E610831A. Poems (1850) and Casa Guidi Windows.
The Lady’s Newspaper, 31 August 1861, pp. 129–130; 7 September 1861, pp. 145–146.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 327–330.
The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I.
The last few months have been remarkable for the number of eminent persons called away by death. More than one crowned head has been laid low, and statesmen, patriots, and warriors have been summoned to leave the battle of life, even while the conflict still raged around them. And the great reaper not only “gathers the golden grain;” “the flowers that lie between” fall also before his resistless sickle, and some names that were just becoming known to the world, as associated with hope and promise for the future, have ceased to be heard amongst us. In one instance, again, a voice has been silenced whose rich utterances have for the last thirty years penetrated to every country in which the English language is spoken, and we have lost, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the greatest of living poets.
An intimate friend, speaking of her in her early life, describes her as “slight and delicate in figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam.” Unlike the majority of persons with large intellectual endowments, she was remarkable for great precocity, writing largely at the very early age of ten, and exceedingly well at fifteen. As her genius matured and ripened, however, she destroyed or suppressed most of her earlier productions, and superseded her first translation of the “Prometheus Bound” by another, which goes fairly through the grand old drama, from first to last. In many of her poems—we may even say in most of them—we find some traces of the great sorrow that fell upon her youth, in the death, by drowning, of her favourite brother and two other persons, her friends. Elizabeth Barrett had been in ill health for some months, owing to the rupture of a blood–vessel upon the lungs, and on this account she was ordered by Dr. Chambers to spend the winter at Torquay; and she derived so much benefit from the mild sea-breezes of Devonshire, that she remained there during the spring and summer months that followed. Her brother had accompanied her to Torquay, and on one fine summer morning he embarked with two friends on board a small sailing-vessel, for a few hours’ trip; they were attended by boatmen, but being [p. 130→] all good sailors, they agreed to dismiss them, and to manage the little vessel for themselves. No one dreamed of danger, and no one has since been able to explain the cause of the calamity that followed, for in a very few minutes the craft settled and went down, in sight of the windows of the house the little party had just quitted. All who were on board perished—even the bodies were never recovered—and the blow fell with double force upon Elizabeth Barrett, because she was unable to divest herself from the idea that she had in some measure been the cause of this great misery. Her health, which had been almost entirely restored, was now so completely shattered, that for many years afterwards she was confined to her room—a darkened room—seeing no one except her own immediate friends, but still able to enjoy the companionship of her favourite books. Her facility as a linguist was extraordinary, and at this time she became acquainted with almost every valuable book in almost every language, ancient as well as modern, for her education had comprised studies and languages not usually taught to women.
By very slow degrees her health improved, and after her marriage with Mr. Browning she accompanied him to Italy, where the latter years of her life have been passed. All her readers know with what earnest enthusiasm she took up the cause of Italian independence, until her thoughts burned into song; and the indignation and the hopes of a great empire live and breathe upon the pages of “Casa Guidi Windows.” The great mass of her poems are included in two thick volumes, published more than ten years ago, and comprising, undoubtedly, the best of all her numerous productions. This collection commences with “A Drama of Exile,” the history of the fall of man—not told Milton-wise, but modelled after the Greek drama—a composition that stands alone in literature. In reading it we are even more surprised at the power of expression than at the power of thought, the great wonder being, not that an intellect of extraordinary wealth and vigour should be able to strike out ideas like these from the grand old Scripture story, but rather that such ideas should be adequately represented in our ordinary language. Her conception of Satan is particularly fine; most writers in portraying the demon lose sight of the fallen archangel, but she never does this; from first to last it is “Lucifer, son of the morning,” fallen, indeed, from his high estate—ruined, and despairful, and rebellious—but Lucifer still. Her Eve stands without a parallel—an incarnation of womanhood interpreted to the world by the heart of a true and tender woman; and the whole poem is inlaid with the richest gems of thought, in which fancy becomes aspiration after good, and enthusiasm is kindled into devotion. “The Seraphim” appropriately follows: a sacred poem of singular beauty and unusual pathos; looking somewhat pale and dim, it is true, by the side of its gorgeous and richly-coloured predecessor, but yet a composition that might well have been a poet’s masterpiece. Turning over the next few leaves, we find ourselves upon classic ground, and some knowledge of the old-world literature is evidently necessary in order to a just appreciation of the poems that follow. Two others in the first volume are wonderful in power and pathos—“The Poet’s Vow,” and “Isobel’s Child”—the one intensely human, quivering and vibrating all through, as with the pulsation of a heart that suffers; the other rising above the feelings of humanity, and looking down upon them through vistas of triumphant faith. Between these two stands the “Romaunt of Margaret,” a poem of an entirely different character, moulded by the supernatural influences, and written in a weird and unearthly strain. Whenever Mrs. Browning touches upon the supernatural, which she does very rarely, she manifests a new and extraordinary power of which we could not otherwise have had any idea, because her general writings do not call it forth—the power of suggesting some vaguely-terrible thought, which we feel strongly, though we are unable to define it. But she uses this faculty rarely, as we said, the “Lay of the Brown Rosary” being the only other poem of hers in which we remember to have been struck with it—chilled by it, would be a more adequate expression.
