serving her
unconscious purpose in the tragic action, is properly enough a mere
sketch; but the two men and the elder woman are profoundly studied
characters, struck into life and revealed to themselves, to one another
and to us, at the supreme moment of a complex crisis. The elder man is
one of Browning's most finished studies, and, morally, one of the worst
characters even he has ever investigated. He is at once bad, clever and
cynical, the combination, of all others, most noxious and most hopeless.
He prides himself above all things on his intellect; and it is evident
that he has had the power to shape his course and to sway others. But
now, at fifty, he knows himself to be a failure. The cause of it he
traces mainly to a certain crisis of his life, when he won, only to
abuse, the affections of a splendidly beautiful woman, whose equal
splendour of soul he saw only when too late. It is significant of him
that he never views his conduct as a crime, a wrong to the woman, but as
a mistake on his part; and his attitude is not that of remorse, but of
one who has missed a chance. When, after four years, he meets
unexpectedly the woman whom he has wronged and lost, the good and evil
in him blaze out in a sudden and single flame of earnest appeal. In the
fact that this passionate appeal should be only half-sincere, or, if
sincere, then only for the moment, that to her who hears it, it should
seem wholly insincere, lies the intensity of the situation.

The character of the woman is less complex but not less consistent and
convincing. Like the man, her development has been arrested and
distorted by the cause which has made him too a wreck. Her love was
single-hearted and over-mastering; its very force, in recoil, turned it
into hate. Yoked to a soulless husband, whom she has married half in
pity, half in despair, her whole nature has frozen; so that when we see
her she is, while physically the same, spiritually the ghost of her
former self. The subtlety of the picture is to show what she is now
while making equally plain what she was in the past. She is a figure not
so much pathetic as terrible.

Pathetic, despite its outer comedy, is the figure of the young man, the
great rough, foolish, rich youth, tutored in evil by his Mephistopheles,
but only, we fancy, skin-deep in it, slow of thought but quick of
feeling, with his one and only love, never forgotten, and now found
again in the very woman whom his "friend" has wronged. H