E531203A. Poems (1850) and Casa Guidi Windows.
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 3 December 1853, pp. 361–363.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 383–386.
Professor Wilson gave perhaps the most concise definition of poetry which could be attempted, when he said it was “the intellect coloured by the feelings.” If this brief interpretation of a term so familiar, and yet about the precise meaning of which so much has been written, does not include all descriptions of poetry, it certainly applies very directly to that which emanates from the female mind. In the writings of almost every literary woman, it is very obvious that the intellect and the emotions have a close and inseparable alliance. In a very few instances, the intellect may be said to preponderate, but in general it is not only coloured, but highly coloured by the feelings; so much so as either to be passionate or deeply pathetic. Hence we find that for the most part women, or men in whom a delicacy of sentiment akin to that which distinguishes the more cultivated of the female sex, have given us the best specimens of what is called the poetry of the affections. In the higher walks of poetry—such as the dramatic—few women have won a reputation. Their range is naturally restricted; for however powerful the imagination may be, the emotions are still more powerful, and what is simply touching, is the product of the female mind in most cases, rather than what is bold, stern, and strong.
Among the living female writers of poetry, there is not one to whom we could point as an exception to this general rule, in the sense in which Joanna Baillie was so, unless it is Mrs Barrett Browning. In her case the feelings, or at least that narrower range of them which we have called the affections, come into play comparatively seldom. In the several volumes she has published, we find nothing akin to the gentleness and sweetly pathetic tone of the poetry of Mrs Hemans, and nearly as little of the passionate impetuosity which characterised that of L. E. L. Except in one or two instances, there is no approximation to the style of any one of our modern British poets—nothing which indicates the influence of a masculine mind sufficiently strong to overcome, or give, as it were, a bias to the natural expression of feminine emotions and experiences. There is great original vigour to be found in much of Mrs Browning’s poetry, sentiment considerably different from that which we usually receive from her sex, and a certain wildness in her fancies not easily accounted for on the ordinary principles which guide us in judging of any literary effort. We do not, indeed, need to be told that she has a large store of acquired knowledge, for that is obvious in almost all her writings, much more so than her experience of ordinary life; but we do need to know that several of Mrs Browning’s early years were spent in a sick-chamber, with the Greek poets for her chief companions, before we can fully estimate the value of her poetry as the expression of natural feelings, or thoroughly appreciate its artistic structure. Shut out, or, more properly speaking, shut in from that communion with persons of her own sex and age which would have tended to the development of that part of her nature which so often struggles rather than flows through her writings, we can easily conceive her mode of thinking, as well as her taste, to have been greatly affected by her studies; while her emotions, restricted in their range, now break out into narrow channels, often with far more than womanly vehemence. In one point—namely, the influence of sorrow upon her genius—there may be said to be a similarity between her poetry and that of her female contemporaries or predecessors in general; but even that influence is usually manifested in a peculiar way. It is occasionally felt as a load which burdens the spirit of the poetess, and darkens her views of life. Thoughtful to a degree beyond what is necessary for the healthy exercise of the poetic faculty, and often gloomy from a too quick sense of the ills of life—or rather, an exaggeration of them—Mrs Browning is by no means a hopeful writer. Her poetry abounds with those solemn communings with her own heart, and those broodings in the shadows of existence which give the mind a melancholy and often an untruthful tone. Her themes are, for the most part, sufficiently indicative of this, and the very titles of her lyrical poems, where they are not obscurely fanciful, are in keeping with the spirit which pervades them. Thus we have The Cry of the Human, The Soul’s Travail [sic, for Travelling], The Cry of the Children, and similar titles. In seeking to make a selection from her poetry, we find that the only choice is between these and another set in which the chord of sorrow is a little more lightly touched. We take the following verses from one of two pieces of the latter kind, respectively called Crowned and Wedded and Crowned and Buried—the one suggested by the accession and marriage of our youthful queen, and the other by the intombment of Napoleon:—
Napoleon! Nations, while they cursed that name,
Shook at their curses; and while others bore
Its sound, as of a trumpet on before,
Brass-fronted legions justified its fame—
And dying men, on trampled battle sods
Near their last silence, uttered it for God’s.
* * * *
That name consumed the silence of the snows
In Alpine keeping, holy and cloud-hid,
The mimic eagles dared what Nature’s did,
And over-rushed her mountainous repose
In search of eyries: and the Egyptian river
Mingled the same word with its grand—“For ever.”
