in them, and Browning plays all their hands, even in The Inn Album, which is not a monologue.  In Red Cotton Nightcap Country, when he has told the story of the man and woman in all its sordid and insane detail, with comments of his own, he brings the victim of mean pleasure and mean superstition to the top of the tower whence he throws himself down, and, inserting his intelligence into the soul of the man, explains his own view of the situation.  In Prince Hohenstiel Schwangau, we have sometimes what Browning really thinks, as in the beginning of the poem, about the matter in hand, and then what he thinks the Prince would think, and then, to complicate the affair still more, the Prince divides himself, and makes a personage called Sagacity argue with him on the whole situation.  As to Fifine at the Fair—­a poem it would not be fair to class altogether with these—­its involutions resemble a number of live eels in a tub of water.  Don Juan changes his personality and his views like a player on the stage who takes several parts; Elvire is a gliding phantom with gliding opinions; Fifine is real, but she remains outside of this shifting scenery of the mind; and Browning, who continually intrudes, is sometimes Don Juan and sometimes himself and sometimes both together, and sometimes another thinker who strives to bring, as in the visions in the poem, some definition into this changing cloudland of the brain.  And after all, not one of the questions posed in any of the poems is settled in the end.  I do not say that the leaving of the questions unsettled is not like life.  It is very like life, but not like the work of poetry, whose high office it is to decide questions which cannot be solved by the understanding.

Bishop Blongram thinks he has proved his points.  Gigadibs is half convinced he has.  But the Bishop, on looking back, thinks he has not been quite sincere, that his reasonings were only good for the occasion.  He has evaded the centre of the thing.  What he has said was no more than intellectual fencing.  It certainly is intellectual fencing of the finest kind.  Both the Bishop and his companion are drawn to the life; yet, and this is the cleverest thing in the poem, we know that the Bishop is in reality a different man from the picture he makes of himself.  And the truth which in his talk underlies its appearance acts on Gigadibs and sends him into a higher life.  The discussion—­as it may be called though the Bishop only speaks—­concerning faith and doubt is full of admirable wisdom, and urges me to modify my statement that Browning took little or no interest in the controversies of his time.  Yet, all through the fencing, nothing is decided.  The button is always on the Bishop’s foil.  He never sends the rapier home.  And no doubt that is the reason that his companion, with “his sudden healthy vehemence” did drive his weapon home into life—­and started for Australia.