1 best: Dearest Isa: Robert Browning's Letters to Isa Blagden, ed. McAleer, Edward C. (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1951), p. 284 (19 11 [1867]).Google Scholar

3 Elizabeth”: See especially volume I of Ward's, MaisieRobert Browning and His World (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967)Google Scholar, where the arguments about Robert's self-repression run for several pages (pp. 285–87), and all turn in one way or another on the decisive role of his sensitivity to Elizabeth's feelings and reputation, or his desire to avoid her characteristic poetic strategies. moment: Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Kenyon, Frederic G. (New York: Macmillan, 1899), II, 368–69.Google Scholar

4 ink”): Letters of Robert Browning, Collected by Thomas J. Wise, ed. Hood, Thurman L. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1933), p. 152.Google Scholaralong!: This is a composite of standard views (DeVane, Honan and Irvine, Ward, Miller) which, I am afraid, when taken together, cannot help but parody themselves. Only Honan and Irvine put sufficient weight upon the reference in the passage to the ministry to conclude that the poem was more likely to have been destroyed than preserved. Their discussion nevertheless imputes to Robert Browning a completely undivided mind on the subject of the Emperor “from Villafranca to 1871”: Irvine, William and Honan, Park, The Book, the Ring, and the Poet (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 373.Google Scholarproblematical: Other readers, troubled by the critical inconsistency that grants general trustworthiness to Elizabeth's letters but will not extend it to their comments on political perceptions she and Robert held in common, will note with pleasure the appearance of an essay by Hetzler, Leo A. in Victorian Poetry, 15 (Winter, 1977)Google Scholar, as I was preparing my own for publication. In the context of a study of “The Case of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Browning and Napoleon III,” Hetzler carefully traces through Elizabeth's letters the similar (if not precisely parallel) evolution of both poets' views (pp. 338–39), commenting by the way that those letters “reveal her to be a well-informed observer of the political scene and gifted with an unEnglish empathy for the inner workings of the French mind and spirit” (p. 338).Google Scholar It seems worth highlighting (since Hetzler does not explicitly do so himself) that, in both content and tone, his comments represent a marked departure from prevailing critical conventions on this subject. on”): Browning to His American Friends, ed. Hudson, Gertrude Reese (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1965), p. 79 (30 08 1861).Google Scholarunification: Ibid., p. 88 (17 Dec. 1861).

5 likely: Ibid., p. 129 (5 Sept. 1863). year: McAleer, , p. 371.Google Scholarwill: Ibid., p. 356.

6 power”: DeVane, William Clyde, A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), p. 361.Google Scholar Further page references to this work will appear in the text. 1872): McAleer, , p. 347Google Scholar; Hood, , p. 152.Google ScholarBrownings: Hetzler's essay, already cited, is the significant exception. Alluding to DeVane among several others (pp. 335–37), he openly breaks from the “traditional” critical view of the Emperor “as a figure with whom Browning could have little political sympathy” (p. 337), and not only elicits the genuine complexities of the Browning letters quoted here but provides a fuller accounting of this and other evidence (see especially pp. 339–42).

7 doom”: James, Henry, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Edinburgh: Black-wood and Sons, 1903), II, 53–54.Google Scholar Among other things, James' judgment was hopelessly biased by his antipathy toward progressivist Italian politics, making it difficult for him to forgive anyone responsible for what he described as “punch [ing] a hole” in the “vast, rich canvas” of pre-unification Italy (I, 94). conceived”: Ward, , I, 286.Google Scholarromance”: Honan, and Irvine, , p. 364.Google Scholarpatriot”: Ibid., p. 367. poet”: Clarke, Isabel, EBB: A Portrait (1929; rpt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970), pp. 258–59.Google Scholar

