E600404A. Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems.
The New-York Times, 4 April 1860, p. 2.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 375–377.
No person who is capable of passing a judgment upon poetry of the class to which the works of Mrs. Browning belong, will need the assurance of her preface to convince him, after he has read but a single one of these “poems before the Congress,” that “they have been written simply because the writer loves truth and justice, quand même, ‘more than Plato’ and Plato’s country, more than Dante, and Dante’s country, more even than Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s country.” Their every verse rings with the clear silver accent of sincere conviction; and the intenser emphasis which sometimes for a moment flings this conviction out with a half-dissonant sharpness like the angry notes of a challenger’s trumpet, is the unconscious emphasis of a proud, pure nature deeply stirred, impatient of the skeptic sloth of others, and not untinged with scorn of the dullness and distrust to which it knows it must so often speak.
Never was there a genius more richly endowed than Mrs. Browning’s, with that exquisite and terrible moral sensibility which Tennyson has so admirably described,
The love of love, the hate of hate,
The scorn of scorn.
Mrs. Browning’s verses, when she is dealing with the passionate realities of right and wrong, seem to flush and pale like a living human face. And this indignation, this sorrow, this hope and wrath, have nothing in them of that lachrymose and egotistical quality commonly described as “womanish.” Womanly they are, in the impetuous and loyal directness with which they assert themselves; womanly, after the fashion of England’s Elizabeth when she spoke those proud words to her soldiers at Tilbury Fort, which Howard of Effingham, and his heroic sailors were so swift to translate for the benefit of the Armada into a language which all Spain could understand. The “Cry of the Children,” the “Crowned and Wedded,” the “Casa Guidi Windows,” and “Aurora Leigh,” while they are vivid with a delicate intensity of feeling which Shelley might have known, are also nervous with a condensed intellectual weight and earnestness more to be looked for from the Roman satirist than from a modern English woman. It is this combined fervor of heart and brain which sets Mrs. Browning apart among our singers; and through all the vagaries of her taste, and all the frequent mistiness of her imagination, makes and keeps for her such an audience as few poets in their life-time have ever won. By that audience these new poems will be welcomed, were it only for the artist’s sake. We can but trust that, once welcomed, they may fulfill another than an æsthetic mission. For we are sure that within the covers of this little book more truth is clasped, and truth of a finer and deeper strain in regard to the character of the Emperor of the French, and to the work which he has done for Italy, than is now to be found, or, in all human probability, will for a long time to come be found, in all the speeches of all the wise men of Britain in Parliament assembled.
Mrs. Browning, when she writes of Italy and of the saviour of Italy, writes of matters which she understands. She writes from her judgment, her experience, her well-founded, righteous and reasonable sympathies. She has no political theories to support; no partisan ends to accomplish; no vulgar prejudices to pander to or obey. The lack of all these things would, perhaps, unfit her to lead a Parliamentary cohort; it fits her all the more to speak the truth, and forestall the temperate verdict of posterity. She has known Italy as few foreigners ever can know any country; known it not merely through the mere accumulations of experience, though ten years of mature life might yield to a much less quick and apprehensive brain than hers a not unprofitable store of facts, but through the appreciative and assimilative attributes of a rarely-gifted nature. A democrat in the simplest, and loftiest, and only worthy meaning of that much blasphemed and more bespattered term, she has judged the Sovereign of the French with patience, with single-mindedness, as those who speak history are bound to judge them who make history. The insolent folly and the parrot-like absence of all reflection with which the career of this extraordinary man has been so commonly passed upon by the cheap “liberalism,” both of England and America, have received no sterner rebuke than is read to them in these poems by a writer whose “liberalism” is a thing not of the lip but of the life. If anything could startle self-sufficiency into self-examination, it might be the consideration that the “despot of France,” seen from the side of the sentiments, commands from a poet like Mrs. Browning the same homage which is rendered to him from the side of common sense by statesmen like Richard Cobden and John Bright. As, for instance, in this opening strain of analytic judgment and deliberate applause:
napoleon iii. in italy.
i.
Emperor, Emperor!
From the centre to the shore,
From the Seine back to the Rhine,
Stood eight millions up and swore
By their manhood’s right divine
So to elect and legislate,
This man should renew the line
Broken in a strain of fate
And leagued kings at Waterloo,
When the people’s hands let go.
Emperor
Evermore.
ii.
With a universal shout
They took the old regalia out
From an open grave that day;
From a grave that would not close,
Where the First Napoleon lay
Expectant in repose,
As still as Merlin, with his conquering face
Turned up in its unquenchable appeal
To men and heroes of the advancing race,
Prepared to set the seal
Of what has been on what shall be.
Emperor
Evermore.
iii.
The thinkers stood aside
To let the nation act.
Some hated the new-constituted fact
Of empire, as pride treading on their pride,
Some quailed, lest what was poisonous in the past
Should graft itself in that Druidic bough
On this green now.
