Arms and the Circassian Woman

6 Arms and the Circassian Woman

In the late 1830s, Jane Porter became acquainted with the writer and diplomat David Urquhart. Born in the Scottish Highlands, Urquhart travelled widely in his youth, gained the acquaintance and support of Jeremy Bentham and Sir Herbert Taylor (George IV’s private secretary), and eventually attained a diplomatic post in Constantinople. Though his assigned mission was the exten- sion of British trade into Turkey and its neighbors – and, indeed, Urquhart became a leading British authority on Turkish customs and history – his interests turned to the fate of the people of the Caucasus, especially the Circassians, and the threat of Russia’s expanding empire. Porter seems to have ﬁrst met Urquhart in 1835, but their encounters became more regular in 1838. The chance of getting to know Urquhart must have intrigued Porter, for a number of reasons related to her brother, Sir Robert Ker Porter. As noted in Chapter 3, Porter, in deference to Robert, carefully avoided the anti-Russian rhetoric that usually accompanied calls for Polish sovereignty. Urquhart, in contrast, was an outspoken Russophobe. Furthermore, Robert was considered something of an expert on the Caucasus, the same region Urquhart was now claiming as his own. Robert’s Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylonia, 1817–1820 was published in 1821, and Porter was anxious to defend her brother’s position of authority. In March 1838 Porter described to Robert (since 1825 a diplomat in Venezuela) an extended conversation with Urquhart, whom she considered ‘something of the Quixote caste.’ Urquhart had related one of his early encounters with the people of Circassia, who received him ‘as a Hermes come down from the Gods – and as proof of his mission, by the effect, it seems he mounted a mountain-top ... and surrounded by the whole nation of Circassia – he made a speech – Against the encroachment of the Russian Power – and laying down a law, how it might be rolled back upon itself.’ Informed of the need for a centralized power to unite them, the people offer Urquhart that very position: ‘We will have no other Ruler – Leader – Lawgiver – King!’ A victory over the

135 T. McLean, The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature © Thomas McLean 2012 136 The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Russians a few days later secured Urquhart’s place in their hearts, and ‘he, the Great Atchiever [sic] – was honoured by the assembled nation, with all kinds of regal & warlike distinctions.’

In short, Achilles himself, was never so bestowed. – And he brought all these royal inaugurating robes of military renown, and legislating wisdom, to England last winter – and in the month of the January succeeding, they had the honour of being worn at – Mrs Skinner’s Fancy Ball!!

Porter assured her brother ‘it smells vastly like the la Manchean knight’s dream of the bottom of the well of Montesinos!’1 But if in 1838 Urquhart struck Porter as more quixotic than kingly, she herself fell under the speaker’s spell seventeen months later. While standing near ‘a large Map of the East,’ Porter asked Urquhart ‘some question about the relative situation of Circassia on the Coast of the Black Sea’:

He did indeed ‘take up the parable’ – proceeding on with so clear, satisfac- tory, and luminous an account of the Circassian nation – its position – its history, or rather movements, from the remotest periods, to the present – its integral character – unchanging manners – indomitable courage – and simplicity of purpose – from Age to Age – who ever were the beleagurers [sic] of the Caucasus – that I was quite delighted – clapping my hands with plea- sure, when he ended – as I would have done to a noble representation of the Promethean Prophet of cloud-capped Elborus, had he stood before me.2

Porter was not alone in falling under the spell of the various writers and diplomats who focused Britain’s interests on the fate of Circassia in the 1830s and 1840s. That land and those writers are the subject of this chapter, which turns from the western frontiers of Russia’s nineteenth-century empire to its southern borders. In the first section, I examine Romantic and Victorian representations of Circassia, in particular considering the prevalent image of the ‘fair Circassian.’ I also introduce the works of Urquhart and others and suggest how these writers made the Circassian familiar to Britons via connections with other oppressed peoples, from Scotland to Poland. Then I consider the work of a sin- gle poet, Frances Brown (or Browne, as it is more often written), once known widely as ‘the blind poetess of Ulster.’ Browne’s long poem of 1844, ‘The Star of Attéghéi,’ is the major poetic response in the English language to a conflict that resulted in the forced removal of more than one million Circassians and Turkic Caucasians from their homeland, a conflict directly related to Russia’s ongo- ing struggles in the Caucasus. Browne draws inspiration from Porter’s novel Thaddeus of Warsaw, Lord Byron’s Eastern Tales, and from the psychologically- charged portraits of women crafted in the decades following these by Felicia Arms and the Circassian Woman 137

Hemans and Letitia Landon; but she extends her predecessors’ work by situating her mysterious and courageous heroine in a narrative based on recent historical events. Thus her poem is also an intriguing expression of nineteenth-century concepts of nationalism, bringing together three nations whose struggles for independence and national identity were well known in the early Victorian era: Circassia, Poland, and Ireland. In doing so it also associates Russia and England as fellow oppressors. Despite her perceived economic, physical, and geograph- ical limitations, ‘the blind poetess of Ulster’ recognized in the Caucasus war a struggle with striking similarities to the situation in Poland and troubling associations with the recent history of her homeland.

