Mr. Sludge, the medium, excuses his imposture, and then thinks “it may not altogether be imposture.  For all he knows there may really be spirits at the bottom of it.  He never meant to cheat; yet he did cheat.  Yet, even if he lied, lies help truth to live; and he must live himself; and God may have made fools for him to live on;” and many other are the twists of his defence.  The poem is as lifelike in its insight into the mind of a supple cheat as it is a brilliant bit of literature; but Browning leaves the matter unconcluded, as he would not have done, I hold, had he been writing poetry.  Prince Hohenstiel’s defence of expediency in politics is made by Browning to seem now right, now wrong, because he assumes at one time what is true as the ground of his argument, and then at another what is plainly false, and in neither case do the assumptions support the arguments.  What really is concluded is not the question, but the slipperiness of the man who argues.  And at the end of the poem Browning comes in again to say that words cannot be trusted to hit truth.  Language is inadequate to express it.  Browning was fond of saying this.  It does not seem worth saying.  In one sense it is a truism; in another it resembles nonsense.  Words are the only way by which we can express truth, or our nearest approach to what we think it is.  At any rate, silence, in spite of Maeterlinck, does not express it.  Moreover, with regard to the matter in hand, Browning knew well enough how a poet would decide the question of expediency he has here brought into debate.  He has decided it elsewhere; but here he chooses not to take that view, that he may have the fun of exercising his clever brain.  There is no reason why he should not entertain himself and us in this way; but folk need not call this intellectual jumping to and fro a poem, or try to induce us to believe that it is the work of art.

When he had finished these products of a time when he was intoxicated with his intellect, and of course somewhat proud of it, the poet in him began to revive.  This resurrection had begun in Fifine at the Fair.  I have said it would not be just to class this poem with the other three.  It has many an oasis of poetry where it is a happiness to rest.  But the way between their palms and wells is somewhat dreary walking, except to those who adore minute psychology.  The poem is pitilessly long.  If throughout its length it were easy to follow we might excuse the length, but it is rendered difficult by the incessant interchange of misty personalities represented by one personality.  Elvire, Fifine only exist in the mind of Don Juan; their thoughts are only expressed in his words; their outlines not only continually fade into his, but his thought steals into his presentation of their thought, till it becomes impossible to individualise them.  The form in which Browning wrote the poem, by which he made Don Juan speak for them, makes this want of clearness and sharpness inevitable.  The work is done with a terrible cleverness, but it is wearisome at the last.