Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught,
Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine
For ever!—
with what immediately follows, would have satisfied the ardent spirit of Mrs Browning.[[114]] And the characterisation of the genius of the French nation, whose lust for war and the glory of war Browning censures as "the dry-rot of the race," rises brilliantly out of its somewhat gray surroundings:—
The people here,
Earth presses to her heart, nor owns a pride
Above her pride i' the race all flame and air
And aspiration to the boundless Great,
The incommensurably Beautiful—
Whose very faulterings groundward come of flight
Urged by a pinion all too passionate
For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow:
Bravest of thinkers, bravest of the brave
Doers, exalt in Science, rapturous
In Art, the—more than all—magnetic race
To fascinate their fellows, mould mankind.
It is a passage conceived in the same spirit as the great chaunt "O Star of France!" written, at the same date, and with a recognition of both the virtues and the shames of France, by the American poet of Democracy. To these memorable fragments from Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau one other may be added—that towards the close of the poem which applies the tradition of the succession by murder of the priesthood at the shrine of the Clitumnian god to the succession of men of genius in the priesthood of the world—"The new power slays the old, but handsomely."
In Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau there is nothing enigmatical. "It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself," so Browning wrote to Miss Blagden soon after the publication of the volume. Many persons, however, have supposed that in Fifine at the Fair (1872) a riddle rather than a poem was given to the world by the perversity of the writer. When she comes to speak of this work Browning's biographer Mrs Orr is half-apologetic; it is for her "a piece of perplexing cynicism." The origin of the poem was twofold. The external suggestion came from the fact that during one of his visits to Pornic, Browning had seen the original of his Fifine, and she lived in his memory as a subject of intellectual curiosity and imaginative interest. The internal suggestion, as Mrs Orr hints, lay in a certain mood of resentment against himself arising from the fact that the encroachments of the world seemed to estrange in some degree a part of his complex being from entire fidelity to his own past. The world, in fact, seemed to be playing with Browning the part of a Fifine. If this were so, it would be characteristic of Browning that he should face round upon the world and come to an explanation with his adversary. But this could not in a printed volume be done in his own person; he was not one to take the public into his confidence. The discussion should be removed as far as possible from his own circumstances and even his own feelings. It should be a dramatic debate on the subject of fidelity and infidelity, on the bearings of the apparent to the true, on the relation of reality in this our mortal life to illusion. As he studied the subject it assumed new significances and opened up wider issues. An actual Elvire and an actual Fifine may be the starting points, but by-and-by Elvire shall stand for all that is permanent and substantial in thought and feeling, Fifine for all that is transitory and illusive. The question of conjugal fidelity is as much the subject of Fifine at the Fair as the virtue of tar-water is the subject of Berkeley's Siris. The poem is in fact Browning's Siris—a chain of thoughts and feelings, reaching with no break in the chain, from a humble basis to the heights of speculation.
But before all else Fifine at the Fair is a poem. Of all the longer poems which followed The Ring and the Book it is the most sustained and the most diversified in imaginative power. To point out passages of peculiar beauty, passages vivid in feeling, original in thought, would here be out of place; for the brilliance and vigour are unflagging, and what we have to complain of is the lack of some passages of repose. The joy in freedom—freedom accepting some hidden law—of these poor losels and truants from convention, who stroll it and stage it, the gypsy figure of Fifine in page-costume, the procession of imagined beauties—Helen, Cleopatra, the Saint of Pornic Church—the half-emerging, half-undelivered statue by Michelagnolo, the praise of music as nearer to the soul than words, sunset at Saint-Marie, the play of the body in the sea at noontide (with all that it typifies), woman as the rillet leaping to the sea, woman as the dolphin that upbears Orion, the Venetian carnival, which is the carnival of human life, darkness fallen upon the plains, and through the darkness the Druidic stones gleaming—all these are essentially parts of the texture of the poem, yet each has a lustre or a shimmer or grave splendour of its own.