8 hemisphere”: Ogilvy, Eliza M., “Recollections,” in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, ed. Heydon, Peter N. and Kelley, Philip (New York: Quadrangle Press and the Browning Institute, 1973), pp. xxxiv–xxxv.Google Scholar The recollections were originally published as a memoir to accompany an 1893 edition of Elizabeth Browning's poems. health”: Kenyon, , II, 306.Google Scholarspirit”: Clarke, , p. 258.Google Scholar One is inclined to infer the political bias of such remarks from their originating largely with earlier British biographers or commentators. Time and post-World War II politics have had a moderating influence. Hayter's, Alethea relatively recent Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New York: British Book Center, 1965)Google Scholar, for example, presents a more balanced account of the political issues; nevertheless, even she patronizingly stresses the poet's “ardor” and “passion,” along with her inability to “grasp” the historical or political process (pp. 134–35). It is instructive to contrast the appreciation of Italian critics, e.g., Francesco Viglione, who described her as Italy's “only English friend … without ulterior motives” regarding the Risorgimento: L'Italia nel pensiero degli scrittori inglesi (Milano: Bocca, 1946), p. 473Google Scholar (my translation). M. L. Giartosio de Courten stays with the “ardor,” but enthusiastically grants Elizabeth, “the clear eyes of the seer poet”: “Elizabeth Barrett Browning e il Risorgimento,” Il Risorgimento, 2 (settembre 1950), 146Google Scholar (my translation). See also the sympathetic observations of Artom-Trèves, Giuliana in The Golden Ring: the Anglo-Florentines, 1847–1862, trans. Sprigge, Sylvia (London: Longmans, Green, 1956), pp. 90–92, and esp. 90n.Google Scholarthemselves: Apart from British chauvinism, there are several semi-articulated sources of the anti-EBB tone of some Robert Browning devotees, some indeed better characterized as symptoms—e.g., that she wrote merely topical poetry and managed by her excessive popularity and (vulgar?) appeal to obscure the greater genius of her husband. The most deeply misogynist is the view that her illness and physical dependency drew off vital energies from her husband, and deprived him of the appropriate matrix for his own creativity, for this last, see esp. DeVane, William Clyde, “The Virgin and the Dragon,” Yale Review, NS 37 (09 1947), 33–38.Google Scholar In the new critical atmosphere perhaps created in part by Marxist as well as by feminist criticism, fresh spokesmanship has begun to undercut such irrational biases. The paper on EBB's politics presented by Julia Markus to the meeting of the Modern Language Association in December 1976 has now been supplemented by the fine introduction to her recent critical edition of Casa Guidi Windows (New York: Browning Institute, 1977).Google Scholar Cf. also Hetzler, : “the emotion with which [EBB] often voiced her opinions may cause one to overlook the discerning reasoning that underlies them” (p. 339).Google Scholar

9 intervention: The emphasis here on monarchist supporters of unification is important, since the anti-monarchist Mazzinists were also anti-Napoleon. Crudely put, the two camps reflected the difference between moderate and radical approaches to unification; more technically, between those who foresaw a unified Italy under the leadership of the King of Piedmont (qua Cavour), and those who sought a republican federation, with Rome as its center, under a president (qua Mazzini). Neither Elizabeth nor Robert appears to have been wholeheartedly Mazzinist, though they were early personal admirers of Mazzini himself. As he became increasingly associated with terrorist activity (e.g., the Orsini plot to assassinate Napoleon in 1857), and with opposition to the diplomatic tactics of Cavour, both poets grew increasingly bitter over what they perceived as his counterproductive influence on the progress of unification (cf. Kenyon, , II, 279Google Scholar, and McAleer, , p. 160).Google Scholarthis”: Kenyon, , II, 382.Google Scholarhopeful”: Ibid., p. 331. few”: Ibid., p. 341.

10 lately”: Ibid., pp. 314, 316–17, 334. always”: Ibid., pp. 318, 322. prose: Julia Markus corroborates this argument with her observations on the poet's choice of the subjective persona for Casa Guidi Windows: “Once we learn to trust her voice again, we will be able to uncover the significance of the very intimate ‘I’ narration of the poem. For the daring subjectivity of voice is a conscious and confident assertion of the moral and social role of the poet in her times” (p. xix).Google Scholarher: She openly recanted her support for Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany in Part II of Casa Guidi Windows (ll. 40–65)Google Scholar, partly, it would seem, to dramatize just how much honest and concerned observers were at the mercy of changing events. Cf. de Courten, Giartosio, who characterizes the “discrepancy” as a deliberate “guarantee of sincerity” (p. 135, my translation).Google Scholar

11 literature: On the strength of EBB's poetry as political literature, see Markus, , pp. xxxiv–xl.Google Scholar See also Hayter, , who commends the “disinterestedness” of her politics (p. 135).Google Scholar She thus makes a virtue of the very quality Henry James had condemned when he characterized her expense of “so much disinterested passion” upon the cause of “a people not her own” as “a possession, by the subject, riding her to death, that almost prompts us at times to ask wherein it so greatly concerned her” (II, 54). use”: Kenyon, , II, 382–83.Google Scholar The letter containing these words was addressed to Henry Chorley, unsympathetic reviewer of Poems Before Congress for the Athenaeum, and author of a nastily jingoistic novel about Italian politics, Roccabella, which he impertinently dedicated to Elizabeth Browning. In its response to Chorley's assertions about “unfit arguments for poetry,” the entire letter bears comparison with the forceful statements in Book V of Aurora Leigh on commitment and contemporaneity in art. Her views are obviously incompatible with the rather doctrinaire modernist estheticism that canonizes the poet as “observer,” whose distance transcends the immediate and ephemeral. Thus Henry James describes Elizabeth Browning as a poet whose “sense of the general,” as he calls it, “had all run to the strained and the strenuous.… We say, roughly, that this is what becomes of distinguished spirits when they fail to keep above” (II, 54–55). For some recent breaking of the critical ranks that have tended to invoke James Joyce in support of this formidable doctrine, see Ellmann's, Richard recent assessment of “The Politics of Joyce,” New York Review of Books, 24 (9 06 1977), 41–46.Google Scholardo?”: McAleer, , p. 67.Google Scholar

