BOOKS.

MR. BROWNING'S NEW WORK.*

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 unde- finable 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.

To specify a little more particularly,—the chief figures in this repulsive story are these three, an old aristocratic roué, whose heart has for some time been reached, if not subdued by the most beautiful and innocent of his victims, —that victim herself,—and a younger man, who, after falling in love with the same lady, and receiving from her the assurance that her heart was already given away, becomes, unconsciously of course, the friend and protégé of her destroyer, till the story which is here told, the scene of which is mostly laid in the inn whose " album " gives its name to the poem, brings about the iclaircissement and the tragic close. That story consists, first, in the narrative of how the aristocratic profligate had gambled all through the May night with his protégé in the inn, and instead of winning a great sum of him, as he had intended, had lost to him more than £10,000 ; how they walk together to the train, • The Inn Album. By Robert Browning. London : Smith, Elder, and Co

the young man urging that he does not need and will not take the money, and the older man confiding to his companion something of the bitterness of his spirit at the blunder he had made four years ago, in betraying to the only woman who had ever absolutely won his heart, and who had absolutely trusted his assurance that they were married in everything but the rite, his dishonourable intention not to make her his wife. Thereupon, he admits, she had thrown him off with the utmost contempt, refusing, moreover, even to hear of mar- riage with one so contemptible as to have cheated her with words before. The young man rightly suspects for a mcmeut that the lady is the same as the one who had conquered his own heart, but is thrown off the scent by hearing that this lady married a clergy- man directly after her breach with her lover. Then comes suddenly an interview between the roué and his victim, in which, after exchanging invectives of a very elaborate kind, the lady admits that she offered herself, on the ruin of ha faith in him, to a conscientious but hard old Evangelical clergyman, who had given out that he wanted to marry,—she did not, however, tell him her story,—and that she had slaved for him in copying bad and dog- matic sermons, and trying to inculcate on the debased minds of the villagers a creed of which she did not believe a word. Here comes a renewal of her aristocratic lover's vows, which she repulses with utter scorn. The younger man, finding them together, at first turns upon both, but soon regains his confidence in the lady, and seeks to protect her from his former friend, by holding over his head the gambling debt, and the threat to post him in the Clubs if he does not pay it. But the roue, who has wormed out of the lady that she had never told her husband of her own fall, threatens her with the exposure of her story to her husband unless she consents to desert him and go off with the young man, which is to be reckoned a quittance of the gambling debt. The lady, knowing his diabolic cynicism, takes poison to prevent the threat from being fulfilled, but before she dies, a scene of horror comes, in -which the youth kills the Satan or " Adversary" of the tale, and the lady signs with her dying breath a statement,—whether true or only a holy falsehood, it is not very easy to gather,—that the fatal blow which killed the aristocratic seducer was struck in defending her from outrage. There is a little story mixed up with this of a young cousin to whom the youth had just engaged himself, without much love on his part, though with a good deal on hers, before the reappearance of the beautiful vision of four years back,—her former friend also,—but this has little to do with the tale except to lend it a deeper shade of horror, in the irony of the contrast between the girl's bright hopes and the truth which is discovered to her when she comes to find two corpses in the inn, and her lover a homicide.

Now to justify such a tale as this, of passion, seduction, unworthy and dishonest marriage, suicide, and murder, or at least homicide,- all in one, there should be plenty of the deepest pathos and the tritest passion, but of this we can find hardly a trace in the poem There is the harsh jar of -vindictive feeling, the scorn of im- measurable pride, the hardness of unrelenting hate, in plenty, but hardly a note of tenderness, and not a note of either forgiveness or of piety. What is worse, the high-breeding of which we are told does not show itself in either the man or the woman. They both scold at each other in language which is always metallic and sometimes thoroughly vulgar, and while in her there is infinitely less of the broken-hearted woman than of the avenging fury, in him there is infinitely less of the selfish but polished cynic than of the pinch- beck fashionable who strains of ter poor repartee. Thus when the lady has been describing her husband, the poor Evangelical clergyman, in a style of harsh contempt which strikes us as singularly un- dignified and treacherous, since it occurs in so very unnecessary a confidence to the lover who had betrayed her, and whom she vows that she utterly despises and hates, he replies with an effort at epigram which no man of even external refinement ever could, under the circumstances, have used :- " You eat that root of bitterness called Man —Raw : I prefer it cooked with social sauce! So, he was not the rich youth after all!"

