of his countrymen. Nor are they, it must be said, free from those defects which belong to such impromptu inspirations. Diffuseness, ruggedness, concetti, and at times colloquialisms, impair and disfigure much that is noble in this poem both as regards its conception and its forms. We are aware that this loose mode of poetic utterance has its disciples,—and that Mrs. Browning’s errors are likely to be commended by those who can emulate them more easily than they can her genius. For ourselves, we are of those who believe that the patience which knows how to reject, to shape and to perfect, is not, as sneerers suppose, a substitute for true creative impulse, but a proof of it:—and it is precisely because Mrs. Browning so often exhibits what Hazlitt termed the “fortitude” of genius, that we regret she should ever lose sight of it. Completeness and severity are not artifice:—as witness the great Florentine to whom this very poem makes such eloquent appeal.
Premising that there are many beauties in the work which by reason of their diffuse and fantastic context we are precluded from quoting, we have almost done with censure. Of the generous impulse, the fine imagination, the social and political wisdom, to be found in it, we shall offer such examples as will suggest their own comment.
Italy’s ancient glory, Mrs. Browning thinks, has been, like that of many an ancestral house, corrupted from a stimulant into an opiate. The heirs of such great renown, she implies, are more willing to dream over their bequest than to put it to use. On this point she finely and truly exclaims:—
We do not serve the dead—the past is past!
God lives, and lifts his glorious mornings up
Before the eyes of men, who wake at last,
And put away the meats they used to sup,
And on the dry dust of the ground outcast
The dregs remaining of the ancient cup,
And turn to wakeful prayer and worthy act.
The dead, upon their awful ’vantage ground—
The sun not in their faces—shall abstract
No more our strength: we will not be discrowned
Through treasuring their crowns, nor deign transact
A barter of the present, in a sound,
For what was counted good in foregone days.
O Dead, ye shall no longer cling to us
With your stiff hands of desiccating praise,
And hold us backward by the garment thus,
To stay and laud you in long virelays!
Still, no! we will not be oblivious
Of our own lives, because ye lived before,
Nor of our acts, because ye acted well,—
We thank you that ye first unlatched the door—
We will not make it inaccessible
By thankings in the doorway any more,
But will go onward to extinguish hell
With our fresh souls, our younger hope, and God’s
Maturity of purpose. Soon shall we
Be the dead too! and, that our periods
Of life may round themselves to memory,
As smoothly as on our graves the funeral-sods,
We must look to it to excel as ye,
And bear our age as far, unlimited
By the last sea-mark! so, to be invoked
By future generations, as the Dead.
She were no poetess, however, who did not revere the Past in its legitimate influence. The present writer has her tribute to that also.—
It shall be testified
That living men who throb in heart and brain,
Without the dead, were colder. If we tried
To sink the past beneath our feet, be sure
The future would not stand. Precipitate
This old roof from the shrine—and, insecure,
The nesting swallows fly off, mate from mate.
Scant were the gardens, if the graves were fewer!
And the green poplars grew no longer straight,
Whose tops not looked to Troy. Why, who would fight
For Athens, and not swear by Marathon?
Who would build temples, without tombs in sight?
Who live, without some dead man’s benison?
Who seek truth, hope for good, or strive for right,
If, looking up, he saw not in the sun
Some angel of the martyrs, all day long
Standing and waiting! your last rhythms will need
The earliest key-note. Could I sing this song,
If my dead masters had not taken heed
To help the heavens and earth to make me strong,
As the wind ever will find out some reed,
And touch it to such issues as belong
To such a frail thing? Who denies the dead,
Libations from full cups? Unless we choose
To look back to the hills behind us spread,
The plains before us sadden and confuse;
If orphaned, we are disinherited.
The poem is divided into two parts:—and in the first is described a procession of the Florentines in honour of the right conceded to them by the Duke to form a civic guard. This description itself is a singular instance of the diffuse, over-fanciful and unmusical style which we have objected to:—but the following lines towards the close have dramatic character.—
Ever in the crowd,
Rude men, unconscious of the tears that kept
Their beards moist, shouted; and some laughed aloud,
And none asked any why they laughed and wept:
Friends kissed each other’s cheeks, and foes long vowed
Did it more warmly; two-months’ babies leapt
Right upward in their mothers’ arms, whose black,
Wide, glittering eyes looked elsewhere; lovers pressed
Each before either, neither glancing back;
And peasant maidens, smoothly ’tired and tressed,
Forgot to finger on their throats the slack
Great pearl-strings; while old blind men would not rest,
But pattered with their staves and with their shoes
Still on the stones, and smiled as if they saw.
