E511200A. Casa Guidi Windows.
Fraser’s Magazine, December 1851, pp. 618–622.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 355–357.
this year’s song-crop.
The phrases which are most common in the mouths of men are often the most difficult to define. We know more or less clearly what we do not mean by them; but what we do mean by them, we know hardly at all. And this is especially true in questions of taste. Analysis will teach us to know why things are not beautiful, but never why they are; still less will any à priori reasoning on the matter, wherein, as in à priori ethics, the usual argument is certain to be the petitio principii. Æsthetic cultivation may teach us to perceive beauties where we never suspected any, and the youth who at seventeen thinks Guido’s theatrical glitter (though Guido has sometimes more in him than that) the perfection of painting, and sees nothing to admire in Francia or young Raphael, learns, as he grows to manhood, to despise the coarse and merely outward beauty of the former, beside the inward and spiritual grace, and the deep scientific composition of the two latter. But all his cultivation will not tell him why Francia and Raphael are beautiful in his eyes. It will at most have awakened in him, not created, a new sense,—a sense which must have been in him, real and living, all along,—which is just as unutterable to him, now that he is aware of it, as it was when he knew nothing of it, and which, when he tries to analyze it, vanishes among a number of very acute and deep-sounding abstract notions, ending in “ation,” “ity,” and “al,” but which are neither beautiful themselves, nor the causes of beauty in him, nor anything whatsoever, except a number of empty words about the matter, by no means the matter itself; just as the most acute and scientific lecture on egg-shells is by no means identical with, or practically as useful as, the simple eating of the egg itself.
With the kindest wishes, therefore, to all “scientific æsthetic” on the matter of poetry, the poet who writes, and the critic who judges, must often be excused from making use of it, even in those questions of artistic form where it would seem at first sight useful, if not necessary. For even in the question of form, what the form ought to be, depends on what the idea is. The body does not shape the spirit, nor are the body and spirit made separately, and then stuck together afterwards; that is, if they are really to be body and spirit, and not in merely mechanical and accidental combination with each other, like the organization of the “gingerbread bride and bridegroom, with a peradventure baby,” which Jean Paul saw at Siebenkäs’s wedding, [p. 619→] “who, like the three children, had come up unhurt out of the fiery furnace, and had” (like most characters in modern plays,) “raisins instead of souls.” On the contrary, the body, if it is to be a real body, is shaped by the spirit, a speech which it has invented to express itself withal, a house which it has made for itself to live in, and that not out of extraneous bricks and mortar, nor by contract with certain faculties of the brain, as hired architects and bricklayers, but which has grown on its back, like a snail’s shell, mysteriously secreted out of its own very self, and moulded atom by atom into the outward likeness of its inner shape. And if any one think the simile a low one, all we answer is, when he can tell us how a snail makes his shell, we will tell him how a poet makes a poem.
When, therefore, we complain, as we do, of want of artistic form in Mrs. Browning’s very noble Casa Guidi Windows, (which we commence by reproving, because we wish not to damp the effect of our enthusiastic praise,) we, after all, only mean that, if we had had the writing of it, we should have put it in a different shape;—an unimportant observation to ourselves, because we are perfectly aware that we could not have written it at all; and an equally unimportant observation in itself, because the reason for putting it in a different form, would be simply because the thing to be expressed would have been different, and our idea, or B.’s or C.’s, of the subject-matter have been, not Mrs. Browning’s, but another; and there is no wisdom in demonstrating that a horse is an ill-made animal, when considered as a cow.
Instead, therefore, of lamenting that Mrs. Browning did not throw those scenes of the Florence Revolution on which she looked out from Casa Guidi windows, instead of the Pindaric Ode, or pair of such, which she has chosen, into the form of an Epos, or a Tragedy, or even, as she might very well have done, into an Aristophanic farce, in which the absurd, by virtue of its intense bitterness, might have risen at moments into the prophetic sublime, we will simply take it as it stands, believing that the very incoherent and fragmentary form of it is in itself a true and natural expression of her own just bewilderment, uncertainty, alternate hope and disappointment, vague yet sure expectation of a darker and a brighter future, a red sunrise of retribution, from whose glory and whose horror her eyes, as they should have done, turned away, while all things quivered before them, indistinctly amid the mist of tears.
Only, on this method, having once accepted the form which the poet has chosen as the natural and fitting one, we reserve to ourselves the right to judge all inconsistencies. If a certain shape be the true one, let that be kept throughout, and let each member of it be the best possible of its kind; and whether those rules have been attended to or not, are quite external and analytic questions, to be solved by comparison.
We assert, then, once and for all, at the outset, that the poem is a most wise and beautiful and noble poem,—a poem with a purpose, and that purpose carried out in speech, as few are in these days of purposeless song-twittering. But, for that very reason, we protest against its obvious faults of carelessness; not for Mrs. Browning’s own sake,—one can afford a few spots on the sun—indeed, never see them except through a telescope,—but for the sake of the many young writers whose taste will be affected by her example, and who, whether or not they can write such pages as the last three of this poem, will say,—“You confess that Mrs. Browning writes the most grand and melodious verse: and she sees no reason against stringing three such rhymes together as ‘elemental,’ and ‘prevent all,’ and ‘ungentle;’ and if she does it, why may not I? You confess that Mrs. Browning is next to Tennyson himself, in uttering the noblest of sound and sense, in homely Saxon monosyllables: and yet she, in her very finest passages, sees no harm in using the very longest and stiffest latin-dictionary words in the very loosest sense; and if she does it, why may not I? You confess that Mrs. Browning can write the very tersest and purest of English when she chooses: and if she sees no reason against false grammar, false inflexions, phrases whose meaning is clear enough, from the strength of the thought, and its coherence with that in the context, and which yet [p. 620→] cannot be construed, or, according to any known rules of English, proved to mean what you evidently see they do mean, but stand like rough stones and scaffold-poles in the face of a polished marble wall, or the written hints about colour and effect, which a sketcher often leaves among his clouds and trees, as remembrancers of what they ought to be like when he comes really to paint them—if Mrs. Browning may do all this, why not I?”
