SD2791. Charles Gavan Duffy to Recollections of Charles Gavan Duffy
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 339–341.
[London]
[Sunday, 22 October 1865] [1]
On Sunday I generally went to Chelsea, and after a pleasant gossip in the little sitting-room at the foot of the stairs with Madame, I sallied out with Carlyle and walked for several hours in Hyde Park or Battersea Park, talking as of old. I rarely could remain for the evening, as John Forster had provided a treat which I found irresistible. Robert Browning had promised to dine with him for some Sundays in succession, and Forster proposed that I should make a third. He knew that I had regarded Browning, since I first read “The Blot on the ’Scutcheon,” in an ill-printed pamphlet, as the first poet of his age and country. I find in my diary a note of the first evening, which occupies as much space as I can afford in this place for these pleasant symposia:—
Before Browning arrived, Forster said that in his opinion the poet was hopelessly misjudged by the bulk of his contemporaries. I suggested that that was what ordinarily happened to an original man, especially to an original poet. It was not so very long since Englishmen utterly disregarded Wordsworth; afterwards they were diverted by the shallow impudence of Jeffrey at his cost; and finally they acknowledged him as the greatest poet of his age. The same process was probably recurring with Robert Browning.
I had the satisfaction of seeing Browning for the first time. He is middle-sized, slight, grey-bearded, with a small but well-shaped head. His personal utterance wants depth and force, and gives the idea of a much less powerful man than he is. But he is gracious and winning in a high degree. After dinner we adjourned to a singularly agreeable smoking-room, lined with encaustic-tiles, and cooled with ferns and creeping plants. The talk fell first upon Palmerston, whose death filled the newspapers. Browning and Forster agreed with a suggestion of mine, that the tone of the London Press about him was false and altogether misleading. He was not, Browning said, what they represented him to be, and no human soul believed that he was. I spoke of the Pall Mall Gazette as an experiment in journalism which ought to succeed. It substituted for the heavy joints and coarse vegetables of the daily Press an intellectual menu of small pleasant plats delicately cooked and daintily served. Browning agreed that it was the perfection of a paper for people who wanted to know what was going on in the world as a man might learn it at a club, or over a dinner-table; not as it was furnished by reading-rooms or news agencies. Forster said he had not yet seen the journal, but the extracts he read in other papers did not attract him. I asked Forster who was mimicking Fonblanque in the Examiner? Why Fonblanque himself, he said. He was a man of feeble organisation, who had kept himself alive for many years, by careful regimen and general watchfulness, and he could not refrain from his old pursuits. Browning said his own father who was a careful liver, had reached eighty-five, and was still vigorous and alert. The conversation went off to Wordsworth. I said Carlyle considered Wordsworth the best talker in England. Browning said he was certainly not at all so in latter years; he spoke little, and only on subjects that interested himself, without respect to the taste of his audience. The first time he met Wordsworth was at dinner, Savage Landor also was present, and both poets invited him to take wine with them after the kindly fashion of that day; and never was a youngster so intoxicated with delight. I said to Forster that the portrait of Savage Landor in his memoir of him had the look of a wild animal, the mouth ready to snap at you, and in the eyes there seemed to lurk a savage reserve of brooding discontent. If the Ten Commandments were written in Francis Horner’s face, a majority of the seven deadly sins seemed to lurk in that mouth. Forster said the portrait was ill-engraved; Landor’s explosions of wrath covered a generous and sympathetic nature, always eager for the right and the true. I asked Forster how it came that Dickens, in one of his last prefaces, could declare that he had not Leigh Hunt in his mind when he painted Harold Skimpole. It was a cruel caricature, turning foibles and weaknesses into crimes, but it was undeniably Leigh Hunt. ‘Oh,’ said Forster, ‘if you had seen the proofs before they passed through my hands you might have better grounds for that opinion. So much was cut out that we persuaded ourselves that the salient traits were effaced, but too many of them remained. Dickens was alarmed at the impression he had made, and did his best to repair the wrong, and doubtless like the queen in the play, did protest too much.’”
Browning thought Hunt had been ill-treated; he had been punished with a severity his offences did not justify. Yes, I said, for the second time at least in Hunt’s life his insouciance and levity had been visited with a savage scorn which ought to be reserved for breaches of honour. Moore plunged him in a bath of vitriol for his book on Lord Byron.
“But fed as he was, and this makes it a dark case,
With sops every day from the lion’s own pan,
He lifts up his leg ’gainst the noble beast’s carcase,
And … does all a dog so diminutive can.”
We know now, Moore knew then, that Byron was selfish and arrogant, and sorely affronted the sensitive poet whom Shelley loved so well. Hunt’s two years’ imprisonment for suggesting that the immaculate Prince Regent associated with persons of doubtful repute, was not a greater injustice than Moore’s pasquinade.
From Moore’s humour the talk passed to that of Southey, which Browning professed to admire. I said I must correct my judgment on this point by so high an authority. I had always considered Southey’s humorous poems dull and even dreary. There were one or two exceptions perhaps, and the others had sometimes a happy line; but how did he compare with Canning, Praed, or Moore? Browning replied that Southey’s humour was of a different genre from that of the poets I named, but he deemed it good of its kind.
The talk wandered to Ireland. Forster said he thought Irish complaints were always exaggerated and often altogether unfounded. They complained of things which were the necessary and inevitable results of the British Empire. “Was it a necessary result,” I inquired, “that the Irish should pay for the most profusely endowed Church in Europe, with which they refused to have any dealings?” “Certainly,” Forster said, “it was a necessary result; the Irish were a minority in the Empire, and must accept the Church and the other institutions of the Empire as a consequence of that fact.” I inquired if the Scotch and the Lower Canadians were not in the same condition, and yet escaped this inevitable penalty. Browning said that was a doctrine which he thought altogether indefensible. The Catholic Church was the Church of the Irish people, and the Protestant Church the Church of the English people, and this was a fact of which legislation might properly take cognisance. I said I was pleased to have Browning’s support for so just and reasonable a doctrine, especially as I found throughout his poems the Catholic Church so habitually disparaged that I should have expected him rather than Forster of condemning it to perpetual subjection. Browning replied that the allusions to the Catholic Church, which I complained of, were mainly attributable to local circumstances. He had lived in Italy, and he took his illustrations of life from the facts which fell under his notice there; had he lived in England he would probably have taken them from the Church of which Forster was so enamoured. I said I had always assumed that one of his illustrations from the Catholic Church which was English and certainly unfriendly, Bishop Blo[u]gram was intended to suggest Cardinal Wiseman. Yes, he said, Bishop Blo[u]gram was certainly intended for the English Cardinal, but he was not treated ungenerously. I replied that I had lent that poem to a remarkably gifted young priest, who considered it more offensive than the naked scorn of Voltaire and Diderot. Browning spoke of Irish poets, and I asked Forster for a volume I had recently given him containing several of Sir Samuel Ferguson’s poems. I read some verses of “The Welshmen of Tyrawley.”
Forster said the ballad was vague and rhapsodical, with quite unnecessary repetitions of the same idea in varied phrases. I told him that he was criticising, as if it were a blemish in the poem, peculiarities which belonged to Celtic literature, which were reproduced by Ferguson with singular skill and success. The vagueness of which he complained was certainly not a characteristic of the poem; it opened with a savage directness which it never lost. Browning maintained an attentive critical silence, but to my surprise did not utter an opinion. When we left I walked away with Browning and promised to visit him next day.
Text: Charles Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres (London, 1898), II, 258–262.
1. Dated by reference to Palmerston’s death, 18 October 1865. The following Sunday was 22 October.
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