passions. The time arrives, when this becomes,
they think, too great for endurance, and their impatience shows itself
in a daily irritability quite new in the household, apparently
causeless, full of sudden, inexplicable turns of thought and act which
turn the peaceful into a tempestuous home. It is not that the husband or
the wife are inconstant by nature--to call _Fifine at the Fair_ a
defence of inconstancy is to lose the truth of the matter--but it is the
desire of momentary change, of a life set free from conventional
barriers, of an outburst into the unknown, of the desire for new
experiences, for something which will bring into play those parts of
their nature of which they are vaguely conscious but which are as yet
unused--new elements in their senses, intellect, imagination, even in
their spirit, but not always in their conscience. That, for the time
being, as in this poem, is often shut up in the cellar, where its voice
cannot be heard.

This is, as I said, a crisis of common occurrence. It may be rightly
directed, its evil controlled, and a noble object chosen for the
satisfaction of the impulse. Here, that is not the case; and Browning
describes its beginning with great freshness and force as Juan walks
down to the fair with Elvire. Nor has he omitted to treat other forms of
it in his poetry. He knew how usual it was, but he has here made it
unusual by putting it into the heart of a man who, before he yielded to
it, was pleased to make it the subject of a wandering metaphysical
analysis; who sees not only how it appears to himself in three or four
moods, but how it looks to the weary, half-jealous wife to whom he is so
rude while he strives to be courteous, and to the bold, free,
conscienceless child of nature whose favour he buys, and with whom,
after all his barren metaphysics, he departs, only to attain, when his
brief spell of foolish freedom is over, loneliness and cynic satiety. It
may amuse us to circle with him through his arguments, though every one
knows he will yield at last and that yielding is more honest than his
talk; but what we ask is--Was the matter worth the trouble of more than
two thousand lines of long-winded verse? Was it worth an artist's
devotion? or, to ask a question I would not ask if the poem were good
art, is it of any real importance to mankind? Is it, finally, anything
more than an intellectual exercise of Browning on which solitary
psychologists may, in their turn, employ th