E600408A. Poems Before Congress.
The Weekly Dispatch, 8 April 1860, p. 7.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 383–384.
To Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Blessing on you for that curse! There are millions in the nation on whom the vial is poured who will in heart and conscience acknowledge it, and there are millions of us also, only lookers on, who will reverberate a responsive Amen. The power that commanded was truly a celestial messenger, and you have obeyed the dictation with womanly pain indeed, but with poetic fervour. America deserves it, and I say this, fully acknowledging so much as glances upon England. Our share, indeed, is not small, though we are happily free from the internal disgrace of “the brand and the thong.” If there be duties of nations as well as individuals, and any force in the command to love our neighbour as ourselves, or justice in the malediction against seeing our brother fall into a pit and not helping him, you have rightly interpreted the way in which the people of one country should regard those of another. Your exposition and application of the tenet resounds in our ears like the inspiration of the song of Deborah, and its rebuke is solemn and awful as the curse on Neroz.
Our transatlantic brethren are fond of charging their faults upon us, and pleading that they derive them from the ancestral country. Too often there has been some truth in the allegation, although it has been unjustifiably extended, and the fault has been sedulously renewed, while the palliation or renunciation has been left unnoticed. No doubt America inherited negro slavery from us, but we have decreed and completed its abolition. It inherited commercial monopoly from us, but we have shown it the path to freedom of trade; and if it have also succeeded to a selfish and grasping policy, if it be more solicitous for the extension of trade than of freedom, and for the accumulation of profits than for the elevation of humanity, yet even on this Italian question we are as a State deeply pledged to respect the rights of the Italian people to say by whom and how they shall be governed. We have given them sympathy at least, and from America, as a people more at liberty to act—a people who are ever ready to fight for game and engage in filibustering expeditions—a people whose very existence as a nation is grounded on the right to disown the oldest technical claims and determine on their own organisation and their own futurity—something more than mere sympathy might have been expected; something more than we, fettered and bound by treaties and alliances, are able to render. But America is too busy squabbling with the mother country about the little island of San Juan, endeavouring to encroach on South America, and hanging those who would emancipate the negro, to intermeddle in anything so little regarded as Italian freedom and independence. You did well, therefore, in suppressing all other feelings, and in giving this poetical expression to political duty.
Yet I think the imprecation might have been more exceptional. Two noble gifts have been made by America to the Italian cause; it gave them Garibaldi for their camps and Margaret Fuller for their hospitals. The one yet lives—may it be for a glorious future!—and the other, after fulfilling her mission of charity during that disastrous siege by which France brought back and reinstalled the Pope, sank, with all her Italian sympathies and her Italian title, into the merciless ocean, calmly descending with a saint-like effulgence beaming around her. Yet even these splendid instances cannot obliterate the indifference you have so righteously denounced; perhaps they make it the more conspicuous. As to ourselves, we acknowledge many a shortcoming, but we hope soon to see our Parliament less “oligarchic,” and that the non-intervention policy will become better and more generously understood. The people are not backward whenever opportunity is afforded to express their lively sympathy with Italy. The impassioned voice of Madame Mario has acted on the ear as your poetry on the eye, and drawn forth the acclamations of multitudes whose voices came from their hearts. I am free to confess that we are too much of a shopkeeping and cotton-spinning nation; but sympathy with the struggling for freedom is not dead within us, nor have we shown that degree of indifference which you have anathematised in our transatlantic descendants. The non-intervention theory has, no doubt, by many here been pushed to an extreme. This has arisen from our distrust of the ruling classes, and our fear that if we did intervene it would be on the wrong side. Such is the real solution of the zeal with which many earnest Liberals have taken up the doctrine—better to stand by inert than to help the oppressor. The Foreign Enlistment Act has operated on both sides, and while it represses those who would strike a blow for freedom, also averts the disgrace of furnishing wealthy despotism with hireling swords and bayonets. It is something to take the position we do as a State—that Italy must work out her own freedom, and that the voice of her population should be respected. Do not, then, twit us about swarming rifles! That very cause of freedom, of which you are a priestess, demands of us that we should have them and learn to use them. We cannot sympathise in your dithyrambics; we cannot bow with you before the same altar, nor idolise that image which you have bedecked with so many gems of poetry; we cannot forget the coup d’état, and the blood which ran down the streets of Paris in the dying struggle for that Republic which he who authorised the slaughter had sworn to maintain; we cannot forget how those brilliant lights of poetry, and intellect, and patriotism which illumined France have been consigned to total eclipse and scattered over the horizon like wandering stars, to sink in darkness. We cannot forget that a promised “vengeance for Waterloo” was one of the steps by which the Imperial throne was mounted, and that the attempt to dictate our laws, and make