Anael, when she is in the preternatural world, loves Djabal as an incarnation of the divine, but in the natural world of her girlhood her heart goes out to the Knight of Malta who loves her.  The in-and-out of these two emotional states—­one in the world of religious enthusiasm, and one in her own womanhood, as they cross and re-cross one another—­is elaborated with merciless analysis; and Anael’s womanhood appears, not as a whole, but in bits and scraps.  How will this young girl, divided by two contemporaneous 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 woman’s character suffers more from this than the man’s, even though Tresham, in the last scene, is half turned into a woman.  Sex seems to disappear in that scene.