neous emotions, one in the supernatural and one in the
natural world, act in a crisis of her life? Well, the first, conquering
the second, brings about her death the moment she tries to transfer the
second into the world of the first--her dim, half-conscious love for
Lois into her conscious adoration of Djabal.

Mildred and Guendolen are the two women in _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_.
Guendolen is the incarnation of high-hearted feminine commonsense, of
clear insight into the truth of things, born of the power of love in
her. Amid all the weaknesses of the personages and the plot; in the
wildered situation made by a confused clashing of pride and innocence
and remorse, in which Browning, as it were on purpose to make a display
of his intellectual ability, involves those poor folk--Guendolen is the
rock on which we can rest in peace; the woman of the world, yet not
worldly; full of experience, yet having gained by every experience more
of love; just and strong yet pitiful, and with a healthy but
compassionate contempt for the intelligence of the men who belong to
her.

Contrasted with her, and the quality of her love contrasted also, is
Mildred, the innocent child girl who loves for love's sake, and
continues to be lost in her love. But Browning's presentation of her
innocence, her love, is spoiled by the over-remorse, shame and fear
under whose power he makes her so helpless. They are in the
circumstances so unnaturally great that they lower her innocence and
love, and the natural courage of innocence and love. These rise again to
their first level, but it is only the passion of her lover's death which
restores them. And when they recur, she is outside of girlhood. One
touch of the courage she shows in the last scene would have saved in the
previous scene herself, her lover, and her brother. The lie she lets her
brother infer when she allows him to think that the lover she has
confessed to is not the Earl, yet that she will marry the Earl, degrades
her altogether and justly in her brother's eyes, and is so terribly out
of tune with her character that I repeat I cannot understand how
Browning could invent that situation. It spoils the whole presentation
of the girl. It is not only out of her character, it is out of nature.
Indeed, in spite of the poetry, in spite of the pathetic beauty of the
last scene, Mildred and Tresham are always over-heightened,
over-strained beyond the concert-pitch of nature. But the drawing of the