E600600A. Poems Before Congress.
Fraser’s Magazine, June 1860, pp. 818–823.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 28, 367–369.
[The article containing this review inludes comments on the poetry of John Stuart Blackie, Henry Lushington, and William Morris, which we omit.]
Another volume of poems that we are forced to condemn, lies beside us. But it is with very different feelings, and in a much more serious spirit, that we indicate our disagreement with Mrs. Barrett Browning. She is a true poet; she has been endowed with a powerful and truthful imagination. We cannot under any circumstances compare the flippancies of a fluent scribe, with the Puck-like caprice
Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming.
If, then, we protest against the poetry and the politics of her new work, we do so “against the grain,” and only because we believe that grave literary and political sins have been committed by one to whom our literature owes much.
We do not indeed object to the subject she has chosen. We can see no reason why the minstrel should not be permitted to touch the political controversies which agitate his contemporaries. The moment of repose which the sculptor seizes is not the only attitude the poet can render. Whatever enlists the emotions or stirs the blood, may contribute material to his art. And some of the truest poetry has been written by men who fought with their swords all day, and “sang the song at night.” …
Our readers must understand that we are not criticising Mr. Lushington, and that we have only used his poems to illustrate the proposition, that very good poetry may be made out of our current politics. Mrs. Browning indeed has failed, but we think not undeservedly; for, as with Hero, “treason is in her thought”—treason to a cause which the poet is bound to cherish. Poetry is the handmaid of freedom. Through it the feelings of the oppressed have found in all ages an outlet and a vindication. It has roused the slave to seek redress; it has written its epitaph when, as sometimes happens in this world, freedom has failed and victory remains with the despot. “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,” and too often the poet can only “table his protest,” leaving his great wrong enrobed in words of immortal scorn or sorrow to be righted at the judgment-seat.
Wrecked all thy hopes, O friend—
Hopes for thyself, thine Italy, thine own;
High gifts defeated of their due renown,
Long toil—and this the end.
* * * *
What to the dead avail
The chance success, the blundering praise of fame?
Oh, rather trust, somewhere the noble aim
Is crowned, though here it fail.
These are the truths, superior to sense, “unseen and eternal,” that poetry no less than theology has to vindicate; and it is base and unnatural therefore when the poet, except as a captive in fetters, follows the despot in his triumph.
There are some things in our world that it is best to witness in silence. We may rejoice that good has come out of evil, but it is not safe to erect “the doing of evil that good may come” into a creed. We are glad that Italy has been freed. We are glad that the Goth has been driven out. Our sympathies are with the historic peoples who should inherit the freedom as well as the intellectual and artistic trophies of the Republic. To us it is not unmemorable that Victor Emmanuel rests—
By unfamiliar Arno, and the dome
Of Brunelleschi.
But though we are content to accept with thankfulness the end, the less that is said about the means the better. In God’s name, do not allow triumphant success to dazzle us out of our senses, out of our sense of truth, out of our sense of right. Italian freedom has a peculiar sacredness in our eyes, but it is because we desire to see it firmly built up, that we feel no triumph when we learn that its foundations have been laid by the unclean hands of the tyrant. The emancipation of Italy is insecure while it rests on the enslavement of Europe. Mrs. Browning may vindicate the reign of fraud and force if she think fit; but she must be told that this is the first—let it be the only—occasion, when “the deathless fire on the altar” has been devoted to so base a use. If our voice can penetrate to where “Arno woos us to the fair white walls,” we would beseech Mrs. Browning to retrace her steps. Freedom—we say it sorrowfully enough—cannot afford at present to lose any of her old [p. 821→] allies. Not the Birmingham democrat alone, but too many of us who have to work that we may eat, and who have in consequence little leisure to spend upon any subject that does not directly concern our own handicraft, are ready to say, “Perish Savoy!” but the poet at least, breathing as he does “a purer ether and serener air,” may be true to the old alliance, can afford to choose the better part.
Our disagreement with Mrs. Browning is vital. Her estimate of the present position of European politics and political freedom is in our opinion unpardonably false. She tells us that the Emperor of the French is a great and virtuous ruler.
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.
* * * * *
Sublime deliverer!—after many days
Found worthy of the deed thou art come to do—
Emperor
Evermore.
A “sublime Deliverer,” she is convinced, must be from his position more fitted to aid freedom than any legitimate monarch.
Autocrat? let them scoff,
Who fail to comprehend
That a ruler incarnate of
The people, must transcend
All common king-born kings.
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.
The “sublime Deliverer” imagines “a great Deed”—the liberation of Italy.
A great man (who was crowned one day)
Imagined a great Deed;
He shaped it out of cloud and clay,
He touched it finely till the seed
Possessed the flower; from heart and brain
He fed it with large thoughts humane,
To help a people’s need.
So he goes to war to work out his great Deed, backed by a people who have the same cause at heart.
On she passed to a Frenchman, his arm carried off by a ball;
Kneeling, .. “O more than my brother! how shall I thank thee for all?
Each of the heroes around us has fought for his land and line,
But thou hast fought for a stranger, in hate of a wrong not thine.
Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed.
But blessed are those among nations, who dare to be strong for the rest.”
And then Mrs. Browning, “viewing her England o’er Alp and sea,” “cries aloud in her poet-passion” because Englishmen remain mercenary, and selfish, and sceptical of the exalted virtue of sublime Deliverers,—a nation of shopkeepers, who do not go to war for an idea, but who “keep their powder dry” notwithstanding.