Imagining Circassia

In 1833, the Encyclopedia Britannica described the ‘national characteristics and manners’ of the Circassians, warning that ‘these must now be regarded as in great measure things of the past.’3 The Circassians, inhabitants of the western Caucasus, were known for ‘the patriarchal simplicity of their manners, the men- tal qualities with which they were endowed, the beauty of form and regularity of feature by which they were distinguished.’ This last quality was familiar enough in the 1790s that Samuel Taylor Coleridge could take it as the subject of his ballad ‘Lewti or the Circassian Love-Chaunt’:

So shines my Lewti’s forehead fair, Gleaming through her sable hair. Image of Lewti! from my mind Depart; for Lewti is not kind.

(11–14)4

Leila, the abused heroine of Lord Byron’s 1813 The Giaour, is similarly praised:

The cygnet nobly walks the water; So moved on earth Circassia’s daughter, The loveliest bird of Franguestan!

(504–6)5

European fascination with the beauty of the ‘Fair Circassian’ was almost inseparable from its fascination with a peculiar ‘custom’ of the people:

The greatest stain upon the Circassian character was the custom of selling their children, the Circassian father being always willing to part with his daughters, many of whom were bought by Turkish merchants for the harems 138 The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature

of Eastern monarchs. But no degradation was implied in this transaction, and the young women themselves were generally willing partners in it.

One questions the Britannica writer’s faith in Circassian ‘patriarchal simplicity’ when he continues this paragraph with the sentence, ‘Herds of cattle and sheep constituted the chief riches of the inhabitants.’ British commentators often ignored the probable cause of Circassian slavery – poverty, exacerbated by geography and war – in order to make an exception of Circassia, the one instance where Europeans were allowed publicly to indulge their Orientalist fantasies. A February 1849 Blackwood’s article on the Caucasus, for example, slips rapidly from principled disdain into the pleasures of exotic imaginings:

In a moral point of view, all slave trafﬁc is of course odious and reprehensi- ble, but that of Circassia differed from other commerce of the kind, in so far that all parties were beneﬁted by, and consenting to, the contract. The Turks obtained from Caucasus handsomer and healthier wives than those born in the harem; and the Circassian beauties were delighted to exchange the poverty and toil of their father’s mountain huts for the luxurious farniente of the seraglio, of whose wonders and delights their ears were regaled, from childhood upwards, with the most glowing descriptions. (Hardman 137)6

Circassian subjects were often represented by British and French Orientalist artists of the period. The Scottish painter William Allan spent ten years in Russia and the Caucasus, and upon his return decorated his Edinburgh studio ‘with Turkish scimitars, Circassian bows and arrows, Caucasian armour and other similar trophies of his travels.’ In his studio the artist was often ‘attired in a quilted Circassian jacket the numerous pockets of which, originally intended for concealing small weapons, were stuffed with paint brushes.’ His Sale of Circassian Captives to a Turkish Bashaw – one of many paintings of the subject – was described by Sir Walter Scott as ‘a beautiful and highly poetical picture’ (Irwin and Irwin 207–8). Occasional references to Circassia or Circassian women appear in nineteenth- century literary texts, though rarely are they the subject of a poem. One of the few is Thomas Haynes Bayly’s ‘The Circassian,’ which describes ‘the Sultan’s chosen slave’ who ‘spurns the chain of jewels’ he gives her because her ‘young heart’s ﬁrst affection’ – her homeland, ‘sweet Circassia’ – ‘still holds her with no chain.’ Bayly was perhaps inspired by the April 1819 arrival in Dover of ‘the Persian Ambassador and the Fair Circassian,’ an event extensively covered in contemporary papers. According to The Times of 27 April, ‘curiosity had been raised to the highest pitch by the different accounts of the beauty of the fair Arms and the Circassian Woman 139

Circassian.’ This ‘Circassian beauty,’ accompanied by ‘two black eunuchs,’ was unfortunately

scarcely seen; for the instant she landed she was put into a coach, which conveyed her to the inn. She had on a hood, which covered the upper part of her head, and a large silk shawl screened the lower part of her face, across the nose, from observation; therefore her eyes, which are truly beautiful, and part of her forehead, were the only parts of her beauties that could be seen.