Let the reader be judge between us and Mrs. Browning, and listen to two quotations, which, whatever faults we may find with their detail, will need no comment of ours to prove their beauty. Take, for instance, the opening; and, to show what we mean, we must do a very rude thing, and, at the risk of spoiling the general effect,—if it be not altogether too excellent to spoil,—comment as we go on, at least by marking words in italics:—
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—
The true English is—in search of which he went so high. Why have we to remind Mrs. Browning, of all living women, of so simple a fact?
——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.
We are sorry to have to complain. But surely “you concluded” is mere—we will not say what—for one of two phrases, “I concluded,” or “You would have concluded, had you been there.” And surely, too, the word “concluded” itself is not the right one. We do not deny that it is logically correct, but do not our instincts tell us that it is æsthetically shocking? One does not conclude, but see and feel, concerning such images; intricate ones, too, as that of the bird and the bush. And why is the “that” which grammar would require in all but colloquial style after “concluded,” omitted? There are but too many of these colloquialisms, to give them no harder name, in this poem; no one hates the meteoroepy of Pope and Co. more than we do; but the most playful simplicity is perfectly consistent with the severest grammar. And why talk of a tremble green, instead of a green tremble? It is not English. In the old ballads, and in the imitations of them, it is quite allowable to put certain stock epithets after the noun, for the sake of making the object expressed by the noun strike the imagination before its accidents. But that rule does not apply here. The object is a green bush trembling. If you have once seen that it trembles, its colour will be unimportant to you—for you know already what it is, and therefore its “green” is superfluous. But if you first—as you would—see that it is green, and then afterwards see that it is trembling, you have, as you ought to have, the common quality first, as the genus, and then, as the individual thereof, the object which is unexpectedly found to possess that quality—and therefore you put the general adjective before, not after, the particular noun—a method which is the cause of beauty in many a fine expression in this very poem, such as “cadenced tears,” “marble film,” “righteous rage,” and such like.
Look again at the same defects in another really noble passage:—
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,— [p. 621→]
(What an image to have been spoilt by two such words as “gestant” and “undeveloped”!)
—each bestrode
(Bestridden is surely the past participle.)
By a single man, dust-white from head to heel,
Indifferent as the dreadful thing he rode,
Calm as a sculptured fate, and terrible!
* * * * * *
So, swept, in mute significance of storm,
The marshalled thousands,—not an eye deflect
(Now “deflect” is neither English nor Latin. It should have been either the English past participle, deflected, or the crude form of the Latin one, deflexus; deflex, like reflex.)
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 steadfast as their swords,
And cognisant of acts, not imageries.
(Of course the meaning is at once unmistakeable, and most poetical. But why bring in the whole sentence by a needless fault of grammar, omitting the preposition which alone could make the first line of the four sense,—“All with straightforward eyes.” And surely, surely, such vague abstract Latin words as cognizant, and imageries, are of too thin and cloudy a fabric to fit in well into the solid objective stuff which surrounds them, or to be in any real artistic keeping with the key of the grand passage which follows, wherein Mrs. Browning is herself again—(except in that sad sixth line.)
The key, O Tuscans, fits too well the wards!
Ye asked for mimes; these bring you tragedies—
For purple; these shall wear it as your lords.
Ye played like children; die like innocents!
Ye mimicked lightnings with a torch: the crack
Of the actual bolt, your pastime, circumvents.
Ye called up ghosts, believing they were slack
To follow any voice from Gilboa’s tents....
Here’s Samuel!—And, so, Grand-dukes come back!
But we will make no more complaints, and with full admiration ask what can well be loftier than this:—
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!—pp. 111, 112. [p. 622→]
By quoting which single passage, we consider ourselves to have made a full amende honorable to Mrs. Browning for all the hard things which we have been forced, by our critical fanaticism, to say of her; and so take our leave of a poem which raises its author’s name higher than even her previous works have done, not merely from the improved metrical polish and rhythm of it, but because it combines, to a degree unique in our day, either among poets or poetesses, rich and intense imagination, with a strength, and health, and abundance of thought, altogether manlike; and yet is in nowise deficient—as the exquisite allusion to her child, in the conclusion, will prove—in occasional touches of the very sweetest womanly tenderness. And if we have said one harsh word here, it is only in the hope that, if these words meet Mrs. Browning’s eye, we may help to “pierce her with conscience,” and shame her—if it must be done so harshly—into doing her own powers justice by that common care, which is expected of every schoolboy, and so prove at once her title as the greatest poetess—and one of the greatest poets—of modern Europe.
[This article concludes with notices of works by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, William Caldwell Roscoe, and George Meredith, which are omitted here.]
[Charles Kingsley]
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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