A review of
The Inn Album, by Robert Browning, London, Smith & Elder; Boston, J. R. Osgood & Co. 1875. Originally published in
The Nation, January 20, 1876.
ON A DRAMA OF MR. BROWNING
This is a decidedly irritating and displeasing
performance. It is growing more difficult
every year for Mr. Browning's old friends to fight
his battles for him, and many of them will feel that
on this occasion the cause is really too hopeless,
and the great poet must himself be answerable for
his indiscretions.
Nothing that Mr. Browning writes, of course,
can be vapid; if this were possible, it would be a
much simpler affair. If it were a case of a writer
"running thin," as the phrase is, there would be
no need for criticism; there would be nothing in
the way of matter to criticise, and old readers
would have no heart to reproach. But it may be
said of Mr. Browning that he runs thick rather
than thin, and he need claim none of the tenderness
granted to those who have used themselves up
in the service of their admirers. He is robust and
vigorous; more so now, even, than heretofore, and
he is more prolific than in the earlier part of his
career. But his wantonness, his wilfulness, his
crudity, his inexplicable want of secondary thought,
as we may call it, of the stage of reflection that
follows upon the first outburst of the idea, and
smooths, shapes, and adjusts it--all this alloy of
his great genius is more sensible now than ever.
The Inn Album reads like a series of rough notes
for a poem--of hasty hieroglyphics and symbols,
decipherable only to the author himself. A great
poem might perhaps have been made of it, but
assuredly it is not a great poem, nor any poem
whatsoever. It is hard to say very coherently
what it is. Up to a certain point, like everything
of Mr. Browning's, it is highly dramatic and vivid
and beyond that point, like all its companions, it
is as little dramatic as possible. It is not narrative,
for there is not a line of comprehensible, consecutive
statement in the two hundred and eleven
pages of the volume. It is not lyrical, for there is
not a phrase which in any degree does the office of
the poetry that comes lawfully into the world--chants
itself, images itself, or lingers in the memory.
"That bard's a Browning; he neglects the
form!" one of the characters exclaims with irresponsible
frankness. That Mr. Browning knows
he "neglects the form," and does not particularly
care, does not very much help matters; it only
deepens the reader's sense of the graceless and
thankless and altogether unavailable character of
the poem. And when we say unavailable, we make
the only reproach which is worth addressing to a
writer of Mr. Browning's intellectual power. A
poem with so many presumptions in its favour as
such an authorship carries with it is a thing to make
some intellectual use of, to care for, to remember,
to return to, to linger over, to become intimate with.
But we can as little imagine a reader (who has not
the misfortune to be a reviewer) addressing himself
more than once to the perusal of The Inn Album,
as we fancy cultivating for conversational
purposes the society of a person afflicted with a
grievous impediment of speech.
Two gentlemen have been playing cards all night
in an inn-parlour, and the peep of day finds one
of them ten thousand pounds in debt to the other.
The tables have been turned, and the victim is the
actual victor. The elder man is a dissolute and
penniless nobleman, who has undertaken the social
education of the aspiring young heir of a great
commercial fortune, and has taught him so well
that the once ingenuous lad knows more than his
clever master. The young man has come down
into the country to see his cousin, who lives, hard
by at the Hall, with her aunt, and with whom his
aristocratic preceptor recommends him, for good
worldly reasons, to make a match.
Infinite discourse, of that formidable full-charged
sort that issues from the lips of all Mr.
Browning's characters, follows the play, and as
the morning advances the two gentlemen leave the
inn and go for a walk. Lord K. has meanwhile
related to his young companion the history of one
of his own earlier loves--how he had seduced a
magnificent young woman, and she had fairly
frightened him into offering her marriage. On
learning that he had meant to go free if he could,
her scorn for him becomes such that she rejects
his offer of reparation (a very fine stroke) and enters
into wedlock with a "smug, crop-haired,
smooth-chinned sort of curate-creature." The
young man replies that he himself was once in
love with a person that quite answers to this description,
and then the companions separate--the
pupil to call at the Hall, and the preceptor to catch
the train for London.
