The moral confusion they produce by their deeds is traced with more than Webster's usual steadiness of nerve and clearness of vision. The evil they inflict is a cause of evil in others; the passion which leads to murder rouses the fiercer passion which aches for vengeance; and at last, when the avengers of crime have become morally as bad as the criminals, they are all involved in a common destruction. Vittoria is probably Webster's most powerful delineation. Bold, bad, proud, glittering in her baleful beauty, strong in that evil courage which shrinks from crime as little as from danger, she meets her murderers with the same self-reliant scorn with which she met her judges. "Kill her attendant first," exclaimed one of them.
"Vittoria. You shall not kill her first; behold my breast:
I will be waited on in death; my servant
Shall never go before me.
"Gasparo. Are you so brave!
"Vittoria. Yes, I shall welcome death,
As princes do some great ambassadors;
I'll meet thy weapon half-way.
"Lodovico. Strike, strike,
With a joint motion.
"Vittoria. 'T was a manly blow;
The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant,
And then thou wilt be famous."
Webster tells us, in the Preface to "The White Devil," that he does not "write with a goose-quill winged with two feathers"; and also hints that the play failed in representation through its being acted in winter in "an open and black theatre," and because it wanted "a full and understanding auditory." "Since that time," he sagely adds, "I have noted most of the people that come to the playhouse resemble those ignorant asses who, visiting stationers' shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books." And then comes the ever-recurring wail of the playwright, Elizabethan as well as Georgian, respecting the taste of audiences. "Should a man," he says, "present to such an auditory the most sententious tragedy that ever was written, observing all the critical laws, as height of style, and gravity of person, enrich it with the sententious chorus, and, as it were, enliven death in the passionate and weighty Nuntius; yet after all this divine rapture, O dura messorum ilia, the breath that comes from the uncapable multitude is able to poison it."
Of all the contemporaries of Shakespeare, Webster is the most Shakespearian. His genius was not only influenced by its contact with one side of Shakespeare's many-sided mind, but the tragedies we have been considering abound in expressions and situations either suggested by or directly copied from the tragedies of him he took for his model. Yet he seems to have had no conception of the superiority of Shakespeare to all other dramatists; and in his Preface to "The White Devil," after speaking of the "full and heightened style of Master Chapman, the labored and understanding works of Master Jonson, the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master Fletcher," he adds his approval, "without wrong last to be named," of "the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekkar, and Master Heywood." This is not half so felicitous a classification as would be made by a critic of our century, who should speak of the "right happy and copious industry" of Master Goethe, Master Dickens, and Master G. P. R. James.
Webster's reference, however, to "the full and heightened style of Master Chapman" is more appropriate; for no writer of that age impresses us more by a certain rude heroic height of character than George Chapman. Born in 1559, and educated at the University of Oxford, he seems, on his first entrance into London life, to have acquired the patronage of the noble, and the friendship of all who valued genius and scholarship. He was among the few men whom Ben Jonson said he loved. His greatest performance, and it was a gigantic one, was his translation of Homer, which, in spite of obvious faults, excels all other translations in the power to rouse and lift and inflame the mind. Some eminent painter, we believe Barry, said that, when he went into the street after reading it, men seemed ten feet high. Pope averred that the translation of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written by Homer before he arrived at years of discretion; and Coleridge declares the version of the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the Faery Queen. Chapman himself evidently thought that he was the first translator who had been admitted into intimate relations with Homer's soul, and caught by direct contact the sacred fury of his inspiration. He says finely of those who had attempted his work in other languages:
"They failed to search his deep and treasures heart.
The cause was, since they wanted the fit key
Of Nature, in their downright strength of art,
With Poesy to open Poesy."