gentleman. You ought to be excessively happy! Pauline. Happy! Damas. Why, how pale you are, child!— Damas. You act with your own free consent? Pauline. My own consent-yes. Damas. Then you are the most-I will not say what you are. Pauline. You think ill of me-be it soyet if you knew all Damas. There is some mystery-speak out, Pauline. Pauline. (Suddenly.) Oh, perhaps you can save me! you are our relation-our friend. My father is on the verge of bankruptcy-this day he requires a large sum to meet demands that cannot be denied; that sum Beauseant will advancethis hand the condition of the barter. Save me if you have the means-save me! You will be repaid above! Damas. (Aside.) I recant-Women are SO bad after all! (Aloud.) Humph, child! I cannot help you-I am too poor. not Pauline. The last plank to which I clung is shivered! Damas. Hold-you see my friend Morier: Melnotte is his most intimate friendfought in the same fields-slept in the same tent. Have you any message to send to Melnotte? any word to soften this blow? Pauline. He knows Melnotte-he will see him he will bear to him my last farewell. (Approaches Melnotte.)-He has a stern air-he turns away from mehe despises me!-Sir, one word I beseech you. Mel. Her voice again! How the old time comes o'er me! Damas. (To Madame.) Don't interrupt them. He is going to tell her what a rascal young Melnotte is; he knows him well, I promise you. Mme. Deschap. So considerate in you, cousin Damas! (Damas approaches Deschappelles; converses apart with him in dumb showDeschappelles shows him a paper, which he inspects and takes.) Pauline. Thrice have I sought to speak; my courage fails me. Sir, is it true that you have knownnay, are The friend of-Melnotte? Mel. Lady, yes!-Myself And misery know the man! Pauline. And you will see him, And you will bear to him-ay-word for word, All that this heart, which breaks in parting from him, Would send, ere still for ever. Mel. He hath told me You have the right to choose from out the world A worthier bridegroom;-he foregoes all claim, Even to murmur at his doom. Speak on! Pauline. Tell him, for years I never nursed a thought That was not his;-that on his wander Mel. Stay, lady-one word more. Were but your duty with your faith united, Would you still share the low-born peasant's lot? Pauline. Would I? Ah, better death with him I love Than all the pomp-which is but as the flowers That crown the victim! (Turning away.) I am ready. (Melnotte rushes to Damas.) Damas. Are yours the instant she has sign'd; Mel. Yet you weep still, Pauline! Pauline. But on thy breast-these tears are sweet and holy! M. Deschap. You have won love and honor nobly, sir! Take her;-be happy both! Mme. Deschap. I'm all astonish'd! You behold him! Who, then, is Colonel Morier? Damas. Mel. Morier no more after this happy day! I would not bear again my father's name Till I could deem it spotless! The hour's come! Heaven smiled on conscience! As the soldier rose From rank to rank, how sacred was the fame That cancell'd crime, and raised him nearer thee! Mme. Deschap. A colonel and a hero! Well, that's something! He's wondrously improved! I wish you joy, sir! Mel. Ah! the same love that tempts us into sin, If it be true love, works out its redemption; And he who seeks repentance for the Past Should woo the Angel Virtue in the Future. ROBERT BROWNING A BLOT IN THE 'SCUTCHEON Robert Browning (1812-1889), of a cultivated but unassuming family, was not a university man, and gained his remarkably wide knowledge, as Shakespeare did, by himself. His early work he wrote especially under the influence of Shelley. He published his first poem, Pauline, in 1833, and The Ring and the Book, his longest and greatest, in 1868-9, and maintained his literary fertility till his death. His most original and characteristic poems are his dramatic lyrics, each the terse revelation of a soul. In 1846 he married Elizabeth Barrett, the poetess, and thereafter lived most of the time in Florence and Venice. A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, the most actable of Browning's nine or so of dramas, was written in 1843 with marvelous speed- in four or five days at the request of the actor and theater-manager Macready. Owing to financial straits, when it came to the point the latter was unwilling to put it on, but instead of candidly telling Browning his difficulties, behaved in an indirect and churlish manner which was intended to give him a hint to withdraw the play, but which Browning did not understand. To foil Macready's attempts to alter the play excessively, Browning had it printed in a few hours, and published it as No. V of Bells and Pomegranates. As a play it was only moderately successful, owing partly to Macready's negligence. His ill conduct in the matter led to a breach in his long friendship with Browning, and this removed one of the poet's inducements to the writing of drama. A Blot in the 'Scutcheon has been revived numerous times down to the present, as in 1848, 1885 and 1888. Browning had in high degree certain of the qualifications of the dramatist, and lacked others. Of the latter the chief is in the construction of plots, which he usually, as in the present case, invented. In A Blot in the 'Scutcheon he admitted extraordinary improbabilities. Certain of the lovers' tragic errors are accounted for by their extreme and thoughtless youth; but it is too much that after Mildred had exclaimed (II. i) that her lover was lost if he returned that night, she should herself signal for himand just as she was expecting him admit her brother. Strange too that the keenwitted Guendolen should not avert the lover's coming; and that titled families with adjoining estates should barely know each other. The song in act II, one of the very finest of Browning's love-lyrics, becomes almost on ludicrous when we realize that it is sung at a window-sill a great height above the ground. Elsewhere too the structure leaves something to be desired. That admirable bit of insight Guendolen's part (one of the keenly modern touches), her guessing that the lover is Mertoun, leads to no result whatever. There are also many long speeches and comparatively little action; Browning's like Shelley's interest in a story was usually in its psychology. The poet is not to be censured, though at first it shocks us, for making Mildred only fourteen years old, obviously in order to increase our tolerance and sympathy for her; under former social conditions people matured earlier than today; in the Middle Ages canon law recognized girls as marriageable at twelve. That we notice some of these defects is almost a tribute to Browning's genius; they stand out the more