WEBSTER AND TOURNEUR.*

Amorta the recent additions which have been made to the "Mermaid" series, the volume comprising the twin tragic masterpieces of John Webster, and the two sole surviving plays of Cyril Tourneur, holds an important place. Mr. Symonds furnishes an admirably written and well-pondered introduction, displaying, so far at least as Webster is con- cerned, his usual keenness of critical insight and intimate knowledge of his subject, though with respect to his treatment of Tourneur we are obliged to confess to no small degree of disappointment. Every reader of the poets will probably recognise, with Mr. Symonds, that Webster was, on the whole, the superior of the two. His melody is richer and fuller than Tourneur's, his view more comprehensive, his intellect broader, if not more subtle and powerful, his command of poetic imagery more imperial, his philosophy saner and riper, though hardly less bitter and sad, and his best scenes have an artistic finish and satisfying excellence to which Tourneur's have no claim. Of that lyrical faculty. which Webster shared in common with so many of his dramatic brethren, the author of The Revenger's Tragedy has, besides, given us no evidence. Nor shall we find in Tourneur those priceless treasures of ethical thought which earned for Webster the title of "noble-minded" by which his con- temporaries distinguished him. It must further be admitted that some of the excellences which strike most forcibly the reader of The Atheist's Tragedy and The _Revenger's Tragedy —their pithy and sententious single lines and phrases, apt illustrations, and ready seizure of analogies in the natural and moral world, for example—are im.nifest, in a yet larger degree, in the pages of Vittoria Corombona and The Duchess of Malfi. Yet, kindred as was the genius of the two dramatists in certain respects, there were radical points of difference; and if there was imitation, it was not on the part of Tourneur, as has been sometimes too readily taken for granted by his detractors, for the credit of priority of production, such as it is, belongs to him. There is the stamp of individuality on every page of Tourneur's masterpiece. In ardour of moral indignation, in intensity of feeling, conception, and utterance, in command over all the resources of the language of vituperation, sarcasm, or satire, in spontaneity and savage earnestness, in superb expression—through the medium of a blank verse whose rhythm vibrates to every thought, mood, or passion—of the fiercest gusts of wrath or scorn, with undertones of un- fathomable grief, wild pathos, or deepest despair, in im- placable hatred of all that is base in man, and reverence, none the less real because oftenest implied, for all that is noblest, and in recognition of the immense power of evil in the world, Tourneur was, if Shakespeare be excepted, unique in his generation. Even if the purely wsthetic merits of The Revenger's Tragedy were less considerable than they are, it would still have a kind of autobio- graphical interest and fascination for us,—for on its pages, even more than on those of The White Devil or The Duchess of Malfi, there is the unmistakable and indelible impress of deep personal suffering, and an exceptionally bitter experience of life. Isolation, the sense of unmerited neglect, lonely pain, baffled aspiration, nameless woe, blighted hopes, brooding discontent, weakness, and ennui are there ; and in the linea- ments of Vendici we discern those of his creator,—distorted, indeed, but easily recognisable. To this great and original character, one of the most striking in the whole Elizabethan drama, Mr. Symonds appears to the present writer to have done somewhat less than justice. He charges Vendici with being a moral leper and fiendishly vindictive, and asserts that he is without elevation of nature. In general it is safer to listen in respectful silence to Mr. Symonds's views than to impugn them rashly, especially when they are backed by a writer of such ability as Mr. Collins, the editor of Tourneur's collected works. Yet we cannot help expressing a partial dissent, at least, from them in this particular instance. Of lust divorced from affection, Vendici nowhere throughout the

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"The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists:" Webster and Tourneur. With an Introduction and Notes by John Addington Symonds. Unexpurgated Edition. London: Vizetelly and Co. 188.

play betrays the slightest taint, but, on the contrary, expresses the utmost abhorrence—too impassioned not to be genuine— at every manifestation of it. His murdered wife had been his sole love, and he is even inclined, after her death, to " chide " himself for the alloy of vulgar passion which had blended with his affection for her. He talks like one to whom sensual joy is almost unintelligible, and we feel, in the great reconciliation scene with his mother in the fourth act of the play, that when he says to his brother, "Let's marry her to our souls, wherein's no lust," his boast is a just one. It is his very coldness, com- bined with his keen and powerful intellect, quick observa- tion, and experience of, without personal participation in, the crooked ways of the Court, which makes him act so well, or rather overact, the part of the pander which he assumes, partly to test to the utmost the virtue of his mother and sister, and partly in fulfilment of his rash oath to the Duke's son, Lussurio, to whom his extreme conscientiousness would not allow him to be forsworn. It is to his credit that, despite his too reasonable distrust of humanity in general, he has the most implicit confidence in the incorruptibility of his mother and sister, and he therefore gives full play to his intellectual powers in his trial of it. His confidence in his sister is amply justified by the result of his experiment ; but his mother is not so difficult to persuade, and his unexpected success with her is so unwelcome to himself, that he passionately reproaches himself with being "a villain not to be forsworn to the Duke's son ;" and when his mother leaves him with the promise to use her influence to corrupt his sister, remarking that "Women with women can work best alone," he bursts into the following exclamations :—

"0, more uncivil, more unnatural,

Than those base-titled creatures that look downward !

Why does not Heaven turn black, or with a frown Undo the world ? Why does not earth start up, And strike the sins that tread upon it ? 0, Were't not for gold and women, there would be no damnation!"