The British public had to wait more than two weeks before getting a more complete description. ‘The fair Circassian turns out to be a brunette,’ proclaimed The Times on 13 May. ‘She is of the middle stature, of exquisite symmetry, rather lusty, complexion of a brownish cast, hair jet black, handsome black penetrating eyes, with beautiful arched eye-brows, and strikingly handsome.’ Satirists took advantage of the visit to poke fun at the aging Prince Regent’s still-amorous nature. The Ambassador at Court; or George and the Fair Circassian describes the ridiculous attempts of the Prince Regent and Lord Castlereagh to seduce the satrap’s mistress. The two are eventually discovered hiding in the young woman’s bedroom, but they manage to talk their way out of trou- ble with the ambassador. The Circassian maiden herself makes only a passing appearance.7 The people of the Caucasus also fascinated contemporary British travelers. On 3 September 1827 The Times reprinted a passage from the New Monthly Magazine on Circassian women. ‘It appeared to me an inconceivable caprice of nature,’ wrote one traveler, ‘to have produced such prodigies of perfection amidst such a rude and barbarous people, who value their women less than their stirrups.’ His companion noted the remarkable beauty of a fifteen-year- old girl, suggesting ‘what celebrity a woman so transcendently beautiful ... would acquire in any of the capitals of Europe, had she but received the ben- efits of a suitable education.’ Visitors in the 1830s were similarly impressed. Edmund Spencer, whose Travels in Circassia appeared in 1837, described the Circassian countenance as ‘perfectly classical, exhibiting, in the profile, that exquisite gently curving line, considered by connoisseurs to be the ideal of beauty’ (2: 321). But by the late 1830s there were more complicated political reasons for British interest in Circassia, and two major travelogues of the period, Spencer’s Travels and James Stanislaus Bell’s Journal of a Residence in Circassia During the Years 1837, 1838 and 1839, reflect the change. By then Russia had annexed the eastern coast of the Black Sea, including Circassia, a right never recognized by the British government and seemingly denied by the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople. According to M.S. Anderson, Russia ‘seemed once more, as in Poland, to be crushing a people struggling to be free. In the process it appeared 140 The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature to be strengthening dangerously its position in the Caucasus and thus its ability to move against the Ottoman Empire, Persia or even India’ (91). David Urquhart visited Circassia in 1834 and afterwards encouraged British and European support for the Circassians. He started the journal Portfolio and gained widespread attention by publishing sensitive Russian documents taken from Warsaw during the 1831 Russo-Polish War – documents given him by Prince Adam Czartoryski, who saw Urquhart as a potential ally. When he ran out of Polish material, Urquhart used his experiences in the Caucasus as evidence of Russia’s expansionist intentions. Russophobe feelings in Britain intensified in late 1836 when Russian authorities seized the British schooner Vixen as it attempted to dock at the Circassian port of Soudjouk-Kalé. Urquhart, who came up with the Vixen scheme, along with J.A. Longworth, a Times corre- spondent whose A Year among the Circassians appeared in 1840, and Bell, who owned the schooner, used the incident to promote official British support for the Circassian cause (Hopkirk 153–62; Gleason 164–204). Moreover Bell and Spencer ‘encouraged the Circassians to resist Russian penetration, promised them British intervention and supplied them with smuggled weapons and ammunition’ (Gammer 117). Bell was particularly forthright about his activities: ‘we therefore freely took part in the councils of the natives, and gave them the benefit of such knowledge as our experience and reading had afforded us, I counselling them as to the particular species of warfare which seemed best suited for the troops they could bring into the field’ (viii).8 His pride is not surprising, for in early 1840 all seemed to be going well in the Caucasus. In February the Circassians stormed Fort Lazarev, a Russian outpost on the Black Sea. They had caught the Russians unprepared and were able to take a number of forts along the coast before the Russians finally sent reinforcements. By December, however, these victories were reversed; ‘all the forts were re-established and fortified even more strongly than before’ (Gammer 117). The Circassian successes did encourage other peoples of the Caucasus to oppose Russian expansion, particularly the Chechens, whose military leader Shamil became a familiar and heroic figure to the British public in the late 1840s and 1850s. ‘Of a mob of scattered tribes, divided by innumerable feuds, he has made a nation capable of the most complete unity of action, and animated by one faith; and his genius as a lawgiver is as pre-eminent as his religious enthusiasm,’ wrote T.H. Huxley in 1854 (511).9 The different peoples of the Caucasus were often confused in the British press: though Shamil (himself Daghestani) led the Chechen forces of the eastern Caucasus, he was quickly labeled ‘Chief of the Circassians.’ While Circassians and Chechens did sometimes fight together, Shamil’s inability to unite the Caucasus against their common enemy was one of his great failures, particularly during the Crimean War, when many in the British government, including Prime Minister Palmerston, ‘were even ready to Arms and the Circassian Woman 141 establish an independent Circassian state’ headed by the Daghestani general (Gammer 272). After the Crimean War Russia concentrated its efforts on destroying resistance in the Caucasus. In the 1860s Russian forces drove the West Caucasians into Ottoman territories and replaced them with ‘Russian, Cossack, Georgian, and to a lesser extent Armenian settlers. ... The Chechens and Daghestanis, now separated from potential Turkish aid by a broad band of secure Russian territory, presented no such strategic threat, and could be left in relative peace’ – at least until the 1990s, when the results of these nineteenth-century policies returned to haunt Russia (Lieven 315).10

Circassia’s Irish voice

The most signiﬁcant poetic work in English inspired by the Circassians’ struggles was written by the blind Irish poet Frances Browne. Born in Stranorlar, County Donegal, in 1816, Browne suffered a severe attack of smallpox at the age of eighteen months and became permanently blind. But her love for literature, including Byron and Scott, and ‘the far more wonderful Romance of History,’ eventually led her to an active literary life in Edinburgh and London (Browne Star xiv). Her ﬁrst collection, The Star of Attéghéi; The Vision of Schwartz; and Other Poems, was published in London in 1844. It was followed by a steady stream of tales, poems, novels, and children’s stories.11 In her literary reminiscences of 1893, the writer Camilla Crosland (Mrs Newton Crosland) described a London encounter with Frances Browne.

