but of a piece with his other writings and in harmony with the body of thought and feeling expressed through them.  Now it is certain that as Browning advanced in years he more and more distrusted the results of the intellect in its speculative research; he relied more and more upon the knowledge that comes through or is embodied in love.  Love by its very nature implies a relation; what is felt is real for us.  But the intellect, which aspires to know things as they are, forever lands us in illusions—­illusions needful for our education, and therefore far from unprofitable, to be forever replaced by fresh illusions; and the only truth we thus attain is the conviction that truth there assuredly is, that we must forever reach after it, and must forever grasp its shadow.  Theologies, philosophies, scientific theories—­these change like the shifting and shredding clouds before our eyes, and are forever succeeded by clouds of another shape and hue.  But the knowledge involved in love is veritable and is verified at least for us who love.  While in his practice he grew more scientific in research for truth, and less artistic in his desire for beauty, such was the doctrine which Browning upheld.

The speaker in Fifine at the Fair is far more a seeker for knowledge than he is a lover.  And he has learnt, and learnt aright, that by illusions the intellect is thrown forward towards what may relatively be termed the truth; through shadows it advances upon reality.  When he argues that philosophies and theologies are the fizgigs of the brain, its Fifines the false which lead us onward to Elvire the true, he expresses an idea which Browning has repeatedly expressed in Ferishtah’s Fancies and which, certainly, was an idea he had made his own.  And if a man approaches the other sex primarily with a view to knowledge, with a view to confirm and to extend his own self-consciousness and to acquire experience of the strength and the weakness of womanhood, it is true that he will be instructed more widely, if not more deeply, by Elvire supplemented by Fifine than by Elvire alone.  The sophistry of the speaker in Browning’s poem consists chiefly in a juggle between knowledge and love, and in asserting as true of love what Browning held to be, in the profoundest sense, true of knowledge.  The poet desires, as Butler in his “Analogy” desired, to take lower ground than his own; but the curious student of man and woman, of love and knowledge—­imagination aiding his intellect—­is compelled, amid his sophistical jugglings, to work out his problems upon Browning’s own lines, and he becomes a witness to Browning’s own conclusions.  Saul, before the poem closes, is also among the prophets.  For him, as for Browning, “God and the soul stand sure.”  He sees, as Browning sees, man reaching upward through illusions—­religious theories, philosophical systems, scientific hypotheses, artistic methods, scholarly attainments—­to the Divine.  The Pornic fair has become the Venice