We are certainly unable to discover anything of the "moral leper" in these utterances. As Webster's Vittoria over-acts

the role of injured innocence, betraying her inward conscious- ness of guilt by her unblushing and scornful repudiation of it,

so Vendici appears to us to overact the part of pander, tinging his most seductive arguments with a subtle irony which reveals his own deep-rooted contempt for the allurements of vice, and employing language which could not but be revolting in the extreme to the delicate mind of his sister, Castiza. In like manner, though impudence is wholly foreign to his nature, his modesty and misfortunes combined having generated in him a confirmed sullenness of habit, yet, after fortifying himself with a magnificently worded invocation to Impudence, the "goddess of the palace,"—

" To whom the costly perfumed people pray,"

he simulates effrontery so well, when he finds it absolutely necessary to the accomplishment of his designs of vengeance, that Lussurio himself is amazed at so extreme a manifestation of it, and administers an instant rebuke,—

"Sfoot, the slave's Already as familiar as an ague, And shakes me at his pleasure. Friend, I can Forget myself in private ; but, elsewhere,

I pray do you remember me."

What infinite sadness and pathos, blended with unselfish joy, there are in Venilici's words over his weeping and repentant mother !—

" I' faith, a sweet shower, it does much good.

The fruitful grounds and meadows of her soul Have been long dry ; pour down, thou blessed dew ! Rise, mother ; troth, this shower has made you higher !"

As for his revenge, it is certainly sanguinary. Yet when one takes into account the unparalleled wrongs he had endured at the hands. of the Duke, and that he and his sons were con- tinually heaping fresh injuries upon himself and his family,

and that legal redress was impossible, one is strongly inclined to excuse the observation of one of Vendici's accomplices :—

"Our wrongs are such,

We cannot justly be revenged too much."

One trait in Vendici's character, his magnanimity, displayed in his declining to kill his enemy, Lussurio, unawares, for the

noble reason,— " Sword, thou wast never a backbiter yet," and in his closing speech, so characteristic in its mingled defiance, self-mockery, and languor of tone, in which he refrains from disclosing the names of his accomplices, though more guilty than he, as their wrongs were less,—

" And if we list, we could have nobles clipped, And go for less than beggars ; but we hate To bleed BO cowardly,"

has not, so far as we remember, received the notice of any critic. It is, perhaps, worth pointing out that we are not definitely told by whose hand the Duke's son Supervacuo dies, though, from Antonio's remark,—

" The rest, ambitious who should rule and sway After his death, were so made all away,"

it would seem that he was involved somehow in the general slaughter, receiving his death-blow, accidental or intentional, from one of his brothers.

So far we have dwelt more on Tourneur than Webster, because his merits have been far less frequently and fully pointed out, than the more obvious if greater ones which dis- tinguish the author of The White Devil, The Duchess of Mal fi, and Appius and Virginia. Webster's wealth of noble thought, his equal command of the passions of terror and pity, his powerful and sombre imagination, delighting now in refined and now in sinister images, his melancholy grandeur, and his deeply impressive pictures of the triumph of lofty and heroic souls over physical humiliation and torture, have struck every reader of his tragedies, and amply justify his claim to rank second only to Shakespeare as a tragic dramatist. The great fourth act of The Duchess of Maifi, some scenes in which even Shelley is said to have thought fully worthy of Shakespeare, would alone have sufficed to establish the superiority of Webster to all but the great master. In compression, depth, and truth of tragic utterance, the short colloquy of Bosola and Ferdinand on the death of the Duchess is certainly un- surpassed and unsurpassable. And what infinite scorn for the empty consolation which the selfish and comfortable optimist is wont to offer to his downcast and down-trodden brother whose sufferings he is impotent or unwilling to relieve, or even to understand, is implied in the following dialogue

• between Ferdinand's instrument and their victim !— "Bos. Leave this vain sorrow.

Things being at the worst begin to mend; the bee When he hath shot his sting into your hand, May then play with your eyelid.

Duch. Good comfortable fellow, Persuade a wretch that's broke upon the wheel To have all his bones new set ; entreat him live To be executed again."

Webster is greater than Tourneur because, while recognising with him the prevalence and the repeated triumphs of evil in the history of the race and of individuals, he sees, what Tourneur certainly does not see, that through pain, suffering, and humiliation, the soul may attain greater heights than it could ever otherwise have reached,—

" There's no deep valley but near some great hill."

Webster's pathos is of the subtlest kind, and is not absent from certain scenes in The Duchess of Malfi ; but its peculiar power is, we think, more fully felt in The White Devil. One's heart is certainly touched by the sufferings of the noble Duchess, and beats in strongest sympathy with her; but it hardly aches as it is made to do by reading the dialogue between Brachiano and his wronged yet still faithful wife, Isabella, in the first scene of the second• act of Vittoria. And the words which Webster puts into the mouth of their little son, Giovanni, when conversing on the death of Isabella with his uncle, Francisco de Medieis, might well have been written by Shakespeare himself :—

" Let her sleepever !

For I have known her wake an hundred nights,

When all the pillow where she laid her head , Was brine-wet with her tears. I s.m,to complain to you, sir ; I'll tell you how they have used her now she's dead : They wrapped her in a cruel fold of lead, And would not let me kiss her.".

We deeply regret, with Mr. Symonds, that room has not been found for the inclusion of Appius and Virginia among Webster's selected plays, for though it does not contain any single - passage comparable in power or beauty to many that might- be quoted from his two great masterpieces, it has more unity of interest than either, and makes less demands on the intellectual faculties of its readers. The character of Virginias himself, is admirably drawn, especially in the noble scene in the ,first ea, in which be makes known to the

Decemviri the wants and sufferings of his soldiers, and the following line is very characteristic of the poet :—

"Make you us dogs, yet not allow us bones ?"

In the following description of Virginia by her lover, lolling,—

" Here I hold My honourable pattern ; one whose mind Appears more like a ceremonious chapel Full of sweet music, than a thronging presence," we have one of the most refined images to be found in Webster or any other poet. We should be glad to dwell longer on the merits of so great a writer, but the limits of space forbid us to do so.