E610700A. Poems Before Congress.
The London Review, July 1861, pp. 405–406.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 327.
[The article in which this review appears also contains reviews of works by Owen Meredith (Robert Bulwer Lytton), Dinah Mulock, and Coventry Patmore; these we omit.]
Mrs. Browning speaks, in her preface to “Poems before Congress,” of the necessity which poets are under of justifying themselves “for ever so little jarring of the national sentiment, imputable to their rhymes.” That national sentiment, which prefers to meet with assonance where it is to be expected, has often enough been jarred by her rhymes. In the same preface, Mrs. Browning expresses a supposition that her verses may appear “to English readers too pungently rendered to admit of a patriotic respect to the English sense of things.” They are rendered too pungent, not merely by unpatriotic fury, but by bad taste. They are a perfect shriek. When we were reviewing Owen Meredith, we felt inclined to quote Waller to the effect that—
Poets we prize, when in their work we find
Some great employment of a worthy mind.
We now feel more inclined to refer to a certain text about meddling with things too high. We regret to find in this volume the old, wild, reckless propensity to use the most sacred names and associations in a totally irreverent connexion. Mrs. Browning surely cannot expect to influence the English people by frantic all-to-nothing rhapsodies. The volume contains some of the very worst specimens of her worst mood. In one of her raptures on “the gloomy sporting man,” Napoleon III., which we wonder whether he has read, she says,— [p. 406→]
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 diplomatists 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 give to the people of God?
However, we will say no more about this strange book, and its almost disgraceful close in the celebrated “Curse,” but that it contains one passage at least of splendid lyrical power. The whole (chapter vi. and vii. of “Napoleon III. in Italy”) is too long for quotation; we give the end of it:—
Now, shall we say,
Our Italy lives, indeed?
And if it were not for the beat and bray
Of drum and tramp 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,
Those 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 tyrant’s 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.
Reviewed:
Poems Before Congress (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1860.
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