Sue and Émile Zola. On his theatre we find no presentation of old men
with their beards torn off and their eyes gouged out, of young men
imprisoned in reeking cesspools and impaled with red-hot spits. Again
and again his passionate and daring genius attains the utmost limit and
rounds the final goal of tragedy; never once does it break the bounds of
pure poetic instinct. If ever for a moment it may seem to graze that
goal too closely, to brush too sharply by those bounds, the very next
moment finds it clear of any such risk and remote from any such
temptation as sometimes entrapped or seduced the foremost of its
forerunners in the field. And yet this is the field in which its paces
are most superbly shown. No name among all the names of great poets will
recur so soon as Webster's to the reader who knows what it signifies, as
he reads or repeats the verses in which a greater than this great
poet--a greater than all since Shakespeare--has expressed the latent
mystery of terror which lurks in all the highest poetry or beauty, and
distinguishes it inexplicably and inevitably from all that is but a
little lower than the highest.

Les aigles sur les bords du Gange et du Caÿstre
Sont effrayants;
Rien de grand qui ne soit confusément sinistre;
Les noirs paeans,

Les psaumes, la chanson monstrueuse du mage
Ezéchiel,
Font devant notre oeil fixe errer la vague image
D'un affreux ciel.

L'empyrée est l'abîme, on y plonge, on y reste
Avec terreur.