view, whether adopted for dramatic objects or ingrained in the writer's
temperament, is equally fit for pure tragedy and unfit for any form of
drama not purely tragic in evolution and event. In "The Devil's
Law-case" it is offensive, because the upshot is incongruous and
insufficient: in "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfy" it is
admirable, because the results are adequate and coherent. But in all
these three plays alike, and in these three plays only, the peculiar
tone of Webster's genius, the peculiar force of his imagination, is
distinct and absolute in its fulness of effect. The author of "Appius
and Virginia" would have earned an honorable and enduring place in the
history of English letters as a worthy member--one among many--of a
great school in poetry, a deserving representative of a great epoch in
literature: but the author of these three plays has a solitary station,
an indisputable distinction of his own. The greatest poets of all time
are not more mutually independent than this one--a lesser poet only than
those greatest--is essentially independent of them all.

The first quality which all readers recognize, and which may strike a
superficial reader as the exclusive or excessive note of his genius and
his work, is of course his command of terror. Except in Aeschylus, in
Dante, and in Shakespeare, I at least know not where to seek for
passages which in sheer force of tragic and noble horror--to the vulgar
shock of ignoble or brutal horror he never condescends to submit his
reader or subdue his inspiration--may be set against the subtlest, the
deepest, the sublimest passages of Webster. Other gifts he had as great
in themselves, as precious and as necessary to the poet: but on this
side he is incomparable and unique. Neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare had
so fine, so accurate, so infallible a sense of the delicate line of
demarcation which divides the impressive and the terrible from the
horrible and the loathsome--Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac from Eugène