Part 24 (1/2)

He and his brother are like plum-trees that grow crooked over standing pools; they are rich and over-laden with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them.

In their lives they are without a friend; for society in guilt brings nought of comfort, and honours are but emptiness:

Glories, like glow-worms, afar off s.h.i.+ne bright; But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.

Their plots and counterplots drive repose far from them:

There's but three furies found in s.p.a.cious h.e.l.l; But in a great man's breast three thousand dwell.

Fearful shapes afflict their fancy; shadows of ancestral crime or ghosts of their own raising:

For these many years None of our family dies, but there is seen The shape of an old woman; which is given By tradition to us to have been murdered By her nephews for her riches.

Apparitions haunt them:

How tedious is a guilty conscience!

When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden, Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake That seems to strike at me.

Continually scheming against the objects of their avarice and hatred, preparing poisons or suborning bravoes, they know that these same arts will be employed against them. The wine-cup hides a.r.s.enic; the headpiece is smeared with antimony; there is a dagger behind every arras, and each shadow is a murderer's. When death comes, they meet it trembling. What irony Webster has condensed in Brachiano's outcry:

On pain of death, let no man name death to me; It is a word infinitely horrible.

And how solemn are the following reflections on the death of princes:

O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl Beats not against thy cas.e.m.e.nt, the hoa.r.s.e wolf Scents not thy carrion: pity winds thy corse, Whilst horror waits on princes.

After their death, this is their epitaph:

These wretched eminent things Leave no more fame behind'em than should one Fall in a frost and leave his print in snow.

Of Webster's despots, the finest in conception and the firmest in execution is Ferdinand of Aragon. Jealousy of his sister and avarice take possession of him and torment him like furies. The flash of repentance over her strangled body is also the first flash of insanity. He survives to present the spectacle of a crazed lunatic, and to be run through the body by his paid a.s.sa.s.sin. In the Cardinal of Aragon, Webster paints a profligate Churchman, no less voluptuous, blood-guilty, and the rest of it, than his brother the Duke of Calabria. It seems to have been the poet's purpose in each of his Italian tragedies to unmask Rome as the Papal city really was. In the lawless desperado, the intemperate tyrant, and the G.o.dless ecclesiastic, he portrayed the three curses from which Italian society was actually suffering.

It has been needful to dwell upon the gloomy and fantastic side of Webster's genius. But it must not be thought that he could touch no finer chord. Indeed, it might be said that in the domain of pathos he is even more powerful than in that of horror. His mastery in this region is displayed in the creation of that dignified and beautiful woman, the d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi, who, with nothing in her nature, had she but lived prosperously, to divide her from the sisterhood of gentle ladies, walks, shrined in love and purity and conscious rect.i.tude, amid the snares and pitfalls of her persecutors, to die at last the victim of a brother's fevered avarice and a desperado's egotistical ambition. The apparatus of infernal cruelty, the dead man's hand, the semblances of murdered sons and husband, the masque of madmen, the dirge and doleful emblems of the tomb with which she is environed in her prison by the torturers who seek to goad her into lunacy, are insufficient to disturb the tranquillity and tenderness of her nature.

When the rope is being fastened to her throat, she does not spend her breath in recriminations, but turns to the waiting-woman and says:

Farewell, Cariola!

I pray thee look thou givest my little boy Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl Say her prayers ere she sleep.

In the preceding scenes we have had enough, nay, over-much, of madness, despair, and wrestling with doom. This is the calm that comes when death is present, when the tortured soul lays down its burden of the flesh with gladness. But Webster has not spared another touch of thrilling pathos.

The death-struggle is over; the fratricide has rushed away, a maddened man; the murderer is gazing with remorse upon the beautiful dead body of his lady, wis.h.i.+ng he had the world wherewith to buy her back to life again; when suddenly she murmurs 'Mercy!' Our interest, already overstrained, revives with momentary hope. But the guardians of the grave will not be exorcised; and 'Mercy!' is the last groan of the injured d.u.c.h.ess.

Webster showed great skill in his delineation of the d.u.c.h.ess. He had to paint a woman in a hazardous situation: a sovereign stooping in her widowhood to wed a servant; a lady living with the mystery of this unequal marriage round her like a veil. He dowered her with no salient qualities of intellect or heart or will; but he sustained our sympathy with her, and made us comprehend her. To the last she is a d.u.c.h.ess; and when she has divested state and bowed her head to enter the low gate of heaven--too low for coronets--her poet shows us, in the lines already quoted, that the woman still survives.

The same pathos surrounds the melancholy portrait of Isabella in 'Vittoria Corombona.' But Isabella, in that play, serves chiefly to enhance the tyranny of her triumphant rival. The main difficulty under which these scenes of rarest pathos would labour, were they brought upon the stage, is their simplicity in contrast with the ghastly and contorted horrors that envelop them. A dialogue abounding in the pa.s.sages I have already quoted--a dialogue which bandies 'O you screech-owl!' and 'Thou foul black cloud!'--in which a sister's admonition to her brother to think twice of suicide a.s.sumes a form so weird as this:

I prithee, yet remember, Millions are now in graves, which at last day Like mandrakes shall rise shrieking.--