The second volume is even more richly stored than the first. As we linger over these poems we feel disposed to award the palm to each in succession—to prefer the “Romaunt of the Page,” as the most exquisitely tender and touching, with its picture of submissive womanhood and all-enduring love; to select as the most beautiful of all the “Rhyme of the Duchess May” with its plaintive and monotonous chant, of which the ear never wearies, and its tale of a strong and loving heart that dared to look death in the face, even under so terrible an aspect; to give the preference to the “Romance of the Swan’s Nest,” that fair delineation of a dreaming childhood, touched with the tender hand of a poet; to think that none among them is so soul-moving as “Bertha in the Lane,” or so magnificently conceived and written as “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.” This last was composed in the short space of twelve hours, to fill up a vacancy in the volume, the writer being at the time a confirmed invalid, and only able to sit up for two or three hours in the day; and yet the thoughts, springing from some root of truth and earnestness, crowned with the flowers and foliage of a fervid imagination. Mrs. Browning’s shorter compositions follow, and close this collection, which was succeeded by two other poems, each occupying an entire volume, and these we reserve for future notion. In them, as in those we have already touched upon, we are struck by the writer’s earnestness, which makes us feel as if her own heart throbbed in the verse—as if she wrote out of her own life and individual experience. This is just the difference between a true poet and a dilettante: the poet writes because he must write, because the subject shapes itself out of his life, and comes before him to be written; the dilettante goes out gleaning to see what stray fragments he can gather up and turn to account.
We select for quotation a portion of the poem entitled “The Mourning Mother.” The child mourned for having been blind from birth:—
Dost thou weep, mourning mother,
For thy blind boy in grave,
That no more with each other
Sweet counsel ye can have?
That thou no more canst show him
The sunshine by the heat;
The river’s silver flowing
By murmurs at his feet?
The foliage, by its coolness,
The roses, by their smell;
And all creation’s fulness
By Love’s invisible?
Weepest thou to behold not
His meek blind eyes again—
Closed doorways which were folded,
And prayed against in vain,
And under which sate smiling
The child-mouth evermore,
As one who watcheth, wiling
The time by, at a door?
And weepest thou to feel not
His clinging hand on thine—
Which now, at dream-time, will not
Its cold touch disentwine?
Yet think—he went out straightway
From the dark world he knew—
No twilight in the gateway
To mediate ’twixt the two—
Into the sudden glory,
Out of the dark he trod,
Departing from before thee
At once to light and God!
Oh, in the blessed psalm now
His happy voice he tries,
Spreading a thicker palm-bough
Than others, o’er his eyes;
Yet still, in all the singing,
Thinks haply of thy song,
Which, in his life’s first springing,
Sang to him all night long,
And wishes it beside him,
With kissing lips that, cool
And soft, did over-glide him,
To make the sweetness full.
Look up, O mourning mother,
Thy blind boy walks in light!
Ye wait for one another
Before God’s Infinite!
But thou art now the darkest,
Thou mother left below;
Thou, the sole blind—thou markest
Content that it be so—
Until ye two give meeting
Where Heaven’s pearl-gate is,
And he shall lead thy feet in,
As once thou leddest his.
Wait on, thou mourning mother.
[Continued in the issue of 7 September 1861.] [p. 145→]
Exactly ten years ago, in the year of the first Great Exhibition, a new poem by Mrs. Browning, contained in one small volume, and entitled “Casa Guidi Windows,” was given to the world. As its name implies, it contains the impressions of the writer upon events which she witnessed from the windows of Guido’s house, in Tuscany—a continuous stream of personal impressions, received with great vividness and intensity, and portrayed with ardent enthusiasm for a country that was then trodden down beneath the feet of the oppressor. It is this strength of indignation, this earnestness of hope, that enriches the poem with a halo of grand and beautiful thoughts. Without this sincerity of soul and vivid realisation of her subject, the lines would doubtless have seemed a little disjointed here and there, and drawn out to the length that causes rhyme to be lost; but these defects are scarcely noticed by a reader whose soul is kindled by the enthusiasm of the poet. Still, in a political poem, there must always be a certain difficulty to overcome, especially when the composition is sustained and of considerable length, as in the present instance; and “Casa Guidi Windows,” with all its width of thought and ardour of faith, cannot be compared with those earlier poems by the same hand which we have already attempted to describe. There, the inspiration was drawn from sources that exist through all time, and move the heart of a responsive humanity; here the subject-matter is local, and the thoughts are those of one particular age; there, she looked within, and brought out the treasures of a past life-experience; here she looks without, and records that which was apparent to the bodily senses. And although the force and colouring [p. 146→] of the whole poem stamp it as the production of the same pen that gave us the “Drama of Exile,” and “The Seraphim,” still it is only at intervals that we point out a passage recalling irresistibly the strains with which we have long been so familiar. There is an instance:—
. . . . The day was such a day
As Florence owes the sun. The sky above
Its weight upon the mountains seemed to lay,
And palpitate in glory, like a dove
Who has flown too fast, full-hearted.
