E510800A. Casa Guidi Windows.
The Prospective Review, August 1851, pp. 313–325.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 326–330.
Old things appear new to new minds. Here is an English visitor to Italy sufficiently read in the political history of the country, declaring her own part in the last of the three European Hopes and Disappointments which Italy has caused, by its rise and fall, within thirty years. An inveterate and incurable, because well-grounded, dissatisfaction with their present condition, makes the Italians always ready, on any occasion, to burst forth into a practical protest, whether in a well or an ill judged manner, against its continuance. God has given to nations the same species of vital tenacity which he has given to individuals: once alive, neither man nor people will give up a proper existence without an intense and oft-renewed struggle. They die very hard. To kill a nation is an immense undertaking. The symbolists need not go to so local and temporary an affair as the draining and cultivation of the Peloponnesus, for the interpretation of the Fable of the Hydra. The Hydra is National existence, the peculiarity of whose numerous heads is that for every one cut off two immediately supply its place, unless the sources of the fresh life be absolutely burnt up with fire; and that the centre head is immortal. We may tell Austria and Russia that their combat is in vain, and that the prestige of the Heraclean success is not theirs, though the instructive symbol of the Heraclean labour may be taken to themselves. These struggles, though ending in the defeat of the peoples, are not vanity—the series of the failures does not lessen but increase the certainty of the final triumph. The Italian struggles are not so heroic or so destructive as those of Poland and Hungary, but, coming at certain intervals, they revive to each generation the consciousness of the fact, and the conclusions to which the fact leads, that Italy is not part of Austria, and that Italians have not ceased to be one among the distinct peoples and nationalities of the world. Thus, then, the rise, and slaughters, [p. 314→] and weary imprisonments, and failure of 1821, the similar though stiller features of 1830, and the wider sweep of the same events and feelings in 1848, are not in vain. They are the national protests renewed at intervals—so that each generation shall make and feel them afresh, and grow up under their influence—and they gather momentum and significance every time they are made. The last struggle, too, has this hopeful peculiarity. It has been indigenous, and example-giving—not extraneous and example-taking. In 1821, it was the revolution of Spain that supplied courage and pretext to Naples and Piedmont; in 1830 it was that of France. But in 1848 Italy herself, nay, that power in her which was supposed to be the immoveable centre of corruption and despotism, rose spontaneously, and it was Rome—it was the Italian Papacy—that sent the ferment and the spirit of just reforms through the nations of Europe.
Though therefore the old features recur—though frightened and politic princes play the same lying, cowardly parts at first, and the same treacherous and despotic parts at last—though the Austrian comes in at last and settles the matter as usual—though Italians begin with the same brave cries, and end in the same submissive silence—though the tailor and the sign-painter and the haberdasher are the media through which they most successfully show to the world and to each other their love of freedom, and desire of self-government—and though the same excess, childishness and ignorance, bring back the old victims to the old yoke, which is easily put on them again, when they are hungry and dispirited, and want quiet and comfortable quarters again, yet the movement of 1848 is the most important and hopeful of any yet, and must necessarily have successors.
