E600331A. Poems Before Congress.
The Saturday Review of Politics, 31 March 1860, pp. 402–404.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 367–370.
The serious prosaic utterance of almost any proposition which has been paraphrased into Mrs. Browning’s poetical rhapsody would be culpable, pitiable, or silly. It is not permitted to Englishmen, or even to Englishwomen, to renounce, in the language of ordinary life, allegiance, loyalty, national instinct, and the deep-rooted faith in freedom which shrinks from usurping upstarts as sensitively as from legitimate despots. Metre has, by long-established convention, acquired a privilege of irresponsibility, which criticism by no means ought to withdraw, although poets have too often attempted to abuse it. While the greatest of all masters of the art have kept their own opinions and characters in the background, high authority is not wanting for the attempt to combine the long separated offices of poet and of prophet. Lord Byron owes the greater part of his fame to his ingenuity in connecting a fictitious personality of his own with the unsatisfactory but popular gospel which it was his mission to preach. Subsequent revelations have shown that the Satanic attributes which he had assumed were only assumed for the purpose of imposing on the general credulity, while the doctrines of Childe Harold and Don Juan expressed sometimes genuine irritation, and more frequently a desire to shock, to surprise, or to command admiration and sympathy. In private conversation he generally repudiated the character which he had made it the business of his life to obtain, and the same course is [p. 403→] generally adopted from similar motives by metrical moralists and politicians. When the wisdom of their utterances is welcomed with universal applause, they willingly let the mask slip aside to display their own individual features, and with better reason they disclaim the sophisms, the blunders, and the perversities which unreasonable critics fix on them, merely because they find them in their works. It ought once for all to be understood that all sentiments in poetry, however they may seem to express the convictions of the writer, are to be attributed to some dramatic personage, and to be judged by their adaptation to his assumed idiosyncrasy. The poet has no more right to step forward in his own person than the advocate to claim the confidence of the Court in his own pretended knowledge of the justice of his cause. It is intolerable that the actor should be any longer allowed to play fast and loose with the sympathies of his audience. Béranger, after winning the affections of his countrymen by describing himself in his songs as a licentious Parisian Cockney, was careful to assert in his autobiography the prudence and decorum of his actual career. Henceforth it will be safe to assume that future Byrons are patterns of domestic virtue, and that Walter de Mapes was incapable of entering the doors of a tavern.
Notwithstanding her imprudent efforts to obtain a hearing in her own person, Mrs. Browning will find it impossible to repudiate the immunities which are inseparably attached to her sex and to her genius. In calling attention to the peculiar doctrines of her present volume, the critic must resolutely forget the personality of the writer. It is not difficult to appreciate the circumstances and mental position of the dramatic character whose idolatrous devotion to Napoleon III. is, with much dramatic fitness, associated with a whole chaos of ignorant prejudices and antipathies against England. A short preface of stilted prose must be included in the fictitious unity of the poem, although Mrs. Browning interrupts the illusion by a statement, which is probably intended to be accepted in its literal sense, that she herself, as well as the pretended worshipper of Bonapartism, has resided for many years in Italy. During that period she must have had many opportunities of witnessing the deteriorating influences which affect the cosmopolitan English exile who divides his idleness between dilettante Liberalism and dilettante art. Detached from his native soil without being engrafted on a foreign stock—unable to test new and plausible systems by practical experience, and gradually forgetting more and more the meaning and the bearing of his native institutions—the lounger of Paris or of Florence adopts from fluent foreign teachers their opinions, first of their own internal politics, and secondly of that very England which he ought to have known better himself. Forgetting the lessons taught by the history of the only free race of modern Europe, the feeble seceder from true political life learns to believe in democracy or socialism as a substitute for liberty, and little further preparation is needed for an effeminate acquiescence in the supremacy of lawless force. The dignity, the calmness, the foresight which still characterize a self-governing nation are merged in a blind enthusiasm for some cause which, even when it is worthy, is generally ill-understood. Mrs. Browning’s mouthpiece, or poetical organ, has long ceased to understand that any political object can be worth regarding except the expulsion of the Austrians, and of the Princes whom they supported, from the provinces of Italy. In a delirium of imbecile one-sidedness, the denationalized fanatic protests against the Volunteer movement, because it is intended for the defence of England and not for the liberation of Tuscany:—
I cry aloud in my poet-passion,
Viewing my England o’er Alp and sea;
I loved her more in her ancient fashion;
She carries her rifles too thick for me,
Who spares them so in the cause of a brother.
