E600324A. Poems Before Congress.
The Atlas, 24 March 1860, pp. 231–232.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 359–361.
The tumultuous hopes and longings newly born, or rather revivified, by the Italian war of last year, have found a noble utterance in these rough, yet in some sort harmonious, verses by the greatest poetess our language has yet produced—a writer who unites the strength of a man’s intellect to the largeness of a woman’s heart. We know perfectly well beforehand what will be said of them by those who hate the cause they glorify—by deniers of popular rights, lovers of Austrian “order,” scorners of sentiment, worshippers of aristocratical exclusiveness and petty international jealousies. They will assert that these songs of freedom are harsh and rugged, for they will make no account of that exaltation of soul which may well cause a verse to stagger now and then, as it causes the human voice to break and fail when it would speak. They will talk of eccentricity and of obscurity; and they will raise the cuckoo cry which every one whose sympathies are wider than the limits of his own land has to meet—the foolish cry that the authoress is anti-English simply because she is cosmopolitan. This last objection Mrs. Browning has herself anticipated and replied to in her Preface, where she writes:—
“If patriotism be a virtue indeed, it cannot mean an exclusive devotion to one’s country’s interests,—for that is only another form of devotion to personal interests, family interests, or provincial interests; all of which, if not driven past themselves, are vulgar and immoral objects. Let us put away the little Pedlingtonism unworthy of a great nation, and too prevalent among us. If the man who does not look beyond this natural life is of a somewhat narrow order, what must be the man who does not look beyond his own frontier or his own sea?
“I confess that I dream of the day when an English statesman shall arise with a heart too large for England, having courage in the face of his countrymen to assert of some suggested policy,—‘This is good for your trade: this is necessary for your domination; but it will vex a people hard by; it will hurt a people further off; it will profit nothing to the general humanity; therefore, away with it!—it is not for you or for me.’ When a British Minister dares speak so, and when a British public applauds him speaking, then shall the nation be so glorious, that her praise, instead of exploding from within, from loud civic mouths, shall come to her from without, as all worthy praise must, from the alliances she has fostered, and from the populations she has saved.
“And poets who write of the events of that time, shall not need to justify themselves in prefaces, for ever so little jarring of the national sentiment, imputable to their rhymes.”
We may grant some of the objections that will be urged against Mrs. Browning’s volume, yet consistently maintain that the book is luminous with noble thought and nobler feeling—harmonious with a harmony beyond mere sweetness, because the verse answers the throbbing of the heart of her [p. 232→] who sings, and obeys a law superior to the law of schools. Even we who say this may, at times, as a matter of simple indulgence to the ear, desire a more regular progression of numbers; and may at other times take exception to a forced rhyme or an extravagant epithet, or regret that the meaning should be left obscure, owing to some equivocal phrase which might have been easily removed, had the manuscript been put away for a few months, and revised at leisure. But we are content, and more than content, to receive these poems as they come to us white-hot and scorching from the furnace of love and scorn, of hope and disappointment, of joy and grief, of passion and prophecy, where they have been wrought—roughly wrought, if you will, but with the stamp and warrant of a power that cannot be denied. No doubt, as a rule, poetry should be carefully elaborated; but there are some verses that are the better for being struck out at a glow, and projected into the world with all the fresh, irregular energy of the original impulse. These Poems before Congress belong to the latter class; and we cannot conceive a better moment for their production than the very week which has been signalised by the splendid electoral triumph of the Central Italians over the cause of Austria and the Pope.
The ruggedness to which we have alluded is more especially observable in the opening poem—that entitled “Napoleon III. in Italy.” For the first page or two, you are inclined to object to the prosaic modulation of the lines; but it is not long before you kindle with the kindling emotion of the writer, and feel that that abrupt and broken utterance is swelling upwards into something like a chant. Mrs. Browning has the courage and the faith in eternal principles of justice to hail, as the incarnation of a majestic truth, the very man whom demagogues and Tories over all the globe have conspired to stamp with odium. She sees that Napoleon the Third is great by the double greatness of his own large nature and of the popular will, which
—elected him and crowned him
Emperor
Evermore.
Deeply and truly does she say that
The people’s instinct found him
(A wind in the dark that ran
Through a chink where was no door);
and simply, bravely, profoundly right is she when she exclaims:—
The people’s blood runs through him,
Dilates from head to foot,
Creates him absolute,
And from this great beginning
Evokes a greater end
To justify and renew him—
Emperor
Evermore.
This is the view of Napoleon’s character and position which we have laboured to maintain in these columns; and to find our conception thus exalted into poetry by a genius such as Mrs. Browning’s, may well compensate us for the misrepresentation of narrower minds. Let us listen to another burst of the same music:—
But now, Napoleon, now
That, leaving far behind the purple throng
Of vulgar monarchs, thou
Tread’st higher in thy deed
Than stair of throne can lead,
To help in the hour of wrong
The broken hearts of nations to be strong,—
Now, lifted as thou art
To the level of pure song,
We stand to meet thee on these Alpine snows!
And while the palpitating peaks break out
Ecstatic from somnambular repose
With answers to the presence and the shout,
We, poets of the people, who take part
With elemental justice, natural right,
Join in our echoes also, nor refrain.
We meet thee, O Napoleon, at this height
At last, and find thee great enough to praise.
Receive the poet’s chrism, which smells beyond
The priest’s, and pass thy ways;—
An English poet warns thee to maintain
God’s word, not England’s:—let His truth be true,
And all men liars! with His truth respond
To all men’s lie. Exalt the sword, and smite
On that long anvil of the Apennine,
Where Austria forged the Italian chain in view
Of seven consenting nations, sparks of fine
Admonitory light,
Till men’s eyes wink before convictions new.
