E510900A. Casa Guidi Windows.
The Eclectic Review, September 1851, pp. 306–317.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 331–335.
We have scarcely noticed the collected poems of Elizabeth Browning, when a new one solicits our attention. The “Casa Guidi Windows” is the natural product of the contemplation of the events which have passed in Italy since the great European outbreak of 1848, by a mind of deep observation and high and generous feeling. Mrs. Browning did not escape the delusive contagion of a popular movement which promised so much, only again to disappoint us. What heart, anxious for human progress, and trusting to the noblest human impulses, can avoid that infection which, like a premature spring-day, inspires us with the most delightful hopes, spite of all experience? At such moments, the past, with its humiliating histories, is forgotten; experience is silenced in the shout of exulting multitudes, animated with heroic sentiments; and, to all but the sternest natures, Charles II., Robespierre, and Marat, for a time, do not show their ominous and spectral faces from behind the ranks of myriad enthusiasts for liberty, fraternity, and equality. Southey was a fanatic under the influence of the First French Revolution; and, though he, and other such plants growing in stony places, lost the roots of their faith in human advancement, withered up by the flaring heats of anarchy and despotism that followed, tens of thousands again hailed with equally exulting confidence the Second Revo- [p. 307→] lution, which once more drove the elder Bourbons from France, only to seat on its throne the Fagan of regal history; tens of thousands kindled into astonished hurrahs at the first movements of Pio Nono in Rome; and as many of us were still ready to believe with spasms of delirious delight in the third French convulsion of 1848, which called a Lamartine to the helm, amidst the tempestuous sea of national passion, only to leave it in the hand of a Louis Napoleon. Perhaps no experience can totally steel us against the seductions of moments so flattering to all that is aspiring, poetical, and human in us; perhaps no really generous nature can be clairvoyant in the instant of such a crisis. We give our faith involuntarily to our fellow-men, while they act as the great spirit of the future in our souls whispers that they should and must one day act; and we only withdraw it with a groan when we again begin to see the morning roses of such evanescent dawns fading rapidly from the Alpine rocks and the horizon, and the ordinary daylight of the world resuming its sombre place, over fresh scenes of desolation. In her short preface, Mrs. Browning makes her confession of weakness, under such circumstances, with praiseworthy candour and amiableness:—
“This poem contains the impressions of the writer upon events in Tuscany of which she was a witness. ‘From a window,’ the critic may demur. She bows to the objection in the very title of her work. No continuous narrative, nor exposition of political philosophy, is attempted by her. It is a simple story of personal impressions, whose only value is in the intensity with which they were received, as proving her warm affection for a beautiful and unfortunate country; and the sincerity with which they are related, as indicating her own good faith and freedom from all partizanship.
“Of the two parts of this poem, the first was written nearly three years ago, while the second resumes the actual situation of 1851. The discrepancy between the two parts is a sufficient guarantee to the public of the truthfulness of the writer, who, though she certainly escaped the epidemic ‘falling sickness’ of enthusiasm for Pio Nono, takes shame upon herself that she believed, like a woman, some royal oaths, and lost sight of the probable consequences of some popular defects. If the discrepancy should be painful to the reader, let him understand that to the writer it has been more so. But such discrepancy we are called upon to accept at every time by the conditions of our nature—the discrepancy between aspiration and performance, between faith and dis-illusion, between hope and fact.
Oh, trusted, broken prophecy,
Oh, richest future, sorely crossed,
Born for the future, to the future lost!
Nay, not lost to the future in this case. The future of Italy shall not be disinherited.” [p. 308→]
The poem opens in an easy and familiar style, a light but sweet prelude to the grave matters which come behind:—
I heard, last night, a little child go singing
’Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,
“O bella libertà, O bella!” stringing
The same words still on notes he went in search
So high for, you concluded the upspringing
Of such a nimble bird to sky from perch
Must leave the whole bush in a tremble green;
And that the heart of Italy must beat,
While such a voice had leave to rise serene
’Twixt church and palace of a Florence street!—
A little child, too, who not long had been,
By mother’s finger steadied on his feet;
And still O bella libertà, he sang.—P. 1.