Suspicion, panic? end this pother;
The sword, kept sheathless at peace-time rusts;
None fears for himself while he feels for another;
The brave man either fights or trusts,
And wears no mail in his private chamber.
There is much fitness and coherency in the portraiture of the illogical renegade, who persuades himself that the England which he calls “his” has no alternative between an unprovoked war with Austria and a total abandonment of all preparations for self-defence. Securities against a French invasion of England strike him as purposeless absurdities, because they have never formed the subject of discussion in Liberal Italian casinos. The cant of Continental democrats, all deriving their inspiration from France, finds a ready mimic in the English convert, who echoes their ignorant calumnies in the shape of unauthorized apologies. The fixed idea of French journalists, that England goes to war only for the sake of fresh markets, is reproduced in characteristically fantastic verses as a contrast to the pure and disinterested virtue of the potentate who is designated in capital letters as HE and HIM:—
He, though the merchants persuade,
And the soldiers are eager for strife,
Finds not his country in quarrels,
Only to find her in trade.
The inference that the Russian war was undertaken on the part of England for the protection of domestic tallow or hemp, would seem to any declaimer at any café on the Continent equally natural and degrading.
By an easy fiction, the ex-Englishman of the volume is supposed to be a poet, and Mrs. Browning’s genius enables her to display considerable metrical ability even in the repulsive task of embodying his servile and seditious platitudes. The burden of the principal poem expresses rather concisely than gracefully the conviction which seems most deeply impressed on the cosmopolitan or table-d’hôte haunting mind—
Emperor
Evermore.
Such is the refrain of a long dithyramb, and the words, though they have as little rhyme as reason, may serve to indicate an unbounded reverence for lawless strength and histrionic greatness. The poor prattler is deeply impressed with the act of the “eight millions who swore by their manhood’s right divine,” &c., to renew the Empire; and, with the unfailing instinct of servility, he rejoices in the triumph of numbers over the intelligence and conscience which alone guard natural freedom:—
The thinkers stood aside
To let the nation act.
Some hated the new constituted fact
Of empire, as pride treading on their pride.
The cosmopolitan poet imagined by the poetess is as superior to moral considerations as to a regard for human dignity protesting against triumphant despotism:—
That day I did not hate,
Nor doubt, nor quail, nor curse.
I, reverencing the people, did not bate
My reverence of their deed and oracle,
Nor vainly prate
Of better and of worse
Against the great conclusion of their will.
It is impossible to follow more faithfully the precedent of Pontius Pilate, although, indeed, that ill-famed Liberal did attempt a little “to prate of better and of worse” against the great conclusion of universal suffrage which returned Barabbas for his approval. However, it seems that the fictitious poet abstained from expressing the enthusiasm so naturally excited by the elevation of a Power dangerous to England and destructive of all liberty in France. It was not before the invasion of Lombardy that—
We meet thee, O Napoleon, at this height
At last, and find thee great enough to praise.
Receive the poet’s chrism, which swells [sic] beyond
The priest’s, and pass thy ways;
An English poet warns thee to maintain
God’s word, not England’s.
For how should the profound conviction of all thoughtful Englishmen be other than inconsistent with the will of God, as revealed in the creed of democratic despotism?
Some fine stanzas are devoted to the celebration of the Italian campaign, but Mrs. Browning seems to violate the dramatic unity of her poem when she satirizes, through the mouth of her fictitious flatterer, the hero at whose feet he is represented as grovelling. After the experience of six months, there is an irony too transparent for poetic uses in the description of Napoleon III. as a Sovereign superior to the traditional frauds of Absolutist diplomacy:—
Is this a man like the rest,
This miracle made unaware,
By a rapture of popular air,
And caught to the place that was best?
You think he could barter and cheat
As vulgar diplomates use,
With the people’s heart in his breast?
Prate a lie into shape
Lest truth should cumber the road,
Play at fast and loose
Till the world is strangled with tape?