It is not our purpose to enter upon that tolerably well-worn subject. We have to do with a Poem by a Lady, not the programme or resumè of a Politician. Mrs. Browning takes advantage of her residence in Florence at the rise and the fall of the revolutionary curtain, to tell us what she saw and felt on both occasions; and very pleasantly she tells her interesting story. But we have several faults, notwithstanding, to find with her Poem—how could we be critics if we had not? Its first great defect lies [p. 315→] not in the dissimilarity of its two parts, but in their too great resemblance. We wish the apology for “the discrepancy” between them had been more needed. One of two things is certain to our mind, either that on revision the writer has bated the warm breath of hope and gladness with which her first part was originally surrounded, or that she never felt any really poetical enthusiasm in reference to the state of things she described. There is a qualified, hesitating, dubious, thoughtful faith in the possibility of a future for Italy, which shows that the prophet had the benefit of subsequent events to guide and sway the tone of her prophecy, or that she never felt the prophetic furor at all. The idea of a twofold Poem, the first part burning with hope and enthusiastic faith, a really “exultant prophecy,” and the second drenched in the tears of indignant and sorrowful disappointment, would have involved a “discrepancy” which there would be no chance of the reader finding “painful.” It is the sameness of the level on which the hope, prepared to be disappointed, of the first part, and the hope actually disappointed in the second, take their stand, that destroys the poetry and the effect of the intended and probably actual contrast. Of the two leaders to whom she looked up with patriotic hope in the first part, the Pope and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, she takes great and successful pains to show that from the first nothing really free and great could possibly be expected; and of the second she indulged a faint hope that he was converted, from his careful face, the reported tear in his eye, and his introduction of his children to the crowd—the first two being very natural to a man agitated by a revolution, and not knowing how he should suppress it, and the last being a mere royal art. It is evident that the chief reason for which Mrs. Browning trusts the Grand Duke and distrusts the Pope, is that she was near the one, and was, in common with the people, the victim of his royal play; whereas she was away from the other, and the influence of that personal attraction which in the Pope’s case was far greater. Had she looked out of Corso windows in Rome, instead of Casa Guidi windows in Florence, had she seen the Pope’s tearful benignant countenance, and witnessed the wave of his benedictory hand, and the kneeling, weeping, and confiding people, her faith [p. 316→] would have been changed. She would have thought and believed little or nothing of the Grand Duke, but would have had great hopes of the Pope. Turin windows would have made a difference again in favour of Charles Albert. People who wish to remain undeceived by royal shows must be near them every day or altogether removed from them. The unhappy medium is fatal to everybody. To see is to believe. William Penn could not resist the royal James, seen now and then, and exercising the blandishment of royalty. Had he kept away from court and never seen the King, he would have been a thorough anti-jacobite. How very natural, then, in our authoress to write and feel—
Nor was it ill, when Leopoldo drew
His little children to the window-place,
He stood in at the Pitti, to suggest
They, too, should govern as the people willed.
She “liked his face”—“the forehead’s build”—“mild and sad,” and “careful nobly”—this of a man in reference to whom, for twenty years or more, the only variation of feeling on the part of his subjects, has been the difference of the proportions of their contempt and their hatred, accordingly as simple weakness or despotism preponderated in himself. She reasons herself, however, when she sees him, into the hope that he may be true. Her repentance is more impassioned and earnest than her fault, and her self-reproach is disproportionately vehement, considering the cautiousness of her trust:—
I bow my soul and knee
And sigh and do repent me of my fault
That ever I believed the man was true.
* * * * * * * *
Forgive that I forgot the mind that runs
Through absolute races, too unsceptical!
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. [p. 317→]
The second defect of this Poem to our minds is its limitation in scope and topic. It is too truly and too literally described by its title. We do not advance the objection which Mrs. Browning anticipates in her preface, that it narrates only the events she saw “from a window,” and her impressions from them. A thoughtful mind may witness and learn and teach a vast deal from windows. We rather object to the windows being so few. The list of outward observations, in face of the multitudinous character of the contemporaneous events of a like interest occurring in Italy and in Europe, and which are necessarily present to the mind of the reader, is exceedingly brief.
There is only one form of material window out of which a Poet can exclusively look with full poetical result—it is that through which a prisoner sees a slip of common sky, or a chimney top. The outward gaze must be so extensive as to cover all that the mind can or would desire to see, or else it must be so limited as to throw the Poet for his materials on his own inner nature. The intermediate position is fatal to the full effect of poetry. It chooses a world, and that a little one. In fact, it is neither the world nor the mind, but a purposely limited portion of each, with the certain suggestion of much that lies beyond it, with a side-long vision and hankering after which the mind is perplexed and distracted. We have been so accustomed to take all Italy, nay, half of Europe, at a gulp from the Tourists, even poetical Tourists included, that we feel the Casa Guidi allowance very small,—and we have been so accustomed to see in the same paper of the same day so much of contemporaneous event, that we feel the tightness of the cordon placed by the olive groves of Florence round us.
