t, in white
silence. The lovers embrace in new knowledge and fervour of love.
Measured steps are heard within, and we know that the guard is
approaching.

Each of the three characters is admirably delineated. Norbert is a fine,
strong, solid, noble character, without subtlety or mixture of motives.
He loves Constance: he knows that his love is returned: he is resolved
to win her hand. From first to last he is himself, honest,
straightforward, single-minded, passionate; presenting the strongest
contrast to Constance's feminine over-subtlety. Constance is more, very
much more, of a problem: "a character," as Mr. Wedmore has admirably
said, "peculiarly wily for goodness, curiously rich in resource for
unalloyed and inexperienced virtue." Does her proposal to relinquish
Norbert in favour of the Queen show her to have been lacking in love for
him? It has been said, on the one hand, that her act was "noble and
magnanimous," on the other hand, that the act proved her nature to be
"radically insincere and inconstant." Probably the truth lies between
these two extremes. Her love, we cannot doubt, was true and intense up
to the measure of her capacity; but her nature was, instinctively, less
outspoken and truthful than Norbert's, more subtle, more reasoning. At
the critical moment she is seized by a whirl of emotions, and, with very
feminine but singularly unloverlike instinct, she resolves, as she would
phrase it, to sacrifice _herself_, not seeing that she is insulting her
lover by the very notion of his accepting such a sacrifice. Her
character has not the pure and steadfast nobility of Norbert's, but it
has the capacity of devotion, and it is genuinely human. The Queen,
unlike Constance, but like Norbert, is simple and single in nature. She
is a tragic and intense figure, at once pathetic and terrible. I am not
aware that the peculiarly pregnant motive: the hidden longing for love
in a starved and stunted nature, clogged with restrictions of state and
ceremony, harassed and hampered by circumstances and by the weight of
advancing years; the passionate longing suddenly met, as it seems, with
reward, and breaking out into a great flame of love and ardour, only to
be rudely and finally quenched: I am not aware that this motive has
ever elsewhere been worked out in dramatic poetry. As here developed, it
is among the great situations in literature.

The verse in which this little tragedy is written has, perhaps, more
flexibility