It is this "emancipation" from our confinement in the bonds of prose,
commonplace, and routine, by a passion and thought-winged imagination,
which is the true subject of the poem. But he chooses to convey his
meaning, as usual, through the rich refracting medium of dramatic
characters and situations quite unlike his own. So his "apology for
poetry" becomes an item in Don Juan's case for the "poetry" of dalliance
with light-o'-loves. Fifine herself acquires new importance; the
emancipated gipsy turns into the pert seductive coquette, while over
against her rises the pathetic shadow of the "wife in trouble," her
white fingers pressing Juan's arm, "ravishingly pure" in her "pale
constraint." Between these three persons the moving drama is played out,
ending, like all Don Juan stories, with the triumph of the baser
influence. Elvire, with her eloquent silences and wistful pathos, is an
exquisite creation,--a wedded sister of Shakespeare's Hero; Fifine, too,
with her strutting bravado and "pose half frank, half fierce," shrills
her discordant note vivaciously enough. The principal speaker himself is
the most complex of Browning's casuists, a marvellously rich and
many-hued piece of portraiture. This Juan is deeply versed in all the
activities of the imagination which he so eloquently defends. Painting
and poetry, science and philosophy, are at his command; above all, he is
an artist and a poet in the lore of Love.

It is easy to see that the kind of adventure on which Juan claims the
right of projecting his imagination has close affinities with the
habitual procedure of Browning's own. Juan defends his dealings with
the gay fizgig Fifine as a step to the fuller appreciation of Elvire; he
demands freedom to escape only as a means of possessing more surely and
intimately what he has. And Browning's "emancipation" is not that of the
purely Romantic poet, who pursues a visionary abstraction remote from
all his visible environment. The emancipated soul, for him, was rather