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The first considerable production of a great writer must always claim attention from the student of his mind and art. The poem is a study in what Browning in his Fifine terms "mental analysis"; it attempts to shadow forth, through the fluctuating moods of the dying man, a series of spiritual states.
Anita Lawton held a similar conversation with each of the three girls, with a like result. To Fifine Déchaussée, a tall, refined girl, with the colorless, devout face of a religieuse, the probability of entering a minister's home, as governess for his children, was most welcome.
One might perish with laughter!" screamed Odalie, with a piercing affectation of merriment, and once more Fifine banged her heels hilariously against the door-step, as she sat on the threshold, and cried in derision, "Fonny! Fonny!" "Where, Fifine? At the stockade? Some hole?"
After Fifine at the Fair appeared the Inn Album, in 1875, a purely narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place one of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after the Inn Album came what is perhaps the most preposterously individual thing he ever wrote, Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper, in 1876.
At the Cathedral entrance she kissed them, and then stood for a moment to watch them as they hurried down the street out of sight. On the evening of the 18th of September, Mother Meraut was late in leaving the Cathedral, and it was nearly dark when she reached Madame Coudert's door. Pierrette sat on the steps waiting for her, with Fifine, the cat, in her arms.
At this Hamish looked blank for a moment and in consternation; Odalie exclaimed, "Oh, oh!" but Fifine infinitely admired Mr. Gilfillan, and nothing doubted him worthy of imitation. "I'll have none, but for a different reason. I'll cut my lovely locks close with Odalie's shears as soon as she finds them," Hamish declared.
Fifine at the Fair, like Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, is one of Browning's apologetic soliloquies the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards actually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the poem is called cynical.
Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Married two wives this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in Fifine at the Fair.
But, alas! for the sight of Odalie's home that she had loved and made so happy, and where he had been as cherished as Fifine herself, all grim, charred ashes; and poor Dill's cabin! he knew by this time that Dill was dead, very dead, or he would have come back to them. The fields, too, that they had sown, and that none would reap, trampled and torn, and singed and burnt!
After that she undertook the rôle of missionary in some sort, and in quiet unobtrusive ways suggested bits of orthodox doctrine of much solace to his ruminating spirit, and sometimes on dreary, icebound days he and she and Fifine sat on the crudely fashioned benches before the fire and sang psalms and hymns together till the station rang with the solemn choiring.
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