au_--one of the rockiest and least attractive of all
Browning's poems--had mystified most of its readers and been little
relished by the rest. And now that plea for a discredited politician was
followed up by what, on the face of it, was, as Mrs Orr puts it, "a
defence of inconstancy in marriage." The apologist for Napoleon III.
came forward as the advocate of Don Juan. The prefixed bit of dialogue
from Moliere's play explains the situation. Juan, detected by his wife
in an intrigue, is completely nonplussed. "Fie!" cries Elvire, mockingly
(in Browning's happy paraphrase),--

"Fie! for a man of mode, accustomed at the court
To such a style of thing, how awkwardly my lord
Attempts defence!"

In this emergency, Browning, as it would seem, steps in, and provides
the arch-voluptuary with a philosophy of illicit love, quite beyond the
speculative capacity of any Juan in literature, and glowing with poetry
of a splendour and fertility which neither Browning himself nor the
great English poet who had identified his name with that of Juan, and
whom Browning in this very poem overwhelms with genial banter, ever
surpassed. The poem inevitably challenged comparison with Byron's
masterpiece. In dazzling play of intellect, in swift interchange of wit
and passion, the English nineteenth century produced nothing more
comparable to the _Don Juan_ of Byron than _Fifine at the Fair_.

It cannot be denied that the critics had some excuse who, like Mortimer,
frankly identified Browning with his hero, and described the poem as an
assertion of the "claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by
varied adventure in the world of temporary loves."[58] For Browning has
not merely given no direct hint of his own divergence from Juan,
corresponding to his significant comment upon Blougram--"he said true
things but called them by false names"; he has made his own subtlest and
profoundest convictions on life and art spring spontaneously from the
brain of this brilliant conqueror of women. Like Goethe's Faust, he
unmistakably shares the mind, the wisdom, the faith, of his creator; it
is plausible to suppose that the poet indorses his application of them.
This is unquestionably a complete mistake; but Browning, as usual,
presumed too much upon his readers' insight, and took no pains to
obviate a confusion which he clearly supposed to be impossible.

[Footnote 58: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 297. Her own criticism is, however,
curiou