That is distinctly under-bred, and is not the only thing of the same sort. In his discussions with his young friend and protégé he is often equally under-bred. Take this, for instance, where he is trying to describe to the young man what the lady is really like with whom they have both been in love, and to retail her story to him with cynical additions of his own :—

"In gratitude for such munificence

I'm bound in common honesty to spare No droplet of the draught: so,—pinch your nose, Pull no wry faces!—drain it to the dregs! I say she ' went off'—' went off,' you subjoin, 'Since not to wedded bliss, as I supposed, Sure to some convent: solitude and peace Help her to hide the shame from mortal view, With prayer and fasting.' No, my sapient Sir !

Far wiselior, straightway she betook herself To a prize-portent from the donkey-show Of leathern long-ears that compete for palm In clerical absurdity ; since he, Good ass, nor practises the shaving-trick, The candle-crotchet, nonsense which repays When you've young ladies congregant,—but schools The poor,—toils, moils and grinds the mill nor means.

To stop and munch one thistle in this life Till next life smother him with roses: just The parson for her purpose ! Him she stroked Over the muzzle ; into mouth with bit, And on to back with saddle.—there he stood, The serviceable beast who beard, believed And meekly bowed him to the burden,—borne Off in a canter to seclusion—ay, The lady's lost !"

Could any effort at satire look less like even the mere outside gentle- man's than this ? We do not refer so much to the not very beautiful medicine-taking metaphor, "pinch your nose, make no wry faces," as to the poor interpolated stuff about the Ritualists, and the mode in which the lady talked the poor drudge of a parson into marrying her. There is neither true passion nor even true hate in that digression ; it is not adapted to bend the young man to the older man's wicked purpose, and it is not adapted even to express the roué's thwarted passion for the woman who had a second time despised him. It seems to us an under-bred attempt at wit, and nothing more.

But if the aristocratic roué does not even show the outside- polish of his order, still less does the lady show the deep feminine love in the absence of which, if he recognised it, Mr. Brown- ing would certainly not make of her the semi-heroic figure he intends. Nothing can be more repulsive, in either sentiment or language, than the spontaneous and entirely superfluous, but very elaborate confidence she makes to her former lover and betrayer of the narrowness and poverty of nature of the husband whom_ she had deceived into marrying her, and who, as she admits,.

trusted her entirely :— " I transcribed

The page on page of sermon-scrawlings—stopped

My intellectual eye to sense and sound—

Vainly : the sound and sense would penetrate To brain and plague there in despite of me Maddened to know more moral good were done Had we two simply sallied forth and preached

I' the Green' they call their grimy,—I with twang Of long-disused guitar,—with cut and slash

Of much misvalued horsewhip he,—to bid The peaceable come dance, the peace-breaker Pay in his person ! Whereas—Heaven and Hell, Excite with that, restrain with this!—so dealt His drugs my husband ; as he dosed himself, He drenched his cattle: and, for all my part Was just to dub the mortar, never fear But drugs, hand-pestled at, have poisoned nose t Heaven he let pass, left wisely undescribed : As applicable therefore to the sleep I want, that knows no waking—as to what's

Conceived of as the proper prize to tempt

Souls less world-weary : there, no fault to find!' But Hell he made explicit. After death, Life : man created new, ingeniously Perfect for a vindictive purpose now That man, first fashioned in beneficence, Was proved a failure ; intellect at length Replacing old obtuseness, memory Made mindful of delinquent's bygone deeds,

Now that remorse was vain, which life-long lay-

Dormant when lesson might be laid to heart ; New gift of observation up and down

And round man's self, new power to apprehend

Each necessary consequence of act

In man for well or ill—things obsolete—

Just granted to supplant the idiotcy Man's only guide while act was yet to choose,.

And ill or well momentously its fruit ; A faculty of immense suffering Conferred on mind and body,—mind, erewhile Unvisited by one compunctious dream During sin's drunken slumber, startled up, Stung through and through by sin's significance. Now that the holy was abolished—just

As body which, alive, broke down beneath

Knowledge, lay helpless in the path to good, Failed to accomplish aught legitimate, Achieve aught worthy,—which grew old in youth,.

And at its longest fell a cut-down flower,—

Dying, this too revived by miracle To bear no end of burthen now that back Supported torture to no use at all, And live imperishably potent—since Life's potency was impotent to ward One plague off which made earth a hell before.