It is strange that any reader should have supposed either the Prologue or the Epilogue to be uttered by the imaginary speaker of the poem. Both shadow forth the personal feelings of Browning; the prologue tells of the gladness he still found both in the world of imagination and the world of reality, over which hovers the spirit that had once been so near his own, the spirit that is near him still, yet moving on a different plane, perhaps wondering at or pitying this life of his, which yet he accepts with cheer and will turn to the best account; the epilogue veils behind its grim humour the desolate feeling that came upon him again and again as a householder in this house of life, for behind the happiness which he strenuously maintained, there lay a great desolation. But the last word of the epilogue—"Love is all and Death is nought" is a word of sustainment wrung out of sorrow. These poems have surely in them no "perplexing cynicism," nor has the poem enclosed between them, when it is seen aright. Browning's idea in the poem he declared in reply to a question of Dr Furnivall, "was to show merely how a Don Juan might justify himself, partly by truth, somewhat by sophistry." No more unhappy misnomer than this "Don Juan" could have been devised for the curious, ingenious, learned experimenter in life, no man of pleasure, in the vulgar sense of the word, but a deliberate explorer of thoughts and things, who argues out his case with so much fine casuistry and often with the justest conceptions of human character and conduct. If we could discover a dividing line between his truth and his sophistry, we might discover also that the poem is no exceptional work of Browning, for which an apology is required, but of a piece with his other writings and in harmony with the body of thought and feeling expressed through them. Now it is certain that as Browning advanced in years he more and more distrusted the results of the intellect in its speculative research; he relied more and more upon the knowledge that comes through or is embodied in love. Love by its very nature implies a relation; what is felt is real for us. But the intellect, which aspires to know things as they are, forever lands us in illusions—illusions needful for our education, and therefore far from unprofitable, to be forever replaced by fresh illusions; and the only truth we thus attain is the conviction that truth there assuredly is, that we must forever reach after it, and must forever grasp its shadow. Theologies, philosophies, scientific theories—these change like the shifting and shredding clouds before our eyes, and are forever succeeded by clouds of another shape and hue. But the knowledge involved in love is veritable and is verified at least for us who love. While in his practice he grew more scientific in research for truth, and less artistic in his desire for beauty, such was the doctrine which Browning upheld.
The speaker in Fifine at the Fair is far more a seeker for knowledge than he is a lover. And he has learnt, and learnt aright, that by illusions the intellect is thrown forward towards what may relatively be termed the truth; through shadows it advances upon reality. When he argues that philosophies and theologies are the fizgigs of the brain, its Fifines the false which lead us onward to Elvire the true, he expresses an idea which Browning has repeatedly expressed in Ferishtah's Fancies and which, certainly, was an idea he had made his own. And if a man approaches the other sex primarily with a view to knowledge, with a view to confirm and to extend his own self-consciousness and to acquire experience of the strength and the weakness of womanhood, it is true that he will be instructed more widely, if not more deeply, by Elvire supplemented by Fifine than by Elvire alone. The sophistry of the speaker in Browning's poem consists chiefly in a juggle between knowledge and love, and in asserting as true of love what Browning held to be, in the profoundest sense, true of knowledge. The poet desires, as Butler in his "Analogy" desired, to take lower ground than his own; but the curious student of man and woman, of love and knowledge—imagination aiding his intellect—is compelled, amid his sophistical jugglings, to work out his problems upon Browning's own lines, and he becomes a witness to Browning's own conclusions. Saul, before the poem closes, is also among the prophets. For him, as for Browning, "God and the soul stand sure." He sees, as Browning sees, man reaching upward through illusions—religious theories, philosophical systems, scientific hypotheses, artistic methods, scholarly attainments—to the Divine. The Pornic fair has become the Venice carnival, and this has grown to the vision of man's life, in which the wanton and coquette named a philosophy or a theology has replaced the gipsy in tricot. The speaker misapplies to love and the truths obtained by love Browning's doctrine concerning knowledge. And yet, even so, he is forced to confess, however inconsistent his action may be with his belief, that the permanent—which is the Divine—can be reached through a single, central point of human love, but not through any vain attempt to manufacture an infinite by piecing together a multitude of detached points:
His problem posed aright
Was—"From a given point evolve the infinite!"
Not—"Spend thyself in space, endeavouring to joint
Together, and so make infinite, point and point:
Fix into one Elvire a Fair-ful of Fifines!"
If he continues his experiments, they are experiments of the senses or of the intellect, which he knows can bring no profit to the heart: "Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant." He will undoubtedly—let this be frankly acknowledged—grow in a certain kind of knowledge, and as certainly he will dwindle in the higher knowledge that comes through love. The poem is neither enigmatical nor cynical, but in entire accord with Browning's own deepest convictions and highest feelings.[[115]]