12 retrospect: Compare, for instance, the letters to the Storys already cited with his comments on the genesis of the poem to Robert Buchanan in early 1871: “I wrote, myself, a monologue in his [Louis Napoleon's] name twelve years ago, and never could bring the printing to my mind as yet. One day perhaps” (Hood, , p. 145).Google Scholar This, of course, to a fellow-poet who had just published a poem on the same theme; the “one day” was later that year. behalf: McAleer, , p. 341 (19 07 1870).Google Scholar The vindication idea becomes even more convincing in the light of Hetzler's reading of the poem as in some sense a defense of Napoleon's underlying sincerity, for that strategy would have avoided the implication that Elizabeth's trust had been misguided.

13 causes”: The exemplary phrases come from Dowden, Edward, Robert Browning (London: Dent, 1904), p. 120Google Scholar, and Melchiori, Barbara, “Browning and Italy,” Writers and Their Backgrounds: Robert Browning, ed. Armstrong, Isobel (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1975), p. 170Google Scholar, respectively. Though most commentators have been willing to grant Robert's active involvement with political events at this time, Melchiori's essay reasserts the view that he made “very little attempt at participation” as part of a temperamental tendency toward “evasion” of contemporary issues and “in order to maintain his [poetic] position as observer” (pp. 169, 172, 181). “The Italy which really mattered to Browning was the Italy that he found in his library, the Italy of the past.… [L] iving in Italy among the people” only allowed him to “clothe the bare ribs of his source-books with flesh and blood” (p. 171). alone: Valuable insight into Browning's emotional and moral dilemma over this episode is provided by Gladish, Robert, “Mrs. Browning's ‘A Curse for a Nation’: Some Further Comments,” Victorian Poetry, 7 (Autumn, 1969), 275–80.Google Scholarstate”: Doctorow, E. L., “The New Poetry,” Matchbox (a publication of Amnesty International), Summer, 1977, p. 1.Google Scholar

14 republic”: Kenyon, , II, 346.Google ScholarItaly: Honan, and Irvine, , p. 364Google Scholar; DeVane, , “The Virgin and the Dragon,” passimGoogle Scholar; Praz, Mario, Studi e svaghi inglesi (Firenze: Sansoni, 1937), pp. 274–75.Google Scholar

15 revolution: Casa Guidi Windows, I.1–216.Google Scholar The familiar phrase from one of Vincenzo da Filicaja's seventeenth-century sonnets appears as a leitmotif throughout this passage. There is no allusion to Mazzini, but the highly metaphorical character of his rhetoric was an aspect of its powerful propagandistic appeal, and the poet may have known this particular phrase from his February 1851 address to the newly-created Friends of Italy, which was quickly reported in Italy among the Raccolta di atti e documenti della democrazia italiana (Genova: Moretti, 1852), pp. 216–48.Google Scholar Relevant, too, is the powerful image of Italy as “formosissima donna,” wounded and bleeding, in Leopardi's, “All'Italia” (1818).Google Scholar Markus' introduction to her edition of Casa Guidi Windows also stresses EBB's rejection of this tradition. Further line references to this poem will be to this edition; references to other poems will cite The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Preston, Harriet W., Cambridge Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).Google Scholarcrown”: Kenyon, , II, 321.Google Scholar

17 Perseus: DeVane, , “The Virgin and the Dragon,” p. 37.Google Scholar

18 love: Critics zealous to psychoanalyze Elizabeth Browning's devotion to heroes as part of a quest for a “father-substitute” (cf. Hayter, , p. 239)Google Scholar, have unduly diverted us from the deep woman-orientedness of even her political poetry, and thus from the possibility that a mother-quest played a much more dominant role in her psychic life. In this light, certain typical motifs gain new meaning—for example, her use of the pomegranate as a life-omen. Beneath the surface of its private significance to herself and Robert, one can sense the pressures of the complex emotions women profoundly associate with the Demeter-Perspehone myth. Compare the story of her wedding-journey and the gift of the pomegranate in Kenyon, , I, 313.Google Scholar For the pomegranate-dialogue between the two poets, see Fairchild, Hoxie, “Browning's Pomegranate Heart,” Modern Language Notes, 66 (04 1951), 265–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 murderings”: McAleer, , p. 63.Google Scholarimpenetrable: For a painstaking attempt to come to terms with this gestation process, see Cundiff, Paul, “The Dating of Browning's Conception of The Ring and the Book,” Studies in Philology, 38 (1941), 543–51.Google Scholar The essay reappears in Cundiff's, Browning's Ring Metaphor and Truth (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972).Google Scholar

21 heaven”: Hudson, , p. 89.Google Scholar

22 content: Ibid., pp. 126, 130, 133.