Flash in God’s justice to the world’s amaze,
Sublime deliverer!—after many days
Found worthy of the deed thou art come to do—
Emperor
Evermore.
How eloquent, how true with the truth of deep sympathy, is this picture of the uprising of the Italians at the signal of Piedmont and of France!—
Out of the dust, where they ground them,
Out of the holes, where they dogged them,
Out of the hulks, where they wound them
In iron, tortured and flogged them;
Out of the streets, where they chased them,
Taxed them, and then bayonetted them,—
Out of the homes, where they spied on them
(Using their daughters and wives),
Out of the church, where they fretted them,
Rotted their souls and debased them,
Trained them to answer with knives,
Then cursed them all at their prayers!—
Out of cold lands, not theirs,
Where they exiled them, starved them, lied on them;
Back they come like a wind, in vain
Cramped up in the hills, that roars its road
The stronger into the open plain;
Or like a fire that burns the hotter
And longer for the crust of cinder,
Serving better the ends of the potter;
Or like a restrainèd word of God,
Fulfilling itself by what seems to hinder.
Emperor
Evermore.
* * * * *
Take up the child, Macmahon, though
Thy hand be red
From Magenta’s dead,
And riding on, in front of the troop,
In the dust of the whirlwind of war
Through the gate of the city of Milan, stoop
And take up the child to thy saddle-bow,
Nor fear the touch as soft as a flower
Of his smile as clear as a star!
Thou hast a right to the child, we say,
Since the women are weeping for joy, as those
Who, by thy help and from this day,
Shall be happy mothers indeed.
They are raining flowers from terrace and roof:
Take up the flower in the child,
While the shout goes up of a nation freed
And heroically self-reconciled,
Till the snow on that peakèd Alp aloof
Starts, as feeling God’s finger anew,
And all those cold white marble fires
Of mounting saints on the Duomo-spires
Flicker against the Blue.
Emperor
Evermore.
Ay, it is He,
Who rides at the King’s right hand!
Leave room to his horse, and draw to the side,
Nor press too near in the ecstacy
Of a newly delivered impassioned land:
He is moved, you see,
He who has done it all.
They call it a cold, stern face;
But this is Italy
Who rises up to her place!—
For this he fought in his youth,
Of this he dreamed in the past;—
The lines of the resolute mouth
Tremble a little at last.
Cry, he has done it all!
Emperor
Evermore.
We can do no more than barely indicate the grace and loveliness of the poem called “The Dance”; the profound pathos of “A Tale of Villafranca”; the ballad sweetness and tearfulness that distinguish the stanzas entitled “A Court Lady”; and the fierce satire and irony of the next poem, “An August Voice.” But we cannot resist the temptation of making some quotations from the finest of the poems—“Italy and the World.” Observe in these passages the subtly interwoven harmony of the verse,—more especially that beautiful pause at the end of each stanza on the unrhymed line, followed by the stately rising towards the rhyme in the next stanza:—
Life and life and life! agrope in
The dusk of death, warm hands, stretch’d out
For swords, proved more life still to hope in,
Beyond and behind. Arise with a shout,
Nation of Italy, slain and buried!
Hill to hill and turret to turret
Flashing the tricolor,—newly created,
Beautiful Italy, calm, unhurried,
Rise heroic and renovated,
Rise to the final restitution!
Rise; prefigure the grand solution
Of earth’s municipal, insular schisms,—
Statesmen draping self-love’s conclusion
In cheap, vernacular patriotisms,
Unable to give up Judæa for Jesus.
Bring us the higher example; release us
Into the larger coming time:
And into Christ’s broad garment piece us
Rags of virtue as poor as crime,—
National selfishness, civic vaunting.
No more Jew or Greek then,—taunting
Nor taunted;—no more England nor France!
But one confederate brotherhood, planting
One flag only, to mark the advance,
Onward and upward, of all humanity.
* * * * *
Modena, Parma, Bologna, Florence,
Open us out the wider way!
Dwarf in that chapel of old St. Lawrence
Your Michel Angelo’s giant Day
With the grandeur of this Day breaking o’er us!
Ye who, restrained as an ancient chorus,
Mute while the coryphæus spake,
Hush your separate voices before us,
Sink your separate lives for the sake
Of one sole Italy’s living for ever!
* * * * *
Beautiful Italy! golden amber,
Warm with the kisses of lover and traitor!
Thou who hast drawn us on to remember,
Draw us to hope now: let us be greater
By this new future than that old story.
Till truer glory replaces all glory,
As the torch grows blind at the dawn of day;
And the nations, rising up, their sorry
And foolish sins shall put away,
As children their toys when the teacher enters.
Till Love’s one centre devour these centres
Of many self-loves; and the patriot’s trick
To better his land by egotist ventures,
Defamed from a virtue, shall make men sick,
As the scalp at the belt of some red hero.
The concluding poem—“A Curse for a Nation”,—is worthy of the rest; but the form is injudicious. Mrs. Browning tells us, on seraphic authority, that—
A curse from the depths of womanhood
Is very salt, and bitter, and good.
Nevertheless, it is unpleasant to hear a lady even “making believe” to curse her own country. It is nothing more than “make-believe”; for this so-called “curse” is simply a sorrowful rebuke to England for not extending her sympathies to other lands. The objectors to Mrs. Browning’s book will probably make much of this little indiscretion; but nothing will blot from the hearts of generous men and women, or remove from the sphere of their gratitude, a series of poems which will remain as an abiding contribution to an immortal cause.
[Edmund Ollier]
Reviewed:
Poems Before Congress (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1860.
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