Another principal defect in the present Poem is its voluntary subjection to the labour, restraint, and artifice necessarily accompanying rhyme, with scarcely one of those compensating advantages which ought to spring from it. The surprise, curiosity, gratification, musical delight, to which the sweet iteration of similarities, without sameness, gives rise in rhyme, are in this Poem diligently lost, and eagerly run away from. The printer and the reader for the most part have the exclusive advantage [p. 318→] of knowing that the author has taken the trouble to effectuate the rhyming peculiarity—the hearer through large portions of the Poem will be in profound ignorance of this interesting fact,—he will suppose that he is reading blank verse. The ear may be conscious of a rhyme sometimes by way of accident, but cannot, till aided by the eye, find out that there is rhyme throughout. This is a lamentable and vexatious effect—for the difficulty of making the rhyme is often unconcealed in this Poem, but the benefit to the ear is scarcely ever reaped. Nothing could have made “old Margheritone” “tremble,” “swoon,”
And die despairing at the open sill
Of other men’s achievements—
instead of at the door, or the window, or the sight of these achievements, except that a rhyme was wanted for the “will” of a previous line,—and even the music that there is in this sorry little note is quite lost to the general ear. No doubt the ear may be educated and attuned to carry a rhyme a long way. And if Mrs. Browning and other writers will agree to fill the world with poems, constructed on the principle of Casa Guidi Windows, the human ear may come to expect the rhyme where she chooses to place it, and be disappointed if it does not find it: and her own ear is probably thus attuned. But she has a very nearly exclusive benefit of the enjoyment. Tennyson, in his exquisite “In Memoriam,” has chosen a difficulty of this kind, and must be confessed to have triumphed in it—but more from his determination to educate the ear of his reader into the expectation of the music he chooses to furnish, and his refusal to distract his attention by any other variety, than by any natural or already formed general affinity of the ear of poetry-loving Englishmen to the locality of his rhymes. He has determined to balk and surprise the ear of his reader in every stanza, through a volume, till drawn along by the irresistible allurement of the course, the reader expects to be balked and surprised in every stanza, by the absence of a rhyme where he wants it, and its presence where he does not want it, and at length he would be amazed at not being balked and surprised as usual. It is not indigenous to the human ear [p. 319→] to love and look for a rhyming verse whose first and second lines do not rhyme, whose first and third lines do not rhyme, but whose first and fourth lines, and second and third lines do. By dint of intoning this peculiarity, the ear under Mr. Tennyson’s auspices at length accepts it, and perhaps may register it for the future among its accepted realities.
There is still to us a fourth leading defect in this Poem. It is narrative and descriptive, not incidentally or mixedly, but essentially and as of its fabric. It is letters to friends put into verse. It is what might have been poetical prose narrative, turned into prosaic verse narrative. It is lively, pleasant, interesting reading, but unnecessarily trammelled with rhyme, that has no music in it, with feet that restrain its progress, and rules that impoverish its wealth and limit its freedom. A poet may write his prose in this way, as Wordsworth has written his—but it is not poetry—it is Poet’s Prose. The prosy wisdom of much of the “Excursion,” the prosier wisdom of more of the “Prelude,” would properly have been ranked among the higher class of Moral Essays or Sermons in our language, characterized by the verse-style in which the author chose to embody his thoughts—had not the author proved himself a Poet on other ground. It is the music and the melody, the celestial discernment of things beautiful and good in the common matters of earth and day-light, the delicious simplicity, and the enriching imagination, that vivify and interpenetrate his smaller poems, and so many passages in his larger, that make one call anything of Wordsworth’s by any name that he likes, and bind up his poetical prose and prosaic poetry all together, and bid the binder in reverence put “Wordsworth’s Poems,” on the outside of all. And so Mrs. Browning, having great versifying power, and being very fond of exercising it, presents us with a pleasant little volume of extracts from a journal of her residence in Florence, which it is according to her liking and idiosyncrasy to write in a verse form.