She moved with such ease that it was difficult at first – and until some little incident was evidence of it – to believe in her infirmity. ...When we consider the touching and graceful verses of Frances Brown – not to mention her prose works – we can but vaguely conjecture what she might have done under happier circumstances. (242–3)

The handful of other nineteenth-century references to Browne similarly dwell on her admittedly extraordinary biography at the expense of her literary accom- plishments. Browne’s situation was not unique; as Susan Brown notes, the ‘biocritical method’ of Victorian commentators ‘meant that there was little basis for aesthetic judgment of poetesses’ work but their lives were scrutinized for conformity to perceived womanly and poetic standards, however conﬂicting those might be’ (184). Critics scrutinized Browne’s poetry not so much for clues to an unhappy private life, but rather for evidence of her blindness. A remarkable example of this is a 43-page article by George Crolly in the December 142 The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature

1844 Dublin Review, purportedly on Browne’s first collection. Crolly eventually quotes at length from Browne’s work, but only after 30 pages comparing Browne’s history to a number of contemporary case studies of children born deaf and dumb. When he turns to the poetry, Browne’s blindness – not Ireland, nor her sensitivity to contemporary nationalism – remains the defining influ- ence on her work. He particularly admires Browne’s ‘exquisite’ shorter works and notes ‘the frequent allusion which is made to the “music of streams.”’ Readers should expect the poet to cherish this idea ‘with peculiar fondness,’ since it ‘is an idea which she has not picked up second-hand from others, but which she has immediately derived from the impressions made upon her own senses’ (549–50). Crolly has an oddly conflicted response to ‘The Star of Attéghéi.’ Though it is ‘perfectly wonderful when we consider that it is the production of a self-taught blind girl of twenty eight’ and ‘by far the best poem which has been published for some time,’ the poem ‘is on the whole weak,’ and Browne uses ‘decidedly the worst metre in the language for such a tale [iambic tetrameter, that used by Byron in The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos]’ (555). More serious, however, is Browne’s decision to model her poem after Homer and Byron: ‘It is no slur on Miss Brown’s genius that she did not succeed where there were two such illustrious competitors; but it is a slur upon her judgment that she entered the field with them at all’ (556). Even Browne’s own editor, in the preface to The Star of Attéghéi, laments that the poet would have been better served if her friends had ‘warned her off this particular ground’ but hopes that readers ‘who prefer her lyrics to her length- ened poem’ will not hold their preference against one ‘who has done so much for, and by, herself’ (xxii). Yet the themes of exile, national identity, and gender, all central to ‘The Star of Attéghéi,’ are equally present in her short verse. Titles such as ‘The Removal of the Cherokees,’ ‘The Lonely Mother,’ and ‘The Australian Emigrant’ suggest Browne’s interest in outsiders and those forgotten by ruling classes. One of the more interesting of Browne’s short poems is ‘The Last of the Jagellons,’ which appears in her 1848 volume, Lyrics and Miscella- neous Poems. The poem’s title probably owes a debt to James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1827), though its opening lines bring to mind those lyrics of Scottish legend by Aytoun or Scott. A speaker calls on the minstrel to ‘wake thy harp once more’ and play the ‘songs that in my land were heard / While yet that land was free!’ In the second stanza we learn the speaker is not some Scottish rustic but a ‘noble matron’ living in exile from ‘Poland’s pleasant plains.’ The minstrel grants her request and sings of Sigismund, the last king of Poland’s Jagellon Dynasty. Sigismund had married a woman of humble birth before his election to the throne, and the nobles demanded he divorce her and either ‘reign alone’ or ‘choose a royal bride.’ Sigismund speaks proudly of the Polish tradition of elective monarchy: Arms and the Circassian Woman 143

My land hath seen her ancient crown Bestow’d for many an age – While other nations have bow’d down To kingly heritage.

He then offers to give up the crown: ‘For, if unshared by her I love, / It shines no more for me.’ The Polish senators remove their objections and immediately consent to Sigismund’s demands, convinced (according to Browne’s note) ‘that so true a husband must make a worthy King.’ The poem closes with the listener’s own reﬂections on this tale:

The Minstrel ceased, and with a sigh That noble matron said – ‘Alas, for Europe’s chivalry – How hath its glory ﬂed! Perchance in silvan grove or glen Such faithful love is known – But when will earth behold again Its truth so near a throne.’

One can see why critics responded positively to Browne’s ‘imagery, her diction and her depiction of what they saw as universal sentiments’ while overlooking the political aspects of her work (DeVoto 73). One can read ‘Last of the Jagellons’ as a timeless tale of love and faithfulness, but that would require ignoring its critique of an aristocratic society that encourages a king to divorce his wife because of her class. It would also mean overlooking the date of publication, 1848, a year of political upheaval not just in Poland, where citizens fought unsuccessfully to end Russian rule, and in Ireland, where William Smith O’Brien’s inchoate rising in Munster foreshadowed future rebellion, but throughout continental Europe. Moreover Browne’s choice of a wise older woman to express a suspicion of lineal monarchy may be unique to the period. In another poem from Lyrics, ‘On the Death of Thomas Campbell,’ Browne recounts the moment at Campbell’s interment when a Polish exile threw upon the cofﬁn ‘some earth he had brought as a relic from the tomb of Kosciusko’:

For thus shall Poland’s heart through ages twine The memory of her brightest stars with thine!

(31–2)

As discussed below, Poland also plays an important role in ‘The Star of Attéghéi.’ It is signiﬁcant that Browne would access Polish history for her poetry, linking 144 The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Poland’s misfortunes with Ireland’s. As Joep Leerssen notes, Poland probably offers the ‘closest European parallel’ to Ireland’s ‘violent and disruptive historical development’ (Remembrance 224–5). Later in the century, writers as different as Ernest Jones, John Stuart Mill, and Anthony Trollope followed Browne, afﬁrming or debating the image of Ireland as ‘England’s Poland.’12 Of course, a number of Browne’s poems directly concern Ireland, including ‘The Last Friends,’ inspired by a United Irishman’s return from exile, and the popular ‘Songs of Our Land’; and their nationalistic tone links Browne with Irish forerunners like Thomas Moore and William Drennan as well as with contemporaries in the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s.13 Many of these poets also address the rights of other European nations like France and Poland. But Browne is almost alone in taking up the cause of the Circassians.

