Webster's instinctive genius or natural disposition of mind is proved by
his treatment of facts placed on record by contemporary annalists in the
tragic story of Vittoria Accoramboni, Duchess of Bracciano. That story
would have been suggestive, if not tempting, to any dramatic poet: and
almost any poet but Shakespeare or Webster would have been content to
accept the characters and circumstances as they stood nakedly on record,
and adapt them to the contemporary stage of England with such dexterity
and intelligence as he might be able to command. But, as Shakespeare
took the savage legend of Hamlet, the brutal story of Othello, and
raised them from the respective levels of the Heimskringla and the
Newgate Calendar to the very highest "heaven of invention," so has
Webster transmuted the impressive but repulsive record of villanies and
atrocities, in which he discovered the motive for a magnificent poem,
into the majestic and pathetic masterpiece which is one of the most
triumphant and the most memorable achievements of English poetry. If, in
his play, as in the legal or historic account of the affair, the whole
family of the heroine had appeared unanimous and eager in complicity
with her sins and competition for a share in the profits of her
dishonor, the tragedy might still have been as effective as it is now
from the theatrical or sensational point of view; it might have thrilled
the reader's nerves as keenly, have excited and stimulated his
curiosity, have whetted and satiated his appetite for transient emotion,
as thoroughly and triumphantly as now. But it would have been merely a
criminal melodrama, compiled by the labor and vivified by the talent of
an able theatrical journeyman. The one great follower of
Shakespeare--"haud passibus aequis" at all points; "longo sed proximus
intervallo"--has recognized, with Shakespearean accuracy and delicacy
and elevation of instinct, the necessity of ennobling and transfiguring
his characters if their story was to be made acceptable to the
sympathies of any but an idle or an ignoble audience. And he has done so
after the very manner and in the very spirit of Shakespeare. The noble
creatures of his invention give to the story that dignity and variety of
interest without which the most powerful romance or drama can be but an
example of vigorous vulgarity. The upright and high-minded mother and
brother of the shameless Flamineo and the shame-stricken Vittoria
refresh and purify the tragic atmosphere of the poem by the passing
presence of their virtues. The shallow and fiery nature of the fair
White Devil herself is a notable example of the difference so accurately
distinguished by Charlotte Brontë between an impressionable and an
impressible character. Ambition, self-interest, passion, remorse, and
hardihood alternate and contend in her impetuous and wayward spirit. The
one distinct and trustworthy quality which may always be reckoned on is
the indomitable courage underlying her easily irritable emotions. Her
bearing at the trial for her husband's murder is as dexterous and
dauntless as the demeanor of Mary Stuart before her judges. To Charles
Lamb it seemed "an innocence-resembling boldness"; to Mr. Dyce and Canon
Kingsley the innocence displayed in Lamb's estimate seemed almost
ludicrous in its misconception of Webster's text. I should hesitate to
agree with them that he has never once made his accused heroine speak in
the natural key of innocence unjustly impeached: Mary's pleading for her
life is not at all points incompatible in tone with the innocence which
it certainly fails to establish--except in minds already made up to
accept any plea as valid which may plausibly or possibly be advanced on
her behalf; and the arguments advanced by Vittoria are not more evasive
and equivocal, in face of the patent and flagrant prepossession of her
judges, than those put forward by the Queen of Scots. It is impossible
not to wonder whether the poet had not in his mind the actual tragedy
which had taken place just twenty-five years before the publication of
this play: if not, the coincidence is something more than singular. The
fierce profligacy and savage egotism of Brachiano have a certain energy
and activity in the display and the development of their motives and
effects which suggest rather such a character as Bothwell's than such a
character as that of the bloated and stolid sensualist who stands or
grovels before us in the historic record of his life. As presented by
Webster, he is doubtless an execrable ruffian: as presented by history,
he would be intolerable by any but such readers or spectators as those
on whom the figments or the photographs of self-styled naturalism
produce other than emetic emotions. Here again the noble instinct of the
English poet has rectified the aesthetic unseemliness of an ignoble
reality. This "Brachiano" is a far more living figure than the porcine
paramour of the historic Accoramboni. I am not prepared to maintain that
in one scene too much has not been sacrificed to immediate vehemence of
effect. The devotion of the discarded wife, who to shelter her Antony
from the vengeance of Octavius assumes the mask of raging jealousy, thus
taking upon herself the blame and responsibility of their final
separation, is expressed with such consummate and artistic simplicity of
power that on a first reading the genius of the dramatist may well blind
us to the violent unlikelihood of the action. But this very extravagance
of self-sacrifice may be thought by some to add a crowning touch of
pathos to the unsurpassable beauty of the scene in which her child,
after the murder of his mother, relates her past sufferings to his
uncle. Those to whom the great name of Webster represents merely an
artist in horrors, a ruffian of genius, may be recommended to study
every line and syllable of this brief dialogue:
_Francisco_. How now, my noble cousin? what, in black?
