no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things genuine reliability. Fifine at the Fair, like Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, is one of Browning’s apologetic soliloquies—­the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards actually falls.  This casuist, like all Browning’s casuists, is given many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the poem is called cynical.  It is difficult to understand what particular connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good even in a sensual fool.

After Fifine at the Fair appeared the Inn Album, in 1875, a purely narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place one of Browning’s vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after the Inn Album came what is perhaps the most preposterously individual thing he ever wrote, Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper, in 1876.  It is impossible to call the work poetry, and it is very difficult indeed to know what to call it.  Its chief characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal energy of words.  Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by romping children.  It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning malediction upon the poet’s critics, a malediction so outrageously good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself clear to the objects of its wrath.  One can compare the poem to nothing in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy.  This is the kind of thing, and it goes on for pages:—­

    “Long after the last of your number
    Has ceased my front-court to encumber
    While, treading down rose and ranunculus,
    You Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle-us! 
    Troop, all of you man or homunculus,
    Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid,
    If once on your pates she a souse made
    With what, pan or pot, bowl or skoramis,
    First comes to her hand—­things were more amiss! 
    I would not for worlds be your place in—­
    Recipient of slops from the basin! 
    You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness
    Won’t save a dry thread on your priggishness!”

You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the brute-force of language.

In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he was unequalled.  Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called “Fears and Scruples,” in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax—­