The child’s song awakes in the heart of the British poetess many musings; musings on the condition of Italy; of what it had been, and what it was. All that its poets and artists had done to beautify and to embalm it, as it were, is the cerement of a long and death-like ruin; of the tone of despair which ran through the noblest songs of the grandest of these poets; of the shadow of sadness which it had cast on the most magnificent productions of these painters. But she prefers to sing and hope with the child:—
With birds, with babes, with men who will not fear
The baptism of the holy morning dew—
And many of such wakers now are here,
Complete in their anointed manhood, who
Will greatly dare and greatlier persevere!—
Than join those thin old voices with my new,
And sigh for Italy with some safe sigh
Cooped up in music ’twixt an oh and ah—
Nay, hand in hand, with that young child, will I
Rather go singing bella libertà,
Than with those poets, crown the dead, or cry
Se tu men bella fossi, Italia!—P. 12.
The poetess is hopeful—it is yet her mood. She listens to her heart, and not to the voices of the dead, and the whisperings of lethargic ages that come from the buried ruins of ancient empire, and from the rus[t]ling vine-leaves that spread a veil of effeminate beauty over them. And yet she has, even in her false confidence, pretty strong revelations of the daunting reality.
So great was Mrs. Browning’s confidence in the men of modern Italy, she almost supposed she might count them heroes, [p. 309→] and therewith she breaks forth into a fine declamation against our trusting in the glorious dead, instead of trusting in ourselves. The whole of the poem is so fresh, so strong, so warm, and beautiful, that we could quote it entire, but to this passage we must give a place:—
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.
The dead, upon their awful ’vantage ground—
The sun not in their faces—shall abstract
No more our strength: we will not be discrowned
Through treasuring their crowns, nor deign transact
A barter of the present, in a sound,
For what was counted good in foregone days.
O Dead, ye shall no longer cling to us
With your stiff hands of desiccating praise,
And hold us backward by the garment thus,
To stay and laud you in long virèlays!
Still, no! we will not be oblivious
Of our own lives because you 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 anymore,
But will go onward to extinguish hell
In our fresh souls, our younger hope, and God’s
Maturity of purpose. Soon shall we
Be the dead too! and, that our periods
Of life may round themselves to memory,
As smoothly as on our graves the funeral-sods,
We must look to it to excel as ye,
And bear our age as far, unlimited
By the last sea-mark! so, to be invoked
By future generations as the Dead.—P. 16.
And now, indeed, our poetess believed, or almost believed, that the time was come when Italy would no longer wait on the dead: that she was up, and sending the blood of life and liberty through the heart of her sons, and that the day of fresh deeds of immortality was burning up the sky:—
. . . The day was such a day
As Florence owes the sun. The sky above,
His weight upon the mountains seemed to lay
And palpitate in glory, like a dove
Who has flown too fast, full-hearted. Take away [p. 310→]
The image! for the heart of man beat higher
That day in Florence, flooding all the streets
And piazzas with a tumult and desire.
The people, with accumulated heats,
And faces turned one way, as if one fire
Did draw and flush them, leaving their old beats,
Went upwards to the Pitti palace wall,
To thank their grand-duke, who, not quite of course,
Had graciously permitted, at their call,
The citizens to use their civic force
To guard their civic homes. So one and all
The Tuscan cities streamed up to the source
Of this new good at Florence.—P. 31.
The description of this procession, as seen from Casa Guidi Windows—magistrates, lawyers, priests, and monks, with all their banners and emblazonry, followed and surrounded by the enraptured people, and hailed from the windows by crowds of ladies waving handkerchiefs—is truly masterly; and the remainder of the first part is cast in the same glowing mould of a mind on fire with the most brilliant anticipations of new and better days. Yet even in the midst of her profoundest exultation, there came across her dim shadows of misgiving, cold touches of what George Fox called “wafts of death”—a feeling that all was not so solid, so heart-whole, so substantial, as it was radiant and imposing. The people had that day planted their standard on the stone of Dante, but—
Dante sits in heaven, and ye are here,
And more remains for doing, all must feel,
Than trysting on his stone from year to year,
To shift processions, civic heel to heel,
The town’s thanks to the Pitti. Are ye free
For what was done that day? A chariot-wheel
May spin fast, yet the chariot never roll.—P. 45.
