Life and Letters of Robert Browning [110]
and to the same friend, often express a recurrent mood,
a revived set of associations, which for the moment destroys
the habitual balance of feeling. The same effect is sometimes produced
in personal intercourse; and the more varied the life,
the more versatile the nature, the more readily in either case
will a lately unused spring of emotion well up at the passing touch.
We may even fancy we read into the letters of 1870 that eerie,
haunting sadness of a cherished memory from which, in spite of ourselves,
life is bearing us away. We may also err in so doing.
But literary creation, patiently carried on through a given period,
is usually a fair reflection of the general moral and mental conditions
under which it has taken place; and it would be hard to imagine
from Mr. Browning's work during these last ten years
that any but gracious influences had been operating upon his genius,
any more disturbing element than the sense of privation and loss
had entered into his inner life.
Some leaven of bitterness must, nevertheless, have been working within him,
or he could never have produced that piece of perplexing cynicism,
`Fifine at the Fair' -- the poem referred to as in progress
in a letter to Miss Blagden, and which appeared in the spring of 1872.
The disturbing cause had been also of long standing;
for the deeper reactive processes of Mr. Browning's nature were as slow
as its more superficial response was swift; and while `Dramatis Personae',
`The Ring and the Book', and even `Balaustion's Adventure',
represented the gradually perfected substance of his poetic imagination,
`Fifine at the Fair' was as the froth thrown up by it
during the prolonged simmering which was to leave it clear.
The work displays the iridescent brightness as well as the occasional impurity
of this froth-like character. Beauty and ugliness are, indeed,
almost inseparable in the moral impression which it leaves upon us.
The author has put forth a plea for self-indulgence with a much slighter
attempt at dramatic disguise than his special pleadings generally assume;
and while allowing circumstances to expose the sophistry of the position,
and punish its attendant act, he does not sufficiently condemn it.
But, in identifying himself for the moment with the conception of a Don Juan,
he has infused into it a tenderness and a poetry with which the true type
had very little in common, and which retard its dramatic development.
Those who knew Mr. Browning, or who thoroughly know his work,
may censure, regret, fail to understand `Fifine at the Fair';
they will never in any important sense misconstrue it.
But it has been so misconstrued by an intelligent and not
unsympathetic critic; and his construction may be endorsed
by other persons in the present, and still more in the future,
in whom the elements of a truer judgment are wanting.
It seems, therefore, best to protest at once against the misjudgment,
though in so doing I am claiming for it an attention which
it may not seem to deserve. I allude to Mr. Mortimer's `Note on Browning'
in the `Scottish Art Review' for December 1889. This note contains
a summary of Mr. Browning's teaching, which it resolves into
the moral equivalent of the doctrine of the conservation of force.
Mr. Mortimer assumes for the purpose of his comparison
that the exercise of force means necessarily moving on;
and according to him Mr. Browning prescribes action at any price,
even that of defying the restrictions of moral law. He thus, we are told,
blames the lovers in `The Statue and the Bust' for their failure to carry out
what was an immoral intention; 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