E510701A. Casa Guidi Windows.
The Ladies’ Companion, 1 July 1851, p. 244.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 323–324.
All who have shared our pride in the genius of Mrs. Browning, and our conviction that she is supreme among the poetesses of England, will receive this, her latest and best poem, with a pleasure hardly to be expressed—certainly not to be exaggerated in the language of praise. Such a noble strain of deep thought and passionate eloquence has been poured forth by no woman, and by not many men. The title prepares us for the utterances of a looker-on in Italy. Casa Guidi belongs to Florence, and Mrs. Browning pours forth the thoughts stirred in her mind concerning Italy’s destinies by the sights which she beheld through “Casa Guidi Windows,” during the late years of Italian revolution. We are by no means ready to adopt all her enthusiasms—all her hopes—all her contempts on the occasion. Every woman is more or less a Prophetess, it has been said, in the directness of her insights, in the depths of her feelings; but to us, the web of Italian wrong and suffering, of wasted effort and deferred regeneration, seems more complex than it obviously does to her. No matter, it is her sincerity to herself—it is her power over what she saw—it is the great thoughts generated—it is the high language in which these are uttered, that we have to consider. It may be that it is we, and not she, who are within, rather than without, the truth of the oracle, which we are somewhat disposed to question.
Nor will we deal with Mrs. Browning hardly, because her poem has in it something more of the journal, with its impromptu fancies, than of the complete work of art, with its matured forms, and its justly blended colours. Carelessness has been objected to Mrs. Browning’s versification: it has been by some called unmusical; whereas we think that its breaks and pauses may be ascribed rather to a superabundance than to a deficiency of the musical sense—to instincts analogous with those which make certain singers and players lean too strongly towards a tempo rubato, by way of avoiding that mechanical monotony which becomes intolerable to every refined ear. Mrs. Browning is occasionally too colloquial, it is true; but so must ever be, more or less, every honest journalist, since he will rarely set down his dearest thoughts and most intimate convictions without in fancy appealing to some one imagined interlocutor—without unconsciously breaking away into some allusion, not impertinent, though, perhaps, in some measure excrescent. Let, however, the most be made of all these objections, and their sum be then doubled,—there is still, beside and above them, such an amount of power, passion, deep thought, and glowing imagery—so much of Woman’s tenderness and trust intertwined with Man’s strength—as will suffice to justify with all real readers of verse our assertion, that “Casa Guidi” is the most remarkable poem of its length and scope ever written by woman.
There are lines and sayings, too, on which any man might vaunt himself. Take for instance the entire balance struck betwixt Past and Present, with as much faith as hope regarding Italy—in that passage where our authoress pleads that the praise by regretful Memory bestowed on that country must not, and should not, be accepted as the due in full which sympathy has to pay.
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.
But in the fulness of truth and charity of her creed, our Poetess goes on to add,
Cold graves, we say?—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 * * * *
Who would build temples, without tombs in sight?
Who live, without some dead man’s benison?
* * * * * 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 above lines are almost Shakspearian in their force and universal beauty. Longer extracts by the half-hundred could we give; but those—the best of our readers—whom we earnestly would direct to this book—will have seen in the above fragments too many traces of the real poet’s hand and eye to doubt what manner of edifice must the “Casa Guidi” be, of which the above are only a few incidental decorations. Wordiness is apt to weaken praise, especially in such a case as Mrs. Browning’s. We have, further, to stand aside and make room for a tribute more graceful than our own, written ere this last, and most powerful of Mrs. Browning’s poems, had appeared.
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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