schen 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.

The four characters who play out the brief and fateful action of this
drama in narrative (the poem is more nearly related in form to the pure
drama than any other of Browning's poems not cast in the dramatic form)
are creations, three of them at least, in a deeper sense than the
characters in _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_, or than the character in
_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_. The "good gay girl,"