O Heaven! I think that day had noble use
Among God’s days.
We should say, that the first division of the poem was written in 1848, when the auguries that Pius the Ninth would prove a friend to Italian liberty were yet welcomed and trusted. Mrs. Browning, however, has even at this period motives for withholding unlimited participation in the popular confidence. With a “learned spirit in human dealings,” she sees that the future of a man must in great measure be determined by his past; and not without charity, yet with rational doubt, she takes leave concerning the Pope—
To ponder what he must be, ere we are bold
For what he may be, with our heavy hope
To trust upon his soul. So, fold by fold,
Explore this mummy in the priestly cope
Transmitted through the darks of time, to catch
The man within the wrappage, and discern
How he, an honest man, upon the watch
Full fifty years, for what a man may learn,
Contrived to get just there; with what a snatch
Of old world oboli he had to earn
The passage through; with what a drowsy sop
To drench the busy barkings of his brain;
What ghosts of pale tradition, wreathed with hop
’Gainst wakeful thought, he had to entertain
For heavenly visions; and consent to stop
The clock at noon, and let the hour remain
(Without vain windings up) inviolate,
Against all chimings from the belfry. Lo!
From every given Pope, you must abate,
Albeit you love him, some things—good, you know—
Which every given heretic you hate
Claims for his own, as being plainly so.
A Pope must hold by Popes a little,—yes,
By councils,—from Nicæa up to Trent,—
By hierocratic empire, more or less
Irresponsible to men,—he must resent
Each man’s particular conscience, and repress
Inquiry, meditation, argument,
As tyrants faction. Also, he must not
Love truth too dangerously, but prefer
“The interests of the Church,” because a blot
Is better than a rent in miniver,—
Submit to see the people swallow hot
Husk-porridge which his chartered churchmen stir
Quoting the only true God’s epigraph,
“Feed my lambs, Peter!”—must consent to sit
Attesting with his pastoral ring and staff,
To such a picture of our Lady, hit
Off well by artist angels, though not half
As fair as Giotto would have painted it;
To such a vial, where a dead man’s blood
Runs yearly warm beneath a churchman’s finger;
To such a holy house of stone and wood,
Whereof a cloud of angels was the bringer
From Bethlehem to Loreto!—Were it good
For any Pope on earth to be a flinger
Of stones against these high-niched counterfeits?
Apostates only are iconoclasts.
He dares not say, while this false thing abets
That true thing, “This is false!” he keepeth fasts
And prayers, as prayers and fasts were silver frets
To change a note upon a string that lasts,
And make a lie a virtue. Now, if he
Did more than this,—higher hoped and braver dared,—
I think he were a Pope in jeopardy,
Or no Pope rather! for his soul had barred
The vaulting of his life. And certainly,
If he do only this, mankind’s regard
Moves on from him at once, to seek some new
Teacher and leader! He is good and great
According to the deeds a Pope can do;
Most liberal, save those bonds; affectionate,
As princes may be; and, as priests are, true—
But only the ninth Pius after eight,
When all’s praised most.
Our readers will agree with us that poetry like this is somewhat too loose and colloquial in its manner:—and we think they will see also in it, that Mrs. Browning has, consciously or unconsciously, caught the tone of her husband. Ere this grows on her, we desire to warn her that her own poetical mantle was of too good stuff and pattern for her not to be a loser by borrowing any other.
The second part of the poem resumes the tale of Florence after the Duke has broken his pledge and fled from his subjects. The mad enthusiasm of a people revolting rather from impulse than from principle—substituting sound for action and the hollow pageants of nominal freedom for the calm purpose and self-sacrificing energy by which only, freedom can be insured—are vividly brought before us. Admirable is the graphic detail and smiting is the sad irony which illustrate this portion of the story. Nor less excellent is this comment on the follies which had such disastrous results.—
Men who might
Do greatly in a universe that breaks
And burns, must ever know before they do.
Courage and patience are but sacrifice;
And sacrifice is offered for and to
Something conceived of. Each man pays a price
For what himself counts precious, whether true
Or false the appreciation it implies.
Here, was no knowledge, no conception, nought!
Desire was absent, that provides great deeds
From out the greatness of prevenient thought;
And action, action, like a flame that needs
A steady breath and fuel, being caught
Up, like a burning reed from other reeds,
Flashed in the empty and uncertain air,
Then wavered, then went out.
