E510614B. Casa Guidi Windows.
The Atlas, 14 June 1851, p. 379.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 311.
“This poem,” says Mrs. Browning, “contains the impressions of the writer upon events in Tuscany of which she was a witness. … It is a simple story of personal impressions, whose only value is in the intensity with which they were received, as proving her warm affection for a beautiful and unfortunate country, and the sincerity with which they are related, as indicating her own good faith and freedom from all partisanship.” The poem is divided into two parts—the first relates to the struggle of Italian independence in 1848—“the second resumes the actual situation of 1851.” It will be gathered from this that the poem is a descriptive one—of a political tendency—and, therefore, somewhat out of the common paths trodden by Mrs. Browning.
We are not of the number of those critics who object to Macbeth that it is not Romeo and Juliet, or to Comus that it is not Paradise Lost. We would not therefore object to the present work that it is not Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, or Bertha in the Lane, or the Rhymes [sic] of the Duchess May. But we may say that it is something much more prosaic and much less interesting than any of Mrs. Browning’s romance-poems; and that we are much better pleased with her chaunts when she deals with fiction than when she deals with fact. They who have returned again and again to Mrs. Browning’s romances, delighting in their tenderness and truth, their pure feeling and nervous eloquence, and have been touched to the heart’s core by their profound pathos, will be disappointed with this work; but it has very striking merits of its own. It is graphic, eloquent, inspiriting. Perhaps we should have relished it more three years ago than in these peaceful times; but now we can only say that when we next meet Mrs. Browning in print we hope she will not present us with a “Revolutionary Epic.”
But there are, doubtless, some very noble things to be seen from these Casa Guidi Windows. The following, for example, contains a striking thought very strikingly expressed:—
A cry is up in England, which doth ring
The hollow world through, that for ends of trade
And virtue, and God’s better worshipping,
We henceforth should exalt the name of Peace,
And leave those rusty wars that eat the soul,—
(Besides their clippings at our golden fleece.)
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.
O Lord of Peace, who art Lord of Righteousness,
Constrained the anguished worlds from sin and grief,
Pierce them with conscience, purge them with redress,
And give us peace which is no counterfeit!
This is not unworthy of the hand which wrote The Cry of the Children and the Cry of the Human; but the stately march of this continuous decasyllable rhyme is not so well adapted to Mrs. Browning’s muse as the more irregular lyrical stanzas which she has hitherto seemed to effect. The present work, in spite of its very striking merits, will not attain the popularity of those pieces which made the reputation of Miss Barrett; but from that reputation it will nothing detract.
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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