Robert was not only balm for Macready’s suffering professional soul; he found him personally soothing. Forster and the rest could be rumbustious and depressing: ‘My nerves and spirits were quite quelled by them all’; but Browning’s ‘gentle manners always make his presence acceptable’.59 Paracelsus, on the evidence of Macready’s diary entry for 8 December 1835—the day he finished reading the poem and set himself to considering it with the same professional eye of a player that he had brought to Talfourd’s Ion—would not do as drama—(which Robert had never intended that it should). The ‘main design of the poem’, according to Macready, ‘is not made out with sufficient clearness, and obscurity is a fault in many passages’. That said, however, he admitted the poem’s ‘most subtle and penetrating search into the feelings and impulses of our nature, some exquisite points of character, the profoundest and the grandest thoughts and most musically uttered. The writer is one whom I think destined for very great things.’
John Forster had been invited as a guest to Macready’s New Year’s Eve dinner at Elm Place, his house in the rural village of Elstree, and so it was by no remote chance that both Forster and Robert happened to be waiting with other Macready invitees earlier in the day at the ‘Blue Posts’ in Holborn, a boarding stage, for the same rumbling and bumping Billing’s coach that Macready himself used almost daily in his journeys to his London chambers from his country home and back again. Mrs Orr says that the introduction between Forster and Robert took place at Macready’s house, whereupon Forster inquired, ‘Did you see a little notice of you I wrote in the Examiner?’ From this point on, Forster and Robert seem to have been pretty constantly together. It was at Elm Place, too, that Robert first met Miss Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, a neighbour of Macready’s, a young woman some ten or eleven years older than Robert, interested in art and literature.
Narses was abandoned as a probable dramatic subject, and no more was heard of Forster’s and Browning’s interest in writing for the theatre, and for Macready in particular, until a few months later in 1826, when Macready acted in a production of Talfourd’s Ion at Covent Garden. The first night, dedicated as a benefit night for Macready (who, after thirteen years, had just abandoned Drury Lane and its abominable manager Alfred Bunn), was on 26 May. Macready, having taken the principal role before a starry audience of literary and legal luminaries, social celebrities, politicians, and peers, was ‘called for very enthusiastically by the audience and cheered on my appearance most heartily. I said: “It would be affectation to conceal the particular pleasure in receiving their congratulatory compliment on this occasion. It was indeed most gratifying to me; and only checked by the painful consideration that this might be perhaps the last new play I ever might have the honour of producing before them. (Loud cries of ‘No No!’) However that might be, the grateful recollection of their kindness would never leave me.”’
Macready repaired after the performance to Talfourd’s house in nearby Russell Square, where he ‘met Wordsworth, who pinned me; Walter Savage Landor, to whom I was introduced, and whom I very much liked; Stanfield, Browning, Price, Miss Mitford—I cannot remember them all.’60 There were some sixty people in all, crowding around one another in congratulatory mode. Macready was placed at the supper table between Landor and Wordsworth, with Browning opposite—which speaks well for Robert’s own status in the company. Macready perhaps forgot or omitted to give some detail in his diary for this tremendous day, but Mrs Orr supplies the information that when Talfourd proposed a toast to the poets of England, Robert was included in their number, named by his host as the author of Paracelsus, and he stayed put in his chair while glasses were raised to him; according to Griffin and Minchin, Wordsworth ‘leaned across the table and remarked, “I am proud to drink your health, Mr Browning!”’61 This story is rubbished by Betty Miller, who points out that Robert had never much liked Wordsworth’s poetry or his politics and would not have been particularly flattered by the grand old placeman’s compliment—even if Wordsworth had been there to make it: he had gone home before the toasts were offered. The story has survived even the firm evidence that contradicts it.
Years later, on 24 February 1875, Robert wrote to the Revd Alexander B. Grosart to explain, with some embarrassment, why he had attacked Wordsworth in ‘The Lost Leader’, a poem published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics in 1845: ‘I did in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerable personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter’s model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account: had I intended more, above all, such a boldness as portraying the entire man, I should not have talked about “handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon.” These never influenced the change of politics in the great poet; whose defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular about-face of his special party, was to my juvenile apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore.’
Wordsworth had abandoned liberalism, Robert’s preferred political position, and by so doing he had proved himself, in Robert’s estimation, that most disgraceful and detestable thing—a traitor. Throughout Robert’s poetical canon there are hissing references to the turpitudinous characters of turncoats. Unpleasant revenges, as unsparing as in Dante’s Inferno, are invented for them.
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat—
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote …62
There will be further occasions on which we will recognize that Robert Browning could be a good hater for the sake of conscience; this is one of the first and most significant. Wordsworth, heaped with honours, eulogized by friends and literary partisans such as Harriet Martineau, had become Poet Laureate in 1843. He had become, too, an object of absolute disgust for Robert, whose poem pulled no punches. This was not satire, this was not an elegant swipe: ‘The Lost Leader’ was a seriously-intended piece of lethal invective that found its mark not only through Robert’s authentic outrage but through his authentic poetic voice. His counterblast has stood as long as Wordsworth’s poetic reputation, and its venomous sting still poisons the old man in posterity.
There are other contradictions and misapprehensions concerning Talfourd’s famous party, none of them too surprising. It was a party celebrating a significant occasion; it was a party boiling and roiling with writers, actors, quantities of poets, lawyers, and journalists; and if it wasn’t an occasion for binding up old wounds and gouging open new ones, settling old scores and setting new grudges, for giving gossip and getting things wrong, then it can’t have been much of a party. But in fact it was all those things and more—it was a wonderful party. The more it is recalled, the more legends it accretes. The Ion supper is a sort of early Victorian charabanc, standing room only, for every notable of the period bundled and bumped together and bowled along, fired by their own fissiparous energies. Robert was noticed by one of the guests, Miss Mitford, who never forgot how he looked that night. Ten years or more later, in a letter of 1847,63 she wrote, ‘I saw Mr Browning once and remember thinking how exactly he resembled a girl drest in boy’s clothes—and as to his poetry I have just your opinion of it—It is one heap of obscurity, confusion and weakness … I met him once as I told you when he had long ringlets and no neckcloth—and when he seemed to me about the height and size of a boy of twelve years old—Femmelette—is a word made for him. A strange sort of person to carry such a woman as Elizabeth Barrett off her feet.’
‘Femmelette’,