E510628A. Casa Guidi Windows.
The Spectator, 28 June 1851, pp. 616–617.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 320–322.
We concluded a review of Mrs. Browning’s collected poems, not many months ago, with a hope which scarcely rose above a wish, that she might live to work herself free of carelessness and affectation, and produce compositions worthy of her really fine sensibility and vigorous imagination. We gladly acknowledge Casa Guidi Windows to be a step, nay a stride, in the right direction. If nimiety, (to borrow a most useful technicality of modern criticism,) diffuseness, obscurity of thought, harshness of diction, a frequent and abrupt transition from the lofty and the beautiful to the ignoble and the commonplace, sudden headlong tumbles from the sublime empyrean of the eagle or the lower firmament where the lark becomes a “sightless song,” still too often recall the vapid inanities and the slipshod slovenliness of some of the earlier poems, the flight is better sustained, the power more predominant over the weakness, the thought more uniformly clear and vigorous, and the language less often degenerates into the thrice-underscored emphasis of school-girl correspondence or the colluvial fluency of the newspaper “hurry-graph.”
The subject of the poem is that phase of the Italian struggle for independence and unity which was exhibited at Florence in 1848, with the ensuing reaction, and the final occupation of Florence by the Austrians. Collaterally it introduces the general movement, and touches on its leading features, the characters of Pio Nono and Charles Albert, the murder of Count Rossi, and the moral defects to which primarily were owing the failure of the attempt and the disappointment of all immediate hope for Italian nationality. From the windows of the Casa Guidi Mrs. Browning surveyed the popular procession to the Pitti Palace, to receive the oath of the Grand Duke Leopold to a constitution; the marching and countermarching of the civic guard, the noisy demonstrations of the enfranchised citizens, “especially the little boys”; the planting of trees of liberty, and the universal reform of cafe-signs which followed the flight of the aforesaid Duke, who grew tired of the prospect of playing constitutional king long before the reality commenced. Then follows a pause: the people find liberty does not exactly mean exemption from toil and payment of taxes, but that along with its visionary grandeurs comes the necessity for self-sacrifice, exertion, even fighting—and then, ah! then, the “ignavum pecus” longs for its meadow-grass and its lazy shade, and will not plough in the heat and dust; and so Guerazzi, “the father of the land,” is dismounted from his pedestal, and the dear paternal Duke is recalled.
Well, how he came I will relate to you;
And if your hearts should burn, why, hearts must burn,
To make the ashes which things old and new
Shall be washed clean in—as this Duke will learn.
From Casa Guidi windows, gazing, then,
I saw and witness how the Duke came back,
The regular tramp of horse and tread of men
Did smite the silence like an anvil black
And sparkless. With her wide eyes at full strain,
Our Tuscan nurse exclaimed, “Alack, alack,
Signora, these shall be the Austrians.” “Nay,
Hush, hush,” I answered, “do not wake the child.”
For so my two-months’ baby sleeping lay
In milky dreams upon the bed and smiled;
And I thought “He shall sleep on, while he may,
Through the world’s baseness. Not being yet defiled,
Why should he be disturbed by what is done?”
Then, gazing, I beheld the long-drawn street
Live out, from end to end, full in the sun,
With Austria’s thousands. Sword and bayonet,
Horse, foot, artillery, cannons rolling on,
Like blind, slow storm-clouds gestant with the heat
Of undeveloped lightnings, each bestrode
By a single man, dust-white from head to heel,
Indifferent as the dreadful thing he rode,
Calm as a sculptured Fate, and terrible:
As some smooth river which hath overflowed,
Doth slow and silent down its current wheel
A loosened forest, all the pines erect;
So, swept in mute significance of storm,
The marshalled thousands, not an eye deflect
To left or right, to catch a novel form
Of the famed city adorned by architect
And carver, nor of beauties live and warm
Scared at the casements, all, straightforward eyes
And faces, held as steadfast as their swords,
And cognizant of acts, not imageries. [p. 617→]
The philosophic historian, who in after times would investigate the causes which led to this lamentable failure of rational expectations, and this miserable disappointment of more exaggerated hopes, will hardly need to do more than add details to the several heads of the description which, with a colouring of indignant wrong, Mrs. Browning gives of the practical proceedings of the Florentine patriots.
