CORRESPONDENCE

New Zealand Tablet, 3 December 1914, Page 49

CORRESPONDENCE

[We do not hold ourselves responsible for opinions expressed by y our correspondents .]

To the Editor. Sir, —In reference to the letter from f Tertium Quid,’ which appeared in your,issue of, November 19, may I be permitted to emphasise two points—first, that the opinion on Robert Browning with which your correspondent disagrees is my personal opinion only, not necessarily that of the Auckland Newman Club,' and, second, that it was not my intention to deny that Browning had to combat in himself a tendency to antiCatholic bigotry. In the full text of my paper, which was necessarily much shortened for insertion in your columns, I endeavored to depict the poet as burdened with the inevitable inheritance of bigotry of a nineteenth century Protestant, but as drawn, nevertheless, into sympathy with Catholicism by his extraordinarily sincere, earnest, and religious nature. It will, lam sure, be unnecessary to remind Tertium Quid’ that natural prejudice against’the Catholic Church and supernatural attraction towards it may co-exist in the same individual. Newman, one short year before his conversion, described himself as knowing little of Catholicism, and not liking the little he knew. That Browning did not wilfully write against the Church I have his own word, given to Charles avail Duffy, who records it in his autobiography, My Lift in Two Hemispheres (V01.’11., p. 258). Browning and he were dining with John Fors.er, and Duffy mentioned to the poet that he, as he thought, found the Catholic Church habitually disparaged in Browning’s poems. ‘ Browning,’ Duffy relates, ‘ 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 enamored.’ This incident will also be found in Hall Griffin and Minchin’s standard Life of. Browning , p. 202. It may, of course, be explained away as merely a courteous reply to a fellow guest: but such an interpretation would hardly be in harmony with Browning’s well-known outspokenness.

As to Cardinal Wiseman, the words I quoted as to the probability of Browning’s conversion are his, from the Rambler for January, 1856, and I am not aware of his having expressed any adverse opinion of the poet.

Tertium Quid ’ and I might exchange Browning quotations for an indefinite period without making impression upon one another’s minds, upon either Half Rome,’ or upon the material the poet has left us for such, an exercise, so I shall not attempt the task. But I must enter a protest against the quotation from Christmas Eve ’ which he has adduced to prove Browning an expounder of religious iridifferentism. For, in the poem, as soon as he has uttered this plea for ‘a mild indifferentism/ the robe of Christ, till then his guide and comfort in the dark and stormy night, is rent from his grasp as a sign of the Divine displeasure. 11ns happened—- ‘ While I watched my foolish heart expand In the lazy glow of benevolence O’er the various modes of man’s belief.— Needs must there be one way, our chief Best way of worship; let me strive To find it, and when found, contrive My fellows also take their share.— ; For I, a man, with men am linked, And not a brute with brutes: no gain That I experience, must remain .Unshared. . . I expect That God, by God’s own ways occult May— I will believe— back All wanderers to a single track.’ And having given utterance to this singularly orthodox sentiment, he finds himself again wrapped safe and warm in a fold of the flying robe of Christ. Nor do I see any incongruity between my very deep respect" for the personality and attainments of the Rev. Father Rickaby, and my absolute disagreement with his statement that Browning never reached higher than the standpoint of vulgar bigotry in regard to the Catholic Church. Happily for us, the giants of literature are to each one of us what we can find in them : we need ' not accept the interpretation even of their brother geniuses. Not all my keen admiration for the late regretted Mgr. Benson has ever induced me to slight, with him, the novels of Walter Scott, or with him to enjoy unreservedly the books of IT. G. Wells.—• I am, etc,, Mary C. Callan. Auckland, November 23.