--

==
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 latelyunused spring of emotion well up at the passing touch.
We may even fancy we read into the letters of 1870 that 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 literarycreation, 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 superficialresponse 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 iridescentbrightness 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 dramaticdisguise 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 sufficientlycondemn 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.'

Mr. Mortimer's generalization does not apply to `The Statue and the Bust',
since Mr. Browning has made it perfectly clear that, in this case,

the intended act is postponed without reference to its morality,
and simply in consequence of a weakness of will, which would have been

as paralyzing to a good purpose as it was to the bad one;
but it is not without superficialsanction in `Fifine at the Fair';

and the part which the author allowed himself to play in it
did him an injustice only to be measured by the inference

which it has been made to support. There could be no mistake more ludicrous,
were it less regrettable, than that of classing Mr. Browning,

on moral grounds, with Byron or Shelley; even in the case of Goethe
the analogy breaks down. The evidence of the foregoing pages

has rendered all protest superfluous. But the suggested moral resemblance
to the two English poets receives a striking comment

in a fact of Mr. Browning's life which falls practically
into the present period of our history: his withdrawal from Shelley

of the devotion of more than forty years on account of an act of heartlessness
towards his first wife which he held to have been proved against him.

The sweet and the bitter lay, indeed, very close to each other
at the sources of Mr. Browning's inspiration. Both proceeded,

in great measure, from his spiritualallegiance to the past --
that past by which it was impossible that he should linger,

but which he could not yet leave behind. The present came to him
with friendly greeting. He was unconsciously, perhaps inevitably,

unjust to what it brought. The injustice reacted upon himself,
and developed by degrees into the cynical mood of fancy

which became manifest in `Fifine at the Fair'.
It is true that, in the light of this explanation, we see an effect

very unlike its cause; but the chemistry of human emotion
is like that of natural life. It will often form a compound

in which neither of its constituents can be recognized.
This perverse poem was the last as well as the first manifestation

of an ungenial mood of Mr. Browning's mind. A slight exception
may be made for some passages in `Red Cotton Nightcap Country',

and for one of the poems of the `Pacchiarotto' volume;
but otherwise no sign of moral or mentaldisturbance betrays itself

in his subsequent work. The past and the present gradually assumed for him
a more just relation to each other. He learned to meet life

as it offered itself to him with a more frank recognition of its good gifts,
a more gratefulresponse to them. He grew happier, hence more genial,

as the years advanced.
It was not without misgiving that Mr. Browning published `Fifine at the Fair';

but many years were to pass before he realized the kind of criticism
to which it had exposed him. The belief conveyed in the letter

to Miss Blagden that what proceeds from a genuineinspiration
is justified by it, combined with the indifference to public opinion

which had been engendered in him by its long neglect,
made him slow to anticipate the results of external judgment,

even where he was in some degree prepared to endorse them.
For his value as a poet, it was best so.

The August of 1872 and of 1873 again found him with his sister at St.-Aubin,
and the earlier visit was an important one: since it supplied him

with the materials of his next work, of which Miss Annie Thackeray,
there also for a few days, suggested the title. The tragic drama

which forms the subject of Mr. Browning's poem had been in great part enacted
in the vicinity of St.-Aubin; and the case of disputed inheritance to which

it had given rise was pending at that moment in the tribunals of Caen.
The prevailingimpression left on Miss Thackeray's mind

by this primitive district was, she declared, that of white cotton nightcaps
(the habitual headgear of the Normandy peasants). She engaged

to write a story called `White Cotton Nightcap Country';
and Mr. Browning's quick sense of both contrast and analogy

inspired the introduction of this emblem of repose into his own picture
of that peaceful, prosaic existence, and of the ghastlyspiritual conflict

to which it had served as background. He employed a good deal
of perhaps strained ingenuity in the opening pages of the work,

in making the white cap foreshadow the red, itself the symbol of liberty,
and only indirectly connected with tragic events; and he would,

I think, have emphasized the irony of circumstance in a manner
more characteristic of himself, if he had laid his stress on the remoteness

from `the madding crowd', and repeated Miss Thackeray's title.
There can, however, be no doubt that his poetic imagination,

no less than his human insight, was amply vindicated
by his treatment of the story.

On leaving St.-Aubin he spent a month at Fontainebleau, in a house situated
on the outskirts of the forest; and here his principal indoor occupation

was reading the Greek dramatists, especially Aeschylus,
to whom he had returned with revived interest and curiosity.

`Red Cotton Nightcap Country' was not begun till his return to London
in the later autumn. It was published in the early summer of 1873.

Chapter 17
1873-1878

London Life -- Love of Music -- Miss Egerton-Smith --
Periodical Nervous Exhaustion -- Mers; `Aristophanes' Apology' --