The four characters who play out the brief and fateful action of this drama in narrative (the poem is more nearly related in form to the pure drama than any other of Browning’s poems not cast in the dramatic form) are creations, three of them at least, in a deeper sense than the characters in Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or than the character in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.  The “good gay girl,” 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.  His last speech, with its clumsy yet genuine chivalry, its touching, broken words, its fine feeling and faltering expression, is one of the most pathetic things I know.  Such a character, in its very absence of subtlety, is a triumph of Browning’s, to whom intellectual simplicity must be the hardest of all dramatic assumptions.