It is a passage conceived in the same spirit as the great chaunt “O Star of France!” written, at the same date, and with a recognition of both the virtues and the shames of France, by the American poet of Democracy.  To these memorable fragments from Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau one other may be added—­that towards the close of the poem which applies the tradition of the succession by murder of the priesthood at the shrine of the Clitumnian god to the succession of men of genius in the priesthood of the world—­“The new power slays the old, but handsomely.”

In Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau there is nothing enigmatical.  “It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself,” so Browning wrote to Miss Blagden soon after the publication of the volume.  Many persons, however, have supposed that in Fifine at the Fair (1872) a riddle rather than a poem was given to the world by the perversity of the writer.  When she comes to speak of this work Browning’s biographer Mrs Orr is half-apologetic; it is for her “a piece of perplexing cynicism.”  The origin of the poem was twofold.  The external suggestion came from the fact that during one of his visits to Pornic, Browning had seen the original of his Fifine, and she lived in his memory as a subject of intellectual curiosity and imaginative interest.  The internal suggestion, as Mrs Orr hints, lay in a certain mood of resentment against himself arising from the fact that the encroachments of the world seemed to estrange in some degree a part of his complex being from entire fidelity to his own past.  The world, in fact, seemed to be playing with Browning the part of a Fifine.  If this were so, it would be characteristic of Browning that he should face round upon the world and come to an explanation with his adversary.  But this could not in a printed volume be done in his own person; he was not one to take the public into his confidence.  The discussion should be removed as far as possible from his own circumstances and even his own feelings.  It should be a dramatic debate on the subject of fidelity and infidelity, on the bearings of the apparent to the true, on the relation of reality in this our mortal life to illusion.  As he studied the subject it assumed new significances and opened up wider issues.  An actual Elvire and an actual Fifine may be the starting points, but by-and-by Elvire shall stand for all that is permanent and substantial in thought and feeling, Fifine for all that is transitory and illusive.  The question of conjugal fidelity is as much the subject of Fifine at the Fair as the virtue of tar-water is the subject of Berkeley’s Siris.  The poem is in fact Browning’s Siris—­a chain of thoughts and feelings, reaching with no break in the chain, from a humble basis to the heights of speculation.