his earnestness; not his fundamental earnestness, but the extent to which he remembered and exhibited it.  “My soul bade fight”:  yes, but “laugh,” too, and laugh for laughter’s as well as fight for principle’s sake.  This, again, is merely a matter of detail, of shading.  There can be little doubt that the whole general outline of the man is right, none whatever that it is a living and breathing outline.  His apology is presented in Browning’s familiar manner of genuine feeling tempered with sophistry.  As a piece of dramatic art it is worthy to stand beside his famous earlier apologies; and it has value too as a contribution to criticism, to a vital knowledge of the Attic drama and the work and personality of Aristophanes and Euripides, and to a better understanding of the drama as a criticism of life.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 50:  George Meredith, On the Idea of Comedy.]

23.  THE INN ALBUM.

[Published in November, 1875. (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol XII. pp. 179-311.) Translated into German in 1877:  “Das Fremdenbuch von Robert Browning.  Aus dem Englischen von E. Leo.  Hamburg:  W. Mauke Soehne.”]

The story of The Inn Album is founded on fact, though it is not, like Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, an almost literal transcript from life.  The characters of the poem are four, all unnamed:  a young “polished snob,” an impoverished middle-aged nobleman, a woman, whom he had seduced, and who is now married to a clergyman; and a young girl, her friend, who is betrothed to the younger of the two men.  Of these characters, the only one whom Browning has invented is the girl, through whom, in his telling of the story, the tragedy is brought about.  But he has softened the repulsiveness of the original tale, and has also brought it to a ringing close, not supplied by the bare facts.  The career of the elder man, which came to an end in 1839, did not by any means terminate with the events recorded in the poem.

The Inn Album is a story of wrecked lives, lost hopes, of sordid and gloomy villainies; with only light enough in its darkness to make that darkness visible.  It is profoundly sad; yet

                “These things are life: 
      And life, they say, is worthy of the Muse.”

It would also be profoundly depressing but for the art which has wrung a grandeur out of grime, which has uplifted a story of mere vulgar evil to the height of tragedy.  Out of materials that might be melodramatic, Browning has created a drama of humanity of which the impression is single, intense and overpowering.  Notwithstanding the clash of physical catastrophe at the close, it is really a spiritual tragedy; and in it Browning has achieved that highest of achievements:  the right, vivid and convincing presentment of human nature at its highest and lowest, at its extremes of possible action and emotion.  It is not perfect:  the colloquialism which truth and art alike demand sinks sometimes, though not in the great scenes, to the confines of a bastard realism.  But in the main the poem is an excellent example of the higher imaginative realism, of the close, yet poetic or creative, treatment of life.