‘The Star of Attéghéi’

Frances Browne must have followed events in Circassia with great interest. Many of her footnotes refer to Spencer’s Travels, and the travelogues by Bell and Longworth both appeared in 1840. Excerpts from Bell’s work appeared in The Times as well as the Dublin Review; Longworth wrote regularly on Circassia for The Times. In the preface Browne writes that her tale

has no better foundation than a newspaper story, which, a few years ago, appeared in many of the British journals, and was said to have been copied from a Russian paper: – but it took a strong hold on my mind, at the time; and nothing but the want of information prevented me from attempting the subject long ago. For any errors and mistakes I can only plead that the land is new to me – and comparatively little known, I believe, to all. (xxii)

I have not located this newspaper story, so it is difficult to know how much of the plot is Browne’s own invention.14 But the two aspects of ‘The Star of Attéghéi’ that I want to explore here – Browne’s representations of nationalism and gender roles – certainly reflect her own concerns with these issues. The action of ‘The Star of Attéghéi’ takes place over two days at the ruins of Soudjouk-Kalé, the same port where the Vixen incident occurred and an actual battle site visited by Spencer. The leaders of the Circassian forces – some of them well-known historical figures – have assembled to meet a Russian envoy who hopes to make peace with the rebels. Among the Circassians there are two mysterious youths, one a Pole, the other of unknown origin. They are brave, inseparable friends who keep to themselves, even ignoring the advances of Circassian maidens. An Irish minstrel named Cuzali first recognizes the true Arms and the Circassian Woman 145 identity of the mysterious warrior known only as the Star of Attéghéi – Attéghéi being the local word for Circassia. When the Russian envoy arrives, the Irish minstrel relates a story to entertain and edify the gathering. He tells of a Circassian ruler who desired his daughter Dizila to marry a Russian prince named Paschoff. The daughter refused, and one night cut off her long hair, leaving it as an offering at the grave of her French mother, and disappeared. The same night a Polish soldier who had been nursed back to health by Dizila also disappeared; neither had been heard from since. The minstrel, once an admirer of Dizila’s mother and tutor to Dizila herself, now searches for her. As Cuzali ends his story and the Russian prepares to depart, the Irish minstrel reveals the envoy to be Paschoff. That night, as the two mysterious friends consider escaping to Poland, it becomes evident that they are the two described in Cuzali’s story. The Star of Attéghéi is Dizila in disguise, defending her homeland from the Russians. The following day in battle Paschoff lunges at the Pole, but Dizila steps in the way. Thus the Russian fulfills a gypsy maiden’s prophecy that he would kill the thing he most loves. The Pole survives the battle but dies of heartbreak. Dizila and her Polish lover are buried together on a hillside nearby. In the memorable opening lines Browne’s narrator calls upon the Irish muse to help her sing of ‘love’ and ‘freedom’s fire,’ the two themes of her poem. She recalls the ancient battles of Irish history and finds a precursor in the blind Ossian, but she also notes Ireland’s colonial history (‘stranger feet’). Her lament for ‘blighted springs’ is disconcertingly prophetic: the potato blight appeared in September 1845. Muse of my country! thou hast sung Of many sorrows; yet thy lyre Is sweet, as when by Ossian strung, To breathe of love or freedom’s fire. Though stranger feet have trodden down Both Tara’s towers and Brian’s crown, – Yet still, through all her blighted springs, The ancient harp of Erin rings, With numbers mighty as, of old, O’er battle-field and banquet rolled, When rose upon the western clime The glory of its early prime.

(1)15

The narrator praises the Irish bard whose music fills not only ‘his native hills’ but also many distant lands, from ‘Columbia’s western plains’ to ‘the rose- crowned Bendemere,’ thus preparing the reader both for her poem’s unfamiliar 146 The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature setting and for Cuzali’s appearance. But she begs off singing of the ‘glorious dead’ of her homeland, for ‘Erin’s fame is poured / In loftier strains, by mightier hands’ (2). Instead she will speak of ‘a land unknown / To Europe’s minstrelsy, – though strown / With wrecks and relics of her fame’ (3). Throughout the poem Browne alludes to these ‘wrecks and relics,’ the physical remains of past civilizations based in Circassia, as well as the remembered stories describing those civilizations; taken together they constitute three myths of nationhood which form the basis for Browne’s historical conception of Circassian national identity. Browne first refers to the founding of Circassia by refugees of Troy, ‘the last of Ilion’s line,’ an assertion supported by the legendary courage and ferocity of Circassians in battle (3). But these descendants of Troy ‘Who to the minstrel might recal [sic] / The flower of Ilion’s proudest spears’ are inspired by ‘a nobler cause,’ the defense of their homeland (21). Elsewhere Browne connects the Circassians with another famous people of antiquity when her narrator describes the shouts of gladness that accompany the first unfurling of Circassia’s flag: ‘the sound that told / The Spartan warrior’s joy, of old!’ (18; see also 87). Circassian women, too, become part of this myth of an ancient Greek world preserved in the Caucasus. Foreshadowing the surprise identity of the Star of Attéghéi, the narrator writes that fear of Russian invaders ‘awoke / The fires that slumbered’ within the ‘mountain maids’ who were descended from another race associated with the Caucasus, ‘The long remembered Amazons’ (13). A second myth of origin associates Circassia with the beginnings of the human race. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century anthropologists described the Caucasus as the birthplace of the European peoples; hence the term Caucasian.16 This remained a popular theory at the time Browne wrote, and she often portrays Circassia as a paradise destined to be lost. The Irish minstrel, standing amid ‘such flowers / As might have bloomed in Eden’s bowers’ (16), calls the land Bright mother of a matchless race, That seem the last of Adam’s line, – In whom the wanderer’s eye may trace The early glory, left to tell This withered world how far it fell!

