on;
and, in the person of his 'Don Juan', defends a husband's claim to
relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by varied adventure in the
world of temporary loves: the result being 'the negation of that
convention under which we habitually view life, but which for some
reason or other breaks down when we have to face the problems of a
Goethe, a Shelley, a Byron, or a Browning.'

Mr. Mortimer's generalization does not apply to 'The Statue and the
Bust', since Mr. Browning has made it perfectly clear that, in this
case, the intended act is postponed without reference to its morality,
and simply in consequence of a weakness of will, which would have been
as paralyzing to a good purpose as it was to the bad one; but it is not
without superficial sanction in 'Fifine at the Fair'; and the part which
the author allowed himself to play in it did him an injustice only to be
measured by the inference which it has been made to support. There could
be no mistake more ludicrous, were it less regrettable, than that of
classing Mr. Browning, on moral grounds, with Byron or Shelley; even
in the case of Goethe the analogy breaks down. The evidence of the
foregoing pages has rendered all protest superfluous. But the suggested
moral resemblance to the two English poets receives a striking comment
in a fact of Mr. Browning's life which falls practically into the
present period of our history: his withdrawal from Shelley of the
devotion of more than forty years on account of an act of heartlessness
towards his first wife which he held to have been proved against him.

The sweet and the bitter lay, indeed, very close to each other at the
sources of Mr. Browning's inspiration. Both proceeded, in great measure,
from his spiritual allegiance to the past--that past by which it was
impossible that he should linger, but which he could not yet leave
behind. The present came to him with friendly greeting. He was
unconsciously, perhaps inevitably, unjust to what it brought. The
injustice reacted upon himself, and developed by degrees into the
cynical mood of fancy which became manifest in 'Fifine at the Fair'.

It is true that, in the light of this explanation, we see an effect very
unlike its cause; but the chemistry of human emotion is like that of
natural life. It will often form a compound in which neither of its
constituents can be recognized. This perverse poem was the last as well
as the first manifestation of an ungenial mood of Mr. Browni