E600416A. Poems Before Congress.
The Globe and Traveller, 16 April 1860, p. 1.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 387–388.
Mrs. Browning’s deep interest in the cause of Italian liberty was made known to the English public in 1850 or 1851, when “Casa Guidi Windows” was published. In that poem she spoke warmly and well in favour of Italian national independence, i.e., the freedom of the various Italian nations from the tyranny of Austria, the Papacy, and Red Republicanism. Even then she did not always speak wisely—for she overlooked the limits of the practicable in her eagerness after the highly desirable. She had not then learned that, in all human matters, the grand difficulty for leaders and rulers, as for men of all sorts and conditions, is not to bring good out of evil (God does that for us), but to work hopefully and stoutly with the mixed evil and good—not impatiently trampling on and scolding at evil-doers—for they are the bulk of humanity everywhere, and for their benefit good and wise people have to think and work. Good people cannot reign triumphant upon the unregenerate earth. If they did it would be great tyranny over bad people;—the bad have to be converted first. While that process is going on, heroes and kings, teachers and priests, and poets have plenty of work to do, without vilifying and misjudging nations and individuals.
But the fervour of political feeling which glowed in the pages of “Casa Guidi Windows” is increased to a scorching heat in “The Poems before Congress;” the poetic fire is, on the contrary, very smoky and dim. In the first of them, “Napoleon III. in Italy,” she proclaims her unqualified admiration of, and consequent trust in, the unselfish policy of the most successful man of our day. No one, in a certain sense, is answerable for his belief; but when one man insists on thrusting his belief down other men’s throats on pain of being denounced in lofty rhymes as cheats, and liars, and fools, it is high time to examine the creed to be swallowed.
We cannot take for just judgment (nor for divine poetry) such fluent adulation as the following, though it is a ringing utterance of what Mrs. Browning firmly believes:—
Is this a man like the rest,
This miracle made unaware
By a rapture of popular air,
And caught to the place that is 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 souls’ complete
To fit the hole of a toad,
And filch the dogman’s meat
To feed the offspring of God.
Is the dogman whose meat is being filched Austria—the meat Italy—and the offspring of God—France and her humble servants? Mrs. Browning may be shocked at such an interpretation—but to our vulgar insular minds it means that, or it is, like the previous couplet—nonsense.
Nay but he, this wonder
He cannot patter or prate,
Though many around him and under,
With intellects trained to the curve,
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.
Emperor
Evermore.
When he became Emperor by the voice of “eight millions,” Mrs. Browning says—
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.
Parts of the poetess’s reverence for the third Napoleon seems to be founded on her conviction that his great aim is identical with that of the first. Does she who loves freedom so much that her freedom of speech often runs into delirium—does she not comprehend that Liberty has had no greater enemy in Christian times than this said first Napoleon “with his conquering face?” Has she ever studied his life—his acts—his written and reported words? Surely she must have read some lately printed by a trustworthy authority, the Count Miot de Melito. Are these the words of a devotee to the cause of liberty and humanity, or to the cause of self, supported by the Blatante Beaste?
“Do you suppose I am triumphing in Italy,” said Bonaparte in Milan, in 1797, “to secure the greatness of the lawyers of the Directory—the Carnots and the Barrases? Do you suppose that it is to found a Republic? What an idea! A republic of 30,000,000 of souls!—with our manners, our vices! How is it possible? It is a chimera with which the French people are bewitched, but which will pass away like so many others. They want glory, the gratification of their vanity. But, liberty! they don’t understand anything about it.
“As to your country, M. de Melzi, there are fewer elements of republicanism there than in France, and even less ceremony is needed with it. We can do with it just what we like; but the proper time is not yet come. We must yield to the fever of the moment, and we are going to have here one or two republics of our own making. Mouge will arrange all that for us. In the meantime I have already abolished two from the Italian territories; and although they were very aristocratic republics, yet it was there that the greatest public spirit and the best established opinions prevailed. We should have had a good deal of trouble with them in the sequel.
“What I have hitherto done,” he said one day at the camp of Boulogne to those admitted to his intimacy, is nothing. “There will never be peace in Europe except under one chief—an Emperor whose officers should be kings—who should distribute kingdoms to his lieutenants; who should make one king of Italy, another king of Bavaria, this man landammann of Switzerland, that, Stadtholder of Holland. All having offices in the imperial household, with such titles as grand cup-bearer, grand pantler, grand equerry, grand huntsman, &c. It may be said that this plan is only an imitation of that upon which the Empire of Germany was founded, and that these ideas are not new. But there is nothing absolutely new. Political institutions only roll along in a circle, and we often return to what has been done.”
The whole spirit of this poem, “Napoleon the Third,” is to us false or perverted. There are passages of great force and some of true poetic beauty, but it must be read carefully to appreciate them. There are only seven other poems; of these “A Tale of Villafranca” has been printed before. Let America take to herself “A Curse for a Nation.” As we judge, the only true poem in this collection is the one called “A Court Lady,” describing the visit of a Milanese lady to the military hospital and her feelings there. Miss Nightingale and her nurses may be amused at the costume chosen for such an occasion, but it is charmingly described.
Mrs. Browning’s preface to this volume is a sort of “piècs justificative,” written with scorn of all those who differ from her in her present frame of mind towards Louis Napoleon. England has fallen from her favour past redemption. Let us hope all her evil wishes for her country may be as innocuous as they are bitter and ungrateful.
Reviewed:
Poems Before Congress (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1860.
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