But if he had abandoned these generous dreams, he had won free trade and given the multitude cheap bread, and in a highly ingenious piece of sophistry he explains, by the aid of the gospel of Evolution, how men are united by their common hunger, and thrust apart by their conflicting ideas. But Hohenstiel knows very well that his intrenchments are not unassailable; and he goes on to compose an imaginary biography of himself as he might have been, with comments which reflect his actual course. The finest part of this æthereal voyage is that in which his higher unfulfilled self pours scorn upon the paltry duplicities of the "Peace" policy by which his actual and lower self had kept on good terms abroad, and beguiled the imperious thirst for "la gloire" at home. Indignantly the author of Hervé Riel asks why "the more than all magnetic race" should have to court its rivals by buying their goods untaxed, or guard against them by war for war's sake, when Mother Earth has no pride above her pride in that same
"race all flame and air
And aspiration to the boundless Great,
The incommensurably Beautiful—
Whose very falterings groundward come of flight
Urged by a pinion all too passionate
For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow."
The Ring and the Book had made Browning famous. But fame was far from tempting him to undue compliance with the tastes of his new-won public; rather it prompted him to indulge his genius more freely, and to go his own way with a more complete security and unconcern. Hohenstiel-Schwangau—one of the rockiest and least attractive of all Browning's poems—had mystified most of its readers and been little relished by the rest. And now that plea for a discredited politician was followed up by what, on the face of it, was, as Mrs Orr puts it, "a defence of inconstancy in marriage." The apologist for Napoleon III. came forward as the advocate of Don Juan. The prefixed bit of dialogue from Molière's play explains the situation. Juan, detected by his wife in an intrigue, is completely nonplussed. "Fie!" cries Elvire, mockingly (in Browning's happy paraphrase),—
"Fie! for a man of mode, accustomed at the court
To such a style of thing, how awkwardly my lord
Attempts defence!"
In this emergency, Browning, as it would seem, steps in, and provides the arch-voluptuary with a philosophy of illicit love, quite beyond the speculative capacity of [any] Juan in literature, and glowing with poetry of a splendour and fertility which neither Browning himself nor the great English poet who had identified his name with that of Juan, and whom Browning in this very poem overwhelms with genial banter, ever surpassed. The poem inevitably challenged comparison with Byron's masterpiece. In dazzling play of intellect, in swift interchange of wit and passion, the English nineteenth century produced nothing more comparable to the Don Juan of Byron than Fifine at the Fair.
It cannot be denied that the critics had some excuse who, like Mortimer, frankly identified Browning with his hero, and described the poem as an assertion of the "claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by varied adventure in the world of temporary loves."[58] For Browning has not merely given no direct hint of his own divergence from Juan, corresponding to his significant comment upon Blougram—"he said true things but called them by false names"; he has made his own subtlest and profoundest convictions on life and art spring spontaneously from the brain of this brilliant conqueror of women. Like Goethe's Faust, he unmistakably shares the mind, the wisdom, the faith, of his creator; it is plausible to suppose that the poet indorses his application of them. This is unquestionably a complete mistake; but Browning, as usual, presumed too much upon his readers' [insight], and took no pains to obviate a confusion which he clearly supposed to be impossible.
[58] Mrs Orr, Life, p. 297. Her own criticism is, however, curiously indecisive and embarrassed.
It was on the strand at Pornic that he encountered the fateful gipsy whom he calls Fifine. Arnold, years before, had read unutterable depths of soul in another gipsy child by another shore. For Browning now, as in the days of the Flight of the Duchess, the gipsy symbolised the life of joyous detachment from the constraints of society and civilisation. The elementary mood, out of which the wondrous woof of reasonings and images is evolved, is simply the instinctive beat of the spirit of romance in us all, in sympathy with these light-hearted losels of the wild, who "cast allegiance off, play truant, nor repine," and though disgraced but seem to relish life the more.
The beautiful Prologue—one of the most original lyrics in the language—strikes the keynote:—
"Sometimes, when the weather
Is blue, and warm waves tempt
To free oneself of tether,
And try a life exempt