Consider how Browning uses the dramatic monologue to contribute to the effects of objectivity and concentration in fictionalizing the predicament of the human soul in his poem Fra Lippo Lippi .

If the zeitgeist of the Victorian period finds a vivid outlet in the poetic Oeuvre of Tennyson , those of Browning , who remained far away from the Victorian madding crowd, chronicle the history of the human soul. A perfect ‘soul’s scanning’, his poems, therefore, shed ample light on the psychic landscape. This accounts of why critics fondly describe them as fictions of the human soul. The question naturally arises about the secret of the poet’s success and critics are generally of the opinion that Browning scored his victory intelligently using the technique of the dramatic monologue.

Browning was very much interested in the stage , but was never much of a success there. His failure, however, was responsible for supplying him with the insight into the type of poetry he should write. Unlike a soliloquy, which is a process of thinking aloud, a dramatic monologue is a speech of a single person in the presence of a silent interlocutor, who never speaks , but whose silent presence adequately dramatizes the speaker’s eloquence. In Browning’s monologues every detail of the setting is well expressed and his tiny stage is peopled with fully rounded figures though only the main character has the speaking part.

In Fra Lippo Lippi Browning chooses an early Renaissance painter who reveals his dilemma in a mood of humour directed against himself. The scene is a night- street where Lippo is intercepted by a guard as he saunters out of his Carmelite Monastery . Lippi recounts the historyof his life, his likes and dislikes , his achievements and failures and the chief of the guard plays the role of the silent interlocutor. The poet vividly fleshes out the inner psyche of Lippo, who wants to drink life to to the lees.

 Browning makes Lippo an irrepressible scapegrace – a tonsured Falstaff –with an appetite for the delights of the palate and the senses , and an artist with inborn leaning towards realism. He is impatient of the distorting pressure of piety upon art , and equally of any ideal beauty beyond that sensible to the eye , being convinced that this world, if we grasp it with both hands, “means intensely and means good” ( W.T.Young).

We must add , however , that to a modern reader Browning’s characters have an ambiguous appeal.These characters do not have the subtle ingenuity of figures like Prufrock or Gerontion. The poems are either making a philosophy of the imperfect , or receiving satisfaction out of their defeat.