ABSTRACT
The passionate anguish of King Lear needs no relief: its awful beauty is enough. But the raw material of a ‘penny dreadful’, such as the theme here is, requires more artistic manipulation than Mr. Browning has given it before it can be called a poem. Beauty of any kind is what he has carefully excluded. Vulgarity, therefore, is stamped upon The Inn Album, in spite of the ingenuity with which, by suppressing name and place and superfluous circumstance, the writer succeeds in presenting only the spiritual action and reaction of his characters upon each other, in spite of the marvellous scalpel-exercise of analysis which bares the most recondite motives, in spite of the intellectual brilliancy which gives a value to everything he has to say.