The reader is then carried back to the inn-parlour,
into which, on the departure of the gentlemen,
two ladies have been ushered. One of them
is the young man's cousin, who is playing at cross-purposes
with her suitor; the other is her intimate
friend, arrived on a flying visit. The intimate
friend is of course the ex-victim of Lord K. The
ladies have much conversation--all of it rather
more ingeniously inscrutable than that of their
predecessors; it terminates in the exit of the cousin
and the entrance of the young man. He recognizes
the curate's wife as the object of his own
stifled affection, and the two have, as the French
say, an intime conversation.
At last Lord K. comes back, having missed his
train, and finds himself confronted with his
stormy mistress. Very stormy she proves to be,
and her outburst of renewed indignation and irony
contains perhaps the most successful writing in the
poem. Touched by the lady's eloquence, the
younger man, who has hitherto professed an almost
passionate admiration for his companion, begins to
see him in a less interesting light, and in fact
promptly turns and reviles him. The situation is
here extremely dramatic. Lord K. is a cynic of a
sneaking pattern, but he is at any rate a man of
ideas. He holds the destiny of his adversaries in
his hands, and, snatching up the inn album (which
has been knocking about the table during the foregoing
portions of the narrative), he scrawls upon
it his ultimatum. Let the lady now bestow her
affection on his companion, and let the latter accept
this boon as a vicarious payment of the gambling
debt, otherwise Lord K. will enlighten the
lady's husband as to the extent of her acquaintance
with himself.
He presents the open page to the heroine, who
reads it aloud, and for an answer her younger and
more disinterested lover, "with a tiger-flash yell,
spring, and scream," throws himself on the insulter,
half an hour since, his guide, philosopher,
and friend, and, by some means undescribed by
Mr. Browning puts an end to his life. This incident
is related in two pregnant lines, which,
judged by the general standard of style of the Inn
Album, must be considered fine:
"A tiger-flash, yell, spring and scream: halloo!
Death's out and on him, has and holds him--ugh!"
The effect is of course augmented if the reader is careful to make the "ugh!" rhyme correctly with the "halloo!" The lady takes poison, which she carries on her person and which operates instantaneously, and the young man's cousin, re-entering the room, has a sufficiently tremendous surprise.
The whole picture indefinably appeals to the imagination. There is something very curious about it and even rather arbitrary, and the reader wonders how it came, in the poet's mind, to take exactly that shape. It is very much as if he had worked backwards, had seen his dénouement first, as a mere picture--the two corpses in the inn-parlour, and the young man and his cousin confronted above them--and then had traced back the possible motives and sources. In looking for these Mr. Browning has of course encountered a vast number of deep discriminations and powerful touches of portraitures. He deals with human character as a chemist with his acids and alkalies, and while he mixes his coloured fluids in a way that surprises the profane, knows perfectly well what he is about. But there is too apt to be in his style that hiss and sputter and evil aroma which characterise the proceedings of the laboratory. The idea, with Mr. Browning, always tumbles out into the world in some grotesque hind-foremost manner; it is like an unruly horse backing out of his stall, and stamping and plunging as he comes. His thought knows no simple stage--at the very moment of its birth it is a terribly complicated affair.
We frankly confess, at the risk of being accused of deplorable levity of mind, that we have found this want of clearness of explanation, of continuity, of at least superficial verisimilitude, of the smooth, the easy, the agreeable, quite fatal to our enjoyment of
The Inn Album. It is all too argumentative, too curious and recondite. The people talk too much in long set speeches, at a moment's notice, and the anomaly so common in Browning, that the talk of the women is even more rugged and insoluble than that of the men, is here greatly exaggerated. We are reading neither prose nor poetry; it is too real for the ideal, and too ideal for the real. The author of
The Inn Album is not a writer to whom we care to pay trivial compliments, and, it is not a trivial complaint to say that his book is only barely comprehensible. Of a successful dramatic poem one ought to be able to say more.
[The end]
Henry James's essay: On A Drama Of Mr. Browning