spectator's ear:--

"... 'All's change, but permanence as well.'
--Grave note whence--list aloft!--harmonics sound, that mean:
Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between
Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence.
The individual soul works through the shows of sense,
(Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true)
Up to an outer soul as individual too;
And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed,
And reach at length 'God, man, or both together mixed,'"[55]
(p. 332.)

The condition of this monument, its history, the conjectures to which
it has given rise, are described in a humorous spirit which belies its
mystic significance; but that significance is imbedded in the very
conception of the poem, and distinctly expressed in the author's
subsequent words. The words which I have just quoted contain the whole
philosophy of "Fifine at the Fair" as viewed on its metaphysical side.
They declare the changing relations of the soul to some fixed eternal
truth foreshadowed in the impulses of sense. They are the burden of Don
Juan's argument even when he is defending what is wrong. They are the
constantly recurring keynote of what the author has meant to say.

Don Juan draws also a new and more moral lesson from this final vision
of his dream. "Inconstancy is not justified by natural law, for it means
unripeness of soul. The ripe soul evolves the Infinite from a fixed
point. It finds the many in the one. Elvire is the _one_ who includes
the _many_. Elvire is the ocean: while Fifine is but the foam-flake
which the ocean can multiply at pleasure. Elvire shall henceforth
suffice to him."

But here, as elsewhere, he makes a great mistake: that of confusing
nature with the individual man. Her instability supplied him with no
excuse for being inconstant, and her permanence gives him no motive for
constancy; and he proves this in another moment by breaking bounds no
longer in word only, but in deed. It turns out that he had put gold as
well as silver into Fifine's tambourine. The result, intended or not,
has been a letter slipped into his hand. He claims five minutes to go
and "clear the matter up;" exceeds the time, and on returning finds his
punishment in an empty home.

This at least, we seem intended to infer. For Elvire has already
startled him by assuming the likeness of a phantom,