A far more creditable and workman-like piece of work, though glorified by no flashes of such sudden and singular beauty, is the tragedy of “Appius and Virginia.” The almost infinite superiority of Webster to Fletcher as a poet of pure tragedy and a painter of masculine character is in this play as obvious as the inferiority in construction and conduct of romantic story displayed in his attempt at a tragicomedy. From the evidence of style I should judge this play to have been written at an earlier date than “The Devil’s Law-case”: it is, I repeat, far better composed; better, perhaps, than any other play of the author’s: but it has none of his more distinctive qualities; intensity of idea, concentration of utterance, pungency of expression and ardor of pathos. It is written with noble and equable power of hand, with force and purity and fluency of apt and simple eloquence: there is nothing in it unworthy of the writer: but it is the only one of his unassisted works in which we do not find that especial note of tragic style, concise and pointed and tipped as it were with fire, which usually makes it impossible for the dullest reader to mistake the peculiar presence, the original tone or accent, of John Webster. If the epithet unique had not such a tang of German affectation in it, it would be perhaps the aptest of all adjectives to denote the genius or define the manner of this great poet. But in this tragedy, though whatever is said is well said and whatever is done well done, we miss that sense of positive and inevitable conviction, that instant and profound perception or impression as of immediate and indisputable truth, which is burnt in upon us as we read the more Websterian scenes of Webster’s writing. We feel, in short, that thus it may have been; not, as I observed at the opening of these notes, that thus it must have been. The poem does him no discredit; nay, it does him additional honor, as an evidence of powers more various and many-sided than we should otherwise have known or supposed in him. Indeed, the figure of Virginius is one of the finest types of soldierly and fatherly heroism ever presented on the stage: there is equal force of dramatic effect, equal fervor of eloquent passion, in the scene of his pleading before the senate on behalf of the claims of his suffering and struggling fellow-soldiers, and in the scene of his return to the camp after the immolation of his daughter. The mere theatric effect of this latter scene is at once so triumphant and so dignified, so noble in its presentation and so passionate in its restraint, that we feel the high justice and sound reason of the instinct which inspired the poet to prolong the action of his play so far beyond the sacrifice of his heroine. A comparison of Webster’s Virginius with any of Fletcher’s wordy warriors will suffice to show how much nearer to Shakespeare than to Fletcher stands Webster as a tragic or a serious dramatist. Coleridge, not always just to Fletcher, was not unjust in his remark “what strange self-trumpeters and tongue bullies all the brave soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are”; and again almost immediately— “all B. and F.’s generals are pugilists, or cudgel-fighters, that boast of their bottom and of the ‘claret’ they have shed.” There is nothing of this in Virginius; Shakespeare himself has not represented with a more lofty fidelity, in the person of Coriolanus or of Brutus, “the high Roman fashion” of austere and heroic self-respect. In the other leading or dominant figure of this tragedy there is certainly discernible a genuine and thoughtful originality or freshness of conception; but perhaps there is also recognizable a certain inconsistency of touch. It was well thought of to mingle some alloy of goodness with the wickedness of Appius Claudius, to represent the treacherous and lecherous decemvir as neither kindless nor remorseless, but capable of penitence and courage in his last hour. But Shakespeare, I cannot but think, would have prepared us with more care and more dexterity for the revelation of some such redeeming quality in a character which in the act immediately preceding Webster has represented as utterly heartless and shameless, brutal in its hypocrisy and impudent in its brutality.
If the works already discussed were their author’s only claims to remembrance and honor, they might not suffice to place him on a higher level among our tragic poets than that occupied by Marston and Dekker and Middleton on the one hand, by Fletcher and Massinger and Shirley on the other. “Antonio and Mellida,” “Old Fortunatus,” or “The Changeling”— “The Maid’s Tragedy,” “The Duke of Milan,” or “The Traitor” — would suffice to counterweigh (if not, in some cases, to outbalance) the merit of the best among these: the fitful and futile inspiration of “The Devil’s Law-case,” and the stately but subdued inspiration of “Appius and Virginia.” That his place was with no subordinate poet — that his station is at Shakespeare’s right hand — the evidence supplied by his two great tragedies is disputable by no one who has an inkling of the qualities which confer a right to be named in the same day with the greatest writer of all time.