Some cursed, because at last
The open heavens to which they had looked in vain
For many a golden fall of marvelous rain
Were closed in brass; and some
Wept on because a gone thing could not come;
And some were silent, doubting all things for
That popular conviction,—evermore
Emperor.
iv.
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.
And yet, O voice and verse,
Which God set in me to acclaim and sing
Conviction, exaltation, aspiration,
We gave no music to the patent thing,
Nor spared a holy rhythm to throb and swim
About the name of him
Translated to the sphere of domination
By democratic passion!
I was not used, at least,
Nor can be, now or then,
To stroke the ermine beast
On any kind of throne,
(Though builded by a nation for its own,)
And swell the surging choir for kings of men—
“Emperor
Evermore.”
v.
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.
To follow the march of this noble canticle throughout, would be to tell the recent story of Italy better than it has ever yet been told. Let the reader go to the poet, and hear it. What legend of ancient war climbs so high as this episode of Milan after Magenta:
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 peaked 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.”
xii.
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 ecstasy
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.”
xiii.
It is not strange that he did it,
Though the deed may seem to strain
To the wonderful, unpermitted,
For such as lead and reign.
But he is strange, this man:
The people’s instinct found him
(A wind in the dark that ran
Through a chink where was no door,)
And elected him and crowned him
Emperor
Evermore.
xiv
Autocrat? let them scoff,
Who fail to comprehend
That a ruler incarnate of
The people, must transcend
All common king born kings,
These subterranean springs,
A sudden outlet winning,
Have special virtues to spend.
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.
xv.
What! did any maintain
That God or the people (think!)
Could make a marvel in vain?—
Out of the water-jar there,
Draw wine that none could drink?
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 the 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?
xvi.
Nay, but he, this wonder,
He cannot palter nor prate,
Though many around him and under,
With intellects trained to the curse,
Distrust him in spirit and nerve,
Because his meaning is straight.
Measure him ere he depart,
With those who have governed and led;
Larger so much by the heart,
Larger so much by the head.
* * * *
xviii.
He will not swagger nor boast
Of his country’s meeds, in a tone
Missuiting a great man most
If such should speak of his own;
Nor will he act, on her side,
From motives baser, indeed,
Than a man of a noble pride
Can avow nor himself at need;
Never, for lucre or laurels,
Or custom, though such should be rife,
Adapting the smaller morals
To measure the larger life.
He, though the merchants persuade
And the soldiers are eager for strife,
Finds not his country in quarrels
Only to find her in trade.—
While still he accords her such honor
As never to flinch for her sake
Where men put service upon her,
Found heavy to undertake
And scarcely like to be paid:
Believing a nation may act
Unselfishly—shiver a lance
(As the least of her sons may, in fact,)
And not for a cause of finance.
Emperor
Evermore.
Nor does Mrs. Browning render less justice to Napoleon at Villafranca than to Napoleon at Solferino. The “Tale of Villafranca” is an inimitable sketch, in which, by a few clean, quick touches, the faltering diplomacy of Europe and the great deed imagined by a great monarch are brought face to face for judgment before the simple, straightforward conscience of Italy. We are sorely tempted to make a place for the poem here; and yet another place for the splendid and stately verses entitled “A Court Lady;” and yet another for that most characteristic and lofty poem, “The Dance;” but our waning space warns us that we must close our ears to all these sirens: and dismiss our readers with half-a-dozen words of criticism, to the wise and beautiful book itself.
Mrs. Browning’s divine rage is more heedful of the mortal rules of metre and syntax in these “Poems before the Congress” than it has usually been. Yet there are some lapses of profound prose in the current of her swelling verse which are sufficiently astounding. How shall we scan, for example, these remarkable lines in “Italy and the World?”
For fully developed Christianity
Is civilization perfected.
It is a phenomenon quite out of our power to explain, that the capacity of accepting such a sequence of syllables as this should coexist with the exquisite instinct of melody which perpetually breaks through the poetic compositions of Mrs. Browning: but the trait seems to be ineradicable, and we have nothing for it but to lament what is plainly past mending. This we do the more sincerely that the one poem in the present collection which is most marred by the outbreaks of this trait is the very one which for our own sake as Americans, we could have wished to be the most artistically faultless. This is a sad, stern poem, called “A Curse for a Nation,” addressed to America, and full of the true voice of all that is civilized, pure, valiant and honest in the world, against our one great national sin. Mrs. Browning’s appeal is made in no Pharisaic temper. Her warning and entreaty come from one who may loyally say,
My heart is sore
For my own land’s sins,
and it will be an evil day for America when such words as hers are heard with impatience, hostility, contempt or indifference by a people who ought not to listen to any foreign taunts upon our slave-holding liberty without feeling that our own
Conscience, tradition and name,
Explode with a deadlier blame
Than the worst of them all.
Reviewed:
Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1860.
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