In Aristophanes' Apology, as elsewhere, we find how simple is the substructure of Browning's most labyrinthine edifices. His art is so much more complicated than his philosophy. Herakles is as much a sequel to Alkestis as is Balaustion's later adventure to her earlier one. The sequence of Euripidean victories is perfect in every detail, down to its being the self-same Kaunian ship and captain that now convey Balaustion to Rhodes. Herakles, the jubilant champion and labourer for men, cannot live without defeat. Life claims her due, and the heavy payment comes about thus. While Herakles performs his last labour, plucking Kerberos from Haides, his wife, sons, and earthly father are turned out of their palace by the usurper, Lukos, and now await death at his hands. Herakles reappears and slays Lukos, but Here's vengeance is not fully wreaked. She sends madness to Herakles, and, in his frenzied state, he kills his boys, taking them for his task-master's children. His wife, too, he slays. When madness departs, despair and shame take possession of Herakles. The kingly, grateful Theseus befriends him in this desolation, and, at Theseus' bidding, Herakles, his faith in God outliving his rejection of Olympian legends, accepts the sorrowfulness of his life, with greater bravery than his most daring labours evoked. His discipline and patience are the sublimest picture in Euripides. The Inn Album, 1875 (Vol. XII.), though in narrative form, is properly an undeveloped drama, and, save in the scene between Ottima and Sebald in Pippa Passes, its dramatic intensity is unequalled. Browning takes for subject, not 'the healthy natures of a grand epoch,' but a story from modern life, of crime and moral distortion, suggesting melodrama, but raised by his treatment to tragedy. So far the poem resembles Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, but the speculative background, the meditative atmosphere of the earlier work are absent from this one. Instead of feeling the presence of the author, praising, blaming, sympathising, sometimes momentarily identifying himself with one or other of his characters, we find an absolutely concentrated treatment, which leaves no space for discursiveness. Browning's own vision of life is curtained for the nonce, and the dramatic half of his mind dominates, obliterating the philosophical half, so far as we may call that obliteration which is really metamorphism. No embryonic motives, no instincts still waiting in the cavity of consciousness to be born and named, but human nature, fully grown, manifesting itself in action, and begetting its fate, is the subject of The Inn Album. Throughout, there is not a line of soliloquy. Browning forbids himself any self-revealment of his characters which is not modified by the presence of a hearer or hearers. The drama is an internal and external tragedy, and the outcome and conclusion of a former one. The actors, intensely distinct and clear-cut, but all nameless, are four-an oldish man, a woman, a 1 Preface to Strafford, 1837. young man, and a girl. Though the girl is instrumental to the plot, psychologically, emotionally, the play lies between the other three. This tragedy of the passions is in eight scenes, or half-acts, most of which take place (a contrast grotesquely humorous) in the stuffy parlour of an inn. The progress of the piece may be summarised thus I. (Lord, a too accomplished card-player, and a libertine 'of much newspaper-paragraph,' has for a year past attached himself to a young fellow, the son of a self-made millionaire. The older man, whose life has been a failure, notwithstanding his large measure of ability and what must be called personal magnetism, crossed the young one's path when the latter was suffering from a disappointment in love for which he purposed abandoning the world to misanthropise in a distant solitude. Induced by his new friend to give up this idea, he became superficially initiated by him in worldliness, and is now about to marry a rich cousin.) The poem opens in the village inn, where the youth has been spending the eve of his visit to the country mansion of his betrothed in playing cards with his evil genius, who had hoped to indemnify himself by one night's success for his approaching loss in the marriage of his 'pupil.' The first speaker is the older man. He asks for the inn album, wherein to reckon the result of the night's play. The reckoning proves him to be the loser, to the extent of ten thousand pounds. The youth offers to cancel the debt, which he knows would prove an almost impossible one to the needy man. Lord affects to scout the idea, replying to the well-meaning tactlessness of his half-unwilling admirer in words partly sardonic, partly conciliatory. II. The youth, still troubled at the thought of taking the impoverished lord's money, sets to wondering why it is that one so much older, so infinitely abler, should be without any of those substantial goods which he himself possesses in superabundance. His companion acknowledges his failure to be due to a fatal woman. Then he tells, in an impenitent, ignorant way ('ignorant' in the sense applied to it on pp. 276, 278 of case-hardened or narrow-hearted) the story of how, four years ago, he won-and betrayed-a young girl's love. His victim only leapt out of her fascination, her captivity, when he disclosed that he had not intended marriage. Her wrath surprised him into offering it, whereupon she further astonished him by refusing. He had destroyed the love he had created. The enormity of his offence seems, even to himself, to demand some attempt at palliation, so he lamely professes that he originally intended to act honourably, had not circumstances hurried him He dimly blames his victim's very perfection of surface for hiding the soul which so removed her from the women of his experience. Since her disdainful rejection of his offer of marriage, her life has passed from his ken. One fact only is known to him—that in a month she had married a country clergyman. Now comes one of the piercing flashes of insight into this wrong. tragedy of souls. The speaker acknowledges that, since the affair he has been describing, his life has withered, and every thing has gone wrong; yet he ignores the significance of the nemesis that has pursued him. The man's grand opportunity (and we know how great is Browning's sense of the value of life's crises as chances for character) was the revelation of a lofty and, till then, pure woman. She loved him, and might have been his saviour. Instead, he blasphemed his opportunity, defiling what he should have worshipped and cherished. "I hate who would not understand, The blind heart that utters that is as much fool as knave, as we shall presently see more completely. Meanwhile his listener, true to youthfulness, does not feel the tragedy much, till, as it soon will, it crosses his own life. Encouraged, however, by his companion's confidence, he tells how he too met his 'wonder of a woman.' By this phrase, both instinctively describe her, who, unknown to them, is one and the same. She had met the young Oxonian during the time of her captivation by the older man, and had refused his honest devotion-"she was another's." When, later, the youth heard that his ideal had married, he thought it was to the man she loved. Still, she stands to him for all love, all loveliness, his affianced cousin being merely his cousin. III. The men vacate the stage for awhile, |