Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/128

 mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too often do. Every new edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the putting of another witness into the box to prove the inaccessibility of Shakspeare's stand-point as poet and artist.

Webster's most famous works are "The Duchess of Malfy" and "Vittoria Corombona," but we are strongly inclined to call "The Devil's Law-Case" his best play. The two former are in a great measure answerable for the "spasmodic" school of poets, since the extravagances of a man of genius are as sure of imitation as the equable self-possession of his higher moments is incapable of it. Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite of a poet, imagination, but in him it was truly untamed, and Aristotle's admirable distinction between the _Horrible_ and the _Terrible_ in tragedy was never better illustrated and confirmed than in the "Duchess" and "Vittoria." His nature had something of the sleuth-hound quality in it, and a plot, to keep his mind eager on the trail, must be sprinkled with fresh blood at every turn. We do not forget all the fine things that Lamb has said of Webster, but, when Lamb wrote, the Elizabethan drama was an El Dorado, whose micacious sand, even, was treasured as auriferous,--and no wonder, in a generation which admired the "Botanic Garden." Webster is the Gherardo della Notte of his day, and himself calls his "Vittoria Corombona" a "night-piece." Though he had no conception of Nature in its large sense, as something pervading a whole character and making it consistent with itself, nor of Art, as that which dominates an entire tragedy and makes all the characters foils to each other and tributaries to the catastrophe, yet there are flashes of Nature in his plays, struck out by the collisions of passion, and dramatic intensities of phrase for which it would be hard to find the match. The "prithee, undo this button" of _Lear_, by which Shakspeare makes us feel the swelling of the old king's heart, and that the bodily results of mental anguish have gone so far as to deaden for the moment all intellectual consciousness and forbid all expression of grief, is hardly finer than the broken verse which Webster puts into the mouth of _Ferdinand_ when he sees the body of his sister, murdered by his own procurement,--

"Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young."

He has not the condensing power of Shakspeare, who squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could carve a cherry-stone with any of the _concellisti_, and abounds in imaginative quaintnesses that are worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that remind us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases of the purest crystallization. Here are a few examples:--

"Oh, if there be another world i' th' moon, As some fantastics dream, I could wish all _men_,  The whole race of them, for their inconstancy,  Sent thither to people that!"

(Old Chaucer was yet slier. After saying that Lamech was the first faithless lover, he adds,--

"And he invented _tents_, unless men lie,"--

implying that he was the prototype of nomadic men.)

"Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds: In the trenches, for the soldier; in the wakeful study,  For the scholar; in the furrows of the sea,  For men of our profession [merchants]; all of which  Arise and spring up honor."

("Of all which," Mr. Hazlitt prints it.)

"Poor Jolenta! should she hear of this, She would not after the report keep fresh  So long as flowers on graves."

"For sin and shame are ever tied together With Gordian knots of such a strong thread spun,  They cannot without violence be undone." "One whose mind Appears more like a ceremonious chapel  Full of sweet music, than a thronging presence." "Gentry? 'tis nought else But a superstitious relic of time past;  And, sifted to the true worth, it is nothing  But ancient riches." "What is death? The safest trench i' th' world to keep man free  From Fortune's gunshot."

"It has ever been my opinion