us the jailers and executioners even of conspiracy, threw the nation into a ferment, and demolished an Administration. Nor can we forget the gilded promises with which the Italian warfare commenced, nor the pitiful termination in the Treaty of Villafranca. Your imaginary and mind-created hero contemplated a godlike deed, which the world would not allow him to realise. I can perceive no such thing. I see instead a paltry bargain which does not unite or free Italy, but coaxes and palters with Austria, and gives Lombardy to Piedmont that itself may take Savoy. As to the world’s hindering the illustrious deed, who could possibly have stopped it had its alleged author so determined? There wanted but the will and the word, and with small exception the world would have rejoiced and shouted. With such an expression of dissent I dismiss this portion of your volume, reserving for the rest and pre-eminently for the curse, my unqualified approbation. A carping critic, who has earned and wears the name of reviler, hints that you write dramatically, and only impersonate the maudlin sentimentalities of an English dilletante residing in Italy. Verses like yours can come from no such impersonation—they would never also be such “words that burn”—nor are you un-English in being thus cosmopolitan. It is the real English feeling, which the wisest and noblest of our race and nation have consecrated. Our Elizabeths and Cromwells were no such non-interveners where civil and religious liberty were at stake, in whatever region. The lessons you inculcate are substantially those of our noblest heroes, our wisest statesmen, our profoundest philosophers, and our brightest poets. The natural post of England is at the head of European freedom, as in antiquity was that of Athens at the head of Greek democracy; and although ruling classes or trade classes may assert a different and a meaner course, yet is that position what the English heart really pants for. When our own institutions were reformed it was prophesied that not a serf or a political prisoner, from the sunny plains of Italy to the frozen deserts of Siberia, but would rejoice in our emancipation, and feel that it heralded his own. The prophecy shall yet be fulfilled. We shall never attempt to revolutionise the world by the force of armies; but there is a moral influence that penetrates even into the most despotic regions, and gives them promise of a better civilisation and of the coming brotherhood of free humanity.
With a fine and just discrimination, there is no material item in the curse upon the United States; no prayer that they may suffer without sympathy what they have quietly seen inflicted upon others; no threat of their fair soil being ravaged by invading armies, nor of their capitol being again devoted to the flames; no prophecy of desolation by storm or earthquake, of the failure of corn and cotton crops, of their swarming merchantmen being swept from every sea by a combination of European cruisers, nor any fulmination of a negro insurrection, in which every black man’s knife should be red with the blood of a white man’s throat. The curse is spiritual, not material. It does not threaten trade or power; it predicts no dissolution of that mighty unity which binds the States into one great Republic, instead of peopling North America with two nations soon becoming hostile, and which would transform its vast plains into one enormous battle-field. The anathema is on their souls and not on their material interests.
Ye shall watch while Kings conspire
Round the people’s smouldering fire;
And, warm for your part.
Shall never dare—O shame!—
To utter the thought into flame
Which burns at your heart.
This is the curse. Write.
When good men are praying erect,
That Christ may avenge His elect,
And deliver the earth,
The prayer in your ears, said low,
Shall sound like the tramp of a foe
That’s driving you forth.
This is the curse. Write.
It well became you thus to speak, and it also well became Victor Emmanuel, in his opening address to the united assemblage of his Parliament, to abstain from any such allusions, and to confine himself to recognising the services of his potent ally. Greatly and gracefully he acknowledges:—“For such a benefit we are indebted to a magnanimous ally, to the valour of his and our soldiers, to the assistance of volunteers, and to the persevering concord of the people.” His unshaken faith looks forward to a noble co-operation, to “the welfare of the people, and the greatness of the country, which is no longer the Italy of the Romans, nor that of the middle ages. It must no more be left a field open to foreign ambition, but it must, on the contrary, be the Italy of the Italians!” Such a champion of civil liberties may well afford to smile at ecclesiastical excommunications! To my mind he is more of the poet’s hero than the one you have selected.
I rejoice that you, a woman and a poetess, have spoken under that inspiration by which your nature and your power are exalted. It is for privileged classes to consult the dignity and security of their order; it is for statesmen to calculate on the strength of parties, and the probable consequences, internal and external, of political movements; it is for demagogues to minister to the interests or the passions of multitudes, and echo back whatever sentiments may serve their individual purposes; but it is for the poet to see the world in a diviner light, and it is for woman to feel the power of moral truth. Most valuable, therefore, is their voice as a contribution to the guidance of a national policy. They keep it from being mean and selfish; they give it purity, heroism, and elevation; and their influence tends to make us feel the deep truth of that never-to-be-forgotten aphorism of one of our greatest statesmen, the first and noblest champion of English Liberalism, that what is morally wrong can never be politically right.
Publicola [William Johnson Fox]
Reviewed:
Poems Before Congress (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1860.
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