At the same time, none must take it for granted that the author of the “Blot on the ’Scutchcon,” “Luria,” “In a Balcony,” is not dramatic in even the most conventional sense.  Above all, indeed—­as Mr. Walter Pater has said—­his is the poetry of situations.  In each of the dramatis personae, one of the leading characteristics is loyalty to a dominant ideal.  In Strafford’s case it is that of unswerving devotion to the King:  in Mildred’s and in Thorold’s, in the “Blot on the ’Scutcheon,” it is that of subservience respectively to conventional morality and family pride (Lord Tresham, it may be added, is the most hopelessly monomaniacal of all Browning’s “monomaniacs"):  in Valence’s, in “Colombe’s Birthday,” to chivalric love:  in Charles, in “King Victor and King Charles,” to kingly and filial duty:  in Anael’s and Djabal’s, in “The Return of the Druses,” respectively to religion and unscrupulous ambition modified by patriotism:  in Chiappino’s, in “A Soul’s Tragedy,” to purely sordid ambition:  in Luria’s, to noble steadfastness:  and in Constance’s, in “In a Balcony,” to self-denial.  Of these plays, “The Return of the Druses” seems to me the most picturesque, “Luria” the most noble and dignified, and “In a Balcony” the most potentially a great dramatic success.  The last is in a sense a fragment, but, though the integer of a great unaccomplished drama, is as complete in itself as the Funeral March in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.  The “Blot on the ’Scutcheon” has the radical fault characteristic of writers of sensational fiction, a too promiscuous “clearing the ground” by syncope and suicide.  Another is the juvenility of Mildred:—­a serious infraction of dramatic law, where the mere tampering with history, as in the circumstances of King Victor’s death in the earlier play, is at least excusable by high precedent.  More disastrous, poetically, is the ruinous banality of Mildred’s anticlimax when, after her brother reveals himself as her lover’s murderer, she, like the typical young Miss Anglaise of certain French novelists, betrays her incapacity for true passion by exclaiming, in effect, “What, you’ve murdered my lover!  Well, tell me all.  Pardon?  Oh, well, I pardon you:  at least I think I do.  Thorold, my dear brother, how very wretched you must be!”

I am unaware if this anticlimax has been pointed out by any one, but surely it is one of the most appalling lapses of genius which could be indicated.  Even the beautiful song in the third scene of the first act, “There’s a woman like a dew-drop, she’s so purer than the purest,” is, in the circumstances, nearly over the verge which divides the sublime from the ridiculous.  No wonder that, on the night the play was first acted, Mertoun’s song, as he clambered to his mistress’s window, caused a sceptical laugh to ripple lightly among the tolerant auditory.  It is with diffidence I take so radically distinct a standpoint from that of Dickens, who declared he knew no love like that of Mildred and