_Giovanni_. Yes, uncle, I was taught to imitate you
In virtue, and you [? now] must imitate me
In colors of your garments. My sweet mother
Is--
_Francisco_. How! where?
_Giovanni_. Is there; no, yonder: indeed, sir, I'll not tell you,
For I shall make you weep.
_Francisco_. Is dead?
_Giovanni_. Do not blame me now,
I did not tell you so.
_Lodovico_. She's dead, my lord.
_Francisco_. Dead!
_Monticelso_. Blest lady, thou art now above thy woes!
* * * * *
_Giovanni_. What do the dead do, uncle? do they eat,
Hear music, go a-hunting, and be merry,
As we that live?
_Francisco_. No, coz; they sleep.
_Giovanni_. Lord, Lord, that I were dead!
I have not slept these six nights.--When do they wake?
_Francisco_. When God shall please.
_Giovanni_. Good God, let her sleep ever!
For I have known her wake an hundred nights
When all the pillow where she laid her head
Was brine-wet with her tears. I am to complain to you, sir;
I'll tell you how they have used her now she's dead:
They wrapped her in a cruel fold of lead,
And would not let me kiss her.
_Francisco_. Thou didst love her.
_Giovanni_. I have often heard her say she gave me suck,
And it should seem by that she dearly loved me,
Since princes seldom do it.
_Francisco_. O, all of my poor sister that remains!--
Take him away, for God's sake!
I must admit that I do not see how Shakespeare could have improved upon
that. It seems to me that in any one of even his greatest tragedies this
scene would have been remarkable among its most beautiful and perfect
passages; nor, upon the whole, do I remember a third English poet who
could be imagined capable of having written it. And it affords, I think,
very clear and sufficient evidence that Webster could not have handled
so pathetic and suggestive a subject as the execution of Lady Jane Grey
and her young husband in a style so thin and feeble, so shallow in
expression of pathos and so empty of suggestion or of passion, as that
in which it is presented at the close of "Sir Thomas Wyatt."
There is a perfect harmony of contrast between this and the death scene
of the boy's father: the agony of the murdered murderer is as superb in
effect of terror as the sorrow of his son is exquisite in effect of
pathos. Again we are reminded of Shakespeare, by no touch of imitation
but simply by a note of kinship in genius and in style, at the cry of
Brachiano under the first sharp workings of the poison:
O thou strong heart!
There's such a covenant 'tween the world and it,
They're loath to break.
Another stroke well worthy of Shakespeare is the redeeming touch of
grace in this brutal and cold-blooded ruffian which gives him in his
agony a thought of tender care for the accomplice of his atrocities:
Do not kiss me, for I shall poison thee.
Few instances of Webster's genius are so well known as the brief but
magnificent passage which follows; yet it may not be impertinent to cite
it once again:
_Brachiano_. O thou soft natural death, that art joint twin
To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet
Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl
Beats not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf
Scents not thy carrion; pity winds thy corpse,
Whilst horror waits on princes.
_Vittoria_. I am lost forever.
_Brachiano_. How miserable a thing it is to die
'Mongst women howling!--What are those?
_Flamineo_. Franciscans:
They have brought the extreme unction.
_Brachiano_. On pain of death, let no man name death to me;
It is a word [? most] infinitely terrible.
The very tremor of moral and physical abjection from nervous defiance
into prostrate fear which seems to pant and bluster and quail and
subside in the natural cadence of these lines would suffice to prove the
greatness of the artist who could express it with such terrible
perfection: but when we compare it, by collation of the two scenes, with
the deep simplicity of tenderness, the child-like accuracy of innocent
emotion, in the passage previously cited, it seems to me that we must
admit, as an unquestionable truth, that in the deepest and highest and
purest qualities of tragic poetry Webster stands nearer to Shakespeare
than any other English poet stands to Webster; and so much nearer as to
be a good second; while it is at least questionable whether even Shelley
can reasonably be accepted as a good third. Not one among the
predecessors, contemporaries, or successors of Shakespeare and Webster
has given proof of this double faculty--this coequal mastery of terror
and pity, undiscolored and undistorted, but vivified and glorified, by
the splendor of immediate and infallible imagination. The most
grovelling realism could scarcely be so impudent in stupidity as to
pretend an aim at more perfect presentation of truth; the most fervent
fancy, the most sensitive taste, could hardly dream of a desire for more
exquisite expression of natural passion in a form of utterance more
naturally exalted and refined.
In all the vast and voluminous records of critical error there can be
discovered no falsehood more foolish or more flagrant than the vulgar
tradition which represents this high-souled and gentle-hearted poet as
one morbidly fascinated by a fantastic attraction toward the "violent
delights" of horror and the nervous or sensational excitements of
criminal detail; nor can there be conceived a more perverse or futile
misapprehension than that which represents John Webster as one whose
instinct led him by some obscure and oblique propensity to darken the
darkness of southern crime or vice by an infusion of northern
seriousness, of introspective cynicism and reflective intensity in
wrong-doing, into the easy levity and infantile simplicity of
spontaneous wickedness which distinguished the moral and social
corruption of renascent Italy. Proof enough of this has already been
adduced to make any protestation or appeal against such an estimate as
preposterous in its superfluity as the misconception just mentioned is
preposterous in its perversity. The great if not incomparable power
displayed in Webster's delineation of such criminals as Flamineo and
Bosola--Bonapartes in the bud, Napoleons in a nutshell, Caesars who have
missed their Rubicon and collapse into the likeness of a Catiline--is a
sign rather of his noble English loathing for the traditions associated
with such names as Caesar and Medici and Borgia, Catiline and Iscariot
and Napoleon, than of any sympathetic interest in such incarnations of
historic crime. Flamineo especially, the ardent pimp, the enthusiastic
pandar, who prostitutes his sister and assassinates his brother with
such earnest and single-hearted devotion to his own straightforward
self-interest, has in him a sublime fervor of rascality which recalls
rather the man of Brumaire and of Waterloo than the man of December and
of Sedan. He has something too of Napoleon's ruffianly good-humor--the
frankness of a thieves' kitchen or an imperial court, when the last thin
fig-leaf of pretence has been plucked off and crumpled up and flung
away. We can imagine him pinching his favorites by the ear and dictating
memorials of mendacity with the self-possession of a self-made monarch.
As it is, we see him only in the stage of parasite and pimp--more like
the hired husband of a cast-off Creole than the resplendent rogue who
fascinated even history for a time by the clamor and glitter of his
triumphs. But the fellow is unmistakably an emperor in the egg--so
dauntless and frontless in the very abjection of his villany that we
feel him to have been defrauded by mischance of the only two
destinations appropriate for the close of his career--a gibbet or a
throne.
This imperial quality of ultimate perfection in egotism and crowning
complacency in crime is wanting to his brother in atrocity, the most
notable villain who figures on the stage of Webster's latest
masterpiece. Bosola is not quite a possible Bonaparte; he is not even on
a level with the bloody hirelings who execute the orders of tyranny and
treason with the perfunctory atrocity of Anicetus or Saint-Arnaud. There
is not, or I am much mistaken, a touch of imaginative poetry in the part
of Flamineo: his passion, excitable on occasion and vehement enough is
as prosaic in its homely and cynical eloquence as the most fervent
emotions of a Napoleon or an Iago when warmed or goaded into elocution.
