e sister whom he passionately loves.

This is a horrible situation which Browning had no right to make. The
natural thing would be for Mildred to disclose that her lover and Lord
Mertoun, whom she was to marry, were one and the same. There is no
adequate reason, considering the desperate gravity of the situation, for
her silence; it ought to be accounted for and it is not, nor could it
be. Her refusal to tell her lover's name, her confession of her
dishonour and at the same time her acceptance of Mertoun as a husband at
her brother's hands, are circumstances which shock probability and
common human nature.

Then it is not only this which irritates a reader; it is also the
stupidity of Tresham. That also is most unnatural. He believes that the
girl whom he has loved and honoured all his life, whose purity was as a
star to him, will accept Mertoun while she was sinning with another! He
should have felt that this was incredible, and immediately understood,
as Guendolen does, that her lover and Mertoun were the same. Dulness and
blindness so improbable are unfitting in a drama, nor does the passion
of his overwhelming pride excuse him. The central situation is a
protracted irritation. Browning was never a good hand at construction,
even in his poems. His construction is at its very worst in this drama.

But now, when we have, with wrath, accepted this revolting
situation--which, of course, Browning made in order to have his tragic
close, but which a good dramatist would have arranged so differently--we
pass into the third act, the tragic close; and that is simple enough in
its lines, quite naturally wrought out, beautifully felt, and of
exquisite tenderness. Rashness of wrath and pride begin it; Mertoun is
slain by Tresham as he climbs to Mildred's window, though why he should
risk her honour any more when she is affianced to him is another of
Browning's maddening improbabilities. And then wrath and pride pass
away, and sorrow and love and the joy of death are woven together in
beauty. If we must go through the previous acts to get to this, we
forgive, for its sake, their wrongness. It has turns of love made
exquisitely fair by inevitable death, unfathomable depths of feeling. We
touch in these last scenes the sacred love beyond the world in which
forgiveness is forgotten.

* * * * *

_Colombe's Birthday_ is of all these plays the nearest to a true drama.
It has been represented in Americ