BOOKS.

FIFINE AT THE FAIR.*

MR. BROWNING'S imagination loves the curious. There is & dash of the grotesque in everything he gives his mind to, and, more than a dash in Fifine at the Fair. The general drift of the book is a poetical philosophy of the higher elements of human life. The prologue sets forth, in a parable of which• we afterwards receive, in the text of the poem, a somewhat. different application, how the poet's imagination is a sort of mediate world between the finite and the infinite,—between time- and eternity,—by the help of which a man living, and living by choice, in the tumult of earthly interests, may be enabled to con- ceive the more spiritual sphere in which, as yet, it has no desire to emerge. Mr. Browning describes a swim,—perhaps in Bunk bay on the Breton coast, as the scene of the poem is laid there,—in which the swimmer, floating in the sea, sees a butterfly above him. hovering in the air between the swimmer and the sun, and observes that neither could enter the other's sphere without a sort of death that should change its mode of living. The sea here represents to him that intermediate region of passion and thought between. the solid earth and spiritual life, which is accessible only to the- poet, and the butterfly is of course a kind of image of the dis- embodied life of the spirit. Watching the butterfly as he floats,, he muses thus :-

"Can the insect feel the better For watching the uncouth play Of limbs that slip the fetter, Pretend as they were not clay?

" Undoubtedly I rejoice That the air comports so well

With a creature which had the choice Of the land once. Who can tall ?

" What if a certain soul Which early slipped its sheath, And has for its home the whole Of heaven, thus look beneath, " Thus watch one who, in the world, Both lives and likes life's way, Nor wishes the wings unfurled That sleep in the worm, they say?

"Bat sometimes when the weather Is blue, and warm waves tempt To free oneself of tether, And try a life exempt "From worldly noise and dust, In the sphere which overbrims With passion and thought, —why, just Unable to fly, one swims!

" By passion and thought upborne, One smiles to oneself,—' They fare Scarce better, they need not scorn Our sea, who live in the air!'

"Emancipate through passion And thought, with sea for sky, We substitute, in a fashion, For heaven,—poetry : " Which sea, to all intent, Gives flesh such noon-disport As a finer element Affords the spirit-sort.

" Whatever they are, we seem: Imagine the thing they know ; All deeds they do, we dream ; Can heaven bo else but so?"

And the inference intended is that poetry gives a real vision of the spiritual life, and especially helps us to understand the highest human relation,—that which is independent of death,—love. The same image recurs, as we have said, in the body of the poem in relation to the desire of the spirit of man to arise " into the- truth of things out of their falseness." Mr. Browning asks him- self how this is possible, and uses the illustration of his Pornic swim to show, imaginatively, that it is quite possible for a mind as well as a body to be really amphibian, to move in an element which it is hopeless even to think of quitting, and yet to live and' move therein as it does, solely through its capacity for inhaling a rarer and purer element by which it can never, under present conditions, be wholly surrounded and sustained :-

"' That rise into the true out of the false—explain?' May an example serve ? In yonder bay, I bathed,

This sunny morning: swam my best, then hung, half swathed !Vine at Me Pair. By Robert Browning. London : Smith, Elder, out Clo. 1872. With chill, and half with warmth, i' the channel's midmost deep: You know how one—not treads, but stands in water? Keep ' Body and limbs below, hold head back, uplift chin, And, for the rest, leave care ! If brow, eyes, mouth, should win Their freedom, excellent ! If they must brook the surge, No matter though they sink, let but the nose emerge.

So all of me in brine lay soaking: did I care One jot ? I kept alive by man's due breath of air I' the nostrils high and dry. At times, o'er these would run The ripple, even wash the wavelet,—for the sun Tempted advance, no doubt: and always flash of froth, Fish-outbreak, bubbling by, would find me nothing loth To rise and look around ; then all was overawept With dark and death at once. But trust the old adept! Back went again the head, a merest motion made, Fin-fashion, either hand, and nostril soon conveyed 'The news that light and life were still in reach as erst: Always the last and,—wait and watch,—sometimes the first.

'Try to ascend breast-high ? wave arms wide free of tether?

Be in the air and leave the water altogether ?

Under went all again, till I resigned myself To only breathe the air, that's footed by an elf, And only swim the water, that's native to a fish.

But there is no denying that, ere I curbed my wish,

And schooled my restive arms, salt entered mouth and eyes

-Often enough—sun, sky, and air so tantalise!

Still, the adept swims, this accorded, that denied ; Can always breathe, sometimes see and be satisfied !

"I liken to this play o' the body, fruitless strife To slip the sea and hold the heaven, my spirit's life 'Twist false, whence it would break, and true, where it would bide.