Aeschylus is above all things the poet of righteousness. “But in any wise, I say unto thee, revere thou the altar of righteousness”: this is the crowning admonition of his doctrine, as its crowning prospect is the reconciliation or atonement of the principle of retribution with the principle of redemption, of the powers of the mystery of darkness with the coeternal forces of the spirit of wisdom, of the lord of inspiration and of light. The doctrine of Shakespeare, where it is not vaguer, is darker in its implication of injustice, in its acceptance of accident, than the impression of the doctrine of Aeschylus. Fate, irreversible and inscrutable, is the only force of which we feel the impact, of which we trace the sign, in the upshot of “Othello” or “King Lear.” The last step into the darkness remained to be taken by “the most tragic” of all English poets. With Shakespeare — and assuredly not with Aeschylus — righteousness itself seems subject and subordinate to the masterdom of fate: but fate itself, in the tragic world of Webster, seems merely the servant or the synonyme of chance. The two chief agents in his two great tragedies pass away — the phrase was, perhaps, unconsciously repeated— “in a mist”: perplexed, indomitable, defiant of hope and fear; bitter and sceptical and bloody in penitence or impenitence alike. And the mist which encompasses the departing spirits of these moody and mocking men of blood seems equally to involve the lives of their chastisers and their victims. Blind accident and blundering mishap— “such a mistake,” says one of the criminals, “as I have often seen in a play” — are the steersmen of their fortunes and the doomsmen of their deeds. The effect of this method or the result of this view, whether adopted for dramatic objects or ingrained in the writer’s temperament, is equally fit for pure tragedy and unfit for any form of drama not purely tragic in evolution and event. In “The Devil’s Law-case” it is offensive, because the upshot is incongruous and insufficient: in “The White Devil” and “The Duchess of Malfy” it is admirable, because the results are adequate and coherent. But in all these three plays alike, and in these three plays only, the peculiar tone of Webster’s genius, the peculiar force of his imagination, is distinct and absolute in its fulness of effect. The author of “Appius and Virginia” would have earned an honorable and enduring place in the history of English letters as a worthy member — one among many — of a great school in poetry, a deserving representative of a great epoch in literature: but the author of these three plays has a solitary station, an indisputable distinction of his own. The greatest poets of all time are not more mutually independent than this one — a lesser poet only than those greatest — is essentially independent of them all.
The first quality which all readers recognize, and which may strike a superficial reader as the exclusive or excessive note of his genius and his work, is of course his command of terror. Except in Aeschylus, in Dante, and in Shakespeare, I at least know not where to seek for passages which in sheer force of tragic and noble horror — to the vulgar shock of ignoble or brutal horror he never condescends to submit his reader or subdue his inspiration — may be set against the subtlest, the deepest, the sublimest passages of Webster. Other gifts he had as great in themselves, as precious and as necessary to the poet: but on this side he is incomparable and unique. Neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare had so fine, so acc
urate, so infallible a sense of the delicate line of demarcation which divides the impressive and the terrible from the horrible and the loathsome — Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac from Eugène Sue and Émile Zola. On his theatre we find no presentation of old men with their beards torn off and their eyes gouged out, of young men imprisoned in reeking cesspools and impaled with red-hot spits. Again and again his passionate and daring genius attains the utmost limit and rounds the final goal of tragedy; never once does it break the bounds of pure poetic instinct. If ever for a moment it may seem to graze that goal too closely, to brush too sharply by those bounds, the very next moment finds it clear of any such risk and remote from any such temptation as sometimes entrapped or seduced the foremost of its forerunners in the field. And yet this is the field in which its paces are most superbly shown. No name among all the names of great poets will recur so soon as Webster’s to the reader who knows what it signifies, as he reads or repeats the verses in which a greater than this great poet — a greater than all since Shakespeare — has expressed the latent mystery of terror which lurks in all the highest poetry or beauty, and distinguishes it inexplicably and inevitably from all that is but a little lower than the highest.
Les aigles sur les bords du Gange et du Caÿstre Sont effrayants; Rien de grand qui ne soit confusément sinistre; Les noirs paeans,
Les psaumes, la chanson monstrueuse du mage Ezéchiel, Font devant notre oeil fixe errer la vague image D’un affreux ciel.
L’empyrée est l’abîme, on y plonge, on y reste Avec terreur. Car planer, c’est trembler; si l’azur est céleste, C’est par l’horreur.
L’épouvante est au fond des choses les plus belles; Les bleus vallons Font parfois reculer d’effroi les fauves ailes Des aquilons.
And even in comedy as in tragedy, in prosaic even as in prophetic inspiration, in imitative as in imaginative works of genius, the sovereign of modern poets has detected the same touch of terror wherever the deepest note possible has been struck, the fullest sense possible of genuine and peculiar power conveyed to the student of lyric or dramatic, epic or elegiac masters.
De là tant de beautés difformes dans leurs oeuvres; Le vers charmant Est par la torsion subite des couleuvres Pris brusquement;
A de certains moments toutes les jeunes flores Dans la foret Out peur, et sur le front des blanches métaphores L’ombre apparait;
C’est qu’Horace ou Virgile out vu soudain le spectre Noir se dresser; C’est que là-bas, derrière Amaryllis, Électre Vient de passer.
Nor was it the Electra of Sophocles, the calm and impassive accomplice of an untroubled and unhesitating matricide, who showed herself ever in passing to the intent and serious vision of Webster. By those candid and sensible judges to whom the praise of Marlowe seems to imply a reflection on the fame of Shakespeare, I may be accused — and by such critics I am content to be accused — of a fatuous design to set Webster beside Sophocles, or Sophocles — for aught I know — beneath Webster, if I venture to indicate the superiority in truth of natural passion — and, I must add, of moral instinct — which distinguishes the modern from the ancient. It is not, it never will be, and it never can have been natural for noble and civilized creatures to accept with spontaneous complacency, to discharge with unforced equanimity, such offices or such duties as weigh so lightly on the spirit of the Sophoclean Orestes that the slaughter of a mother seems to be a less serious undertaking for his unreluctant hand than the subsequent execution of her paramour. The immeasurable superiority of Aeschylus to his successors in this quality of instinctive righteousness — if a word long vulgarized by theology may yet be used in its just and natural sense — is shared no less by Webster than by Shakespeare. The grave and deep truth of natural impulse is never ignored by these poets when dealing either with innocent or with criminal passion: but it surely is now and then ignored by the artistic quietism of Sophocles — as surely as it is outraged and degraded by the vulgar theatricalities of Euripides. Thomas Campbell was amused and scandalized by the fact that Webster (as he is pleased to express it) modestly compares himself to the playwright last mentioned; being apparently of opinion that “Hippolytus” and “Medea” may be reckoned equal or superior, as works of tragic art or examples of ethical elevation, to “The White Devil” and “The Duchess of Malfy”; and being no less apparently ignorant, and incapable of understanding, that as there is no poet morally nobler than Webster so is there no poet ignobler in the moral sense than Euripides: while as a dramatic artist — an artist in character, action, and emotion — the degenerate tragedian of Athens, compared to the second tragic dramatist of England, is as a mutilated monkey to a well-made man. No better test of critical faculty could be required by the most exacting scrutiny of probation than is afforded by the critic’s professed or professional estimate of those great poets whose names are not consecrated — or desecrated — by the conventional applause, the factitious adoration, of a tribunal whose judgments are dictated by obsequious superstition and unanimous incompetence. When certain critics inform a listening world that they do not admire Marlowe and Webster — they admire Shakespeare and Milton, we know at once that it is not the genius of Shakespeare — it is the reputation of Shakespeare that they admire. It is not the man that they bow down to: it is the bust that they crouch down before. They would worship Shirley as soon as Shakespeare — Glover as soon as Milton — Byron as soon as Shelley — Ponsard as soon as Hugo — Longfellow as soon as Tennyson — if the tablet were as showily emblazoned, the inscription as pretentiously engraved.
The nobility of spirit and motive which is so distinguishing a mark of 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 Charlo
tte 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:
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 333
