Juan is deeply versed in all the
activities of the imagination which he so eloquently defends. Painting
and poetry, science and philosophy, are at his command; above all, he is
an artist and a poet in the lore of Love.

It is easy to see that the kind of adventure on which Juan claims the
right of projecting his imagination has close affinities with the
habitual procedure of Browning's own. Juan defends his dealings with
the gay fizgig Fifine as a step to the fuller appreciation of Elvire; he
demands freedom to escape only as a means of possessing more surely and
intimately what he has. And Browning's "emancipation" is not that of the
purely Romantic poet, who pursues a visionary abstraction remote from
all his visible environment. The emancipated soul, for him, was rather
that which incessantly "practised with" its environment, fighting its
way through countless intervening films of illusion to the full
knowledge of itself and of all that it originally held _in posse_. This
might not be an adequate account of his own artistic processes, in which
genial instinct played a larger, and resolute will a smaller, part than
his invincible athleticism of temperament would suggest. But his
marvellous wealth of spontaneous vision was fed and enriched by
incessant "practice with" his environment; his idealism was vitalised by
the ceaseless play of eye and brain upon the least promising mortal
integuments of spirit; he possessed "Elvire" the more securely for
having sent forth his adventurous imagination to practise upon
innumerable Fifines.

The poem itself--as a defence of his poetic methods--was an "adventure"
in which imagination played an unusually splendid part. A succession of
brilliant and original images, visions, similes, parables, exhibits the
twofold nature of the "stuff" with which the artist plays,--its
inferiority, its poverty, its "falseness" in itself, its needfulness,
its potency, its worth for him. It is the water which supports the
swimmer, but in which he cannot live; the dross of straw and chaff which
yields the brilliant purity of flame (c. 55); the technical cluster of
sounds from which issues "music--that burst of pillared cloud by day and
pillared fire by night" (c. 41). The whole poem is haunted by the sense
of dissonance which these images suggest between the real and the
apparent meaning of things. Browning's world, else so massive and so
indubitable, becomes unsubstantial and phantasmal, an illusive p