The Duke is brought back to subjugated Florence by the aid of Austria. His return is told in words which are as defined and glowing as the forms and colours by which painting appeals to the eye. In dealing with these “modern instances,” Mrs. Browning has invested them with a tone of ideal grandeur which gives them in point of poetic effect all the remoteness of antiquity. We could cite no better example of the truth that the distance between the common and the ideal is not that between the past and the present, but that between objects as perceived by the senses and objects as interpreted by the mind.
Deeply as Mrs. Browning venerates peace, she is no party to that one-sided tranquillity which is built on the sacrifice of the weak. True peace she holds to be the recognition of mutual rights by the component classes of a State. The apathy of a nation prostrate beneath tyranny she thinks to be a worse evil than the horrors of popular insurrection. We know few things in modern poetry more passionate, vigorous, or true than her protest against that hushing of human claims which means not the silence of a people contented, but that of a people stifled. Her protest, it is almost needless to say, is not [p. 598→] directed against those noble teachers who, abhorring recourse to the sword, would base national peace upon national justice,—but against the despotic who in the lust of power would crush the soul, and the sordid who would postpone its demands to the convenience of traffic.
I, too, have loved peace, and from bole to bole
Of immemorial, undeciduous trees,
Would write, as lovers use, upon a scroll
The holy name of Peace, and set it high
Where none should pluck it down. On trees, I say,—
Not upon gibbets!—With the greenery
Of dewy branches and the flowery May,
Sweet mediation ’twixt the earth and sky
Providing, for the shepherd’s holiday!
Not upon gibbets!—though the vulture leaves
Some quiet to the bones he first picked bare.
Not upon dungeons! though the wretch who grieves
And groans within, stirs not the outer air
As much as little field-mice stir the sheaves.
Not upon chain-bolts! though the slave’s despair
Has dulled his helpless, miserable brain,
And left him blank beneath the freeman’s whip,
To sing and laugh out idiocies of pain.
Nor yet on starving homes! where many a lip
Has sobbed itself asleep through curses vain!
I love no peace which is not fellowship,
And which includes not mercy. I would have
Rather, the raking of the guns across
The world, and shrieks against Heaven’s architrave.
Rather, the struggle in the slippery fosse,
Of dying men and horses, and the wave
Blood-bubbling … Enough said!—By Christ’s own cross,
And by the faint heart of my womanhood,
Such things are better than a Peace which sits
Beside the hearth in self-commended mood,
And takes no thought how wind and rain by fits
Are howling out of doors against the good
Of the poor wanderer. What! your Peace admits
Of outside anguish while it sits at home?
I loathe to take its name upon my tongue—
It is no peace. ’Tis treason, stiff with doom,—
’Tis gagged despair, and inarticulate wrong,
Annihilated Poland, stifled Rome,
Dazed Naples, Hungary fainting ’neath the thong,
And Austria wearing a smooth olive-leaf
On her brute forehead, while her hoofs outpress
The life from these Italian souls, in brief.
Notwithstanding the ostensible failure of the Italian struggle, Mrs. Browning believes that it has already subserved the interests of freedom. It has shattered the last link that knit the affections of the people to Papal domination. It has prepared the mind of Italy for the reception of religious freedom. It has emancipated human hearts from those superstitions which make intolerance easy. In expressing these hopes, the poetess renders a worthy and judicious tribute to Mazzini,—and makes touching reference to the patriotic impulse of Charles Albert, to his interval of weakness, and to its final expiation.—For one fine passage of prophecy, speaking by the mouth of Mrs. Browning’s Muse out of the graves of the patriots, we must, despite its length, make room.—
In the name of Italy,
Meantime, her patriot dead have benizon!
They only have done well; and what they did
Being perfect, it shall triumph. Let them slumber.
No king of Egypt in a pyramid
Is safer from oblivion, though he number
Full seventy cerements for a coverlid.
These Dead be seeds of life, and shall encumber
The sad heart of the land until it loose
The clammy clods and let out the spring-growth
In beatific green through every bruise.
The tyrant should take heed to what he doth,
Since every victim-carrion turns to use,
And drives a chariot, like a god made wroth,
Against each piled injustice. Ay, the least
Dead for Italia, not in vain has died,
However vainly, ere life’s struggle ceased,
To mad dissimilar ends they swerved aside.
Each grave her nationality has pieced
By its own noble breadth, and fortified,
And pinned it deeper to the soil. Forlorn
Of thanks be, therefore, no one of these graves!