And now that we have done with what we consider the defects of this Poem, let us indulge ourselves in the acknowledgment of the pleasant reading it has been to us. We are grateful for anything from a pen, from which has already dropped so much that has enchained and entranced [p. 320→] us.* There is a copious spring in Mrs. Browning’s nature of power and sweetness. She is a woman of wonderful talent, of unusual knowledge, of great spirit, and of a large mental experience. There is something at once manly and womanly in the character of her mind—energy large, and feeling deep. We miss in the present Poem her ancient pensiveness. We ought, we suppose, to rejoice that that phase has been succeeded by another. But “the soul is nursed for heaven by the discipline of a sacred sorrow. The look that is fixed on immortality, wears not a perpetual smile; and eyes through which shine the light of other worlds, are often dimmed with tears.”** It was that union of the spirit of joy, with the shadows of grief—the energy and enterprize of healthy thought, at times bearing upwards, at other times itself borne down by, the accompanying weight of trial and pain—etherealized and spiritualized—that constituted to us the greatest charm of her poetry and her character. Perhaps we should not wish such things back again to the happy wife and mother; and we fear that secretly we are bemoaning our own fate, and are regretting that we have lost Miss Barrett, who was a very interesting person to us in her Poems.
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*See Notice of her two vols. in an earlier Number of this Review.
**Christian Aspects of Faith and Duty. By J.J. Tayler.
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Nobody, we presume, now dare publish a prose tour in Italy, still less the journal of a stranger’s stay in Florence merely. Our authoress has wisely on the whole, therefore, taken her natural form of verse, and combined her allusions to pictures, and statues and poets, with a moment of profound European and universal interest. She has interwoven her allusions very skilfully and Byron-like with the main topic of her Poem. But when we cast our dim eyes athwart the interval of many years in attempted remembrance of that dear city of Florence, we feel almost a regret that the allusions are so few—and that they are rather learned, and from books, and in sympathy with feelings and creators, than natural, and from the heart of the eye, and in sympathy with the things created. We hear more of the workers than the works—of men than places—of events than sights—of history than material [p. 321→] reality. We have, indeed, such brilliant lines as these—the
Golden Arno, as it shoots away,
Straight through the heart of Florence.*
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*Notwithstanding which, for “golden,” read “muddy;” for “shooting away,” read “creeping away;” unless indeed the melting snows of the spring gave a little life to this common-place river at Florence.
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She takes the trouble of ascending to the Monastery of St. Gualbert also, and sees the billowy sea of hills that greets the gaze at the summit, and joins in the subsequent descent, both of which we well remember, down the long-winding various path on easy meditative gazing mule-back (with us) in the slanting rays of an October evening sun, with the far-spread undulating valley, the autumnal trees, the white-faced cottages and villas, placed just where a painter would have wished them, if he had not found them—and accordingly we have some pleasant lines on the text:
And Vallombrosa, we two went to see
Last June, beloved companion.
She is our guide also to “Santa Maria Novella Church,” and directs us to
Ascend the right stair of the farther nave,
To muse in a small chapel scarcely lit
By Cimabue’s Virgin.
We are taken also to Michael Angelo, whose
Statues wait
In the small chapel of the dim St. Lawrence.*
But she avoids many of the accustomed raptures, seems to kiss but shun the footsteps of those “worthier poets,” who stood and sang before in Italy—so as even, if we be not mistaken, to omit altogether the Venus, and the whole Tribune, and almost all the Pitti. In truth it is not as a lover of the art, but as an eager admirer of the mind and soul, of Italy, in all ages, that she takes her stand in this [p. 322→] poem, which is moral rather than æsthetic. She turns away indeed from those masses for the dead which we are but too much disposed to be always singing in Italy.
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.
* * * * * * *
O Dead, ye shall no longer cling to us
With your stiff hands of dessiccating [sic] praise,
And hold us backward by the garment thus,
To stay, and laud you in long virelays!
Still, no! we will not be oblivious
Of our own lives, because ye lived before,
Nor of our acts, because ye acted well,—
We thank you, that ye first unlatched the door—
We will not make it inaccessible
By thankings in the doorway any more,
But will go onward to extinguish hell
With our fresh souls, our younger hope and God’s
Maturity of purpose. Pp. 16–17.
Still her soul is large enough to understand the meaning of the worship of the past and its saints.
Cold graves we say? it shall be testified
That living men who throb in heart and train,
Without the dead, were colder. If we tried
To sink the past beneath our feet, be sure
The future would not stand.
* * * * * *
Scant were the gardens, if the graves were fewer!
* * * * * *
Who would build temples, without tombs in sight?
Who live, without some dead men’s benison?