The one is a human snake, the other is a human wolf. Webster could not
with equal propriety have put into the mouth of Flamineo such
magnificent lyric poetry as seems to fall naturally, however suddenly
and strangely, from the bitter and blood-thirsty tongue of Bosola. To
him, as to the baffled and incoherent ruffian Romelio in the
contemporary play of "The Devil's Law-case," his creator has assigned
the utterance of such verse as can only be compared to that uttered by
Cornelia over the body of her murdered son in the tragedy to which I
have just given so feeble and inadequate a word of tribute. In his
command and in his use of the metre first made fashionable by the
graceful improvisations of Greene, Webster seems to me as original and
as peculiar as in his grasp and manipulation of character and event. All
other poets, Shakespeare no less than Barnfield and Milton no less than
Wither, have used this lyric instrument for none but gentle or gracious
ends: Webster has breathed into it the power to express a sublimer and a
profounder tone of emotion; he has given it the cadence and the color of
tragedy; he has touched and transfigured its note of meditative music
into a chord of passionate austerity and prophetic awe. This was the key
in which all previous poets had played upon the metre which Webster was
to put to so deeply different an use.
Walking in a valley greene,
Spred with Flora summer queene:
Where shee heaping all hir graces,
Niggard seem'd in other places:
Spring it was, and here did spring
All that nature forth can bring.
(_Tullies Loue_, p. 53, ed. 1589.)
Nights were short, and daies were long;
Blossoms on the Hauthorns hung:
Philomele (Night-Musiques King)
Tolde the comming of the spring.
(_Grosart's Barnfield_ [1876], p. 97.)
On a day (alack the day!)
Love, whose month is ever May,
Spied a blossom passing fair
Playing in the wanton air.
(_Love's Labor's Lost_, act iv., sc. iii.)
And now let us hear Webster.
Hearke, now every thing is still,
The Scritch-Owle, and the whistler shrill,
Call upon our Dame, aloud,
And bid her quickly don her shrowd:
Much you had of Land and rent,
Your length in clay's now competent.
A long war disturb'd your minde,
Here your perfect peace is sign'd.
Of what is't, fooles make such vaine keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth, weeping:
Their life, a generall mist of error,
Their death, a hideous storme of terror.
Strew your haire with powders sweete:
Don cleane linnen, bath[e] your feete,
And (the foule feend more to checke)
A crucifixe let blesse your necke:
'Tis now full tide 'tweene night and day,
End your groane, and come away.
(_The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy_: 1623: sig. K, K 2.)
The toll of the funereal rhythm, the heavy chime of the solemn and
simple verse, the mournful menace and the brooding presage of its note,
are but the covering, as it were, or the outer expression, of the tragic
significance which deepens and quickens and kindles to its close.
Aeschylus and Dante have never excelled, nor perhaps have Sophocles and
Shakespeare ever equalled in impression of terrible effect, the fancy of
bidding a live woman array herself in the raiment of the grave, and do
for her own living body the offices done for a corpse by the ministers
attendant on the dead.
The murderous humorist whose cynical inspiration gives life to these
deadly lines is at first sight a less plausible, but on second thoughts
may perhaps seem no less possible a character than Flamineo. Pure and
simple ambition of the Napoleonic order is the motive which impels into
infamy the aspiring parasite of Brachiano: a savage melancholy inflames
the baffled greed of Bosola to a pitch of wickedness not unqualified by
relenting touches of profitless remorse, which come always either too
early or too late to bear any serviceable fruit of compassion or
redemption. There is no deeper or more Shakespearean stroke of tragic
humor in all Webster's writings than that conveyed in the scornful and
acute reply--almost too acute perhaps for the character--of Bosola's
remorseless patron to the remonstrance or appeal of his instrument
against the insatiable excess and persistence of his cruelty: "Thy pity
is nothing akin to thee." He has more in common with Romelio in "The
Devil's Law-case," an assassin who misses his aim and flounders into
penitence much as that discomfortable drama misses its point and
stumbles into vacuity: and whose unsatisfactory figure looks either like
a crude and unsuccessful study for that of Bosola, or a disproportioned
and emasculated copy from it. But to him too Webster has given the
fitful force of fancy or inspiration which finds expression in such
sudden snatches of funereal verse as this:
How then can any monument say
"Here rest these bones till the last day,"
When Time, swift both of foot and feather,
May bear them the sexton kens not whither?
