in genius than either
Webster or Ford, although Tourneur sometimes obtains a lurid and ghastly
tragic intensity which more than equals Ford when at his best; and
Marston, in the midst of crabbedness and dulness, sometimes has touches
of pathos and Michelangelesque foreshortenings of metaphor worthy of
Webster. But Tourneur and Marston have neither the constant sympathy
with oppressed virtue of the author of the "Duchess of Malfy," nor the
blind fury of passion of the poet of "Giovanni and Annabella;" they look
on grim and hopeless spectators at the world of fatalistic and insane
wickedness which they have created, in which their heroes and heroines
and villains are slowly entangled in inextricable evil. The men and
women of Tourneur and Marston are scarcely men and women at all: they
are mere vague spectres, showing their grisly wounds and moaning out
their miserable fate. There is around them a thick and clammy moral
darkness, dispelled only by the ghastly flashes of lurid virtue of
maniacs like Tourneur's Vindici and Hippolito; a crypt-like moral
stillness, haunted by strange evil murmurs, broken only by the
hysterical sobs and laughs of Marston's Antonios and Pandulphos. At the
most there issues out of the blood-reeking depth a mighty yell of pain,
a tremendous imprecation not only at sinful man but at unsympathizing
nature, like that of Marston's old Doge, dethroned, hunted down, crying
aloud into the grey dawn-mists of the desolate marsh by the lagoon--

O thou all-bearing earth
Which men do gape for till thou cram'st their mouths
And choak'st their throats for dust: O charme thy breast
And let me sinke into thee. Look who knocks;
Andrugio calls. But O, she's deafe and blinde.
A wretch but leane relief on earth can finde.

The tragic sense, the sense of utter blank evil, is stronger in all
these Elizabethan painters of Italian crime than perhaps in any other
tragic writers. There is, in the great and sinister pictures of Webster,
of Ford, of Tourneur, and of Marston, no spot of light, no distant
bright horizon. There is no loving suffering, resigned to suffer and to
pardon, like that of Desdemona, whose dying lips forgive the beloved who
kills from too great love; no consoling affection like Cordelia's, in
whose gentle embrace the poor bruised soul may sink into rest; no
passionate union in death with the beloved, like the union of Romeo and
Juliet; nothing b