He has been Prime Minister at New Zealand for a year and a half,but gets tired,and returns home with a poem.'
This is my last extract from the correspondence with Miss Blagden.
Her death closed it altogether within the year.
It is difficult to infer from letters,however intimate,the dominant state of the writer's mind:most of all to do so in Mr.Browning's case,from such passages of his correspondence as circumstances allow me to quote.Letters written in intimacy,and to the same friend,often express a recurrent mood,a revived set of associations,which for the moment destroys the habitual balance of feeling.The same effect is sometimes produced in personal intercourse;and the more varied the life,the more versatile the nature,the more readily in either case will a lately unused spring of emotion well up at the passing touch.
We may even fancy we read into the letters of 1870that eerie,haunting sadness of a cherished memory from which,in spite of ourselves,life is bearing us away.We may also err in so doing.
But literary creation,patiently carried on through a given period,is usually a fair reflection of the general moral and mental conditions under which it has taken place;and it would be hard to imagine from Mr.Browning's work during these last ten years that any but gracious influences had been operating upon his genius,any more disturbing element than the sense of privation and loss had entered into his inner life.
Some leaven of bitterness must,nevertheless,have been working within him,or he could never have produced that piece of perplexing cynicism,'Fifine at the Fair'--the poem referred to as in progress in a letter to Miss Blagden,and which appeared in the spring of 1872.
The disturbing cause had been also of long standing;for the deeper reactive processes of Mr.Browning's nature were as slow as its more superficial response was swift;and while 'Dramatis Personae','The Ring and the Book',and even 'Balaustion's Adventure',represented the gradually perfected substance of his poetic imagination,'Fifine at the Fair'was as the froth thrown up by it during the prolonged simmering which was to leave it clear.
The work displays the iridescent brightness as well as the occasional impurity of this froth-like character.Beauty and ugliness are,indeed,almost inseparable in the moral impression which it leaves upon us.
The author has put forth a plea for self-indulgence with a much slighter attempt at dramatic disguise than his special pleadings generally assume;and while allowing circumstances to expose the sophistry of the position,and punish its attendant act,he does not sufficiently condemn it.
But,in identifying himself for the moment with the conception of a Don Juan,he has infused into it a tenderness and a poetry with which the true type had very little in common,and which retard its dramatic development.
Those who knew Mr.Browning,or who thoroughly know his work,may censure,regret,fail to understand 'Fifine at the Fair';they will never in any important sense misconstrue it.
But it has been so misconstrued by an intelligent and not unsympathetic critic;and his construction may be endorsed by other persons in the present,and still more in the future,in whom the elements of a truer judgment are wanting.
It seems,therefore,best to protest at once against the misjudgment,though in so doing I am claiming for it an attention which it may not seem to deserve.I allude to Mr.Mortimer's 'Note on Browning'
in the 'Scottish Art Review'for December 1889.This note contains a summary of Mr.Browning's teaching,which it resolves into the moral equivalent of the doctrine of the conservation of force.
Mr.Mortimer assumes for the purpose of his comparison that the exercise of force means necessarily moving on;and according to him Mr.Browning prescribes action at any price,even that of defying the restrictions of moral law.He thus,we are told,blames the lovers in 'The Statue and the Bust'for their failure to carry out what was an immoral intention;and,in the person of his 'Don Juan',defends a husband's claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by varied adventure in the world of temporary loves:the result being 'the negation of that convention under which we habitually view life,but which for some reason or other breaks down when we have to face the problems of a Goethe,a Shelley,a Byron,or a Browning.'