I move in, yet resist, am upborne every side By what I beat against, an element too gross To live in, did not soul duly obtain her dose 'Of life-breath, and inhale from truth's pure plenitude Above her, snatch and gain enough to just illude 'With hope that some brave bound may baffle evermore The obstructing medium, make who swam henceforward soar : —Gain scarcely snatched when, foiled by the very effort, eowse, Underneath ducks the soul, her truthward yearnings dowse Deeper in falsehood ! ay, but fitted less and less To bear in nose and mouth old briny bitterness Proved alien more and more : since each experience proves Air—the essential good, not sea, wherein who moves Mast thence, in the act, escape, apart from will or wish.

Move a more hand to take waterweed, jelly-fish, Upward you tend ! And yet our business with the sea Is not with air, but just o' the water, watery : We must endure the false, no particle of which Do we acquaint us with, but up we mount a pitch Above it, find our head reach truth, while hands explore The false below : so much while here we bathe,—no more !"

The whole of Mr. Browning's poem is a filling-in of this ideal ground- work, an illustration of his text that the life of man is a life of error lived by the help of truth, a life of falsehood which implies the need and capacity for reality, a life of illusion grounded and fulfilled in some ultimate perception of true being, a life of endless yearning after that which always eludes and yet always inspires us, a life of time imbued with meaning by a spark of eternity,—in short, a life such as that attributed to the nymph-goddess by JEschylus when be called her "divine or mortal, or a mingling of both ;" (dE6cruro; (3P67110; xexPu,xiPr,). This is the theme which Mr. Brown- ing pursues through many a page of his eccentric, caustic, abrupt, business-like passion, into something like a philosophy of love, of beauty, of art, and even of faith. He enlarges—in his own specially-beloved style of what we may call brusque short-hand English, for he burkes his articles, definite and indefinite, and:not Ainfrequently his prepositions, in his eagerness to get on and his impatience of those universal commonplace links of thought which he thinks the world may take for granted without giving him the trouble of writing them down,—on the absolute subordination of the external world to the qualities of mind which it contributes to develop in man in the seeing soul, all worth lies, I assert,

And nought i' the world, which, save for soul that sees, inert Was, is, and would be ever,—stuff for transmuting,—null And void until man's breath evoke the beautiful— But, touched aright, prompt yields each particle, its tongue Of elemental flame,—no matter whence flame sprung From gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness, So long as soul has power to make them burn, express What lights and warms henceforth, leaves only ash behind, Howe'er the chance."

To illustrate how Mr. Browning applies this theory of the abso- lute subordination of the external to the flame of feeling it excites in man, to his philosophy of beauty, we may explain that he includes expressly, as one of his three great types of beauty, the type of 'horror, i.e., the intense repulsion with which human nature recoils from ugliness, for there also you have a genuine flame of feeling struck out of the soul by collision with the external world, indeed horror of ugliness is the first stage of that passion which in its highest form is love,—self-abandonment to what is or seems higher than oneself. He takes the great modern artist Gerome as the most perfect expositor of this type of beauty,—horror of ugliness. He takes Sir Joshua Reynolds as the expositor of the second and higher, because more positive phase of beauty, the beauty of a fascination that has a smiling magic of sweetness and pleasure in it, but no true intensity ; and this last,—the intensity of self- oblivion,—Mr. Browning presents, as we have said, as the highest phase of beauty,—that utter passion and absolute self-sacrifice which implies the white-heat of the human soul. Again, Mr. Brown- ing defines Art as that which, given a trace of any beauty of human expression, searches for the whole till it completes it, and divines by a sort of natural gift what the full beauty of any fragmentary gleam really would be. Love, again, is, according to Mr. Brown- ing's philosophy, the supplementary impulse which helps one life to perceive in another, qualities which it needs, and which, by combination with its own, will create a larger and truer life

While, oh; how all the more will love become intense,

Hereafter, when 'to love ' means yearning to dispense, Each soul, its own amount of gain through its own mode

Of practising with life, upon some soul which owed Its treasure, all diverse and yet in worth the same, To new work and changed way! Things furnish you rose-flame, Which burn up red, green, blue, nay, yellow more than needs, For me, I nowise doubt; why doubt a time succeeds

When each one may impart, and each receive, both share The ohmic secret, learn,—where I lit force, why there

You drew forth lambent pity,—where I found only food For self-indulgence, you still blew a spark at brood I' the greyest ember, stopped not till self-sacrifice imbued

Heaven's face with flame? What joy, when each may supplement

The other, changing each, as changed till, wholly blent,

The old things shall be new, and, what we both ignite, Fuse, lose the varicolor in achromatic white !

Exemplifying law, apparent even now

In the eternal progress,—love's law which I avow And thus would formulate : each soul lives, longs and works

For itself, by itself, because a lodestar lurks, An other than itself,—in whatsoe'er the niche

Of mistiest heaven it bide, whoe'er the Glumdalclioh

May grasp the Gulliver : or it, or he, or she- Theosutos e broteios eper kekramene,—

(For fun's sake, where the phrase has fastened, leave it fixed!

