He cannot let the subject alone, he is always returning to it. Earlier in the scene, when he tells Bosola that he does not wish his sister to marry again, he says:
Do not you ask the reason, but be satisfied
I say I would not.
Mr. Farquharson said these words with just the right emphasis, an emphasis that sent a shudder through one's flesh, it was so simple, so vague, and yet so peculiar.
Now, for this Mr. Farquharson ought to have been highly praised. It meant, first of all, that Mr. Farquharson had an original conception of his part; and, secondly, that he had the technique to carry his conception across the footlights. But imagination must meet imagination; if it meets nothing but dullness it might just as well be dull itself, its effect is necessarily nil; and, apparently, that is what Mr. Farquharson's noble effort did meet. It was really astonishing to find written in the daily Press the pained little grumblings of men who had been unable to discover an adequate motive for Ferdinand's conduct, and who expressed their dissatisfaction with Webster's capacity as a dramatist, after having been accustomed for many years to the dramatic genius of Mr. Walter Ellis (the author of A Little Bit of Fluff), Mr. George R. Sims (the author of The Great Day), Mr. Oscar Asche (author of Chu Chin Chow), Mr. Robert Hichens (author of The Voice from the Minaret), and many others of equal greatness but too numerous to mention. It was perhaps an over-familiarity with the works of this galaxy of genius that led one London newspaper to describe The Duchess of Malfi in headlines as "Funnier than Farce." The atmosphere of a genuine tragedy might easily appear "funny" to anyone accustomed to that of the average London play. One great difficulty that confronted some critics was the impossibility—after a war in which millions were slaughtered—of imagining the murder of four men. Because Webster's tragedy ends in the death of four of the principal characters, it is, apparently, farcical or funny. It never even seems to have occurred to these detractors of a great work that in Italy of the Renaissance—the place and period with which Webster is dealing—such incidents were as common as divorce suits nowadays; but it would, assuredly, be asking too much to expect people to exercise a little historical imagination who have no imagination of any sort, and who are, therefore, to be pitied for their inability to understand any play that does not contain a telephone.
On the bulk of the audience, however, Mr. Farquharson's Ferdinand made a deep impression, and the wonderful fifth scene in the second act, where Ferdinand enters with the words: "I have this night digged up a mandrake," was very nearly one of the finest and most blood-curdling things I have ever witnessed. It was just marred by a few exaggerations of gesture and crudities which could have easily been put right, but in conception and power it was magnificent. I have used the word "blood-curdling," although I know that nobody's blood curdles nowadays, least of all the blood of dramatic critics. But that is just what is wrong with them. It is no distinction to have blood that does not "curdle." The blood of an ox does not curdle—not at the tragedy of King Lear, nor Macbeth, nor the third act of Die Walküre, nor the Prometheus of Scriabin. There must be an imagination in the spectator to take fire, and without imagination the work of a poet like Webster must of necessity appear incomprehensible:
Methinks I see her laughing—
Excellent hyena! Talk to me somewhat quickly,
Or my imagination will carry me
To see her in the shameful act of sin.
To the unimaginative these lines of Ferdinand's will seem nothing, but they are wonderful in their dramatic vividness and appropriateness. I have quoted them because it is the sort of writing Webster gives us on every page; it is not one of his purple patches. Webster's command of language is little short of marvellous. To anyone with a sense of words it is a wonderful experience to read The Duchess of Malfi for the first time; and after seeing it played one returns to the book and finds it all ten times more wonderful still. Could anything be more utter cant than the suggestion that the plays of many modern dramatists are superior to Webster's even as literature? How many of them can be read at all, even once? It is so nearly impossible that more than half of them cannot be published, and of those that are published the perusal of a few pages leads to their prompt consignment to the dustbin. As for ever attaining that combination of great poetry with perfect dramatic appropriateness culminating in moments when vox in faucibus hæsit, it is utterly beyond them. Such passages as:
Bosola. Strangling; here are your executioners.
Duch. I forgive them:
The apoplexy, catarrh, or cough o' the lungs
Would do as much as they do.
Bos. Doth not death fright you?
Duch. Who would be afraid on't
Knowing to meet such excellent company
In the other world?
Bos. Yet, methinks
The manner of your death should much afflict you:
This cord should terrify you.
Duch. Not a whit:
What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds? or to be smotherèd
With cassia? or to be shot to death with pearls?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits; and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges
You may open them both ways.
Such passages are as abundant in Webster as dots in the novels of Mr. H. G. Wells. The only readable modern English dramatist—with the exception of Mr. Granville Barker, and possibly of Sir James Barrie—is Mr. Shaw; but one reads Mr. Shaw for his wit, and his wit, like water-ices, is, though tasty, very poor sustenance. Yet the same people who treat The Duchess of Malfi as "Farce" take Mr. Shaw's amusing buffoonery quite seriously; and there is one explanation for both phenomena, and it is the one with which I began—lack of imagination. An imaginative man does not need Mr. Shaw to show him in a play that soldiers value their lives, and there being nothing astoundingly novel in the idea, he is free to appreciate Mr. Shaw's extravagant humour; but the unimaginative man thinks, firstly, that it is some perilous and subversive doctrine, or some new and wonderful truth—according to his political prejudice—and then, secondly, when some personal experience fits Mr. Shaw's formula, looks upon Mr. Shaw as a dealer in real property, and has for him that serious consideration he has for his landlord. This explains the fate of such a brilliant piece of extravaganza as Arms and the Man, which Mr. Loraine has produced at the Duke of York's Theatre. Originally the darling of unimaginative intellectuals—to whom it had brought light—and the bugbear of equally unimaginative Philistines—to whom its "light" was the flame of revolution—it is now accepted by the ordinary man in the pit as an ordinary, matter-of-fact account of what war is, because the man in the pit is just back from one and recognises the likeness. The deafening applause from ex-soldiers at the Duke of York's Theatre is something to go and hear. To them Mr. Shaw is no intellectual forerunner opening up obscure paths of thought, but a man who has described exactly what used to go on in the only army they have ever known, and they have for him the serious respect they have for all retailers of materials. He is a dealer not in "fancies," but in real goods. But this "reality" is just as imaginary as the former "light." Neither Bluntschli nor Cyrano de Bergerac represents the soldier. There is, in fact, no such thing as a soldier, there are only soldiers. The intellectual has never had his "light" nor the plain man his "reality"; for, being without imagination, they cannot have these things. There is no way of truth reaching an unimaginative man; he is doomed to live under a series of illusions, only shedding one to receive another, but, by a sublime paradox, the only illusion he can never shed is the illusion that poetry is an illusion, an illusion of the senses. It is the fate of poetry, of such magnificent poetic drama as Webster's, to remain always undraped in the world of imagination and never by any protective mimicry to take the colour of its surroundings and put on a fashionable dress. This, its unique greatness, is in the eyes of the unimaginative man its weakness, because he fails to recognise in it any of the outward appearances of his daily life—in short, he fails to see his washerwoman because to him she is a washerwoman and not a woman.
It is pleasant to think that there are actors and actresses who practically, for sheer love of their art, will give their time and ability for two isolated performances of a long and difficult work like The Duchess of Malfi. The performance, as a whole, was remarkably good, and it seems to me worth while recording the cast here: