E511000A. Casa Guidi Windows.
The English Review, October 1851, pp. 173–179.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 337–339.
Grand in parts, and fervid every where, is this new work of Mrs. Browning’s, and yet we think it scarcely worthy of her; not that [p. 174→] we are too Tory, or too orthodox, to sympathize with her denunciations, either of the absolutist rulers of the Continent, or of that sham pope, Pius:—
For, Tories as we are, and Churchmen too,
True Freedom rests for aye our soul’s ambition!
but because art, art of a high and genial order, seems to us to be sadly lacking in this last production of the lady’s muse; nay, we must even question its poetic inspiration. If, indeed, mere intensity of indignation, and height of scorn, and depth of sympathy could constitute such inspiration, then would this poem be absolutely overflowing with the divine afflatus: but it is not so; a man or a woman may feel deeply, and rhyme angrily, and assail fiercely, and yet produce indifferent poetry after all. And this, it seems to us, has been the case with Mrs. Browning in the present instance. We say, it seems—for in the works of a poet of real genius (and as such we recognise Mrs. Browning most gladly) there must, almost of necessity, be much that is beautiful; and the critic, who can scarcely be too ardent in his praises of the beautiful (such is our critical faith), should always shrink from too sweeping a condemnation of what he may be judging hastily and prematurely—of what the author must have considered far more deeply than himself. Fortunately, however, the critic need not pretend to be infallible, and we wish to speak with all becoming modesty on the present occasion. But to revert to our charge, art seems to us to be missing here, as well as lyrical impulse. Had we been asked to express our sense of the one most marked characteristic of Mrs. Browning’s genius, we should certainly have specified that bounding freedom of ringing melody, that open-hearted genial power of pouring forth the unpremeditated music of the heart, that happy, and sometimes majestic, sometimes exquisitely tender, adaptation of the sound to the sense,—which we have admired, for instance, in her “Rhyme of the Duchess May,” her “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” her “Cry of the Children” or her magnificent “Dead Pan.” That lyric impulse, which seemed to demonstrate that she sang for singing’s sake, was what we had a right to look for, as we imagined, in all of Mrs. Browning’s poems. In those of her poet-husband’s, on the contrary,—missing this quality for the most part at least, we looked for some quality possibly more valuable, viz. a certain extraordinary ease and naturalness of manner, combined with intense dramatic power and fervour, deep thought, or burning ardour, flashing, or let us rather say, ringing, from every close and burnished line. But Browning has been wont to achieve his greatest effects by passion, rather than by melody of rhythm: if he possesses the true faculty of song, he does not often exercise it. Mrs. Browning has felt, [p. 175→] on the contrary, most justly, that therein lay her strength; or, rather, her poetic instincts and impulses have compelled her to pour forth her soul in unpremeditated lyric melodies, where the sound was not only an echo to the sense, but became, in itself also, a source of passion and of beauty. Take as an instance from that most exquisite of poems, “Cowper’s Grave,” these lines:—
O poets! from a maniac’s tongue, was pour’d the deathless singing!
O Christians! at your cross of hope, a hopeless hand was clinging!
O men! this man, in brotherhood, your weary paths beguiling,
Groan’d inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling!
And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,
How discord on the music fell, and darkness on the glory,
And how, when one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,
He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted;
He shall be strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation,
And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker adoration:
Nor ever shall he be, in praise, by wise or good forsaken;
Named softly, as the household name of one whom God hath taken.
Surely we need not say that one great charm of this is, its being a gush of natural song; and still less need we point attention to the nevertheless important fact (usually an indispensable mark of good poetry), that the sense almost invariably ends with the line, and is not carried on by two or three words into the next. Now, it is against this fundamental canon of poetry that Robert Browning may be said to sin systematically; but then he yields us such compensation in the dramatic power and intense reality of his strains, that we are contented to raise no quarrel with him upon the subject; though we cannot refrain from adding, that it is mainly from the extreme indulgence in this one bad habit (as in itself we must consider it), that his “Sordello” is of such marvellously tough digestion. In “The Lost Leader,” and some few other poems, Mr. Browning has condescended to bow to the ordinary laws of metre, or rather of metrical poetry (for his metre, in itself, is always admirable); and in these instances he has achieved the lyrically beautiful: in general he does not aim at this goal; he contents himself with being dramatic and terribly in earnest; he is poetical in conception and expression, only not lyrical. Of course this remark applies to his rhymes, and not to his blank verse, which has a charming cadence of its own. But, woe to relate! Mrs. Browning is not contented with being Elizabeth Barrett Browning; she will be Robert Browning also: not possessing (“absque invidia,” be it said) his concentrated powers of thought and passion (we are quite sure that she would be the [p. 176→] first to concur in this opinion), she has nevertheless emulated his dramatic method of delivery, and has thereby sacrificed her own fresh melody of song. Her new poem is written systematically on the principle of not ending the sense with the line; and we are consequently compelled to own that we think it a clever, occasionally passionate, and here and there powerful, political talkification, or rhymed manifesto, in which we may discern, indeed, sundry poetical thoughts and images, (certain of them spoilt in the delivery by an excess of 19th-century mannerism, a bigmouthed oracle style of talk too much in fashion with the poets of the day, Tennyson and Mrs. Browning in particular), a vast amount of sympathy with Italy, and many bursts of just scorn for Young Italy, and of execration for tyrants,—but very little poetry! we are sorry to say so. We would have given these 140 eloquent pages for two or three of some genuine passionate lyric on the wrongs and woes of Italy; such another as the “Cry of the Children;” some gush of heart’s-music which might have found a world-wide echo. We are vexed that Mrs. Browning should thus forfeit, wilfully and of “malice prepense,” her own especial prerogative; and we entreat Mr. Browning to exert his conjugal authority to constrain (if need be) a reversion to the melodies of old; that each of these true bards may shine on, in his or her true sphere, without encroaching needlessly upon the other’s dominions. Here is the opening of “Casa Guidi Windows;” it will more than justify, we think, all that we have spoken:—
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!