(14) The third myth Browne employs is more surprising. In a footnote she explains that the ‘Circassians were Christians, before their conversion to Mohammedanism; and Christianity is said to have been planted among them by some Crusaders, who found their way into that country’ (105). Indeed, nineteenth-century commentators sometimes used these Christian roots (along with the supposed ‘fairness’ of the people) to argue that Circassians were more Arms and the Circassian Woman 147 advanced than other peoples of the Caucasus. But Browne suggests that the Circassians were united as a people against the Crusades. Her narrator speaks critically of the Crusaders, connecting them and Christianity directly with the Russian invaders:

once The cross waived [sic] o’er thee; – from the steep Of Elbrûz, yet, it tells thy sons Where low the last Crusaders sleep; And now, the same bright banner leads Thy spoiler to his darkest deeds!

(5)

Later, as the Irish minstrel begins his tale, he speaks of ‘the old and stately towers’ of the Crusaders, which

cost our country years of woe And war, before she laid them low: – So ever perish freedom’s foe!

(35)

Conversely, Islam becomes a religion of mercy. At the death of the Pole, the narrator herself announces that ‘Allah sent a better fate / For faith so pure and love so great!’ (94). One sees a similar respect for Islam in Byron’s The Giaour, one of the Eastern Tales that probably inspired Browne. But Byron’s fragmented narrative is a found manuscript, supposedly written long ago by a Muslim author. Browne’s narrator identiﬁes herself as Irish, and her subject is contemporary. Browne’s narrator also exhibits a surprising respect for pagan beliefs. Cuzali praises ‘Immortal Merem,’ ‘Queen of the world,’ a goddess Browne notes to be ‘identical with the Virgin Mary’ (54, 108), while a gypsy maiden correctly pre- dicts the tragic fate of Paschoff (65, 91). The presence of these female divinities and prophetesses – Browne also mentions (less admiringly) Vinon, ‘a warlike princess of Imeretia; who is said to have converted the Caucasian tribes to Christianity’ (55, 109) – challenges Western stereotypes of the ‘Fair Circassian’ and anticipates the surprising reversal of gender roles between Dizila and her Polish lover, discussed below. There are moments in the text – moments clearly related to these myths of origin – when Browne seems to describe Circassia as some kind of historical relic; as in a footnote where readers learn that ‘Circassian warriors wear a kind of armour, which is said to resemble that worn by the knights of the Mid- dle Ages’ (106). There is, however, another rhetoric of nationality intersecting 148 The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature these myths of origin that situates the events of ‘Star of Attéghéi’ clearly in the nineteenth century. Numerous passages associate Circassia’s battle for independence with contemporary struggles in Ireland and Poland. Browne unites these three lands in their willingness to ﬁght for the freedom of others, and in Europe’s unwillingness to return the favor.

But who shall gather from the grave, In Syria’s waste or Tigris’ wave, Circassia’s early-perished brave? – Who shall reclaim, from Europe’s ﬁelds, Sarmatia’s bright but broken shields, – Or give my country back the hearts That led the world in arms and arts? Ah! such hath ever been her lot, The faithful but the still forgot!

(6)

The inhabitants of these three lands meet on the pages of Browne’s narrative. Dizila’s lover is a Polish soldier who has abandoned the Russian army to ﬁght for Circassia, though the narrator suggests the presence of other Poles in the rebel forces: The Pole, scarce deemed a stranger there, – For, oft, his distant country’s song Arose upon the mountain air

(19)

Cuzali represents an Irish presence in the Caucasus, while the narrator links Ireland and Circassia metaphorically on the poem’s ﬁnal page:

Land of Attéghéi! Thou bearest A banner of that verdant hue Which to my country’s hills is dearest

(103)

Such depictions may strike some twenty-ﬁrst century readers as extremely romantic; actually the presence of Polish soldiers in Circassia was well doc- umented. Spencer notes the existence of ‘hundreds of Poles’ and writes that ‘many of their national songs have been translated into the Circassian language, and are now sung with as much enthusiasm as their own war songs’ (2: 417–18). This was a result of ‘the Caucasus being considered in Russia as a second Siberia’ where political enemies were sent ‘to serve as private soldiers’ Arms and the Circassian Woman 149

