E510620A. Casa Guidi Windows.
The Sun, 20 June 1851, p. 3.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 314–315.
Remembering, as we did, so many exquisite effusions from the hand of our authoress, we welcomed, with all eagerness the verses contained in the present volume, immediately on their first appearance. It was an additional attraction to us that they were poetic blossoms which had bloomed in the midst of the sunshine and the verdure of an Italian landscape. Hence the book became to us a twofold object of fascination. We imagined to ourselves in the current of these lucubrations the luscious flavour imparted by the ripening influences of the “warm south,” a draught of—
the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainéd mouth!
In no respect have our anticipations been realized. “Casa Guidi Windows,” as the work of one who has already given indications of genius, has in fact yielded us only the most painful and vexatious disappointment. Its argument is incoherent throughout, its diction affected, its style artificial, its whole character that of prose jingling into rhyme without the merit of the smoothness usually found in even common-place versification. Yet, miserable failure as the volume is, containing as it does scarcely three pages in any way worthy of Mrs. Browning, it has been lauded to the skies by her mistaken eulogists, who would cram the veriest balderdash down our throats as poetry simply because it emanated from her pen. Poetry, forsooth! If this is poetry we never read one line of poetry before, and trust most devoutly we may never again be subjected to a similar infliction. Why, a fifth form boy never perpetrated more melancholy doggrel than may be encountered in profusion by just skimming over the pages haphazard. Take the following as a sample; it occurs in the 18th page:—
This was he,
Savonarola, who, while Peter sank,
With his whole boat-load, called courageously,
“Wake Christ! Wake Christ!”—who having tried the tank
(To rhyme, of course with sank.)
Of the church-waters used for baptistry,
Ere Luther lived to spill them, said they stank!
Poetry! The praise lavished upon stuff like this is ignominy scattered over the ashes of the really illustrious. But it may be argued by those who are infatuated into the indulgence of a blind admiration that we are unfairly extracting injurious specimens prepense. In testimony of the contrary, take the very opening lines of this much vaunted “Casa Guidi Windows”—
I heard last night a little child go singing,
’Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,
O bella libertà, O bella! stringing
(Another word dragged in neck and crop, in defiance of all euphony, solely and exclusively for the sake of the rhyme.)
The same words still on notes he went in search,
So high for,
(Rather blundering that: a sixpenny dictionary might have suggested of as more grammatical.)
you concluded the upspringing
Of such a nimble bird to sky from perch, &c.
(Perch, just in the same way to chime with search and church.)
Occasionally, moreover, the text runs into the baldest prose, recounting the most obvious matters of course. As, where gazers from the casements are spoken of—
By whom, if flower or kerchief were thrown out,
From any lattice, then the same would fall
Into the river underneath, no doubt.
No doubt! the reader answers like an echo. How solemn in its arresting awfulness also is that passage in which the writer points out the shade of the buried Buonarrotti, beginning flippantly—“That’s Michael Angelo!” Indeed. What shall be said likewise in extenuation of such a fragment as that in which Mrs Browning speaks
Of poets sonneteering in their sleep
’Neath the pale olives, which droop, tickling some
On chin and forehead from a dream too deep, &c?
It is because we see a volume crowded with specimens of this kind of composition panegyrised as a master-piece of poetic eloquence, and held up as a model of mingled grace and sublimity—it is because we hear it designated by all the most encomiastic words in the phraseology of literary vassalage, and because we see these things, and at the same time love and reverence in our heart of hearts such poems as the “Lycidas” of Milton, or the “Alastor” of Shelley, of the “Lusiad” of Camoens, or the “Colin Clout” of Spenser, or the “Fridoline” of Schiller, and because we regard works like these as poetry, that we must protest, with all the emphasis of which emotion can render us capable, against those who would compel us to bend the knee in homage before a book like “Casa Guidi Windows.” True, no doubt, a woman like Mrs. Browning could not exactly write two or three hundred pages of versification, however indifferent they might be in the aggregate, without scattering over them occasionally a clever thought or an ingenious expression. But, simply because at p. 7 we find the dawn described as “haggard like the sleepless,” and because at page 22 we find it observed that “happy accident turns holy art,” and because at page 2 the national songs of the Roman Peninsula are designated “pangs sheathed into music,” therefore we are not bound to accept the mass of wearisome and stilted affectations in which these minute atoms of excellence are almost lost sight of altogether, as a masterpiece of divine eloquence and preternatural inspiration. Yet in these extravagant and hyperbolical terms of panegyric the volume before us has been mentioned, and our present emphasis of condemnation is attributable to the disgust with which we have noticed this ill-judged servility of criticism to an empty name upon an indifferent title-page. It is this contemptible spirit of subserviency to mere reputation, which tends to cast such a malign and degenerating influence over literature—criticism, moreover, being thrown into contempt by its indiscriminate regard for cliquerie and its abject attention to mere favouritism. To such an absurdity have we seen this wretched evidence of infatuation carried in the instance now under consideration, that we have observed italicised such lines as the following—italicised as specimens of poetic ability:—
——slashed our sleeves like patriots, nor foreswore
The true Republic in the form of hats.
