Poetic Violence

The Complete Works of John Webster. New Text with Commentary and Introductions. Edited by F. L. Lucas. 4 Vols. (Chatto and Windus. 18s. each.)

IN the later Elizabethans there is an accent—more than an accent ; a style of mind—more shocking in its savagery than any Grand Guignol or blood-mongering in the history of drama. It is shocking because it is sincere. Its sincerity is proved by its rich and fertile invention. No man who desired to startle an audience could be so lovingly at home as in these black waters of the soul.

There are only scraps of information to tell us what sort of man John Webster was ; but those scraps fit in well enough -with his most famous works. They show us a character of tortured dignity and isolation ; they go to prove that his melancholy is not accidental and assumed,

but something after his own nature. We can take it, I think, that his bitterness is a unified interpretation of his

own experience.

We can apply another test to see if his outlook was of a piece with himself. A true gloom of mind finds great subjects to occupy it ; and of all great subjects the fittest are Woman and Death. Buoyancy and cheerfulness take Love and Immortality in their stride—beliefs so natural to these moods that they admit of no argument ; Lore and Immortality are the substance of happy, spontaneous creation. There can be no creation at all without some foundation in these beliefs ; but a gloomy mind revolves among them accusingly ; they should be true, they must be true, but look and see ! The world is made of unfaithfulness, greed and lust, violences, treacheries, and the slow or sudden poison of death.

These are the fit births of thought for a real melancholy. An artificial gloom would shirk the question, and cynicism solves it too easily. Webster was bitten by the same devil as John Donne ; he found desire was ashes, because no woman was true. No doubt he provoked his own experiences by his own temperament, his own expectations. The world will return exactly this answer to a man who feels that life can never be perfect and absolute because in every moment of life we can see the encroachment of death. His whole experience will prove consistent with his temperament.

Webster is consistent, certainly. Even when he is most lyrical the same undercurrent is in his verse :—

" Survey our progresse from our birth,

We are set, we grow, we tome to earth.

Courts adieu, and all delights,

All bewitching appetites ;

Sweetest breath, and clearest eye, Like perfumes gee out and dye ; And consequently this is done, As shadowes wait upon the Sunne."

Here is a song sung by—of all people, a villainous money- lender ; but it is such a song as any character in Webster's plays might sing, for he sings it himself.

It looks as though the Elizabethan heroism had over- reached itself, and turned sour in the mouths of later con- temporaries. A romantic heroism demands a certain pertness in the face of death—and of woman ; and those who cannot stomach that pertness will need a very tragic air to console themselves for their inadequacy to the heroic idea/. It was a male world ; in its coarseness, in its explosiveness, in its chivalry, equally affirming the values of masculinity. A man bred up to its ideals, yet revolting from them, could hardly find another way of keeping his self-esteem than by an extreme sensitiveness to the horror of death-in-life, and lust-in-love.

Mr. F. L. Lucas has done a very laborious and valuable piece of work in his edition of Webster. At first it seems that he has rather over-commented his author ; there are introductions upon introductions and appendices upon appendices. But this is the first really authoritative and complete collected edition ; in view of its importance, we have no ground to complain of its bulk and its slight air of pretentiousness. There has been very little criticism of Webster ; nineteenth-century litterateurs had an awful habit of enthusiasm when contemplating an Elizabethan play- wright. They poured out such a stream of praise that the poet was almost drowned : his black head could sometimes be seen bobbing up and down in the ocean of his imputed grandeur ; but form and feature were lost to view. Mr. Lucas is more measured ; even if his description of Webster's quality falls back too frequently upon " thunderstorms and "lightning flashes," he has taken a good, clear look at his man and noticed his proper singularities among his contemporaries.

We jump to different atmosphere indeed in Sir Samuel Tuke's The Adventures of Five Hours. It is one of the first plays of the Restoration ; astonishing in its prophecies of the Augustan age ; with an intricate plot very cleverly handled ; written in "middle speech" of epigrammatic terseness ; totally lacking in the splendours and the imagin- ative height of the old drama.

Samuel Pepys went to see it more than once. "The play, in one word," he writes, "is the best, for the variety and continuance of the plot to the very end, that I ever saw, or think ever shall." It took all the savour out of Othello, More of Venice, "which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play, but having lately read The Adventures of the Five Houres, it seems a mean thing." One thing it contained no hint of ; the later Restoration looseness, vivacity and colloquial freshness. It is a hard

thing to persuade mankind that Thomas Shadwell is anything but a synonym for dullness ;, Dryden fixed him so beautifully with this quality that to deny that Shadwell is dull is as absurd as denying that the earth is round. Though he was Poet Laureate, he was truly no poet ; but in his comedies there is a larger and vivider picture of his times than any other playwright gave. He deserves this monumental edition of his works ; lesser men have come by fair play and an honest appreciation a thousand times over, while Shadwell has been sunk under the unalterable verdict of a satire of genius.

He comes to his own in the end ; he issues to judgment in five vast volumes, surrounded by the vast erudition of the Rev. Montague Summers. The learning of Mr. Summers is exhausting : at times it is rather indiscriminately applied. There is thus a double burden to be borne in reading the new edition ; there is a certain prolixity in Shadwell himself ; there is a certain wandering and intricate scholarship in his editor. But both tasks have their alleviations and rewards.

ALAN PORTER.