Time proved this only too true. As in the first part of her poem our authoress sees the shouting, rushing, weeping people pressing on for the space of three hours to the grand-duke’s palace, and the grand-duke in tears too, bringing his children to the window, and telling them that “they too should govern as the people willed;” so in her second part she sees the same grand-duke coming to the same palace escorted by a ponderous force of Austrians. The traitor-prince had slipped away from his own people, and with the oaths of attachment to them, and the tears of crocodile tenderness, still warm on his lips, and wet upon his cheeks, returned to tread them down under the heels of Austrian slaves. And the people! what had they done? How had they kept their pledges? those of patriotism to the death? of devotion [p. 311→] to their country worthy of the country of Virginius and of Brutus? They had shook their swords in their scabbards, “like heroes, only louder;” they had torn down the duke’s arms when they found him fled, denounced him as a traitor, and then sent for him back again, though Guerazzi had been busy at work to relieve their burdens, and re-arrange, on a sound basis, their affairs.
Alas, alas! it was not so this time,
Conviction was not, courage failed, and truth
Was something to be doubted of. The mime
Changed masks, because a mime; the tide as smooth
In running in as out; no sense of crime,
Because no sense of virtue. Sudden ruth
Seized on the people … they would have again
Their good grand-duke, and leave Guerazzi, though
He took that tax from Florence:—“Much in vain
He took it from the market-carts, we trow,
While urgent that no market-men remain,
But all march off, and leave the spade and plough
To die among the Lombards. Was it thus
The dear, paternal duke did? Live the duke!”
At which the joy-bells multitudinous,
Swept by an opposite wind, as loudly shook.
Recall the mild archbishop to his home,
To bless the people with his frightened look,
For he shall not be hanged yet, we intend.
Seize on Guerazzi! guard him in full view,
Or else we stab him in the back, to end.
Rub out those chalked devices! Set up now
The duke’s arms; doff your Phrygian caps; and mend
The pavement of the piazzas, broke into
By the bare poles of freedom! Smooth the way
For the duke’s carriage; let his highness sigh,
“Here trees of liberty grew yesterday.”
Long live the duke! How roared the canonry,
How rocked each campanile! and through a spray
Of nosegays, wreaths, and kerchiefs, tossed on high,
How marched the civic guard, the people still
Shouting—especially the little boys!
Alas! poor people of an unfledged will!
Most fitly expressed by such a callow voice.
Alas! still poorer duke incapable
Of being worthy even of that noise.—P. 100.
The farce, in fact, had run its course. The people, ignorant, their moral nature totally undermined by ages of dominant priestcraft and political despotism, and wholly destitute of the fortitude which springs from a deep reflection on their wrongs, and the political science acquired in earnestly and long en- [p. 312→] deavouring to get rid of them, proved, as such a people must, mere men of straw, who perish in the blaze their sudden fury kindles—mere chaff, blown away by the wind of their own raising. The priests had proved priests, treacherous, sly, and true to their object. The Pope had turned out a pope instead of a Catholic Luther. The Austrians had found, that though they could not for a moment stand before a Napoleon, they were a match for a few millions of the slaves they had emasculated. It was a woful story, ending, as all such stories must end, where the aim, however excellent, has to be carried out by mere noise and bravado, against the steady, unwavering, implacable myrmidons of a despotism, which has no feeling beyond its grand instinct of ruling, and crushing to rule.
Yet, in the face of this striking fact, we are surprised at Mrs. Browning, even, while in most eloquent terms, she is taking shame to herself for having hoped success from such materials, lowering the tone of her own philosophy, and becoming an advocate, and a most energetic and dangerous one, for war. In her first book, in the midst of her genuine aspiration, and before experience had shown her how frail were the reeds on which she leaned, she eulogized, and most beautifully, the philosophy of peace.
Children use the fist
Until they are of age to use the brain:
And so we needed Cæsars to assist
Man’s justice, and Napoleons to explain
God’s counsel, when a point was nearly missed,
Until our generations should attain
Christ’s stature nearer. Not that we, alas!
Attain already; but a single inch
Will help to look down on the swordsman’s pass,
As Roland on a coward who could flinch;
And after chloroform and ether-gas,
We find out slowly what the bee and finch
Have ready found, through Nature’s lamp in each,—
How to our races we may justify
Our individual claims, and as we reach
Our own grapes, bend the top vines to supply
The children’s uses; how to fill a breach
With olive-branches; how to quench a lie
With truth, and smite a foe upon the cheek
With Christ’s most conquering kiss! why these are things
Worth a great nation’s findings, to prove weak
The “glorious arms” of military kings!