Who seek truth, hope for good, or strive for right,
If looking up, he saw not in the sun
Some angel of the martyrs, all day long
Standing and waiting! Pp. 29, 31. [p. 323→]
Of what passed beneath her own eye the description is very life-like. The two processions, for example—the one in the first part, when—“the day was such a day as Florence owes the sun”—the various estates go up to the Grand Duke at the Pitti, on his taking the oath, we presume, to the new constitution—the magistrates, the lawyers, the priesthood, the “martyrs” by their sign, the artists, the trades, the populace, the representatives of the several Tuscan States, with their banners; and then the “various children” which the world had sent out of “her teeming flanks,” “Greeks, English, French.” The other in the second part, when the Duke returns—
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.
* * * * * * *
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 stedfast as their swords,
And cognisant of acts, not imageries. Pp. 103, 105.
Her reasons for not trusting a priest are all excellent—though Gioberti, probably the main originator of the last Italian revolution, has been publishing endless arguments [p. 324→] for years, to show how it is a Pope and a Pope alone who can liberate Italy and the world.
And yet we must
Beware, and mark the natural kiths and kins
Of circumstance and office, and distrust
A rich man reasoning in a poor man’s hut,
A poet who neglects pure truth to prove
Statistic fact; a child who leaves a rut
For the smooth road; a priest who vows his glove
Exhales no grace; a prince who walks a-foot;
A woman who has sworn she will not love;
Ninth Pius sitting in Seventh Gregory’s chair,
With Andrea Doria’s forehead!
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*Roscoe took a good deal of pains to initiate us into the proper Italian forms of Italian names. It was a novelty to us English then. Mrs. Browning takes pains to turn most of them into English again, and that being now a novelty in its turn, it sounds agreeably.
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Several portions of the Second Part would have offended us as common-place or thrust in, but for the admirable account to which they are turned by the skilful transitional allusions. Of this description are the lines on the Great Exhibition.
Just now, the world is busy: it has grown
A Fair-going world. Imperial England draws
The flowing ends of the earth,” &c.
But we pardon this and the conversations between the contributors, for the spirit of the appeal to which they are the introduction.
O Magi of the East and of the West—
* * * Is your courage spent
In handiwork only? Have you nothing best
Which generous souls may perfect and present,
And He shall thank the givers for? No light
Of teaching, liberal nations, for the poor,
Who sit in darkness when it is not night?
No cure for wicked children? Christ,—no cure!
No help for women sobbing out of sight
Because men made the laws?
And so the apostrophe to her own child, with which the Poem concludes, her “own young Florentine,” to whom
The earliest world-day light that ever flowed,
Through Casa Guidi windows chanced to come— [p. 325→]
though spirited and mother-like, might lack sufficient reason for its place, but for the admirable skill with which she makes her young boy, in the wreck of her hopes for Italy and liberty, be to her “with his brave blue English eyes,” the prophet of the ever fertile future.
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 watercourses.
There was some colloquial phraseology, appearing not always very agreeably in some of Mrs. Browning’s former pieces, which was not important, because it was confined to the piece in which it appeared, and left others untrespassed on by its intrusion. But in a poem of greater length, and which is one, the appearance of similar phrases is an offence against the whole. We don’t like
When all’s said, and howe’er the proud may wince,
and we don’t think at all that Michael Angelo would condescend to return the Grand Duke’s vulgarity by being so vulgar himself, and saying
Outlasting, therefore, all your lordships, Sir!
So keep your stone, beseech you, for your part,” &c.
We don’t like “there’s room too, I repeat,” in poetry. “Why, these are things,” “Why the world were wrecked,” sound better from the lips of Hotspur reading a letter in a drama—than in a didactic and descriptive poem. The interlocutions at the Exhibition are not at all to our taste, coming from the writer of the Vision of Poets: “These corals will you please to match against your oaks.”—“Here’s sculpture.”—“Methinks you will not match this steel of ours,”—loquitur Mr. Rogers, of Sheffield, we suppose. “Nor you this porcelain,” observes a gentleman from China or Dresden.
Nevertheless, or, as Mrs. Browning would remark, “when all’s said”—here is a picture of the sojourn of a woman of genius and high spirit in Florence, full of colours that will not fade—full of life that will not die—of truth that will not perish.
[Charles Wicksteed]
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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