[Footnote 46:  I find in a letter of Browning, which Mrs Orr has printed in her Life and Letters of Browning (1891), a reference to “what the editor of the Edinburgh calls my eulogium on the Second Empire—­which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be—­’a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England’—­it is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself.”]

20.  FIFINE AT THE FAIR.

    [Published in 1872 (Poetical Works, Vol.  XI. pp. 211-343).]

Fifine at the Fair is a monologue at once dramatic and philosophical.  Its arguments, like those of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, are part truth, part sophistry.  The poem is prefaced by a motto from Moliere’s Don Juan, in which Donna Elvira suggests to her husband, with a bitter irony, the defence he ought to make for himself.  Don Juan did not take the hint.  Browning has done so.  The genesis of the poem and the special form it has assumed are further explained by the following passage from Mrs. Orr:—­

“Mr. Browning was, with his family, at Pornic, many years ago, and there saw the gypsy who is the original of Fifine.  His fancy was evidently set roaming by her audacity, her strength—­the contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually found expression in a poetic theory of life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the necessary complement of each other.  As he laid down the theory, Mr. Browning would be speaking in his own person.  But he would turn into someone else in the act of working it out—­for it insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified Don Juan would grow up under his pen."[47]

This modified Don Juan is the spokesman of the poem:  not the “splendid devil” of Tirso de Molina, but a modern gentleman, living at Pornic, a refined, cultured, musical, artistic and philosophical person, “of high attainments, lofty aspirations, strong emotions, and capricious will.”  Strolling through the fair with his wife, he expatiates on the charm of a Bohemian existence, and, more particularly, on the charms of one Fifine, a rope-dancer, whose performance he has witnessed.  Urged by the troubled look of his wife, he launches forth into an elaborate defence of inconstancy in love, and consequently of the character of his admiration for Fifine.

He starts by arguing:—­

            “That bodies show me minds,

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!”

He then applies his method to the whole of earthly life, finally resolving it into the principle:—­

“All’s change, but permanence as well.