* * * *
O wild St Helen! very still she kept him,
With a green willow for his pyramid,
Which stirred a little if the low wind did,
A little more if pilgrims overwept him,
Disparting the lithe boughs to see the clay
Which seemed to cover his for judgment-day.
Nay, not so long!—France kept her old affection,
As deeply as the sepulchre the corse,
Until, dilated by such love’s remorse,
To a new angel of the resurrection
She cried: “Behold thou, England! I would have
The dead whereof thou wottest from that grave.”
* * * *
A little urn—a little dust inside
Which once outbalanced the large earth, albeit
To-day a four years’ child might carry it,
Smooth browed and smiling let the burden down,
Orestes to Electra—O fair town
Of Paris, how the wild tears will run down,
And run back on the chariot-marks of Time,
When all the people shall come forth to meet
The passive victor, death still on the street
He rode through ’mid the shouting and bell-chime
And martial music under eagles which
Dyed their rapacious beaks at Austerlitz.
* * * *
I do not praise this man: the man was flawed
For Adam—much more Christ!—his knee unbent,
His hand unclean—his aspiration pent
Within a sword-sweep—pshaw!—but since he had
The genius to be loved, why let him have
The justice to be honoured in his grave.
There is a freedom in these verses which many other pieces of higher poetical merit do not possess. One poem, The Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, deserves special [p. 362→] notice, as the best illustration of Mrs Browning’s sense of the artistic which her volumes afford. There is much less affectation in it than in most of the others, and strongly expressed emotions are sustained to a passionate climax with great success. We know of no poem by a living writer at all equal to it in this respect. Tennyson’s Locksley Hall has a passionate energy finely conveyed, but it lacks the vehemence of The Lady Geraldine’s Courtship—a vehemence so thoroughly consistent with the nature, design, and progress of the poem, as to give us a far higher idea of Mrs Browning’s artistic capacity than even her more elaborate works convey. The story is that of a poet galled by the conventionalities which interpose themselves between him and the object of his love, a lady of noble birth and stately beauty—the old story, in fact, of the troubadour and the dame of high degree, with somewhat of a modern application. We commend it to the reader’s notice, for no such extract as we could give would afford anything like a satisfactory idea of the poem. The Lost Bower is another of Mrs Browning’s highest efforts, though totally different from the work we have just referred to. It is suggestive and well conceived, the fancy is exquisite in many parts of it, and although we cannot quote from it advantageously, the following lines will suffice to illustrate its imaginative character:—
Ah! could this same bower, I fancied,
Be the work of Dryad strong,
Who, surviving all that chancèd
In the world’s old pagan wrong,
Lay hid, feeding in the woodland on the last true poet’s song.
So, young muser, I sate listening
To my fancy’s wildest word—
On a sudden, through the glistering
Leaves around, a little stirred,
Came a sound, a sense of music which was rather felt than heard.
Softly, finely, it enwound me,
From the world it shut me in,
Like a fountain falling round me,
Which, with silver waters thin,
Clips a little marble Naiad, sitting smilingly within.
We have said enough, perhaps, to give the reader a pretty distinct impression of Mrs Browning’s genius. She has not yet done herself anything like justice. Early predilections still sway her, and she still lacks real self-interest in the subjects upon which she employs her genius. A later poem, The Drama of Exile, is an attempt, and, so far as its artistic consistency is concerned, not a very successful one, to apply the spirit and form of Greek tragedy to the subject of the Fall, or rather, the expulsion from Paradise. The dialogue, which is in many instances sustained and noble, alternates with a succession of choruses, marked at once by the best and the worst features of Mrs Browning’s style. Such a subject, it may easily be conceived, demands the exercise of a strong imagination, and in many parts of this poem there are passages of undoubted power—of a severe and stern strength, in fact, approaching the highest character of dramatic expression; but, at the same time, we in some measure lose the effect of these, when, in the next page, we come upon vague declamations and paltry conceits which at once suggest a want of unity in the spirit as well as the construction of the poem. In spite of these faults, however, The Drama of Exile abounds with illustrations of what we conceive to be the highest style of poetry. In proof of this, we need only quote one or two passages at random. Here is a brief description of the effects of “the Fall” on the animal creation:—
On a mountain-peak
Half-sheathed in primal woods, and glittering
In spasms of awful sunshine, at that hour
A lion couched—part raised upon his paws,
And his calm massive face turned full on thine.