(1: 270). The presence of an Irishman seems more of a stretch, though Scotsman William Allan spent years there, and Spencer compares the Circassian to ‘Scott’s Highland Chieftain’ (1: 291). Spencer also reports that the rebels were ‘said to be commanded by an English ofﬁcer, who had served in India’ (1: 253), and describes one ‘Mr. Marr, an enterprising son of Caledonia’ living in Circassia with his Europe-educated sons, who had ‘completely assimilated themselves to the manners of the natives’ (1: 311). Linking the Circassians with these other peoples allows Browne to broaden her critique. Clearly Russian expansionism is the poem’s primary target, and the fate of Poland reminds readers that the war in Circassia is not an isolated incident but part of a pattern already lamented by British commentators. ‘Shall this gallant people be suffered to sink, another sacriﬁce to Russian ambition?’ asked a reviewer of Spencer’s Travels in the April 1838 Edinburgh Review. ‘Before the dying shriek of Poland has ceased to vibrate on the ear of Europe, shall another nation be swallowed up?’ (Fraser 140). Of course such rhetoric is a not- so-subtle critique of British foreign policy. But the many references in Browne’s poem to Ireland, ‘England’s Poland,’ claim a more direct association between Britain and Russia as fellow oppressors. Early in the poem a Circassian leader speaks of Victoria: the queen Whose sceptered rule the ocean owns: The farthest Indian shores have seen Her banner; and the utmost isle That sees the dying sunset smile Beholds her ever wandering sails; – The Moscovite before them quails! – And there, perchance, some sword may wake, If not for yours, for freedom’s sake?

(28)

The Star of Attéghéi responds by reminding the others of the fates of Poland and Greece, given ‘not freedom, but the name’ (29). Likewise when the envoy Paschoff offers payment to the Irish minstrel for his song, Cuzali responds with an indictment of both Russian and British expansionist policies:

The Moscov need not now be told How well my wearied country knows The power that dwells in strangers’ gold

(69)

Freedom will not come to the Caucasus via British arms or Russian wealth. Rather Browne imagines a more radical solution: a coalition of oppressed 150 The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature peoples, united against the greatest imperial powers of the era. Here she builds on the transnational heroines and plots of novelists like Frances Burney, Lady Morgan, and Germaine de Staël, works described by Deidre Lynch as present- ing ‘now unimaginable communities that drew differently and disorientingly on the cultural flows of Europe’ (64).17 She also avoids the inconsistencies of her travelogue sources. While Spencer documents the presence of Poles, Georgians, even Scots among the Circassians, he is quick to praise ‘a race the most beautiful upon the face of the globe, and who have never been contaminated by a mixture with the blood of foreigners’ (1: 284). Apparently Spencer did not consider those Circassian women he saw at a Constantinople ‘bazaar for the sale of female slaves’ as members of the race (1: 149–52). Conversely, Browne seems to revel in the many peoples who come together in defense of Circassia. Student of a much-traveled Irish minstrel and teacher to a Polish soldier, her heroine Dizila ‘had pored upon the pages / That make the Christians wise’ but also absorbed the ‘ancient wisdom’ of the Caucasus (47).18 Dizila has other important literary predecessors. George Crolly noted Browne’s debt to Lara, in which Byron’s heroine takes on the guise of a male page to assist the title character, and Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, where Tancred unknowingly kills the warlike Clorinda (554–5). One thinks too of Queen Medb in the Táin Bó Cualgne, Britomart in Spencer’s Faerie Queene, and, closer to Browne’s time, Felicia Hemans’s ‘Joan of Arc in Rheims,’ ‘The Widow of Crescentius,’ and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Romaunt of the Page.’19 As Angela Leighton notes, ‘Byronism evidently offered many of these women writers, not so much the cheap ideal of a dark, handsome husband, but the prospect of a transvestite emancipation from the restricting dress of femininity’ (82). But Browne is alone among her contemporaries in creating a woman warrior not resurrected from ancient or medieval history but of the present day, and one whose lover follows her into battle. Dizila’s iconoclasm begins at home, with her refusal to be sold to the highest bidder. Early in the poem Browne’s narrator makes reference to the sale of women, one of the few facts her British readers might know of Circassia: ‘Alas! that e’er those free-born flowers / Should bloom for Othman’s slavish bowers!’ (9). Her father Zaphor does not promise Dizila to a Persian ambassador but rather a Russian prince, warning her that ‘Submission best becomes thy sex, / And scruples serve but to perplex / The young’ (59–60). Such a fate seems particularly galling, considering the story of Dizila’s French mother. Raised in the Napoleonic era, she followed her first husband on the disastrous Russian cam- paign of 1812, where ‘she became a Cossack’s slave.’ She was found much later, ‘sad and worn,’ by Zaphor, who comforted and married her (39). Dizila, who had earlier encouraged her father to rejoin the battle against Russia – a battle he had given up after the death of his wife – escapes a similar fate by leaving home in a passage that clearly echoes the wild ride of Byron’s Polish hero Mazeppa, Arms and the Circassian Woman 151 another character who was forced from his homeland only to transform himself into a great military figure:

Two warrior youths were seen to speed, As swift as ﬂies the Tartar steed, By winter’s hungry wolves pursued Through Ukraine’s boundless solitude

(61)

In striking contrast, the Pole had arrived in Circassia a consenting member of the Russian army, completely ignorant of Russian aggression against Poland: ‘Too young to feel his sword was drawn / For Poland’s spoilers.’ Dizila must tell him ‘Of all his distant country’s tears, / Beneath the conqueror’s iron hand’ and convinces him to help her escape (53). Indeed, she seems to take the ‘masculine’ role in all parts of their relationship. The night before battle, she implores him to break his word of eternal faithfulness and return home:

Thy father’s hearth awaits thee yet, – Thy mother’s heart can ne’er forget – Oh! ﬂy the terrors of our shore, And ﬁnd that peaceful home, once more

(82)

He does not refuse, but begs her to join him:

Then, wilt thou share my Polish home, And bless my kindred with the light Of thy bright presence? Dearest, come, – And leave the ﬁelds of fear and ﬁght!