Maim the soul’s complete
To fit the hole of a toad;
And filch the dogman’s meat
To feed the offspring of God.
It is impossible to say whether the Emperor Napoleon, or any other person, can be supposed to perform the unknown operations which are shadowed forth in the last four lines; but, as to his bartering and cheating “as vulgar diplomates use,” the English reader modestly replies that there would be great injustice in comparing the inspirer of M. Thouvenel’s despatches to any vulgar diplomatist. A prophecy follows that he will be applauded for ever—
Not only within the civic wall
By the loyal, but also without
By the generous and free.
The admission that the generous and free are outside that wall of loyalty within which Parisian journalists sing their master’s praises, is somewhat inconsistent with the assumed character of the Anglo-foreign devotee.
The apparent shortcomings of Villafranca are defended on two somewhat incompatible assumptions. Gallicized Liberalism at one moment represents the Imperial hero as withdrawing into his own conscious greatness, of which the world was not worthy:
The world is many—I am one:
My great Deed was too great.
But the worshippers of force invariably admire the associated virtue of cunning; and “An August Voice,” in a poem under the same title, appeals to the Tuscans not to take back the Grand Duke, whom the same divine organ had promised to Austria to [p. 404→] restore. Horace and Virgil, though by no means chary of sycophantic phrases, never went so far as to compliment Augustus by attributing to him wilful and interested mendacity.
The only poem which is unconnected with the subject of the French war in Italy contains a so-called curse against the United States on account of negro slavery. The priestess, or Pythoness, who delivers the commination is, like the bearded exile of the Imperialist eulogy, an English resident abroad, who seems to cultivate patriotic attachment to every country but her own. When an angel enjoins her to indite her superfluous execration, she endeavours, with more than the perversity of Balaam, to express by preference that hysterical antipathy to England which Mrs. Browning attributes in turn to almost all her characters:—
“Not so,” I answered. “Evermore
My heart is sore
For my own land’s sins: for little feet
Of children bleeding along the street:
For parked-up honors that gainsay
The right of way;
For almsgiving through a door that is
Not open enough for two friends to kiss.
* * * * *
For an oligarchic Parliament,
And bribes well meant,
What curse to another land assign
When heavy souled for the sins of mine?”
This is the kind of stuff which ignorant foreigners delight to repeat; and their pleasure is multiplied tenfold when English renegades can be found to vent calumnies against a land which they have forgotten. There are more barefooted children and rough pavements, and a greater amount of neglected poverty in any Italian village than in an English town of thrice the population. An “oligarchic Parliament” implies the Government of a country by its natural leaders, and not by the nominees of a Prefect or the delegates of a mob. The unmeaning jargon of “bribes well meant,” characteristically represents the mannerism of the class which Mrs. Browning has selected for representation; yet it is strange that a true poetess should amuse herself by contemplating the objects of her art through so exceptional and distorted a medium.
If Mrs. Browning herself has ever been transiently affected by the prejudices and impulses which she represents in life-like absurdity, it would be unjust as well as discourteous to censure too severely the aspirations of an enthusiastic lady who may for a moment have been inclined to look at the world only as it relates to Florentine politics. She has probably by this time found that every Italian statesman worthy of the name concurs substantially in the opinions which have long been universally entertained in England. The character and designs of the individual ruler who has given the Italians an opportunity of liberation are in themselves of secondary importance. It is not because a despot abuses his omnipotence, but because he possesses it, that Englishmen abhor the system which he represents. Twenty crusades would not cure the inherent defect of a Government which rests on an irresistible armed force. There is no occasion to declaim, either in verse or in prose, against the form of Government to which foreigners may submit, but if the subject must be discussed, it is not unfitting “to prate of better and of worse” in the spirit in which a poet of a former generation denounced the first of the Bonapartes:—
Never may from our souls this truth depart,
That an accursed thing it is to gaze
On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye.
Mrs. Browning knows Greek well enough to understand that a tyrant is not necessarily an ogre, and that his crime consists mainly in the superiority to law which he has perhaps attained by successful usurpation.
[Charles Synge Christopher Bowen]
Reviewed:
Poems Before Congress (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1860.
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