This is no exaggerated account of what is done in these poems.

Three people, even when the poems are monologues, are arguing 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.