E600700A. Poems Before Congress.
The Spiritual Magazine, July 1860, pp. 293–295.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 28, 378–379.
[This review appears in an article that focuses on the works of Thomas Lake Harris. We include only those remarks pertaining to EBB.]
Take now the woman who has won the highest “present popularity” in verse—Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Who does not recollect the love and admiration with which they read her earlier poems; how they glowed over the noble “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” and the healthy, intellectual, musical strains that accompanied it? But from the moment that the critics began to trumpet and exalt her as a marvel of strength and philosophical thought, the poetess seemed seized by a passion for a very Samsonian vigour. Her manner lost the quiet and real vigour which it had from nature; it became forced, stilted, strained, and theatric. The action was no longer free and flowing, but galvanic: there came a fierce and pretensious style, with strange spasmodic starts, and affected phrases. There arose a fire that was of fever rather than from the life-blood of a genuine inspiration. This character, to my feeling, runs more and stronger through all her succeeding compositions. Though containing bold theorisms of reform, especially as regards woman, they yet belong entirely to the earth-plane, if they have not lately, according to Harris’s theory, been strongly biologized from below. In the “Casa Guidi Windows” she suddenly veered round to a great admiration of war. Since then she has become fascinated with the second modern Moloch, Louis Napoleon; her admiration of this man, whose life is a lie, amounts to little if anything short of possession. From this Buonaparte element—the great element of modern unrest, which keeps all Europe one great barracks, and will never let it be quiet till it has trodden it out—she hopes the regeneration of nations! Suddenly, after he has lied to France, juggling it out of its republican freedom by the falsified dice of universal suffrage; and lied to Italy, promising to free it [p. 294→] from the Alps to the Adriatic; and lied to all Europe, promising to submit the question of the annexation of Savoy to it, before moving in it, her wild enchantment culminates in hymns of worship to him, and dire curses on her country!
In these curses and these Io Peans to the incarnate lie of France, it is remarkable that the hissing dissonance of the verse keeps pace with the revolting horror of the theme. It is not the melody of the soul’s music that we have now, but a shriek of frenzy—an agonized scream. After her shout of “Emperor! Emperor!” she gives us staggering metres like these for the harmonies of verse:—
The thinkers stood aside
To let the nation act.
Some hated the new-constituted fact
Of empire, as pride treading on their pride.
Some quailed, lest what was poisonous in the past
Should graft itself in that Druidic laugh
On this green now.
Some cursed, because at last
The open heavens to which they had looked in vain
For many a golden fall of marvellous rain
Were closed in brass: and some
Wept on because a gone thing could not come;
And some were silent, doubting all things for
That popular conviction,—ever more
Emperor!
If any one would convince himself whether this kind of style and composition is sterling, let him take up a volume of any of our genuine men—Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Cowper, or Shelley, all men of wonderfully diverse idiosyncracies, yet united in the one great attitude of calm power in contrast to rant and dissonance. But the most awful exhibition is the curse on her native country. I should be sorry to blacken this page with it; but, as a sample, take the first and last stanzas:—
Because ye have broken your own chain
With the strain
Of brave men climbing a nation’s height,
Yet thence bear down with brand and thong
On souls of others—for this wrong
This is the curse. Write!
* * * * * * * *
Go, wherever ill deeds shall be done,
Go, plant your flag in the sun
Beside the ill-doers!
And recoil from clenching the curse
Of God’s witnessing universe
With a curse of yours.
This is the curse. Write!
And this is the cursing poured out on England by a daughter of England! This is for England who has done more fighting for other nations than all other nations put together; who have [p. 295→] blindly, yet generously, spent three thousand millions in war, chiefly for other nations, betwixt 1688 and 1856! This is for England who can point to her remaining debt of eight hundred millions and say, “That is my monument of Foreign Intervention!” This is for England who having now renounced that useless and thankless system, has yet, we will venture to say, done more to free Italy by her moral influence than France by her arms; for without the moral influence of England, what would have restrained the despotic designs of Napoleon on Italy, which are only partly restrained? Without which influence the eagle of France would never have withheld its talons from the Italian prey.*
Such is the earth-plane of literature and its tendency to be invaded and ruined from a lower sphere. There is no instance of it which I have ever seen more wonderful and sorowful than the one here noted.
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*Since writing this article I have heard, but not seen, that Mrs. Browning has disclaimed the application of the “Curse for a Nation” to England, and transferred it to America. On referring to her volume again, I observe phrases which might bear out that application, but, unfortunately, these are so vague, that none but a specially prompted reader could so apply them. And why, indeed, should the Americans, lying so far out of the scene, be dragged in and cursed for not coming and fighting for the Italians? Unfortunately, too, were this particular poem plucked out of the book, all the rest of it is so steeped in the same violent spirit against England, that it would possess little less of that cursing which the poetess says in the mouth of a woman is “so very salt, and bitter, and good!” It is very singular that this curse is given as a spirit-communication, thus confirming the idea of biologising ab infra. May the gifted poetess soon break the dark spell, cease to hymn the praises of charlatans, and learn the eternal truth of the words—
“Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow!”
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William Howitt
Reviewed:
Poems Before Congress (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1860.
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