* * * When the ended curse
Left silence in the world—right suddenly
He sprang up rampant, and stood straight and stiff,
As if the new reality of death
Were dashed against his eyes—and roared so fierce—
Such thick carnivorous passion in his throat
Tearing a passage through the wrath and fear—
And roared so wild, and smote from all the hills
Such fast keen echoes crumbling down the vales
Precipitately—that the forest beasts,
One after one, did mutter a response
In savage and in sorrowful complaint
Which trailed along the gorges.
There is scarcely a line in the above passage which might not have been written by the greatest poet of any land or any time. The description evinces imaginative strength in its sternest and loftiest form, and a picturesqueness vivid and terrible. As an example of what is more thoughtful and pathetic in the poem, we take the following on the destiny of woman, almost the only lines suggestive of feminine authorship:—
If wo by thee
Had issue to the world, thou shalt go forth
An angel of the wo thou didst achieve.
* * * Thy love
Shall chant its own beatitudes
After its own life working. A child’s kiss
Set on thy sighing lips shall make thee glad:
A poor man served by thee shall make thee rich,
A sick man helped by thee shall make thee strong;
Thou shalt be served thyself by every sense
Of service which thou renderest.
I bless thee in the name of Paradise,
And by the memory of Edenic joys
Forfeit and lost; by that last cypress-tree
Green at the gate, which thrilled as we passed out;
And by the blessed nightingale, which threw
Its melancholy music after us.
* * * *
And on thy longest patience there shall wait
Death’s speechless angel.
We have selected these passages as being least affected by disconnection with the context; there are others of equal strength and equal beauty, going far to redeem the faults of taste and the artistic shortcomings of the poem.
Mrs Browning’s latest work is a poem of some length, with the rather curious title of Casa Guidi Windows. It professes to be a survey from the windows of the house occupied by the poetess at Florence during the eventful year of 1848; but though for the most part of a political character, its references are not confined to the occurrences which took place in the Tuscan capital. The survey extends over all Italy, and embraces the most interesting incidents of the revolutionary era in that land. All Mrs Browning’s sympathies are with the cause of the people, and she pleads for freedom and denounces tyranny in poetry of an earnest and often highly impassioned tone. She does not fail, however, to record, frequently in the language of sorrow or of pity, the impression made upon her mind by the unstable and fitful attachments of those who to-day plant the trees of liberty, and rally round the people’s flag, and to-morrow throw up their caps and shout a welcome to their returning rulers. Apart from the fine poetic fire which burns in many parts of the Casa Guidi Windows, the views which it gives us of Italian politics are clear and interesting. We do not usually look to poems for such things, least of all do we expect to find them in poetry written by a lady; but, as we have said, Mrs Browning’s sympathies are not such as [p. 363→] are confined within the sphere of feminine likings and dislikings. She has a great deal of masculine energy, and her writings are often pervaded by a spirit of political zeal not common in those even of the other sex. The Casa Guidi Windows contains less of its author’s mannerism than any of her other poems, and has often the fiery rapidity of the improvisatrice, with a beauty of expression which she has not surpassed in any previous effort. Here is a tribute to Carlo Alberto, the Sardinian soldier-king, which is full of force, and more than worthy of the warrior—
Who bursting that heroic heart of his
At lost Novara, that he could not die,
Though thrice into the cannon’s eyes for this
He plunged his shuddering steed, and felt the sky
Reel back between the fire-shocks; stripped away
The ancestral ermine ere the smoke had cleared,
And naked to the soul, that none might say
His kingship covered what was base and bleared
With treason, he went out an exile, yea,
An exiled patriot.
* * * *
And taking off his crown, made visible
A hero’s forehead.
This is at least one evidence that the age we live in is not destitute of themes for the poet when the inspiration of genius comes to mould the modern event into the poetic thought. But we are tending towards politics and prolixity, and must leave the reader to judge of how far the extracts we have given make good the claim of Mrs Browning to be considered a poetess in the true sense of that term. It is doubtful if a word which is usually meant to convey the idea of poetic gifts allied with the characteristics of the female nature, applies very directly to Mrs Browning. In her case, the imagination is by no means so highly coloured by the feelings as to prevent the possibility of any reader supposing that her poetry, if published anonymously, had been written by one of the sterner sex. That she is gifted with the power of producing something far higher than she has yet given to the world is, we think, undeniable; and that what she has done is worthy of being remembered, is the opinion, we hope, to which we have now brought the reader.
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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