which had already appeared in Bishop Blougram’s Apology, Mr. Sludge the Medium, and other poems, have overwhelmed his art, and his intellect, in its pride of strength, has grown wanton. Fifine at the Fair is said to be “a defence of inconstancy, or of the right of experiment in love.”  Its hero, who is “a modern gentleman, a refined, cultured, musical, artistic and philosophic person, of high attainments, lofty aspirations, strong emotions, and capricious will,” produces arguments “wide in range, of profound significance and infinite ingenuity,” to defend and justify immoral intercourse with a gipsy trull.  The poem consists of the speculations of a libertine, who coerces into his service truth and sophistry, and “a superabounding wealth of thought and imagery,” and with no further purpose on the poet’s part than the dramatic delineation of character. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is spoken of in a similar manner as the justification, by reference to the deepest principles of morality, of compromise, hypocrisy, lying, and a selfishness that betrays every cause to the individual’s meanest welfare.  The object of the poet is “by no means to prove black white, or white black, or to make the worse appear the better reason, but to bring a seeming monster and perplexing anomaly under the common laws of nature, by showing how it has grown to be what it is, and how it can with more or less self-delusion reconcile itself to itself.”

I am not able to accept this as a complete explanation of the intention of the poet, except with reference to Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. The Prince is a psychological study, like Mr. Sludge the Medium, and Bishop Blougram.  No doubt he had the interest of a dramatist in the hero of Fifine at the Fair and in the hero of Red Cotton Nightcap Country; but, in these poems, his dramatic interest is itself determined by an ethical purpose, which is equally profound.  His meeting with the gipsy at Pornic, and the spectacle of her unscrupulous audacity in vice, not only “sent his fancy roaming,” but opened out before him the fundamental problems of life.  What I would find, therefore, in Fifine at the Fair is not the casuistic defence of an artistic and speculative libertine, but an earnest attempt on the part of the poet to prove,

  “That, through the outward sign, the inward grace allures,
  And sparks from heaven transpierce earth’s coarsest covertures,—­
  All by demonstrating the value of Fifine."[A]

[Footnote A:  Fifine at the Fair, xxviii.]