Now setting aside the pretty extravagance, as we must consider it, of this idea—this, we say emphatically, is scarcely poetry: there seems little genuine impulse in it; we do not hear the lyre sounding in our ears; these are clever rhymes, so it seems at least to us, and nothing more. Of course the “Athenæum,” with its usual discernment, thinks them most powerfully poetical: of course the “Leader” is in raptures: but some praises are the severest censures. “Casa Guidi Windows,” as it appears to us, might just as well have been indited in prose—nay, better; and animated, graphic, heart-stirring prose this manifesto would have made, though it lacks the essence of poetry, viz. condensation of thought, [p. 177→] feeling, and expression. In Robert Browning’s lyric or rather dramatic strains we hear our hearts throb with almost every syllable, and this passionate reality it is which makes amends for the lyrical beauty that is deficient: now Mrs. Browning’s political indignation, strong as it is, cannot take the place of those more personal passions which her husband has so powerfully expressed, and that, be it remembered, in brief poems, and at their crowning moments of development. We repeat, that it is our impression, that animated, passionate prose, would, in this instance, have struck a deeper key, and have proved more likely to achieve its end, that of regenerating the heart of Italy. We have not poetry before us: we have hope, and hopeful memories, if we may so say, blent with passionate fears and sad anticipations; and we have anger also, and scorn, and prophecy, but the inspiration of song has rarely crowned the singer. Strange and fantastic metaphors, and somewhat transcendental epithets, (we speak roughly,) are scarcely poetry. Calling Italy “impassioned nympholept of her own past,” is scarcely poetry; though the critics may indulge in endless raptures, and score and underscore, as they are well-nigh certain to do, all those phrases which breathe the full-blown mannerism of the nineteenth century, with its vague vastiness and artificial quaintness of epithet. Because Alfred Tennyson is really wonderfully happy on this last score, though even he fatigues us with this happiness, every versemonger now is on the perpetual search for single sounding lines or startling adjectives; and critics applaud them rapturously who are utterly blind to the artistic grandeur of a whole; who can sneer, for instance, unhappy creatures! at such an epic as Southey’s “Roderick.” The “Edinburgh” said the other day, oracularly, and with an air of pains-taking condescension, that Southey was an amiable poet, but unhappily no artist, and that nothing he had done would live. Who are these unhappy men who persist in addressing their pens with honest Dogberry, “Write me down an ass?” This age has its mannerism, and a very sounding mannerism it is; and he who will not pay tribute to its false gods or true, must look for long neglect and vulgar scorn. Not that we would speak of Tennyson or the Brownings as “false gods;” far from it: we admire them all three exceedingly, but that, despite their mannerism and tendencies to oracular bigmouthedness, and not on the score of these things. We feel it necessary to protest against a deluge of “artistic” verbiage which threatens to overwhelm us; the herd of critics and of poetasters discern the salient mannerisms of true poets, and they are the only things they do discern; and these mannerisms they set up as the standard by which to measure all poetry. There is power, real power, however, in “Casa Guidi [p. 178→] Windows;” there are many fine thoughts, and some few beautiful images, and there is a vast amount of political earnestness. Many strong speeches are uttered, and some true. Popery is dealt with unsparingly, and all visible Churches are condemned apparently for the sake of her of Babylon. Pius is anathematised; the Grand Duke Leopold of Florence is reviled; so, on the other hand, are the talkative young republicans of Italy, ever more ready with the word than with the deed; who maintain, concerning themselves, in the justly bitter words of our authoress,
If we did not fight
Exactly, we fired muskets up the void,
To show that victory was our’s of right!
One of the noblest passages in the poem is that near the close, concerning King Charles Albert of Sardinia, who died, it will be remembered, so speedily after his abdication. We will extract it, though entering a protest at the same time against the rather inflated admonition to Italian patriots not to consider themselves demeaned by brotherhood with true-hearted and freedom-loving royalty; we do not think a king’s name is a word of shame, little as we sympathise with continental despotism.
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 shatter’d 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 discrown’d 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 suffer’d for our native land!
My brother, thou art one of us. Be proud.’
So much for the self-esteem of the democracy! to whose ranks Mrs. Browning, once a good royalist, seems to have deserted: we say, seems, for poetic sympathies are only apparently exclusive, and are not always lasting. That the wrongs of Italy are great, we do believe; but we look upon its rulers as quite as much the victims of national and ecclesiastical degeneracy, as are any of their subjects: and we scarcely think “big talk,” and “procla- [p. 179→] mations à la Mazzini” of some Utopian greatness to be realized by a mere outreaching of the hand, likely to regenerate a nation. This regeneration must be the stern work of suffering and of years, and, we may add, of religious reformation also; for until the degrading superstitions of Rome are trampled down, most especially that vile system of indulgence-seeking, which constitutes the popular religion of Italy, we cannot hope or believe that liberty will prove the child of revolution. In conclusion, we would entreat Mrs. Browning to sing indeed, and that her own wild notes, not verifying too literally her own fable of “The Poet and the Nightingale.” She will know what we mean. No more distressing politics, we hope, at least not treated after this quasi-poetic fashion, but rather songs breathing of the heart’s affections, sweetly and wildly fantastic, as her “Brown Rosary,” if she will, tenderly and pathetically passionate as the “Year’s Spinning,” or “Catarina to Camoens.”
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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