E600500B. Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems.
The Dial (Cincinnati), May 1860, pp. 326–327.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 396.
Mrs. Browning is always sure of her audience; for she has created it. She has not only made poems, but poets; her intensity of utterance, her culture, her emotion, have proved contagious with the thinkers of her sex. For a long time it was inquired if Mrs. Browning had written “Philip my King,” or “My Last Dance,” or this or that fugitive piece which appeared in some magazine. It was published that they were written by other hands; yet close readers knew that they were none the less written by Mrs. Browning.
But the difficulty with E.B.B. is, that she can not stand the fiery draughts of her own emotion; she is intoxicated by them, and lacks that peculiar and celestial quality of the Poet—the ability to see things as they are. Therefore, she is not so much a Poet as a Pythoness. “Aurora Leigh” was not a poem, it was a romantic oration on Laws, Castes, Statesmen, Chartism, etc., etc.
In the present little work there is a sad lack of health. In reading the [p. 327→] Laudation of Napoleon (the little) by this noble woman whose very heartbeats are measured by the march of Freedom—the Laudation of Napoleon, the Liar and the Serpent who crept into the heart of Rome when she was free—crept there by a Lie—and strangled the Divine Babe in its cradle—one knows not whether to burst into tears or laughter. Is it not plain that some villainous little Puck has been making use of that flower which Cupid’s falling arrow made, called, “Love-in-idleness,” on our poet’s eyes, and Louis N. is the Bottom she beholds on waking, and must perforce love? How else could she have written thus:
Nay, but he, this wonder
He can not falter 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,
Emperor
Evermore.
We give the Shakesperian commentary on this:
Titania. I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:
Mine ear is much enamored of thy note;
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;
And thy fair virtue’s force perforce doth move me
On the first view to say, to swear I love thee.
Bottom. Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that. And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company now-a-days. The more the pity, that some honest neighbor will not make them friends. Nay, I can gleek upon occasion.
Titania. Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful.
Bottom. Not so neither; but if I had wit enough to get out of this wood, I have enough to serve mine own turn.
Yet we are not sorry that Mrs. Browning has had the amiable credulity to write this book: it is a part of that coercion which a bad man needs to commit and bind him to an important policy, to which the mere instinct of self-preservation would have guided any one in his place, but which he would evade by any blind way, so soon as his self-interest could be shown to jump with the temporal authority of the Pope. Therefore let there be a lock and bolt on every swerving byway. He can not be a man; he shall be a scourge.
The other poems in this little book, seven in number, are all political; and though they have the pallor of the first, they, like it, abound in passages of rare depth. “Christmas Gifts” is a production of exquisite Art. The rebuke of the United States for her faithlessness to liberty is given in thoughts that lighten and words that thunder.
Reviewed:
Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1860.
___________________