One of the finest descriptions in the book is that which records the march of the Austrians through Tuscany, witnessed from Casa Guidi Windows:—
Then, gazing, I beheld the long-drawn street
Live out, from end to end, full in the sun,
With Austria’s thousands. Sword and bayonet,
Horse, foot, artillery,—cannons rolling on,
Like blind, slow storm-clouds gestant with the heat
Of undeveloped lightnings, each bestrode
By a single man, dust-white from head to heel,
Indifferent as the dreadful thing he rode,
Like a sculptured Fate, and terrible!
All readers who are familiar with the sculpture of the Italian Court in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, will remember the magnificent tomb of one of the Medicis, from the chisel of Michel Angelo, and recognise the force and vividness of the following description:—
That’s Michael Angelo! his statues wait
In that small chapel of the dim St. Lawrence!
Day’s eyes are breaking bold and passionate
Over his shoulder, and will flash abhorrence
On darkness, and with level looks meet fate,
When once loose from that marble film of theirs;
The Night has wild dreams in her sleep; the Dawn
Is haggard as the sleepless; Twilight wears
A sort of horror; as the veil withdrawn
’Twixt the artist’s soul and works had left them heirs
Of his deep thoughts.
This is a fine description, but there is another, of Cimabue’s Virgin, too long for quotation, which is more than fine. The soul of the writer had been kindled by a divine enthusiasm as she stood before the picture, and she tells the story of Charles of Anjou, whom, in his passage through Florence, Cimabue allowed to see this painting while yet in his studio; and how the populace followed the royal visitor, and “shouted to behold the picture, not the king;” and how the people carried it in triumph to the church, and deposited it there.
In the concluding portion of the poem, we find a richly-coloured allusion to the great event then taking place—the Exhibition of 1851. The world, as the writer says, had grown a fair-going world, and England was drawing round her the flowing ends of the earth, “as a queen gathers in her robes amid her golden cincture.” She goes on to describe a few beautiful things with which the Palace was stored—the corals, that grew “within a wilderness of purple seas”—the great diamond, that “flashed out along a dark of diamonds”—silks, in which the gold, wrought into the tissue,
Swims to the surface of the silk, like cream,
And curdles to fair patterns,
—delicate muslins, that “rather seem than be”—carpets, upon whose velvet roses you walk “inaudible, like spirits”—goblets, in which you can
Take in with your wine
The very sun its grapes were ripened under,
Drink light and juice together!
—the model of a steamship, so perfect in its details, and so powerful in its working, that you seem to behold it
Crushing down the brine,
Like a blind Jove, who feels his way with thunder!
Just now, while we are preparing for another great world-fair, we look back with even more than usual interest to the events and preparations of 1851; but, indeed such passages as those from which we have quoted cannot be read at any time without a strong sense of their exceeding beauty. They unite, in a singular degree, extreme delicacy and finish with great power and emphasis, and thus they present some of the characteristics by which Mrs. Browning is especially distinguished.
And we confess that, while we have been trying to open other eyes to the many beauties of this poem, already well known to us, our own soul has burned within us, and we have learned to admire and appreciate it more fully than before. For when we approach these shrines, one which the thoughts of a true poet are laid and stored for ever, the cup that we would fill for others is sure to overflow, leaving some of its treasures for ourselves.
A number of miscellaneous poems by Mrs. Browning have appeared since the publication of her last complete work, and many of these will, no doubt, be published in a new form. Varying in beauty and in merit, they are all characterised by the same touch; and even in reading one, to the sentiment of which we most strongly object, we are reminded of an observation made by Mrs. Beecher Stowe upon a picture of Rubens, exhibited in some foreign church or collection: she did not like it at all; she admits, in fact, she shrank away from it; but she felt and knew, by the very pain he gave her, that Rubens was a great master of his art. The most beautiful of Mrs. Browning’s late productions appeared in the Cornhill Magazine for the July of 1860, and is called “A Musical Instrument.” It would be a kind of sin to quote from it, unless we could give the whole; because the exceeding beauty of the strain is partly dependent upon the regular succession of ideas, and also upon the rhythmical recurrence of certain sounds. We remember being moved to indignation at one criticism on this poem, which set forth that it was chiefly valuable as affording a subject for the charming illustration which accompanied it!—the charming illustration consisting of the figure of a shaggy individual, whose hair has apparently been very recently released from curl-papers, while his lower limbs warrant the supposition that a successful experiment with Rowland’s Macassar has been made upon those members. This is a likeness of “the great god Pan,” who is thus represented as half a goat, sitting by the water-side in a posture peculiarly suggestive of peril and discomfort, surrounded by reeds of remarkable height, and by a new species of dragonfly, quite unknown to entomologists.
Persons who have no more feeling than this for poetry really ought not to be allowed to criticise it; the sacred groves of Academe ought to be railed in, and a notice put up that all trespassers will be prosecuted. Those who presume to criticise ought to be poets themselves—dumb ones perhaps, but poets still, able to feel if not to speak: there are many such in the world.
Reviewed:
Poems (1850) (EBB).
Casa Guidi Windows.
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