'Fifine at the Fair'--the poem referred to as in progress in a letter to
Miss Blagden, and which appeared in the spring of 1872. The disturbing
cause had been also of long standing; for the deeper reactive processes
of Mr. Browning's nature were as slow as its more superficial response
was swift; and while 'Dramatis Personae', 'The Ring and the Book',
and even 'Balaustion's Adventure', represented the gradually perfected
substance of his poetic imagination, 'Fifine at the Fair' was as the
froth thrown up by it during the prolonged simmering which was to leave
it clear. The work displays the iridescent brightness as well as the
occasional impurity of this froth-like character. Beauty and ugliness
are, indeed, almost inseparable in the moral impression which it leaves
upon us. The author has put forth a plea for self-indulgence with a
much slighter attempt at dramatic disguise than his special pleadings
generally assume; and while allowing circumstances to expose the
sophistry of the position, and punish its attendant act, he does not
sufficiently condemn it. But, in identifying himself for the moment with
the conception of a Don Juan, he has infused into it a tenderness and
a poetry with which the true type had very little in common, and which
retard its dramatic development. Those who knew Mr. Browning, or who
thoroughly know his work, may censure, regret, fail to understand
'Fifine at the Fair'; they will never in any important sense misconstrue
it.

But it has been so misconstrued by an intelligent and not unsympathetic
critic; and his construction may be endorsed by other persons in the
present, and still more in the future, in whom the elements of a truer
judgment are wanting. It seems, therefore, best to protest at once
against the misjudgment, though in so doing I am claiming for it an
attention which it may not seem to deserve. I allude to Mr. Mortimer's
'Note on Browning' in the 'Scottish Art Review' for December 1889. This
note contains a summary of Mr. Browning's teaching, which it resolves
into the moral equivalent of the doctrine of the conservation of force.
Mr. Mortimer assumes for the purpose of his comparison that the exercise
of force means necessarily moving on; and according to him Mr. Browning
prescribes action at any price, even that of defying the restrictions
of moral law. He thus, we are told, blames the lovers in 'The Statue and
the Bust' for their failure to carry out what was an immoral intenti