E521100A. Casa Guidi Windows.
The North British Review, November 1852, pp. 80 and 103–104.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 389–390.
[This article contains notices of nine other works (all prose) on Italy; these we omit.]
We have a distillation of Italian politics in poetry, under the attractive though somewhat enigmatical name of “Casa Guidi Windows.” We have no time to criticise at length a poem so vigorous and so beautiful, and calculated to take so high a place for its own merits, apart from the interest of Italian politics. It is, in short, the poetical apotheosis of Young Italy; and yet that young gentleman is pretty soundly lectured before his canonization. Our object is more sober, and less ambitious: and leaving Mrs. Browning to watch the Arno as it shoots “right through the heart of Florence,” we would occupy ourselves in tracing the political history and prospects of Tuscany, as suggested in these and sundry other works, “too tedious to mention.”
[This article continues with further remarks on other works on Italy.] [p. 103→]
Yet it is perhaps better that the constitution of February has been finally and fully abolished, than that it should exist only in name. It has brought out more distinctly the true state of things, both as to the measures and the men. The once popular Leopold II., and his patriot oath, have become a byeword among his people, and we cannot refrain from quoting one stanza of the “Casa Guidi Windows,” which perhaps, on the whole, the Grand Duke might consider as slightly personal.
Why swear at all, thou false Duke Leopold?
What need to swear? What need to boast thy blood
Taintless of Austria, and thy heart unsold
Away from Florence? It was understood
God made thee not too vigorous or too bold,
And men had patience with thy quiet mood,
And woman pity, as they saw thee pace
Their festive streets with premature grey hairs:
We turned the mild dejection of thy face
To princely meanings, took thy wrinkling cares
For ruffling hopes, and called thee weak, not base. [p. 104→]
Better to light the torches for more prayers,
And smoke the pale Madonnas at the shrine,
Being still ‘Our poor Grand Duke,’ ‘Our good Grand Duke,’
‘Who cannot help the Austrian in his line,’
Than write an oath upon a nation’s book
For men to spit at with scorn’s blurring brine!
Who dares forgive what none can overlook?
Reviewed:
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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