Mr. Browning’s whole theory of artistic perception is contained in the foregoing lines; but he proceeds to enforce it in another way.  “The life thus evoked from death, the beauty from ugliness, is the gain of each special soul—­its permanent conquest over matter.  The mode of effecting this is the special secret of every soul; and this Don Juan defines as its chemic secret, the law of its affinities, the law of its actions and reactions.  Where one, he says, lights force, another draws forth pity; where one finds food for self-indulgence, another acquires strength for self-sacrifice.  One blows life’s ashes into rose-coloured flame, another into less heavenly hues.  Love will have reached its height when the secret of each soul has become the knowledge of all; and the many-coloured rays of individual experience are fused in the white light of universal truth.”

Here again Don Juan imagines a retort.  Elvire makes short work of his poetic theories, and declares that this professed interest in souls is a mere pretext for the gratification of sense.  “Whom in heaven’s name is he trying to take in?” He entreats music to take his part.  “It alone can pierce the mists of falsehood which intervene between the soul and truth.  And now, as they stroll homewards in the light of the setting sun, all things seem charged with those deeper harmonies—­with those vital truths of existence which words are powerless to convey.  Elvire, however, has no soul for music, and her husband must have recourse to words.”

The case between them may, he thinks, be stated in this question, “How do we rise from falseness into truth?” “We do so after the fashion of the swimmer who brings his nostrils to the level of the upper air, but leaves the rest of his body under water—­by the act of self-immersion in the very element from which we wish to escape.  Truth is to the aspiring soul as the upper air to the swimmer:  the breath of life.  But if the swimmer attempts to free his head and arms, he goes under more completely than before.  If the soul strives to escape from the grosser atmosphere into the higher, she shares the same fate.  Her truthward yearnings plunge her only deeper into falsehood.  Body and soul must alike surrender themselves to an element in which they cannot breathe, for this element can alone sustain them.  But through the act of plunging we float up again, with a deeper disgust at the briny taste we have brought back; with a deeper faith in the life above, and a deeper confidence in ourselves, whom the coarser element has proved unable to submerge.”

“Suppose again, that as we paddle with our hands under water, we grasp at something which seems a soul.  The piece of falsity slips through our fingers, but by the mechanical reaction just described, it sends us upwards into the realm of truth.  This is precisely what Fifine has done.  Of the earth earthy as she is, she has driven you and me into the realms of abstract truth.  We have thus no right to despise her” This discourse is interrupted by a contemptuous allusion to a passage in “Childe Harold,” (fourth canto), in which the human intelligence is challenged to humble itself before the ocean.