ABSTRACT
It is always with hesitation and pain that we speak unfavourably of the work of any writer to whom the world owes as much as it does to Mr. Browning. And we have felt this so keenly on the present occasion, that the fear of missing something great in what superficially appeared poor, has kept us silent till there seemed no danger of misapprehension. It is, however, impossible to say that we find anything really admirable in this repulsive and very roughly versified story. It is not tragedy, for tragedy should ‘purify’, if not ‘by pity and by fear’, still somehow by mingled sympathy for human weakness and reverence for human greatness, and Mr. Browning does not manage either to touch our sympathy for the erring, nor to thrill us with the high passion of a great mind. We dislike the victim almost as keenly as we dislike the betrayer of his story, and find in the delineation neither of the one nor of the other that vividness and truthfulness of conception which convince us that we are dealing with real life, though it be only the real life of a true poet’s imagination. The story has all the faults of a melodrama, that is, of a sensational situation in which the tragic effect of the circumstances narrated, rises in agony far above the tragic effect of the feeling portrayed; and the lines of true poetry contained in the two hundred pages are quite too few to relieve the heavy atmosphere by gleams of that undefinable light ‘that never was on sea or land.’ Our objection to the Inn Album is briefly this,— that it tells a tale of a wrecked life and dwells on the grimmest caprices of the irony of fate, without either touching the reader’s heart or filling his imagination with the mystery of the mutilated hopes and broken purposes he finds portrayed…,
[A detailed account of the characters and plot follows.] Assuredly, as a whole, this poem is not worthy of Mr. Browning. His immoral
lord is simply pert, and often vulgar; his injured lady is hard, without a trace of humility, or anything of that large store of love which would fain win back to better ways him who had ruined her life. Then there is not a trace of Mr. Browning’s acute and often most instructive thoughtfulness in the poem. From the beginning to the end of it, we have found not one of those rare bits of wisdom of which his earlier poems were full. The grating character of his style is exaggerated; the reflective light has disappeared from it; and the action of the