And so with wide embrace, my England, seek
To stifle the bad heat and flickerings
Of this world’s false, and nearly expended fire!
Draw palpitating arrows to the wood, [p. 313→]
And send abroad thy high hopes, and thy higher
Resolves, from that most virtuous altitude,
Till nations shall unconsciously aspire
By looking up to thee, and learn that good
And glory are not different. Announce law
By freedom; exalt chivalry by peace;
Instruct, how clear calm-eyes can overawe,
And how pure hands, stretched swiftly to release
A bond-slave, will not need a sword to draw
To be held dreadful. O my England, crease
Thy purple with no alien agonies,
Which reach thee through the net of war! No war!
Disband thy captains, change thy victories,
Be henceforth prosperous, as the angels are—
Helping, not humbling.—P. 47.
This is glorious poetry—glorious in its intellectual strength, in its lofty eloquence, and glorious in the divinity of a resplendent truth, which the world is slowly learning from the oracles of all truth, from the words of Christ, uttered nearly two thousand years ago on the hills of Judea. It would be difficult to find, in all the treasured wealth of English literature, words which more completely describe the policy which the people of England have adopted, and to which they are every day giving a more zealous adhesion, than are contained in the concluding lines of this passage. The cry is for “no war!” to “disband our captains, change our victories;” and “henceforth be prosperous, as the angels are—helping, not humbling.” That, if we understand anything, is precisely the doctrine of Mr. Cobden, and the policy of the Peace Society. How astounding, therefore, is it to find the same mouth which had been so eloquent for this pacific policy, in the very same volume, and in the very part of it where one should have expected that the woful experiments of physical force would have confirmed inconceivably that great belief in the omnipotency of gentleness—crying so coldly and cruelly for war!
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 [p. 314→]
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 foeman’s whip,
To sing and laugh out idiotcies of pain.
Nor yet on starving homes! where many a lip
Has sobbed itself asleep 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 shrieking 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 own womanhood,
Such things are better than a thing 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
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!—P. 109.
Again we say, this is glorious poetry. It is one of those sublime bursts of passionate feeling which can spring up only in a heart of the noblest nature, and find expression on the tongue or in the pen of proud, lofty, and magnanimous genius. But, at the same time, it is a total recantation of the Christian philosophy which so nobly quickens the soul of the preceding passage; it is, if anything, a return to the meeting of force by brutal force, which that passage so eloquently condemns. This is by no means “Christ’s most conquering kiss.” We honour the feeling [p. 315→] of profound indignation which inspires it, but we deplore the turn which that indignation takes. If we are to have “no war;” to “disband our captains, change our victories;” we must certainly abstain from fanning the horrid flame of war under any circumstances. But if England is to be condemned because she contends for peace, then must she “crease her purple with alien agonies,” and give a sanction to all those horrors that are ready to rend once more the very bowels of the nations. If Mrs. Browning merely means, that while we advocate peace, we should also do all in our power to induce, and morally to compel, despotic nations to abstain from violating the rights of other nations, and from crushing those who fall into their hands in their efforts to withstand their aggressions; then we say, such is precisely the doctrine of the best portion of the English public, if we understand it at all. This is the cry, and no other, which “is gone forth from England through the hollow world.” We would have Austria cease from violating the free constitution of Hungary; we would, as all the world knows, have had the injuries of Poland redressed; we would, had the public feeling of England prevailed, have warned back France sternly from the annihilation of Republican Rome; and we believe, with Mrs. Browning’s more truly philosophical and Christian faith, there is no need for a nation “to draw the sword to be held dreadful.” We are persuaded that England can, and eventually will, make her moral and commercial influence felt for the preservation of peace, tenfold more powerfully than she ever made the force of her arms felt. And that this great Christian and moral demonstration may succeed, writers like Mrs. Browning must support it by pen, and mouth, and every social influence. Has Mrs. Browning ceased to think that
Children use the fist
Until they are of age to use the brain?
Or that England should renounce that noble altitude of position which she had so finely recommended to her, to
Send abroad her high hopes, and still higher
Resolves, from that most virtuous altitude,
Till nations shall unconsciously aspire
By looking up to her, and learn that good
And glory are not different; to announce law
By freedom, exalt chivalry by peace?