23 sympathizer: Several of Browning's contemporaries have left pertinent retrospective accounts of this London cultural ambience as it related to both Browning and Mazzini. See especially Rossetti, William Michael, Rossetti Papers, 1862–1870 (New York: Scribner's, 1903), pp. 225–31Google Scholar; and Conway, Moncure Daniel, Autobiography: Memories and Experiences (1904; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1970), II, 60–66.Google Scholar For an excellent scholarly overview, see Rudman, Harry, Italian Nationalism and English Letters (London: Allen and Unwin, 1940), esp. pp. 25–32.Google Scholar

24 Italy!”: Quotations from The Ring and the Book are taken from Altick's, Richard edition (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971).Google Scholar

27 1860: Cf. Dicey, Edward, Rome in 1860 (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1861), p. 194Google Scholar, which specifically alluded to this celebration. Dicey, an acquaintance of the Brownings, dedicated this particular book to them. His later article on Elizabeth Browning and Italy for Macmillan's Magazine and his book on Cavour are alluded to in a letter from Browning to Isa, 9 Sept. 1861 (McAleer, , p. 89).Google Scholar For evidence of the persistent fascination of the image of Mazzini as rescuer-saint of the Risorgimento, and of the way this image forms an integral part of the virgin and the dragon myth, see the closing paragraph of the chapter on Mazzini in Garnett, Richard, History of Italian Literature (New York: Appleton, 1928), p. 374Google Scholar, where the virgin-princess Italy is rescued from the dragon Austria by her three heroic brothers, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour.

28 Pope: Much effort has been expended on the study of Browning's portrait of Pope Innocent within his own historical context, but (to my knowledge) nothing has been said of the relevance of the portrait to Pius IX, not even at the time of the poem's publication. John Doherty, reviewer for the Dublin Review in 1869, discusses Browning's theological “errors” in “The Pope,” but makes no reference to the papacy of Pio Nono: see Browning: The Critical Heritage, ed. Litzinger, Boyd and Smalley, Donald (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 325.Google Scholar Perhaps some subconscious association led Melchiori to refer inadvertently to the Pope of the poem as “Pius,” but the reference is, curiously, to Pius X, not Pius IX (Armstrong, , p. 174).Google Scholar

30 resolution: Though originally associated with the Italian political philosopher Gioberti, and later with Cavour's enunciation of the doctrine of “a free Church in a free State,” the European popularization of this concept was largely owing to the widely-publicized commentaries of Charles de Montalembert, which received immediate translation and publication in England: see Pius IX and France in 1849 and 1859 (London: W. Jeffs, 1859)Google Scholar, which presented an eloquent and convincing defense of Pius IX by a respected, if conservative, intellectual. Cf. also Dicey, : “There is no wish in the Italian people … to alter the national faith, or to dispense with the Pope, as a spiritual potentate. Before long, some arrangement must be come to between the Pope and the Italian people if the papacy is to last at all” (pp. 269–70).Google Scholar For the connections between papal acts and pronouncements of this period and the Italian political situation, see Hales, E. E. Y., Pio Nono: A Study in European Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1954), esp. pp. 274–90Google Scholar; also Daniel-Rops, H., The Church in an Age of Revolution, 1789–1870, trans. Warrington, John (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1965), esp. pp. 304–05.Google Scholarrealpolitik: In a letter to Isa dated 18–20 Oct. 1862, Browning spiritedly defended Louis Napoleon's diplomatic efforts to persuade the Pope to adjust to the new political realities; Browning appears convinced that the Pope will, in the long run, concede, and “bear the blow with decency” (McAleer, , pp. 131–32).Google Scholar Internal evidence within The Ring and the Book, however, suggests continued sympathetic Pope-watching on Browning's part. The surly observations made by the “Venetian visitor” to Rome in Book XII are, in vivid particulars, a recreation of the crossfire of public opinion Pius IX was under (especially from 1867 on, when Venice was added to the Kingdom of Italy), with their allusions to “that old enmity to Austria, that / Passion for France and France's pageant-king,” and the Pope's alleged tendency to be “ever mindful of the mob” (ll. 75–117 passim).

31 clerics: It is especially interesting to compare the sympathetic treatment of the Monsignor in Pippa Passes. Melchiori, however, reads Browning as a diehard anticleric: see Armstrong, , pp. 174–77.Google Scholar

33 union: Cf. Wilson, Edmund's suggestive essay, “Abraham Lincoln: The Union as Religious Mysticism,” in Eight Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), pp. 181–202.Google Scholar The imaginative convergence of the two “revolutions” among English commentators was frequent, almost commonplace, at this time.