sharply against the trenchant reality of the play. And at other points it shows a wary foresight notable in a work so rapidly written. There is a thrill of dramatic irony in act II, scene i, where the light-hearted Guendolen twice chaffs her cousin in his hidden anguish about finding an imaginary blot in Mertoun's 'scutcheon; and another in act I. iii., when Guendolen is about to say that the women of their race are all chaste, and Mildred pitifully interrupts. Mildred's sudden death is made intelligible by her heart-seizures earlier (I, iii, II). In the first scene of all, the irascible indifference to the approaching marriage shown by old Gerard, the favorite of Mildred, who used to care about the least thing that touched the House's honor," warns the seeing eye that all is not sound. We are thus allowed the pleasure, no small one, of pointed surmise. But such subtleties in structure are not what Browning chiefly cared for; in his dramas as in his other work, and as Wordsworth said of his own poetry, it is the feeling which gives importance to the incident, and not the incident to the feeling. Emotion and personality, these are the two things which made the world so inexhaustibly interesting to Browning; that they are the life and soul of drama, of which plot is only the body, is what drew him now and again to its stimulating domain. Whatever his people do or leave undone, we certainly feel their reality. Guendolen is the embodiment of energetic sensitive life- with her merry heart, her tart, chaffing tongue, her intuition, her loyalty, almost a sister to Shakespeare's Beatrice; alas that she had not Beatrice's fortune! Thorold is the spring of the action, with his nobility and love, his stiffness and egoism, partly due to family pride, partly adopted to hold in his nervous impulsive nature, tense at times with the strain between his agitation and his self-control. He deceives himself; he is far less moved by brotherly love than by his notion of dignity. His worship of family honor is not intelligently and reasonably woven into his whole view of the world, it is a superstitious religion which must not be adapted or discussed. He had half-meant to expose his sister to Austin and Guendolen even before he learned the supposed culmination of her shame, her apparent resolve to marry yet to keep her lover. His reckless impulsiveness in calling in the two to face her makes intelligible his suddenness in killing Mertoun. Mildred and Mertoun are far less individualized, and justly so. They are high-bred emotional youth, and nothing else, the embodiment of an ever-recurring human tragedy: Alas, alas, that ever love was sin! Over and over again their youth wins our compassion where they would excite only impatience if they were adult. Their hateful false position requires of them the very thing their lack of which got them into it cool wariness, worldly wisdom. They cannot nerve themselves to the brief sharp necessities of their situation. Mertoun at his first appearance half-betrays himself to Austin, who sees through his unskilful feigning. His boyish hero-worship for Thorold, of which he tells him as he is dying, makes the cool hypocrisy required of him at their first meeting doubly impossible to him. The lovers' childish wilfulness and impatience in planning another secret meeting brings their death; Mildred's childish timorous procrastination of her interview with her brother brings their death. Her moment of caution when she tries to call Mertoun back is defeated by his being out of hearing of her low voice. The play is wholly a tragedy of human individualities, not of social conditions or of any particular age. It is vaguely in the not very remote past, an age of coaches and periwigs, long cloaks, swords and even cross-bows; in the eighteenth century, Browning says. But externals are unimportant; there is nothing arbitrary. The strength of the play as a tragedy is that the ruin is not due to chance, but follows remorselessly from the personalities involved, from the clash of Thorold's unthinking and impetuous sense of honor with Mildred's, and Mertoun's, unthinking youth and impetuous love. Brother and sister have traits in common; the tragedy is a family tragedy. It is the more intense because all the characters have our sympathy, and all rise to the highest dignity at their ending. We admire Mertoun for passing from submission to severity in his last words to Thorold, and Mildred for passing from severity to submission. But the intensity is most of all due to the sense of the needlessness of the ruin. As in the tragic story of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini in the fifth canto of Dante's Inferno, a wayward twist has defeated what should have been beauty and happiness. In style the play shows Browning at his simplest. Aware that he must be instantly understood, he obviously strove to avoid the close-packed intricacy and subtlety of much of his poetry. There is a little of it, as even the actors have felt. Mr. Charles Fry, who was concerned in one of the last revivals during Browning's life, told the present editor in 1911 a characteristic anecdote. At a rehearsal Mr. Fry said to the poet, "Mr. Browning, I fear you will think me very stupid, but I don't understand the meaning of this line I have to speak." Browning took the book and looked at it, and said, "Dear me, I don't know what it means." Browning never liked to give the impression of taking his own work over-seriously; still, the remark may console some of those whom he has puzzled. There is but little, however, of such trouble in this play. It abounds in passages of significant brevity and simple distinction. Few poets have oftener rivaled Shakespeare in the dramatic nerve of his style. There could hardly be a greater contrast than between this play and The Lady of Lyons, even aside from their difference in excellence; yet both well illustrate the drama of the nineteenth century. The interest of the latter play is dispersed, is in the plot and external showy incident; the characters are little studied, the morals popular and superficial, the style and the general type of play unoriginal and traditional. The interest in Browning's play is condensed, intense, and internal; is in the expression and clash of personalities. As we see in The Lady of Lyons certain of the literary currents and tastes of the century, we see here its freedom from the literary orthodoxies and compulsion which have so largely controlled the earlier drama, and withheld so many men from fully expressing their larger selves. We may see here the modern love of concrete truth rather than of preconceived ideals. |