that which incessantly "practised with" its environment, fighting its
way through countless intervening films of illusion to the full
knowledge of itself and of all that it originally held _in posse_. This
might not be an adequate account of his own artistic processes, in which
genial instinct played a larger, and resolute will a smaller, part than
his invincible athleticism of temperament would suggest. But his
marvellous wealth of spontaneous vision was fed and enriched by
incessant "practice with" his environment; his idealism was vitalised by
the ceaseless play of eye and brain upon the least promising mortal
integuments of spirit; he possessed "Elvire" the more securely for
having sent forth his adventurous imagination to practise upon
innumerable Fifines.

The poem itself--as a defence of his poetic methods--was an "adventure"
in which imagination played an unusually splendid part. A succession of
brilliant and original images, visions, similes, parables, exhibits the
twofold nature of the "stuff" with which the artist plays,--its
inferiority, its poverty, its "falseness" in itself, its needfulness,
its potency, its worth for him. It is the water which supports the
swimmer, but in which he cannot live; the dross of straw and chaff which
yields the brilliant purity of flame (c. 55); the technical cluster of
sounds from which issues "music--that burst of pillared cloud by day and
pillared fire by night" (c. 41). The whole poem is haunted by the sense
of dissonance which these images suggest between the real and the
apparent meaning of things. Browning's world, else so massive and so
indubitable, becomes unsubstantial and phantasmal, an illusive pageant
in which Truth is present only under a mask, being "forced to manifest
itself through falsehood." Juan, who declares that, unlike poets, "we
prose-folk" always dream, has, in effect, a visionary quality of
imagination which suits his thesis and his theme. The "dream figures" of