ABSTRACT
What, we should like to know, is Mr. Browning but the Fifine of poets? Does he not alternately charm, plague, and flirt with us wretched critics, till we are perfectly bewildered? Is he not always piping before us, shredding grammar, prosody, sense, and all such toys? Don’t the Elvires of the world constantly say to us ‘What is it you can possibly see to admire in this Mr. Browning, with his pink and impudence? Why don’t you like Tennyson, who is always musical? Or if you don’t like Tennyson, why can’t you read the good Tupper?1 But Browning!’— and Elvire clasps her hands, and looks more than she has brains to utter. The truth is, if we are to attack the Fifines, Mr. Browning must be the first to suffer. And this we take to be the meaning of his poem-it is an apology for himself and his poetry. Now we are going no further into the matter. It is not Fifine, but Fifine’s dancing which we admire. And after this distinction, we proceed with a clear conscience. So far we have laughed. But it is a subject for the deepest regret that Mr. Browning should have cast his poem, dealing as it does with some of the most perplexing problems of human nature, those terrible difficulties, which in proportion-and this is the saddest part-as a man is endowed with a spiritual nature, beset him and hinder him and even altogether stop him, into such a form. The subject-matter of Fifine at the Fair, would undoubtedly, treated as Browning could treat it, and as he has treated it here in many passages, have made the epic of the present day. We believe that he has put more substance into Fifine at the Fair than into any other poem. But for the ordinary reader it might just as well have been written in Sanscrit. There are such breaks, digressions, involutions, crabbed constructions, metaphysical hairsplitting, that reading becomes a positive fatigue. On the other hand, a perfect anthology of beauties might be culled. If the duty of poetry has ever been fulfilled, it is by the prologue. Here the muse assumes her true office-to comfort us with hope, and to suggest that there may be possibilities which lie beyond the range of our philosophy. The epilogue is utterly unworthy of Browning. There is to our mind something akin to profanation about it. As to the main scope of the