But if, after exerting our moral and political means to restrain neighbouring nations from aggressions, and to induce them to forego their vengeance against their revolting subjects and their unhappy prisoners, we are to attempt to compel them by arms, or to instigate others to bloodshed as a means of redress, then [p. 316→] we renounce our high standing at the head of civilization, and descend to the level of the physical-force revolutionists.
Now, if there be one book that more than another has inspired us with a sense of hopelessness from mere physical force, it is this “Casa Guidi Windows.” Nothing can show more convincingly how utterly unqualified are the Italians to overcome by arms the monstrous military powers arrayed against them. Mrs. Browning most truly says, that in order to act, nations must know. And herein lies the melancholy fact, that revolution after revolution on the continent breaks out, without success. No one can long converse with the people of any nation on the continent without feeling how wholly they calculate on physical, how little they comprehend moral, force. The truth is, that both rulers and people on the continent are centuries behind England in political science. It is their gross destitution of political science which is the ruin of the European nations. The kings dare not trust to great moral principles; they do not understand them; and, therefore, they are hastening their own destruction by the maintenance of stupendous armaments. The people have no faith in, or true comprehension of, their real moral and social power, and, therefore, still dream of barricades and sudden surprises, where, in the long run, they are always beaten. The people of the continent are not yet capable, by courage, by union, by patience, by firm self-denial, of standing up and quelling victoriously by arms the million mass of soldiery which the kings maintain to keep them down; and if not capable of this, how far less so are they of establishing and perpetuating governments built on such popular victory, in which they shall not themselves relapse into the dissensions of faction, and the crimes and vengeances of the powers that now be?
Nothing, therefore, can be clearer than that the true policy of England is to maintain before the nations the lofty moral position which Mrs. Browning, in her better hours, recommends—to go on showing the triumphs of constitutional exertion, and the momentum of peaceful but determined public opinion on Government. This is not the place to enter wholly into this question; but nothing is easier than to show that, by our merely pacific powers, we have means, if rightly applied, of wonderfully curbing the tyrannies of foreign princes. We have played the game of martial interference in Europe on a terrific scale, and what is the result? That all that we did has been undone by subsequent events, except the creation of our awful debt. The combined tyrannies of Europe can compete with us in arms; but they cannot cope with us in the moral forces that we can bring to bear upon them. Mr. Cobden has successfully pointed out one such force of crushing effect on them—that of refusing them [p. 317→] the loan of English money. Let public opinion, on this head, only advance to that pitch, that capitalists shall not dare to incur the opprobrium of lending means of offence to foreign kings, and their wars will cease to exist, and their power of injustice against their own subjects must soon follow. In fact, the revolutionists are more effectually ruining the martial dynasties of Europe by their delay than by their action. All these Governments, under the terror of revolution, are maintaining armies that are crushing themselves. Their embarrassments are every day frightfully augmenting; and the armed peace they are maintaining will, ere long, tell on them with all the effects of the most exhausting war. But this is only one means among many of levelling the present martial oppression of Europe. If the nations could but once comprehend the invincible force of a general pacific resistance to unconstitutional government—if they steadily, everywhere, and with imperturbable endurance, demand constitutional privileges, they would very soon place their governments in a false position, and cover them with an odium before which no martial power, however great, can long stand. We are persuaded of nothing more strongly than that it is the great duty and office of England by her example to teach this, and that nothing can be more fatal to the interests of civilization than for her to abandon her faith in the power of pacific exertion, and give sanction, under any provocation whatever, or under witness of partial sufferings, however torturing to her sympathies, to the lower tendencies of the continent, to physical and sanguinary redress. Such a policy could only lead to years of bloody contention, and a prostration of the nations, with all their now growing commercial, social, and intellectual interests, which it is too frightful to contemplate.
We have extended our observations on this portion of Mrs. Browning’s work in proportion to our sense of the vital importance of the subject. In this particular instance we hold her to be wrong, illogical, and halting in her otherwise manly and prominent progression. As a whole, her present poem is, perhaps, the finest which she has produced, and is certainly one of the noblest productions of female genius. The language is singularly eloquent and strong; the feeling which pervades it is in the highest tone of humanity. Nothing can be more charming than the broad and generous sympathies which live in it, embracing all the interests of the race. The pathos occasionally, as in the fine lines on the fate of the wife of Garibaldi, is deep and most womanly. The despotism of princes is assailed with a scathing vigour, and the deadly hypocrisy of priests is unveiled with the perfection of satiric art.
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
___________________
