Mildred and Mertoun have loved and sinned.  Mertoun visits her every night.  Gerard, an old gamekeeper, has watched him climbing to her window, and he resolves to tell this fatal tale to Tresham, Mildred’s brother, whose strongest feeling is pride in the unblemished honour of his house.  Meantime Mertoun has asked Tresham for Mildred’s hand in marriage, and these lovers, receiving his consent, hope that their sin will be purged.  Then Gerard tells his story.  Tresham summons Mildred.  She confesses the lover, and Tresham demands his name.  To reveal the name would have saved the situation, as we guess from Tresham’s character.  His love would have had time to conquer his pride.  But Mildred will not tell the name, and when Tresham says:  “Then what am I to say to Mertoun?” she answers, “I will marry him.”  This, and no wonder, seems the last and crowning dishonour to Tresham, and he curses, as if she were a harlot, the 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.