The happy fifteen-year sojourn in Italy ended in 1861 with Elizabeth's death. The widower returned to London with his son. During the twenty-eight years remaining to him, the quantity of verse he produced did not diminish. Dramatis Personae (1864) is a volume containing some of his most intriguing monologues, such as "Caliban upon Setebos." And in 1868 he published his longest and most significant single poem, The Ring and the Book, which was inspired by his discovery of an old book of legal records concerning a murder trial in seventeenth-century Rome. His poem tells the story of a brutally sadistic husband, Count Guido Franceschini. The middle-aged Guido grows dissatisfied with his young wife, Pompilia, and accuses her of having adulterous relations with a handsome priest who, like St. George, had tried to rescue her from the appalling situation in which her husband confined her. Eventually Guido stabs his wife to death and is himself executed. In a series of twelve books, Browning retells this tale of violence, presenting it from the contrasting points of view of participants and spectators. Because of its vast scale, The Ring and the Book is like a Victorian novel, but in its experiments with multiple points of view it anticipates later works such as Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim (1900) and Akira Kurosawa's film Rashdmon (1950).
After The Ring and the Book several more volumes appeared. In general, Browning's writings during the last two decades of his life exhibit a certain mechanical repetition of mannerism and an excess of argumentation�tendencies into which he may have been led by the unqualified enthusiasm of his admirers, for it was during this period that he gained his great following. When he died, in 1889, he was buried in West- minster Abbey.
During the London years Browning became extremely fond of social life. He dined at the homes of friends and at clubs, where he enjoyed port wine and conversation. He would talk loudly and emphatically about many topics�except his own poetry, about which he was usually reticent. Despite his bursts of outspokenness, Browning's character seemed, in Thomas Hardy's words, "the literary puzzle of the nineteenth century." Like William Butler Yeats, he was a poet preoccupied with masks. On the occasion of his burial, his friend Henry James reflected that many oddities and many great writers have been buried in Westminster Abbey, "but none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones been so odd."
Just as Browning's character is hard to identify so also are his poems difficult to
relate to the age in which they were written. Bishops and painters of the Renaissance,
physicians of the Roman Empire, musicians of eighteenth-century Germany�as we
explore this gallery of talking portraits we seem to be in a world of time long past,
remote from the world of steam engines and disputes about human beings' descent
from the ape. Yet our first impression is misleading. Many of these portraits explore
problems that confronted Browning's contemporaries, especially problems of faith
and doubt, of good and evil, and of the function of the artist in modern life. "Caliban
upon Setebos," for example, is a highly topical critique of Darwinism and of natural
(as opposed to supernatural) religions. Browning's own attitude toward these topics
is partially concealed because of his use of speakers and of settings from earlier ages,
yet we do encounter certain recurrent religious assumptions that we can safely assign
to the poet himself. The most recurrent is that God has created an imperfect world
as a kind of testing ground, a "vale of soul-making," as John Keats had said. It followed,
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for Browning's purposes, that the human soul must be immortal and that heaven itself be perfect. As Abt Vogler affirms: "On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round." Armed with such a faith, Browning sometimes gives the impression that he was himself untroubled by the doubts that gnawed at the hearts of Tennyson, Arnold, and other figures in the mid-Victorian period. Yet Browning's apparent optimism is consistently being tested by his bringing to light the evils of human nature. His gallery of villains�murderers, sadistic husbands, mean and petty manipulators� is an extraordinary one. Few writers, in fact, seem to have been more aware of the existence of evil.