E600421A. Poems Before Congress.
Chambers’s Journal, 21 April 1860, pp. 251–253.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 390–392.
It would be enough for most ladies to be universally acknowledged to be the greatest female poet that ever wrote; but Mrs. Browning exceeds the rest of her sex as greatly in ambition as in genius. She would be Prophet as well as Bard—professions which, in these later times, have altogether ceased to be identical. Her Casa Guidi Windows is still, we believe, to be had at the booksellers’, and in the first edition, a beautiful and too enduring monument of the untrustworthiness of poetical prediction. We do not wonder, living as she does amidst the “alien vines” of Italy, that her great heart should feel for that unfortunate country, and sympathise with its yearnings after freedom—its struggles to escape from under foot of that Austria which, “with the smooth olive-wreath on her brute forehead,” prateth of peace where there is no peace; but she should not suffer the sheen of that glorious land so to dazzle her that she forgets the less favoured fields at home. This absenteeism, it seems, works no better with people of genius than with Irish landlords. Because England is not ready to spend blood and treasure as the Great Napoleon did—which, with Mrs Browning, means the present Emperor—for the emancipation of the Italian peninsula, and with no other end or aim, she is bitter against it as a renegade. When that Deliverer was elected Autocrat of France, she confesses that, for her part, she did not hymn that event with a song of triumph, nor hail it with much of hope.
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.
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.
These bards rush in where Able Editors fear to tread! [p. 252→] It was well that, in the hour of inspiration, when those last two lines were written, no vision of the coming peace at Villafranca was vouchsafed to the inward eye of the poetess, or the world would have lost some stirring verses. When the peace did take place—and not without its shock even for this Napoleon-worshipper—it merely afforded opportunity for another poem, one verse of which represents the Emperor standing “sad, before the sun,” and indulging in the following reflection:
The world is many—I am one;
My great deed was too great.
God’s fruit of justice ripens slow:
Men’s souls are narrow; let them grow.
My brothers, we must wait.
Happy, again, was it that, at the time of composition of that stanza, no Imperial fingers were foreshadowed clutching at the guerdon for his help, a new department for his kingdom. Mrs Browning is doubtless now employed in versifying some justification of her hero for that latest act in the Italian drama. We have heard that the writings of this English admirer of his are not unread by him; and if so, we should like to have seen the expression of the imperial countenance when he perused the following lines:
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?
Nay, but he, this wonder,
He cannot palter nor 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.
He holds that, consenting or dissident,
Nations must move with the time;
Assumes that crime with a precedent
Doubles the guilt of the crime;
—Denies that a slaver’s bond,
Or a treaty signed by knaves,
(Quorum magna pars and beyond
Was one of an honest name),
Gives an inexpugnable claim
To abolishing men into slaves.
The Emperor Napoleon must have had no little difficulty in recognising himself in such a mirror, and been as much astonished, perhaps, at the heroic unselfishness he had been unconsciously exhibiting as his countryman in the play was, who found he had been talking prose all his life without his own knowledge.
“Noble verse, but erring thought,” is in this volume, as Ruskin once wrote of a great poet, and yet not by so much greater than her we speak of. The voice that sang so wisely the Fourfold Aspect, so tenderly the Cry of the Children, so finely the Dead Pan, is strong and clear as ever, dealing—though in the female treble—with matters of the day with a far greater ease and power than the laureate uses, although, like her gifted husband, Mrs Browning sometimes goes out of her way to devise uncomfortable and halting metres, whereby to express her thoughts; as in Italy and the World, in this present volume, wherein she drives that heroic country about in much such a vehicle—metaphorically speaking—as Mr Thomas Sayers of the prize-ring might return in from a victory, to his “crib” in town.
We wonder what our Irish friends, now subscribing to the Apostolic Father in Rome, will think of these Christmas Gifts accorded to his Holiness by Mrs Browning:
Cardinals left and right of him,
Worshippers round and beneath,
The silver trumpets at sight of him
Thrill with a musical blast:
But the people say through their teeth:
“Trumpets? we wait for the last!”
He sits in the place of the Lord,
And asks for the gifts of the time;
Gold, for the haft of a sword,
To win back Romagna averse,
Incense, to sweeten a crime,
And myrrh, to embitter a curse.