Now, in the first place, is not this a monstrous caricature of history? The Emperor was perfectly disinterested when he undertook the Italian war! His unselfish attachment to Italy—
Beautiful Italy! golden amber,
Warm with the kisses of lover and traitor—
forced him to quarrel with Austria. [p. 822→] He did not mean to add Savoy to France, nor to rectify “the frontiers of the Empire!” And the French trooper eagerly joined the campaign, because he felt a brotherly love for the enslaved Italians, and not because an unquenchable thirst for military glory consumes the grandsons of the veterans who desolated Europe! Credat Judæus.
But the political faith which Mrs. Browning professes is even more dangerously false. We say nothing of Napoleon’s title to the throne; vows were made to be broken, and “sublime Deliverers” cannot be tied by the oaths which bind meaner mortals; but surely the failure of a great people to work out their freedom is a spectacle that ought not to be regarded with indecent exultation by any free man or woman. Apart altogether, however, from such considerations,—Is the Emperor Louis Napoleon a fact for which we must fervently thank Heaven? Even on Mrs. Browning’s own showing, we answer—No. She sneers at those who hold that the public law of nations ought not to be disregarded, cannot be disregarded, even in a good cause, without great evil and peril; and she rejoices that a ruler has been at last discovered who, untouched by fear or remorse, can break through the fine-spun cobwebs, the gossamer chains, of ancient treaties.
He holds that, consenting or dissident,*
Nations must move with the time:
Assumes that guilt with a precedent
Doubles the guilt of the crime;
Denies that a slaver’s bond,
Or a treaty signed by knaves,
Gives an inexpugnable claim
To abolishing men into slaves.
________
*The coup d’état of 1851 supplies, we suppose, an illustration of a “dissident nation” “moving with the time.”
________
Is Mrs. Browning serious? Is not this the argument that has ever proved most fatal to freedom? The man who believes that his self-will is the suprema lex, and who, because he considers them unjust or unrighteous, refuses to recognise the obligations of law, has been in all ages of the world the surest ally of tyranny, the most dangerous enemy to liberty. We thought that by this time, and by our own nation at least, the doctrine, that freedom has nothing to hope for, and everything to fear, from such a man, had become axiomatic. The sense of utter insecurity which at the present moment paralyses Europe—paralyses her commerce, her industry, her arts, and the whole intricate mechanism of her life—might convince the most incredulous, might convince Mrs. Browning herself, how mischievous to steady progress this disturbing element invariably proves.
The bitterness with which Mrs. Browning speaks of her own country, is to us (who believe that the attitude of England has been upon the whole wise and honourable, prudent and resolute) the most painful feature in her book. We think that she has utterly misjudged us; but instead of attempting to vindicate ourselves, let us ask Mrs. Browning a single question. She denounces in strong words the sins of English Governments: she laments the miseries which the English people suffer,
Evermore
My heart is sore
For my own land’s sins; for little feet
Of children bleeding along the street:
For parked up honours that gainsay
The right of way:
For almsgiving through a door that is
Not open enough for two friends to kiss,
For love of freedom which abates
Beyond the Straits;
For patriot virtue starved to vice on
Self-praise, self-interest, and suspicion.
For an oligarchie parliament
And bribes well meant. &c.
She has not used stronger language to describe the misrule of the Grand-Dukes; and it is that misrule which in her opinion justified foreign intervention. Now, suppose her hero should tear another treaty to tatters, should “shape another great Deed,” should feel it his duty to enfranchise another misgoverned nation, should think of liberating Us,—would [p. 823→] she not be bound again to celebrate the Deliverer? Canning, anticipating Mrs. Browning, has pithily described the cosmopolitan politician:—
A steady patriot of the world alone,
The friend of every country—but his own.
Such a being affords, no doubt, a very pleasing object to angelic contemplation; but is, we fancy, upon the whole, rather “too much of a good thing” for this present evil world.
Mrs. Browning’s book being intended for a political manifesto, it is perhaps unnecessary to add that as poetry it is a complete failure. There are one or two passages that recal the cunning hand and the sweet voice of the accomplished poetess; and the piece entitled An August Voice—Una voce augusta—in which the Emperor sarcastically recommends the Tuscans to take back their Grand-Duke, is bitter and powerful; though it is strange that Mrs. Browning’s keen moral perception should not teach her that such an argument in the mouth of the man who negotiated the treaty of Villafranca is the very apotheosis of bad faith.
You’ll take back your Grand Duke?
’Twas weak that he fled from the Pitti:
But consider how little he shook
At thought of bombarding your city!
And balancing that with this,
The Christian rule is plain for us;
Or the Holy Father’s Swiss
Have shot his Perugians in vain for us.
You’ll call back the Grand Duke.
* * * * *
You’ll take back your Grand Duke?
Observe, there’s no one to force it,—
Unless the Madonna, St. Luke
Drew for you, choose to endorse it.
I charge you by great St. Martino
And prodigies quickened by wrong,
Remember your dead on Ticino;
Be worthy, be constant, be strong.
Bah!—call back the Grand Duke!
But, on the whole, the poetry is the weakest, most inchoate, most unmusical, and most ineffective that we have met with for a long time. We are sorry to be obliged to use this language: had we not a real and most honest admiration for Mrs. Browning’s gifts we would willingly hold our peace; but the disease is malignant, a sharp remedy is needed, and it is best to speak out plainly.
Shirley [John Skelton]
Reviewed:
Poems Before Congress (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1860.
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