Not Hers,—who, at her husband’s side, in scorn,
Outfaced the whistling shot and hissing waves,
Until she felt her little babe unborn
Recoil, within her, from the violent staves
And bloodhounds of the world: at which, her life
Dropt inwards from her eyes, and followed it
Beyond the hunters. Garibaldi’s wife
And child died so. And now, the sea-weeds fit
Her body like a proper shroud and coif,
And murmurously the ebbing waters grit
The little pebbles, while she lies interred
In the sea sand. Perhaps, ere dying thus,
She looked up in his face which never stirred
From its clenched anguish, as to make excuse
For leaving him for his, if so she erred.
Well he remembers that she could not choose.
A memorable grave! Another is
At Genoa, where a king may fitly lie,—
Who bursting that heroic heart of his
At lost Novara, that he could not die,
Though thrice into the cannon’s eyes for this
He plunged his shuddering steed, and felt the sky
Reel back between the fire-shocks;—stripped away
The ancestral ermine ere the smoke had cleared,
And naked to the soul, that none might say
His kingship covered what was base and bleared
With treason, he went out an exile, yea,
An exiled patriot! Let him be revered.
Yea, verily, Charles Albert has died well:
And if he lived not all so, as one spoke,
The sin pass softly with the passing bell.
For he was shriven, I think, in cannon smoke,
And taking off his crown, made visible
A hero’s forehead. Shaking Austria’s yoke
He shattered his own hand and heart. “So best,”
His last words were upon his lonely bed,—
“I do not end like popes and dukes at least—
Thank God for it.”
* * * *
The sun strikes, through the windows, up the floor:
Stand out in it, my own young Florentine,
Not two years old, and let me see thee more!
It grows along thy amber curls, to shine
Brighter than elsewhere. Now, look straight before,
And fix thy brave blue English eyes on mine,
And from thy soul, which fronts the future so,
With unabashed and unabated gaze,
Teach me to hope for, what the Angels know,
When they smile clear as thou dost. Down God’s ways,
With just alighted feet between the snow
And snowdrops, where a little lamb may graze,
Thou hast no fear, my lamb, about the road,
Albeit in our vain-glory we assume
That, less than we have, thou hast learnt of God.
Stand out, my blue-eyed prophet!—thou, to whom
The earliest world-day, light that ever flowed
Through Casa Guidi windows chanced to come!
Now shake the glittering nimbus of thy hair,
And be God’s witness;—that the elemental
New springs of life are gushing everywhere,
To cleanse the water courses, and prevent all
Concrete obstructions which infest the air!
—That earth’s alive, and gentle or ungentle
Motions within her, signify but growth:
The ground swells greenest o’er the labouring moles.
Howe’er the uneasy world is vexed and wroth,
Young children, lifted high on parent souls,
Look round them with a smile upon the mouth,
And take for music every bell that tolls.
Who said we should be better if like these?
And we … despond we for the future, though
Posterity is smiling at our knees,
Convicting us of folly? Let us go—
We will trust God. The blank interstices
Men take for ruins, He will build into
With pillared marbles rare, or knit across
With generous arches, till the fane’s complete.
This world has no perdition, if some loss.
From such brief analysis of this poem as we have been able to give, and from the foregoing extracts, our readers will see that we have been dealing with no ordinary work. Such exceptions as we have taken gain their chief emphasis from the genius to which they act as a foil. In whatever degree they may detract from the completeness of what is here written, they nothing abate our high estimate of the writer. Not the least interesting feature of these pages is, the developement which they supply of the author’s mental history. Mrs. Browning’s poetical course, tinged at its commencement with something of sentimental melancholy, has gradually acquired the brighter influences of faith and sympathy,—and the present volume shows their application to practical uses. Her record of personal feelings has given way to the morals which they suggest,—and the interests of the single heart have expanded into those of mankind. This, we take it, is the progress of every nature in which the poetic element is deeply rooted. The mind which at first sadly contrasts the actual with its ideal, learns in time to find the ideal in the actual. Such is the highest office of the poet,—and one which, to our thinking, Mrs. Browning has here fulfilled. Her generous sympathies with a wronged nation have not blinded her to the errors which wrecked its struggles,—nor have the familiarities of the present hid from her the spiritual truth which underlies them. Her book is at once courageous and wise. Amidst the many who hold failure as disgrace, she has apprehended the right that should have triumphed. Through the obloquy of defeats she has recognized as heroes now, men who will be so chronicled in the future. She has perceived by foresight what Posterity discovers through retrospect,—that greatness unreviled lacks its credentials—that martyrdom is the path to canonization.
[John Westland Marston]
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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