E520200A. Casa Guidi Windows.
The Monthly Christian Spectator, February 1852, p. 116.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 385–386.
There is not less of poetry than principle in the following extract from Mrs. E. Barrett Browning’s last volume, entitled ‘Casa Guidi Windows.’ ‘Deeply,’ as a recent critic remarks, ‘as Mrs. Browning venerates peace, she is no party to that one-sided tranquility which is built on the sacrifice of the weak. True peace, she holds to be the recognition of mutual rights by the component classes of a state. There are few things in modern poetry more passionate or vigorous than this protest against that hushing of human claims, which means not the silence of a people contented, but that of a people stifled. It is almost needless to say, that it is directed not against these noble teachers, who, abhorring recourse to the sword, would base national peace upon national justice,—but against the despotic, who, in the lust of power, would crush the soul, and the sordid, who would postpone its demands to the convenience of traffic.’* In regard to the means which should be employed to obtain this peace, we should perhaps differ from the gifted authoress, for we believe in no peace obtained through ‘raking of the guns across the world,’ or any other physical means. Brute force never yet brought ‘fellowship’ and ‘mercy.’
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*Editors’ note: The quoted passage is taken from the review of Casa Guidi Windows in The Athenæum of 7 June 1851 (pp. 597–598). For the full text of this review, see vol. 17, pp. 306–309.
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I, too, have loved peace, and from bole to bole
Of immemorial, undeciduous trees,
Would write, as lovers use, upon the scroll
The holy name of Peace, and set it high
Where none shall 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 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 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 in articulate wrong,
Annihilated Poland, stifled Rome,
Razed 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.
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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