What care I, then, though my last sleep
Be in the desert or the deep,
No lamp nor taper, day and night,
To give my charnel chargeable light?
I have there like quantity of ground,
And at the last day I shall be found.
The villanous laxity of versification which deforms the grim and
sardonic beauty of these occasionally rough and halting lines is
perceptible here and there in "The Duchess of Malfy," but comes to its
head in "The Devil's Law-case." It cannot, I fear, be denied that
Webster was the first to relax those natural bonds of noble metre "whose
service is perfect freedom"--as Shakespeare found it, and combined with
perfect loyalty to its law the most perfect liberty of living and
sublime and spontaneous and accurate expression. I can only conjecture
that this greatest of the Shakespeareans was misguided out of his
natural line of writing as exemplified and perfected in the tragedy of
Vittoria, and lured into this cross and crooked by-way of immetrical
experiment, by the temptation of some theory or crotchet on the score of
what is now called naturalism or realism; which, if there were any real
or natural weight in the reasoning that seeks to support it, would of
course do away, and of course ought to do away, with dramatic poetry
altogether: for if it is certain that real persons do not actually
converse in good metre, it is happily no less certain that they do not
actually converse in bad metre. In the hands of so great a tragic poet
as Webster a peculiar and impressive effect may now and then be produced
by this anomalous and illegitimate way of writing; it certainly suits
well with the thoughtful and fantastic truculence of Bosola's
reflections on death and dissolution and decay--his "talk fit for a
charnel," which halts and hovers between things hideous and things
sublime. But it is a step on the downward way that leads to the negation
or the confusion of all distinctions between poetry and prose; a result
to which it would be grievous to think that the example of Shakespeare's
greatest contemporary should in any way appear to conduce.
The doctrine or the motive of chance (whichever we may prefer to call
it) is seen in its fullest workings and felt in its furthest bearings by
the student of Webster's masterpiece. The fifth act of "The Duchess of
Malfy" has been assailed on the very ground which it should have been
evident to a thoughtful and capable reader that the writer must have
intended to take up--on the ground that the whole upshot of the story is
dominated by sheer chance, arranged by mere error, and guided by pure
accident. No formal scheme or religious principle of retribution would
have been so strangely or so thoroughly in keeping with the whole scheme
and principle of the tragedy. After the overwhelming terrors and the
overpowering beauties of that unique and marvellous fourth act, in which
the genius of this poet spreads its fullest and its darkest wing for the
longest and the strongest of its flights, it could not but be that the
subsequent action and passion of the drama should appear by comparison
unimpressive or ineffectual; but all the effect or impression possible
of attainment under the inevitable burden of this difficulty is achieved
by natural and simple and straightforward means. If Webster has not
made the part of Antonio dramatically striking and attractive--as he
probably found it impossible to do--he has at least bestowed on the
fugitive and unconscious widower of his murdered heroine a pensive and
manly grace of deliberate resignation which is not without pathetic as
well as poetical effect. In the beautiful and well-known scene where the
echo from his wife's unknown and new-made grave seems to respond to his
meditative mockery and forewarn him of his impending death, Webster has
given such reality and seriousness to an old commonplace of contemporary
fancy or previous fashion in poetry that we are fain to forget the
fantastic side of the conception and see only the tragic aspect of its
meaning. A weightier objection than any which can be brought against the
conduct of the play might be suggested to the minds of some readers--and
these, perhaps, not too exacting or too captious readers--by the sudden
vehemence of transformation which in the great preceding act seems to
fall like fire from heaven upon the two chief criminals who figure on
the stage of murder. It seems rather a miraculous retribution, a
judicial violation of the laws of nature, than a reasonably credible
consequence or evolution of those laws, which strikes Ferdinand with
madness and Bosola with repentance. But the whole atmosphere of the
action is so charged with thunder that this double and simultaneous
shock of moral electricity rather thrills us with admiration and faith
than chills us with repulsion or distrust. The passionate intensity and
moral ardor of imagination which we feel to vibrate and penetrate
through every turn and every phrase of the dialogue would suffice to
enforce upon our belief a more nearly incredible revolution of nature or
revulsion of the soul.