are taken from
actual stories that occurred while Browning was alive, and _Fifine at
the Fair_ analyses a common crisis in the maturer lives of men and
women. The poems thus keep close to special cases, yet--and in this the
poet appears--they have an extension which carries them beyond the
particular subjects into the needs and doings of a wider humanity. Their
little rivers run into the great sea. They have then their human
interest for a reader who does not wish for beauty, passion,
imagination, or the desires of the spirit in his poetry; but who hankers
at his solitary desk after realistic psychology, fanciful ethics,
curiosities of personal philosophy, cold intellectual play with
argument, and honest human ugliness.

Moreover, the method Browning attempts to use in them for the discovery
of truth is not the method of poetry, nor of any of the arts. It is
almost a commonplace to say that the world of mankind and each
individual in it only arrives at the truth on any matter, large or
small, by going through and exhausting the false forms of that
truth--and a very curious arrangement it seems to be. It is this method
Browning pursues in these poems. He represents one after another various
false or half-true views of the matter in hand, and hopes in that
fashion to clear the way to the truth. But he fails to convince partly
because it is impossible to give all or enough of the false or half-true
views of any one truth, but chiefly because his method is one fitted for
philosophy or science, but not for poetry. Poetry claims to see and feel
the truth at once. When the poet does not assert that claim, and act on
it, he is becoming faithless to his art.

Browning's method in these poems is the method of a scientific
philosopher, not of an artist. He gets his man into a debateable
situation; the man debates it from various points of view; persons are
introduced who take other aspects of the question, or personified
abstractions such as _Sagacity, Reason, Fancy_ give their opinions. Not
satisfied with this, Browning discusses it again from his own point of
view. He is then like the chess-player who himself plays both red and
white; who tries to keep both distinct in his mind, but cannot help now
and again taking one side more than the other; and who is frequently a
third person aware of himself as playing red, and also of himself as
playing white; and again of himself as outside both the players and
criticising their severa