Then a king of the west said: “Good!
I bring thee the gifts of the time;
Red, for the patriot’s blood,
Green, for the martyr’s crown,
White, for the dew and the rime,
When the morning of God comes down.”
—O mystic tricolor bright!
The pope’s heart quailed like a man’s:
The cardinals froze at the sight,
Bowing their tonsures hoary:
And the eyes in the peacock-fans
Winked at the alien glory.
The worst part of the sixty-five pages that make up this book, is the attack upon England which concludes it, entitled A Curse for a Nation; it is in bad taste and worse metre, besides which disadvantages, its statements do not happen to be correct. England does not “keep her calm footing upon writhing bond-slaves,” nor do “the fiend’s work perfectly in strangling martyrs;” it does not
Watch while nations strive
With the blood-hounds, die or survive,
Drop faint from their jaws,
Or throttle them backward to death,
And only under its breath
Favour the cause;
as Mrs Browning may read in the debates of parliament, as reported in the columns of the Times any day of the week except Monday. Moreover, there is scarcely an honest man in England who would not help Italy, and free Venetia, if he only knew how to set about it: therein lies the whole reason of its apparent sluggishness, and it would be doing a real good if, in the next political poem with which she favours us, our authoress would indicate the precise steps that ought to be taken. It is something that Mrs Browning does now and then entertain a doubt of a thing being done which has once been taken in hand by her hero-emperor; and we will conclude with a beautiful extract from her Napoleon III. in Italy, which exhibits this rare misgiving:
But Italy, my Italy,
Can it last, this gleam?
Can she live and be strong,
Or is it another dream
Like the rest we have dreamed so long? [p. 253→]
And shall it, must it be,
That after the battle-cloud has broken
She will die off again
Like the rain,
Or like a poet’s song
Sung of her, sad at the end
Because her name is Italy—
Die and count no friend?
Is it true—may it be spoken—
That she who has lain so still,
With a wound in her breast,
And a flower in her hand,
And a grave-stone under her head,
While every nation at will
Beside her has dared to stand
And flout her with pity and scorn,
Saying: “She is at rest,
She is fair, she is dead,
And, leaving room in her stead
To Us who are later born,
This is certainly best!”
Saying: “Alas! she is fair,
Very fair, but dead,
And so we have room for the race.”
—Can it be true, be true,
That she lives anew?
That she rises up at the shout of her sons,
At the trumpet of France,
And lives anew?—is it true
That she has not moved in a trance,
As in Forty-eight?
When her eyes were troubled with blood
Till she knew not friend from foe,
Till her hand was caught in a strait
Of her cerement, and baffled so
From doing the deed she would;
And her weak foot stumbled across
The grave of a king,
And down she dropped at heavy loss,
And we gloomily covered her face, and said:
“We have dreamed the thing;
She is not alive, but dead.”
Now, shall we say
Our Italy lives indeed?
And if it were not for the beat and bray
Of drum and trump of martial men,
Should we feel the underground heave and strain,
Where heroes left their dust as a seed
Sure to emerge one day?
And if it were not for the rhythmic march
Of France and Piedmont’s double hosts,
Should we hear the ghosts
Thrill through ruined aisle and arch,
Throb along the frescoed wall,
Whisper an oath by that divine
They left in picture, book, and stone,
That Italy is not dead at all?
Ay, if it were not for the tears in our eyes,
These tears of a sudden passionate joy,
Should we see her arise
From the place where the wicked are overthrown,
Italy, Italy? loosed at length
From the tyrants’ thrall,
Pale and calm in her strength?
Pale as the silver cross of Savoy
When the hand that bears the flag is brave,
And not a breath is stirring, save
What is blown
Over the war-trump’s lip of brass,
Ere Garibaldi forces the pass!
Alas, alas! why does a lady who can sing like this persist in writing leading articles? What an unfortunate allusion, as it now turns out, is that to the silver cross of Savoy! Mrs Browning may
Cry aloud in her poet passion,
Viewing her England o’er Alp and sea,
I loved her more in her ancient fashion—
She carries her rifles too thick for me;
but with her good leave, or without it, and by help of our volunteers, we will at least confine the annexations of her darling Emperor to eastward.
Reviewed:
Poems Before Congress (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1860.
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