So soft it says,—God, man, or both together mixed !) This, guessed at through the flesh, by parts which prove the whole, This constitutes the soul discernible by soul."

And Mr. Browning's poetical philosophy of faith is in strict keeping with these previous conceptions of beauty, art, and love. Divine truth is known not by looking outside the soul, but by watching the permanent residuum left beneath all its own changes. Mr. Browning preaches that what men believe only because they desire it, is all human,—the falsehood through which Truth at last mani- fests itself,—but that the Truth which manifests itself through these falsehoods is that which forces itself back again upon the mind after all its efforts to believe otherwise, and which we could not know to be true till after the falsehoods had tried and failed to supersede it. That which endures in spite of not redounding to men's vanity and dignity, that which after every effort to magnify humanity forces us into submission to its will, being quite other than our will,—this is divine will. Yet the true is gained through the false, —just as the air was breathed by the swimmer through the help of the water which taken alone would have drowned him, —and could not have been gained without its aid. It is the experi- ence of human dreams which alone enables us to see that that which disappoints and breaks human dreams, and which forces us to mould ourselves into keeping with it, instead of indulging them any longer, is above and beyond all human dreams, and is indeed the permanent to which their transience leads us :- " Each lie

Redounded to the praise of man, was victory Man's nature had both right to get, and might to gain, And by no means implied submission to the reign Of other quite as real a nature, that saw fit To have its way with man, not man his way, with it. This time, acknowledgment and acquiescence quell Their contrary in man ; promotion proves as well Defeat: and Truth, unlike the False with Truth's outside, Neither plumes up his will nor puffs him out with pride. I fancy, there must lurk some cogency i' the claim, Man, such abatement made, submits to, all the same.

But, if time 'a pressure, light's Or rather, dark's approach, wrest thoroughly the rights Of rule away, and bid the soul submissive bear Another soul than it play master everywhere In groat and small,—this time, I fancy, none disputes There 'a something in the fact that such conclusion suits Nowise the pride of man, nor yet chimes in with attributes Conspicuous in the lord of nature. He receives

And not demands—not first likes faith and then believes."

Such is the general tenor of this curious philosophical poem,— a poem which is connected in the slightest possible way with its title, Fifine at the Fair. Fifine is only a gipey acrobat, who

appears with her husband at the Breton fair of Pornic, and whose habits, tastes, and loves, and unwomanly type of beauty, serve as graphic texts from which to start on these long dissertations as to the true philosophy of art and love and faith. The deeply- rooted gipsy lawlessness which hates civilised order, while yet it is attracted to it, hovers round it, and lives upon what it can snatch from it, starts Mr. Browning on his first vein of thought, that it is through the experience of what is false and temporary that we alone earn any knowledge of what is true, even though it is the spark of troth in us which enables us to live in the false and temporary. But Fifine's share in the poem, though graphic as far as it goes, and not wanting in picturesque elements, is extremely slight.

We have taken some pains to give a sort of résumé of Mr. Browning's teaching in this poem, because the style is abrupt, not always very easy to construe, and full of sharp digressions. As a poem, though it has much that is very vigorous and striking in it, we cannot think it one of his best. The philosophy is questionable, but always, when it is clear, ingenious and brilliantly illustrated. But the movement is harsh, and the treatment is far too intel- lectual,—far too little harmonised by art. We cannot endure what we have termed his short-hand style. In a poem, to leave out the little connecting links for the sake of brevity, is like stripping a rose-tree of its leaves for the sake of gaining space. Take the briefest of specimens :— " What sound out-warbles brook, while, at the source, it wins That moss and stone dispart, allow its bubblings breathe ?" Just conceive speaking of " a brook " as "brook " ! It is as jarring to us as the bourgeois custom of some wives of calling their husbands Mr. B. or Mr. C. And then the compression of "that moss and stone allow its bubblings to breathe," or " let its bubblings breathe," into "allow its bubblings breathe." That is not only not poetry ; it is hardly prose. And why need Mr. Brown- ing make his certainly very unpleasant-mannered husband say, when he gives a sharp hit at his wife's weaknesses, "pouch that"? He might almost as well let him give her a blow in the stomach. This is the kind of fault which makes a poet full of intellectual resource and ability,—indeed one whom one sometimes is tempted to think too intellectual by half for poetry, because he thinks so much more of the substance than the form of what he says,—so often repulsive as to offend his warmest admirers, and almost always "caviare to the million." Fifine at the Fair is one of his most thoughtful,— almost morbidly thoughtful,—poems. But no one will compare it with the volume containing Men and Women or with The Ring and the Book, for elements of true beauty. It is, indeed, on the whole, difficult, and more than usually abrupt and violent in the turns of its thought.