“Bitter things I write,
Because my soul is bitter for your sake,
O Freedom! O my Florence!”
But it is neither the vigour of the descriptions nor the indignant vehemence of the invective that gives to this poem its most powerful charm. That is owing to the womanly faith and trust, which, though tempered by experience and enlightened by a manly power of analyzing events and facing disagreeable truths, yet shine serene and untroubled either by the storm of adverse circumstances or the more bitter trial of disappointment through the weakness or the crimes of those who have been loved and confided in. And with this is united an insight into the possibilities of men that rises above the actual, shaped as it is by a thousand counteracting causes, and sees with the eye of prophecy and realizes with the glow of triumph “the great hereafter in the now.” Even poor wretched fatuous Pio Nono, sunk as he is below the level of the helot king of Prussia traitor, from sheer weakness, first to the traditions of his church and order, and next to the people whom he had seduced to the very acts of which he now makes them the scapegoats—even he is exhibited so fashioned by his antecedents and so trammelled by his circumstances, the falsehood and the cruelty on which the Papal throne rests, that we feel towards him more pity than either contempt or indignation. Of Charles Albert Mrs. Browning’s appreciation is so kindly, and her tribute to him so noble, as to force one to forget with her his bad generalship, the old Carbonari stain, and all that Italy might have gained had his genius been on a level with his aspirations.
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.”
The subjective mode of treatment, by which the theme has been fitted to a woman’s hand, and by which it acquires the unity of a work of art and at the same time dispenses with the detail of continuous narrative, enables the writer to diverge at pleasure from her direct course, and, without causing any feeling of interruption, to introduce a variety of topic and allusion. Foremost among such discursions is a magnificent description of the treasures of the Crystal Palace, and a fervent appeal on behalf of “poor Italia baffled by mischance,” to the nations on their way to the World’s Fair, “O gracious nations,” cries the poetess,
“You all go to your Fair; and I am one
Who at the roadside of humanity
Beseech your alms,—a justice to be done.
So, prosper!”
But of these episodical passages there is one so stirring in its fervid enthusiasm and righteous indignation, as to be not unworthy of standing side by side with Milton’s noblest sonnet, “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints!” and which as coming from a woman’s heart is a tenfold more impressive protest against a phase of philanthropy of which we have heard much of late years, and under which is very apt to lurk, unsuspected by itself, an epicurean love of ease and an immoral lust of gain. A Joan of Arc might have uttered it in her loftiest moments, in the fervent prayer which strengthened her arm and nerved her heart for some heroic action of great enterprise.
A cry is up in England, which doth ring
The hollow world through, that for ends of trade,
And virtue, and God’s better worshiping,
We henceforth should exalt the name of Peace,
And brave 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!— . . . . . .
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,
Constrain the anguished worlds from sin and grief,
Pierce them with conscience, purge them with redress,
And give us peace which is no counterfeit!
But who, it may be said, can be enthusiastic for a cause which has fallen by the weakness of its own adherents, the measure of whose folly can only be taken by those who know the rottenness of the power which oppresses them, and the mingled imbecility and wickedness of those who wield it? None but a woman and a mother, with her first-born smiling at her knee, could have given such an answer to the despairing and the contemptuous, as Mrs. Browning has given. She sends forth her dove over the wild waste of waters, and here is the olive branch brought back in its mouth, showing the new world emerging in hope and promise from the subsidence of the deluge.
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 unabash’d 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.
Well said Wordsworth, “Wisdom doth live with children round her knees”; and had he been living, even he, with all his indifference to contemporary poetry, would scarcely have failed to recognize this passage as a genuine inspiration, caught, where poets too seldom seek it, at their own hearths. And to those who think that women and politics should be wide as the poles asunder, we recommend it, as a proof of the feminine warmth of heart that may coexist with a vivid sympathy with the public affairs of nations, and of the deeper human interest those affairs themselves assume when thus viewed in relation to family life and from the centre of the natural affections. For ourselves, we are proud henceforth to rank, if not among Mrs. Browning’s indiscriminate admirers, at least among those who regard her poetical career with hopeful attention, and who look to her for some work not only instinct with genuine feeling and sparkling with flashes of beauty, but matured by patient thought, and perfected by that labour without which the greatest genius aspires in vain to the honours of art.
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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