This doctrine, which one healthy view of things,

One sane sight of the general ordinance-

Nature,—and its particular object,—man,- Which one mere eye-cast at the character Of Who made these and gave man sense to boot,

Had dissipated once and evermore,—

This doctrine I have dosed our flock withal.

Why ? Because none believed it. They desire Such Heaven and dread such Hell, whom everyday The alehouse tempts from one, a dog-fight bids Defy the other ? All the harm is done Ourselves—done my poor husband who in youth Perhaps read Dickens, done myself who still

Could play both Bach and Brahms. Such life I lead— Thanks to you, knave ! You learn its quality—

Thanks to me, fool!"

That passage has a certain metallic,—certainly not any poetic,— vigour, but it is not the vigour of a woman whom any man could trust unless she loved him ; and it is quite impossible to feel any sympathy with the errors of a woman who could thus betray the weaknesses of the husband she had deceived, to the unfaithful lover whom she despised.

Nor does the character of the third actor in this tragedy, the young man who kills the seducer, in any way relieve its dis- agreeable character. There is some simplicity and straight- forwardness in him, but he does not interest us, and we hardly care to know, what Mr. Browning does not tell us, how he got out of the rather awkward position in which the story leaves him alone with two corpses, one of them made a corpse by himself.

We do not mean to deny that there are one or two truly poetical passages in the poem. Here, for instance, is a fine description of an elm in May :—

" The other never once has ceased to gaze

On the great elm-tree in the open, posed Placidly full in front, smooth bolo, broad branch,

And leafage, one green plenitude of May.

The gathered thought runs into speech at last.

'0 you exceeding beauty, bosomful Of lights and shades, murmurs and silences, Sun-warmth, dew-coolness,—squirrol, bee and bird, High, higher, highest, till the blue proclaims 'Leave earth, there's nothing better till next step Heavenward F—so, off flies what has wings to help!"'

Even that is injured by Mr. Browning's atrocious shorthand sort of practice of leaving out his articles, which makes his style bear to fully expressed thought much the same relation which Liebig's extract bears to wholesome food ; " there's nothing better till next step heavenward," has a business-like economy of words about it which suggests the City correspondent more than the poet. But it would be unfair not to give the finest passage in the story, in which the lady answers the reproach addressed to her, not quite unjustly we think, by her seducer that she had never truly loved him :-

"' No love ? Ah, dead love ! I invoke thy ghost

To show the murderer where thy heart poured life At summons of the stroke he doubts was dealt On pasteboard and pretence! Not love, my love ! I changed for you the very laws of life : Made you the standard of all right, all fair.

No genius but you could have been, no sage, No sufferer—which is grandest—for the truth !

My hero—where the heroic only hid To burst from hiding, brighten earth one day !

Age and decline were man's maturity ; Face, fofm were nature's type : more grace, more strength, What had they been but just superfluous gauds, Lawless divergence ? I have danced through day On tiptop at the music of a word, Have wondered where was darkness gone as night Burst out in stars at brilliance of a smile!

Lonely, I placed the chair to help mo seat Your fancied presence ; in companionship, I kept my finger constant to your glove Glued to my breast ; then—•whore was all the world ?

1 schemed—not dreamed—how I might die some death Should save your finger aching ! Who creates, Destroys, he only : I had laughed to scorn Whatever angel tried to shake my faith And make you seem unworthy : you yourself Only could do that! With a touch 'twas done.

' Give me all, trust me wholly !' At the word,

I did give. I did trust—and thereupon The tench did follow. Ah, the quiet smile, The masterfully folded arm in arm, As trick obtained its triumph one time more !

In turn, my soul too triumphs in defeat: Treason like faith moves mountains : love is gone "

There is no take-off from the power of that passage, not even a pronoun or a definite article omitted so as to make you feel the jar caused by going down two steps at once, as we do, for instance, when Mr. Browning uses "nose" in the abstract for the nose of a particular woman,—

" Rich ! how supremely did disdain curl nose !"

—a phrase which suggests that "nose," like "space and time," may be, perhaps, as abstract as a "form of thought."

Assuredly, as a whole, this poem is not worthy of Mr. Brown- ing. 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 characters on each other resembles rather the cliff of cog-wheels, than the influence of mind on mind. The Inn Album will not live.