The length also might be excused if the subject were a great one or had important issues for mankind.  But, though it has its interest and is human enough, it does not deserve so many thousand lines nor so much elaborate analysis.  A few lyrics or a drama of two acts might say all that is worth saying on the matter.  What Browning has taken for subject is an every-day occurrence.  We are grateful to him for writing on so universal a matter, even though it is unimportant; and he has tried to make it uncommon and important by weaving round it an intricate lace-work of psychology; yet, when we get down to its main lines, it is the ordinary event, especially commonplace in any idle society which clings to outward respectability and is dreadfully wearied of it.  Our neighbours across the Channel call it La Crise when, after years of a quiet, not unhappy, excellent married existence, day succeeding day in unbroken continuity of easy affection and limited experience, the man or the woman, in full middle life, suddenly wearies of the apparent monotony, the uneventful love, the slow encroaching tide of the commonplace, and looks on these as fetters on their freedom, as walls which shut them in from the vivid interests of the outside world, from the gipsy roving of the passions.  The time arrives, when this becomes, they think, too great for endurance, and their impatience shows itself in a daily irritability quite new in the household, apparently causeless, full of sudden, inexplicable turns of thought and act which turn the peaceful into a tempestuous home.  It is not that the husband or the wife are inconstant by nature—­to call Fifine at the Fair a defence of inconstancy is to lose the truth of the matter—­but it is the desire of momentary change, of a life set free from conventional barriers, of an outburst into the unknown, of the desire for new experiences, for something which will bring into play those parts of their nature of which they are vaguely conscious but which are as yet unused—­new elements in their senses, intellect, imagination, even in their spirit, but not always in their conscience.  That, for the time being, as in this poem, is often shut up in the cellar, where its voice cannot be heard.

This is, as I said, a crisis of common occurrence.  It may be rightly directed, its evil controlled, and a noble object chosen for the satisfaction of the impulse.  Here, that is not the case; and Browning describes its beginning with great freshness and force as Juan walks down to the fair with Elvire.  Nor has he omitted to treat other forms of it in his poetry.  He knew how usual it was, but he has here made it unusual by putting it into the heart of a man who, before he yielded to it, was pleased to make it the subject of a wandering metaphysical analysis; who sees not only how it appears to himself in three or four moods, but how it looks to the weary, half-jealous wife to whom he is so rude while he strives to be