E510702A. Casa Guidi Windows.
The Scotsman, 2 July 1851, p. 3.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 324–326.
It is not often that the attention of the public—that is, of the small portion thereof who are lovers of poetry—is called to a work more remarkable in some respects than this latest production of Mrs. Browning. The authoress is already well known as having put forth two volumes of poetry, much of it of unquestioned power and excellence in its own walk—serious, aspiring, fervid, with a fervour truly religious—and yet, to our taste, somewhat too metaphysically subtle and obscure, as is the fatal tendency of nearly all the best poets of the last twenty years—somewhat too ambitious, and of a tone of such unvaried sadness, as, in spite of our sympathy with its manifold beauties, to throw over it the air of a painfully morbid self-consciousness. The young and serious intellect was apparent, in short, in death-throe struggle with itself and with the universe, in that fearful “sturm und drang” period, as Goethe describes it, which all deep and reflective natures must sooner or later pass through—seeking consolation and finding none, not in nature and in reason, but in fine-spun abstractions without a foundation, in spiritual castles in the air.
The work before us, if still chargeable in some degree with more than one of the faults we have indicated, is on the whole a powerful, passionate, thoroughly human production—written, every line of it, from the heart, and so going directly to the heart. It describes the alternations of triumph and disgrace which have marked the lot of the Italian people generally, but especially the Florentines, from the first dawn of liberty in 1848 down to the apparent consolidation of tyranny and slavery in 1851. It was from the windows of her abode in Florence, the Casa Guidi, that Mrs. Browning witnessed those external demonstrations which announced the rise and fall of one party and the other; and it was while looking from these windows, she tells us, that, hearing a child chaunting in the streets “O bella liberta!” the words, in connection with what was passing around, struck a key-note in her own nature, which set her pondering over the fortunes of Italy, past and present, and finally led her into the strain which produced the poem before us. The poem, we should not omit to mention, is divided into two parts, of very different merit, as it seems to us—the former part, which was written three years ago, treats of Italy during the short ascendancy of the democratic principle, and is in our opinion greatly inferior to the latter, which depicts the Italians and their cause prostrated beneath the brute force of Austria. And now, having said thus much by way of preface, we cannot do our readers a greater service than by giving them a few extracts, from which they may form an estimate of the work for themselves.
The reason of the failure of the people’s cause in Italy, apart from the perfidy of their rulers, lay undoubtedly in want of union and want of purpose. Hear Mrs. Browning:—
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. Behold, who blames
A crooked course, when not a goal is there,
To round the fervid striving of the games?
An ignorance of means may minister
To greatness, but an ignorance of aims
Makes it impossible to be great at all.
The Grand Duke Leopold’s perjury is thus powerfully and pathetically alluded to:—
I saw the man among his little sons,
His lips warm with their kisses, while he swore—
And I, because I am a woman, I,
Who felt my own child’s coming life before
The prescience of my soul, and held faith high,
I could not bear to think, whoever bore,
That lips so warmed, could shape so cold a lie.
Here is a warning for the Russia-bolstered crew of Princes, which they would do well to give timely heed to:—
Resuscitated monarchs disentomb
Grave-reptiles with them, in their new lifethroes:
Let such beware. Behold, the people waits,
Like God. As He, in his serene of might,
So they, in their endurance of long straits.
Ye stamp no nation out, though day and night
Ye tread them with that absolute heel which grates
And grinds them flat from all attempted height.
You kill worms sooner with a garden spade
Than you kill peoples; peoples will not die;
The tail curls stronger when you lop the head;
They writhe at every wound and multiply,
And shudder into a heap of life that’s made
Thus vital from God’s own vitality.
’Tis hard to shrivel back a day of God’s
Once fixed for judgment; ’tis as hard to change
The people’s, when they rise beneath their loads,
And heave them from their backs with violent wrench,
To crush the oppressor. For the judgment rod’s
The measure of this popular revenge.
We have next a protest against the peace whose existence is dependent alone on the crushed and powerless condition of the vanquished masses, their inability to make themselves heard:—
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 in starving homes! where many a lip
Has sobbed itself to sleep 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,
Constrain the anguished worlds from sin and grief,
Pierce them with conscience, purge them with redress,
And give us peace which is no counterfeit.
Surely these, if ever anything, are of the “thoughts that breathe and words that burn.” We would fain have quoted at full length the fine passage with which the poem concludes, in which Mrs Browning expresses her belief that the seeds of vitality and political regeneration in Italy, if crushed and dormant, are not dead, and utters, with the privilege of a seer, a prophecy of the not-distant triumph of freedom and of justice. Our space, however, will not permit us this, and we can only select the following touching allusion to the close of Charles-Albert’s career—his patriotic struggle, his exile, and his death:—
Another grave’s
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, has suffered for our native land!
My brother, thou art one of us, be proud!’
Here we close a book in which a prying criticism may easily detect blemishes, but which stands high, if judged by that high test which is, after all, the only true one, and overrides all aesthetic rules—its power, namely, to captivate the intellect and to touch the heart.
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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