A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ is the simplest, and perhaps the deepest and
finest of Browning's plays. The Browning Society's performances, and Mr.
Barrett's in America, have proved its acting capacities, its power to
hold and thrill an audience.[21] The language has a rich simplicity of
the highest dramatic value, quick with passion, pregnant with thought
and masterly in imagination; the plot and characters are perhaps more
interesting and affecting than in any other of the plays; while the
effect of the whole is impressive from its unity. The scene is English;
the time, somewhere in the eighteenth century; the motive, family honour
and dishonour. The story appeals to ready popular emotions, emotions
which, though lying nearest the surface, are also the most
deeply-rooted. The whole action is passionately pathetic, and it is
infused with a twofold tragedy, the tragedy of the sin, and that of the
misunderstanding, the last and final tragedy, which hangs on a word,
spoken only when too late to save three lives. This irony of
circumstance, while it is the source of what is saddest in human
discords, is also the motive of what has come to be the only satisfying
harmony in dramatic art. It takes the place, in our modern world, of the
Necessity of the Greeks; and is not less impressive because it arises
from the impulse and unreasoning wilfulness of man rather than from the
implacable insistency of God. It is with perfect justice, both moral and
artistic, that the fatal crisis, though mediately the result of
accident, of error, is shown to be the consequence and the punishment of
wrong. A tragedy resulting from the mistakes of the wholly innocent
would jar on our sense of right, and could never produce a legitimate
work of art. Even Oedipus suffers, not merely because he is under the
curse of a higher power, but because he is wilful, and rushes upon his
own fate. Timon suffers, not because he was generous and good, but from
the defects of his qualities. So, in this play, each of the characters
calls down upon his own head the suffering which at first seems to be a
mere caprice and confusion of chance. Mildred Tresham and Henry Mertoun,
both very young, ignorant and unguarded, have loved. They attempt a late
reparation, apparently with success, but the hasty suspicion of Lord
Tresham, Mildred's brother, diverted indeed into a wrong channel, brings
down on both a terrible retribution. Tresham, who shares the ruin he
causes, feels, t