It is easy to see that the kind of adventure on which Juan claims the right of projecting his imagination has close affinities with the habitual procedure of Browning’s own.  Juan defends his dealings with the gay fizgig Fifine as a step to the fuller appreciation of Elvire; he demands freedom to escape only as a means of possessing more surely and intimately what he has.  And Browning’s “emancipation” is not that of the purely Romantic poet, who pursues a visionary abstraction remote from all his visible environment.  The emancipated soul, for him, was rather that which incessantly “practised with” its environment, fighting its way through countless intervening films of illusion to the full knowledge of itself and of all that it originally held in posse.  This might not be an adequate account of his own artistic processes, in which genial instinct played a larger, and resolute will a smaller, part than his invincible athleticism of temperament would suggest.  But his marvellous wealth of spontaneous vision was fed and enriched by incessant “practice with” his environment; his idealism was vitalised by the ceaseless play of eye and brain upon the least promising mortal integuments of spirit; he possessed “Elvire” the more securely for having sent forth his adventurous imagination to practise upon innumerable Fifines.

The poem itself—­as a defence of his poetic methods—­was an “adventure” in which imagination played an unusually splendid part.  A succession of brilliant and original images, visions, similes, parables, exhibits the twofold nature of the “stuff” with which the artist plays,—­its inferiority, its poverty, its “falseness” in itself, its needfulness, its potency, its worth for him.  It is the water which supports the swimmer, but in which he cannot live; the dross of straw and chaff which yields the brilliant purity of flame (c. 55); the technical cluster of sounds from which issues “music—­that burst of pillared cloud by day and pillared fire by night” (c. 41).  The whole poem is haunted by the sense of dissonance which these images suggest between the real and the apparent meaning of things.  Browning’s world, else so massive and so indubitable, becomes unsubstantial and phantasmal, an illusive pageant in which Truth is present only under a mask, being “forced to manifest itself through falsehood.”  Juan, who declares that, unlike poets, “we prose-folk” always dream, has, in effect, a visionary quality of imagination which suits his thesis and his theme.  The “dream figures” of the famous ladies pass before us like a gorgeous tapestry,—­some rich Venetian rendering of a medieval ballade du temps jadis; then Venice itself opens before us, all moving life and colour, under the enchantment of Schumann’s Carnival, only to resolve itself into a vaster pageant of the world, with its mighty fanes of art and science, which, seemingly “fixed as fate, not fairy-work,” yet

                               “tremblingly grew blank
      From bright, then broke afresh in triumph,—­ah, but sank
      As soon, for liquid change through artery and vein
      O’ the very marble wound its way.”