. . .. . .
We did not fight
Exactly, we fired muskets upon the void.
To show that victory was ours of right.
. . .. . .
We proved that Austria was dislodged, or would,
Or should be, and that Tuscany in arms,
Should, would, dislodge her in high hardihood.
And so on inexhaustibly drenching us with the diluted balderdash, and calling it forsooth by that divine appellation which belongs of right only to the sweetest and the wisest utterances of humanity. Gladly do we turn from such trash as makes up the bulk of these vaunted quotations to the subjoined passage, one which stands forth conspicuously as one of nervous and thoughtful beauty. The writer is speaking of violets strewn over the grave of Savonarola.
We, who are the seed
Of buried creatures, if we turned and spate
Upon our antecedents, we were vile,
Bring violets rather! If these had not walked
Their furlong, could we hope to walk our mile?
Therefore bring violets! Yet if we, self- baulked,
Stand still a-strewing violets all the while,
These had as well not moved, ourselves not talked
Of these. So rise up with a cheerful smile,
And, having strewn the violets, reap the corn,
And, having reaped and garnered, bring the plough
And draw new furrows ’neath the healthy morn,
And plant the great Hereafter in this Now.
A vigorous outburst like this we can admire, but not those spurious exclamations, which, coming from the lips of our authoress, are mistaken by her worshippers for the blended oracles of a poet and a metaphysician. Two metaphors, and two only out of the whole book, appear to us to be in any way deserving of commendation: the first where it is prettily said—
I wove these staffs so subtly that the gold
Swims to the surface of the silk like cream,
And curdles to fair patterns;
the second where, speaking in a grander mood, and with a voice more powerful in its resonance, it is remarked—
This model of a steam-ship moves your wonder?
You should behold it crushing down the brine,
Like a blind Jove who feels his way with thunder.
Elsewhere we come upon such very dilapidated figures of speech as (at page 46) that about the lion shaking from his mane the dewdrops. Once, and only once, Mrs. Browning rises from the dead level of her present mediocrity and writes as formerly wrote the vigorous hand of Elizabeth Barrett. It is where she pronounces, in numbers not unworthy of her theme, the funeral panegyric of the late hero-king, Charles Albert of Sardinia. She has been lamenting over one grave, and thus continues:—
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.’ And now that he is dead,
Admitting it is proved and manifest
That he was worthy, with a discrowned head,
To measure heights with patriots, let them stand
Beside the man in his Oporto shroud,
And each vouchsafe to take him by the hand,
And kiss him on the cheek, and say aloud,
‘Thou, too, hast suffered for our native land!
My brother, thou art one of us. Be proud.’
Very noble and beautiful is this, and worthy of a woman’s heart, and a woman’s intellect, and a woman’s enthusiasm. Nevertheless, twenty lines even though they be as meritorious as the foregoing, are insufficient to redeem a volume which is otherwise worthless as a specimen of tedious and affected versification. Considered, moreover, in regard to its design, the work must be denied all claim—even the faintest—to originality, it being literally neither more nor less than a very hoarse amen, croaked somewhat tardily to the aspirations syllabled in the “Roman” of Sydney Yendys. Altogether the book is calculated in no manner to extend Mrs. Browning’s popularity, tending, we believe, on the contrary, very seriously to deteriorate her reputation.
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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