* * * * *

Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between
Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence. 
The individual soul works through the shows of sense,
(Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true)
Up to an outer soul as individual too;
And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed,
And reach at length ‘God, man, or both together mixed.’”

Last of all, just as his speculations have come to an end in an earnest profession of entire love to his wife, and they pause for a moment on the threshold of the villa, he receives a note from Fifine.

      “Oh, threaten no farewell! five minutes shall suffice
      To clear the matter up.  I go, and in a trice
      Return; five minutes past, expect me!  If in vain—­
      Why, slip from flesh and blood, and play the ghost again!”

He exceeds the allotted five minutes.  Elvire takes him at his word; and, as we seem to be told in the epilogue, husband and wife are reconciled only in death.

Such is the barest outline of the structure and purport of the poem.  But no outline can convey much notion of the wide range, profound significance and infinite ingenuity of the arguments; of the splendour and vigour of the poetry; or of the subtle consistency and exquisite truth of the character-painting.  Small in amount as is this last in proportion to the philosophy, it is of very notable kind and quality.  Not only the speaker, but Fifine, and still more Elvire, are quickened into life by graphic and delicate touches.  If we except Lucrezia in Andrea del Sarto, in no other monologue is the presence and personality of the silent or seldom-speaking listener so vividly felt.  We see the wronged wife Elvire, we know her, and we trace the very progress of her moods, the very changes in her face, as she listens to the fluent talk of her husband.  Don Juan (if we may so call him) is a distinct addition to Browning’s portrait-gallery.  Let no one suppose him to be a mere mouthpiece for dialectical disquisitions.  He is this certainly, but his utterances are tinged with individual colour.  This fact which, from the artistic point of view, is an inestimable advantage, is apt to prove, as in the case of Prince Hohenstiel, somewhat of a practical difficulty.  “The clearest way of showing where he uses (1) Truth, (2) Sophism, (3) a mixture of both—­is to say that wherever he speaks of Fifine (whether as type or not) in relation to himself and his own desire for truth, or right living with his wife, he is sophistical:  wherever he speaks directly of his wife’s value to him he speaks truth with an alloy of sophism; and wherever he speaks impersonally he speaks the truth.[48]” Keeping this in mind, we can easily separate the grain from the chaff; and the grain is emphatically worth storing.  Perhaps no poem of Browning’s contains so much deep and acute comment on life and conduct: