No one denies that there are nobler words than any that we have quoted, in Jonson, in Fletcher, or in Massinger; but there is hardly a play (perhaps none) of theirs in which the immoralities of which we complain do not exist,—few of which they do not form an integral part; and now, if this is the judgment which we have to pass on the morality of the greater poets, what must the lesser ones be like?
Look, then, at Webster’s two masterpieces, ‘Vittoria Corrombona’ and the ‘Duchess of Malfi.’ A few words spent on them will surely not be wasted; for they are pretty generally agreed to be the two best tragedies written since Shakspeare’s time.
The whole story of ‘Vittoria Corrombona’ is one of sin and horror. The subject-matter of the play is altogether made up of the fiercest and the basest passions. But the play is not a study of those passions from which we may gain a great insight into human nature. There is no trace—nor is there, again, in the ‘Duchess of Malfi’—of that development of human souls for good or evil which is Shakspeare’s especial power—the power which, far more than any accidental ‘beauties,’ makes his plays, to this day, the delight alike of the simple and the wise, while his contemporaries are all but forgotten. The highest aim of dramatic art is to exhibit the development of the human soul; to construct dramas in which the conclusion shall depend, not on the events, but on the characters; and in which the characters shall not be mere embodiments of a certain passion, or a certain ‘humour’: but persons, each unlike all others; each having a destiny of his own by virtue of his own peculiarities, and of his own will; and each proceeding toward that destiny as he shall conquer, or yield to, circumstances; unfolding his own strength and weakness before the eyes of the audience; and that in such a way that, after his first introduction, they should be able (in proportion to their knowledge of human nature) to predict his conduct under those circumstances. This is indeed ‘high art’: but we find no more of it in Webster than in the rest. His characters, be they old or young, come on the stage ready-made, full grown, and stereotyped; and therefore, in general, they are not characters at all, but mere passions or humours in human form. Now and then he essays to draw a character: but it is analytically, by description, not synthetically and dramatically, by letting the man exhibit himself in action; and in the ‘Duchess of Mall’ he falls into the great mistake of telling, by Antonio’s mouth, more about the Duke and the Cardinal than he afterwards makes them act. Very different is Shakspeare’s method of giving, at the outset, some single delicate hint about his personages which will serve as a clue to their whole future conduct; thus ‘showing the whole in each part,’ and stamping each man with a personality, to a degree which no other dramatist has ever approached.
But the truth is, the study of human nature is not Webster’s aim. He has to arouse terror and pity, not thought, and he does it in his own way, by blood and fury, madmen and screech-owls, not without a rugged power. There are scenes of his, certainly, like that of Vittoria’s trial, which have been praised for their delineation of character: but it is one thing to solve the problem, which Shakspeare has so handled in ‘Lear,’ ‘Othello,’ and ‘Richard the Third,’—‘Given a mixed character, to show how he may become criminal,’ and to solve Webster’s ‘Given a ready-made criminal, to show how he commits his crimes.’ To us the knowledge of character shown in Vittoria’s trial scene is not an insight into Vittoria’s essential heart and brain, but a general acquaintance with the conduct of all bold bad women when brought to bay. Poor Elia, who knew the world from books, and human nature principally from his own loving and gentle heart, talks of Vittoria’s ‘innocence—resembling boldness’ [53]—and ‘seeming to see that matchless beauty of her face, which inspires such gay confidence in her,’ and so forth.
Perfectly just and true, not of Vittoria merely, but of the average of bad young women in the presence of a police magistrate: yet amounting in all merely to this, that the strength of Webster’s confest master-scene lies simply in intimate acquaintance with vicious nature in general. We will say no more on this matter, save to ask, Cui bono? Was the art of which this was the highest manifestation likely to be of much use to mankind, much less able to excuse its palpably disgusting and injurious accompaniments?
The ‘Duchess of Malfi’ is certainly in a purer and loftier strain: but in spite of the praise which has been lavished on her, we must take the liberty to doubt whether the poor Duchess is a ‘person’ at all. General goodness and beauty, intense though pure affection for a man below her in rank, and a will to carry out her purpose at all hazards, are not enough to distinguish her from thousands of other women: but Webster has no such purpose. What he was thinking and writing of was not truth, but effect; not the Duchess, but her story; not her brothers, but their rage; not Antonio, her major-domo and husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and thus he has made Antonio merely insipid, the brothers merely unnatural, and the Duchess (in the critical moment of the play) merely forward. That curious scene, in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him and makes him marry her, is, on the whole, painful. Webster himself seems to have felt that it was so; and, dreading lest he had gone too far, to have tried to redeem the Duchess at the end by making her break down in two exquisite lines of loving shame: but he has utterly forgotten to explain or justify her love by giving to Antonio (as Shakspeare would probably have done) such strong specialties of character as would compel, and therefore excuse, his mistress’s affection. He has plenty of time to do this in the first scenes,—time which he wastes on irrelevant matter; and all that we gather from them is that Antonio is a worthy and thoughtful person. If he gives promise of being more, he utterly disappoints that promise afterwards. In the scene in which the Duchess tells her love, he is far smaller, rather than greater, than the Antonio of the opening scene: though (as there) altogether passive. He hears his mistress’s declaration just as any other respectable youth might; is exceedingly astonished, and a good deal frightened; has to be talked out of his fears till one naturally expects a revulsion on the Duchess’s part into something like scorn or shame (which might have given a good opportunity for calling out sudden strength in Antonio): but so busy is Webster with his business of drawing mere blind love, that he leaves Antonio to be a mere puppet, whose worthiness we are to believe in only from the Duchess’s assurance to him that he is the perfection of all that a man should be; which, as all lovers are of the same opinion the day before the wedding, is not of much importance.
Neither in his subsequent misfortunes does Antonio make the least struggle to prove himself worthy of his mistress’s affection. He is very resigned and loving, and so forth. To win renown by great deeds, and so prove his wife in the right to her brothers and all the world, never crosses his imagination. His highest aim (and that only at last) is slavishly to entreat pardon from his brothers-in-law for the mere offence of marrying their sister; and he dies by an improbable accident, the same pious and respectable insipidity which he has lived,—‘ne valant pas la peine qui se donne pour lui.’ The prison-scenes between the Duchess and her tormentors are painful enough, if to give pain be a dramatic virtue; and she appears in them really noble; and might have appeared far more so, had Webster taken half as much pains with her as he has with the madmen, ruffians, ghosts, and screech-owls in which his heart really delights. The only character really worked out so as to live and grow under his hand is Bosola, who, of course, is the villain of the piece, and being a rough fabric, is easily manufactured with rough tools. Still, Webster has his wonderful touches here and there—
‘Cariola. Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers! Alas
What will you do with my lady? Call for help!
Duchess. To whom? to our next neighbours? they are mad folk.
Farewell, Cariola.
I pray thee look thou giv’st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold; and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.—Now, what you please;
What death?’
And so the play ends, as does ‘Vittoria Corrombona,’ with half a dozen murders coram populo, howls, despair, bedlam, and the shambles; putting the reader marvellously in mind of that well-known old book of the same era, ‘Reynolds’s God’s Revenge,’ in which, with all due pious horror and bombastic sermonising, the national appetite for abominations is duly fed with some fifty unreadable Spanish histories, French histories, Italian histories, and so forth, one or two of which, of course, are known to have furnished subjects for the playwrights of the day.
The next play-writer whom we are bound to notice is James Shirley, one of the many converts to Romanism which those days saw. He appears, up to the breaking out of the Civil War, to have been the Queen’s favourite poet; and, according to Laugbaine, he was ‘one of such incomparable parts that he was the chief of the second-rate poets, and by some has been thought even equal to Fletcher himself.’