(82)

This is almost stereotypical romantic ardor, save that the gender roles are reversed. Dizila refuses, so her faithful lover remains as well: ‘In good or ill, whate’er betide, / My chosen path is by thy side!’ (84). In battle Dizila saves her lover’s life by receiving the stroke intended for him. Her lover is not even able to avenge her death; the Circassian leader Hassan must do so, while the Pole, bearing the Circassian flag, dies in his lover’s arms. It should be no surprise that this feminized male lover is Polish. Along with Dizila’s French mother he is one of the two unnamed characters in the poem, which is perhaps fitting for an exile whose homeland is ruled by foreigners, a country erased from nineteenth-century maps of Europe. He seems an obvious 152 The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature literary descendant of Kosciuszko´ and the popular British image of the Pole as courageous and loyal but finally defeated and exiled. But it is fascinating to note how Browne reimagines the Romantic-era tropes of the Pole. Here he is trans- planted to a foreign land, fighting for another oppressed people. The role that so distressed William Aytoun – the Poles were the ‘the most active agents and instigators of revolution all over the continent of Europe’ – becomes honorable in Browne’s narrative. But Browne does something even more remarkable in her portrayal of gender. Rather than being destroyed by a perversely masculine woman – the role played by Catherine the Great in Chapters 1 and 2 – the Pol- ish gentle man becomes, in Browne’s revision, the ideal companion to a strong woman. The represented reversal in gender roles that made Catherine perversely masculine, Kosciuszko´ perversely weak, and British women in lancer’s uniforms objects of humor, is transformed by Browne into a model relationship. In contrast to Dizila’s Russian suitor and her power-hungry father, the Pole is the only character (save perhaps the Irish minstrel) who understands the Star of Attéghéi. The two die clasped in each other’s arms and are buried together in one grave. For all her rhetorical innovation, not even Browne could break one rule of Romantic/early Victorian literature: the life of a heroine as transgressive as Dizila must end tragically. She thus also avoids explaining the paradox of what exactly Dizila is fighting for, since a return to traditional life in Circassia would suggest a continuation of the Circassian slave trade. While it is true a happy ending would have been misleading – Browne here is limited by historical realities – one could imagine Dizila escaping to fight another day. But this was not to be. Nevertheless, in her final image of Cuzali and Hassan joined in contempla- tion before the tomb of Dizila and her lover, Browne exploits a favorite trope of Felicia Hemans in order to bring home her international vision. As Tricia Lootens has argued, Hemans’s ‘emphasis on reverence for patriot’s graves’ was ‘one of the greatest sources of her power as a Victorian patriotic poet ... heroes’ graves not only unified distinct national folk communities but also bound those communities to the rest of the world by evoking the universal love and sorrows of liberty’ (247). For Browne, her heroes’ tomb unites the opponents of British and Russian imperialism, under Erin’s familiar shade:

For, since they laid that beauteous pair To rest, beneath the mountain mould, Have Hassan and Cuzali been As brothers; – days and years have rolled Away, and left their friendship green.

(101) Arms and the Circassian Woman 153

In the final lines the narrator declares her song ‘more sad than sweet’ and tells the Irish muse ‘to thee it owes / At least its sorrow’ (102). She calls on Europe once more to aid the Circassians and wishes ‘better fortune smile / On them than ever blessed the isle!’ (103). The famine would soon wreak havoc throughout Ireland, causing a million and a half citizens to leave their country, adding tremendously to an emigration rate that was already growing rapidly in the 1830s and early 1840s. Browne herself would leave Ulster for Britain in 1847, where she continued her prolific writing career but preferred prose to poetry. Though the ‘wonderful Romance of History’ remained a favorite theme, she never again attempted any poetic work as ambitious as ‘The Star of Attéghéi.’ Still it would be wrong to follow Browne’s earliest critics in ignoring her longest, most politically complex poem. In an era when the popularity of annuals and anthologies encouraged writers to produce lyric poetry, Browne challenged her readers by reviving and transforming the Eastern Tale. Unlike her Romantic precursors, she dared to imagine a Byronic heroine for her tale and used the form to comment overtly on international politics. Unlike contemporary British travelers, who admired the racial ‘purity’ of the Circassians, Browne imagined a national movement united in its toleration of different languages, ethnicities, and religions. It would also be wrong to consider the poem unconnected with contemporary political events in her homeland. It seems significant that Browne’s beginnings as a writer coincided with the Young Ireland movement, a group which ‘attempted to bridge sectarian and class lines’ in the early 1840s and ‘produced immensely popular patriotic poetry and ballads’ (Grubgeld 400–1). Edmund Curtis notes that the Young Irelanders ‘were full of the romantic lib- eral nationalism of the time which animated men like Garibaldi and Kosciusko’ (366). Indeed, the movement took its name from radical predecessors of the 1830s, Young Italy and Young Poland. Browne may not have had actual links with Young Ireland, but her poetry – and certainly not least ‘The Star of Attéghéi,’ which relates the tragic tale of an oppressed nation and culture with affinities to Ireland itself – deserves to be read beside the work of other contemporary Irish and European poets who were trying to give voice to the unheard. For all her modesty at the outset of ‘The Star of Attéghéi,’ Browne makes the tragedy of contemporary Ireland almost as much a subject of her poem as the tragedies of Poland and Circassia.