The Ring and the Book had made Browning famous.  But fame was far from tempting him to undue compliance with the tastes of his new-won public; rather it prompted him to indulge his genius more freely, and to go his own way with a more complete security and unconcern. Hohenstiel-Schwangau—­one of the rockiest and least attractive of all Browning’s poems—­had mystified most of its readers and been little relished by the rest.  And now that plea for a discredited politician was followed up by what, on the face of it, was, as Mrs Orr puts it, “a defence of inconstancy in marriage.”  The apologist for Napoleon III. came forward as the advocate of Don Juan.  The prefixed bit of dialogue from Moliere’s play explains the situation.  Juan, detected by his wife in an intrigue, is completely nonplussed.  “Fie!” cries Elvire, mockingly (in Browning’s happy paraphrase),—­

     “Fie! for a man of mode, accustomed at the court
      To such a style of thing, how awkwardly my lord
      Attempts defence!”

In this emergency, Browning, as it would seem, steps in, and provides the arch-voluptuary with a philosophy of illicit love, quite beyond the speculative capacity of any Juan in literature, and glowing with poetry of a splendour and fertility which neither Browning himself nor the great English poet who had identified his name with that of Juan, and whom Browning in this very poem overwhelms with genial banter, ever surpassed.  The poem inevitably challenged comparison with Byron’s masterpiece.  In dazzling play of intellect, in swift interchange of wit and passion, the English nineteenth century produced nothing more comparable to the Don Juan of Byron than Fifine at the Fair.

It cannot be denied that the critics had some excuse who, like Mortimer, frankly identified Browning with his hero, and described the poem as an assertion of the “claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by varied adventure in the world of temporary loves."[58] For Browning has not merely given no direct hint of his own divergence from Juan, corresponding to his significant comment upon Blougram—­“he said true things but called them by false names”; he has made his own subtlest and profoundest convictions on life and art spring spontaneously from the brain of this brilliant conqueror of women.  Like Goethe’s Faust, he unmistakably shares the mind, the wisdom, the faith, of his creator; it is plausible to suppose that the poet indorses his application of them.  This is unquestionably a complete mistake; but Browning, as usual, presumed too much upon his readers’ insight, and took no pains to obviate a confusion which he clearly supposed to be impossible.

[Footnote 58:  Mrs Orr, Life, p. 297.  Her own criticism is, however, curiously indecisive and embarrassed.]