A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.)

by Mrs. Sutherland Orr

But here, as elsewhere, he makes a great mistake: that of confusing nature with the individual man. Her instability supplied him with no excuse for being inconstant, and her permanence gives him no motive for constancy; and he proves this in another moment by breaking bounds no longer in word only, but in deed. It turns out that he had put gold as well as silver into Fifine's tambourine. The result, intended or not, has been a letter slipped into his hand. He claims five minutes to go and "clear the matter up;" exceeds the time, and on returning finds his punishment in an empty home.

This at least, we seem intended to infer. For Elvire has already startled him by assuming the likeness of a phantom, and he gives her leave, in case he breaks his word, to vanish away altogether. The story ends here; but its epilogue "The Householder" depicts a widowed husband, grotesquely miserable, fetched home by his departed wife; and his identity with Don Juan seems unmistakable. This scene is more humorous than pathetic, as befits the dramatic spirit of the poem; but the most serious purport and most comprehensive meaning of "Fifine at the Fair" are summed up in its closing words. The "householder" is composing his epitaph, and his wife thus concludes it: "Love is all, and Death is nought."

"PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHWANGAU, SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY."

"Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau" is a defence of the doctrine of expediency: and the monologue is supposed to be carried on by the late Emperor of the French, under this feigned name. Louis Napoleon is musing over past and present, and blending them with each other in a waking dream. He seems in exile again. But the events of his reign are all, or for the most part behind him, and they have earned for him the title of "inscrutable." A young lady of an adventurous type has crossed his path, in the appropriate region of Leicester Square. Some adroit flattery on her side has disposed him to confidence, and he is proving to her, over tea and cigars, that he is not so "inscrutable" after all; or, if he be, that the key to the enigma is a simple one. "This wearer of crinoline seems destined to play Oedipus to the Sphinx he is supposed to be;" or better still, as he gallantly adds, the "Lais" for whose sake he will unveil the mystery unasked. The situation he thus assumes is not dignified; but as Mr. Browning probably felt, his choice of a confidante suits the nature of what he has to tell, as well as the circumstances in which he tells it. Politically, he has lived from hand to mouth. So in a different way has she. A very trifling incident enables him to illustrate his confession, which will proceed without interruption on the listener's part.

They are sitting at a table with writing materials upon it. Among these lies a piece of waste-paper. Prince Hohenstiel descries upon it two blots, takes up a pen, and draws a line from one to the other. This simple, half-mechanical act is, as he declares, a type of his whole life; it contains the word of the enigma. His constant principle has been: not to strive at creating anything new; not to risk marring what already existed; but to adapt what he found half made and to continue it. In other words, he has been a sustainer or "saviour," not a reformer of society.

Many pages are devoted to the statement and vindication of this fact, and they contain everything that can be said, from a religious or practical point of view, in favour of taking the world as we find it. Prince Hohenstiel's first argument is: that he has not the genius of a reformer, and it is a man's first duty to his Creator to do that only which he can do best; his second: that sweeping reforms are in themselves opposed to the creative plan, because they sacrifice everything to one leading idea, and aim at reducing to one pattern those human activities which God has intended to be multiform; the third and strongest: that the scheme of existence with all its apparent evils is God's work, and no man can improve upon it. There have been, he admits, revolutions in the moral as well as the physical world; and inspired reformers, who were born to carry them on; but these men are rare and portentous as the physical agencies to which they correspond, and whether "dervish (desert-spectre), swordsman, saint, lawgiver," or "lyrist," appear only when the time is ripe for them. Meanwhile, the great machine advances by means of the minute springs, the revolving wheel-work, of individual lives. Let each of these be content with its limited sphere. God is with each and all.

And Prince Hohenstiel has another and still stronger reason for not desiring to tamper with the existing order of things. He finds it good. He loves existence as he knows it, with its mysteries and its beauties; its complex causes and incalculable effects; the good it extracts from evil; the virtue it evolves from suffering. He reveres that Temple of God's own building, from which deploys the ever varying procession of human life. If the temple be intricate in its internal construction, if its architectural fancies impede our passage; if they make us stumble or even fall; his invariable advice is this: "Throw light on the stumbling-blocks; fix your torch above them at such points as the architect approves. But do not burn them away." He considers himself therefore, not a very great man, but a useful one: one possessing on a small scale the patience of an Atlas, if not the showy courage of a Hercules: one whose small achievements pave the way for the great ones.

Thus far the imaginary speaker so resembles Mr. Browning himself, that we forget for the moment that we are not dealing with him; and his vicarious testimony to the value of human life lands him, at page 145, in a personal protest against the folly which under cover of poetry seeks to run it down. He lashes out against the "bard" who can rave about inanimate nature as something greater than man; and who talks of the "unutterable" impressions conveyed by the ocean, as greater than the intelligence and sympathy, the definite thoughts and feelings which can be uttered. The lines from "Childe Harold" which will be satirized in "Fifine at the Fair" are clearly haunting him here. But we shall now pass on to more historic ground.

It is a natural result of these opinions that Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau regards life as the one boon which contains every other; and that the material prosperity of his people has been the first object by which his "sustaining" policy was inspired. He does not deny that even within the limits thus imposed, some choice of cause or system seemed open to him. "It seemed open to him to choose between religion and free-thought, between monarchy and government by the people: and to throw his energies entirely into one scale or the other, instead of weighting one and the other by turns. It could justly have been urged that the simpler aim is included in the more complex, and that he would promote the interests of his subjects by serving them from the wider, rather than from the narrower point of view."

"But what is true in theory is not always so in practice. He has loved a cause, and believed in it—the cause of united Italy; and so long as he was free to express sympathy with this—so long, his critics say, as he was a mere voice, with air to float in, and no obstacle to bar his way—he expressed it from the bottom of his soul. But with the power to act—with the firm ground wheron to act—came also the responsibilities of action: the circumstance by which it must be controlled. He saw the wants of his people; the eyes which craved light alone, and the mouths which craved only bread. He felt that the ideal must yield to the real, the remote to what was near; and the work of Italian deliverance remained incomplete. It was his very devotion to the one principle which brought the reproach of vacillation upon him."