stness: 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 Mertoun,
no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its
conception, like it; who, further, at a later date, affirmed that he
would rather have written this play than any work of modern times: nor
with less reluctance, that I find myself at variance with Mr. Skelton,
who speaks of the drama as "one of the most perfectly conceived and
perfectly executed tragedies in the language." In the instance of Luria,
that second Othello, suicide has all the impressiveness of a plenary act
of absolution