e tragedy of
"Appius and Virginia." The almost infinite superiority of Webster to
Fletcher as a poet of pure tragedy and a painter of masculine character
is in this play as obvious as the inferiority in construction and
conduct of romantic story displayed in his attempt at a tragicomedy.
From the evidence of style I should judge this play to have been written
at an earlier date than "The Devil's Law-case": it is, I repeat, far
better composed; better, perhaps, than any other play of the author's:
but it has none of his more distinctive qualities; intensity of idea,
concentration of utterance, pungency of expression and ardor of pathos.
It is written with noble and equable power of hand, with force and
purity and fluency of apt and simple eloquence: there is nothing in it
unworthy of the writer: but it is the only one of his unassisted works
in which we do not find that especial note of tragic style, concise and
pointed and tipped as it were with fire, which usually makes it
impossible for the dullest reader to mistake the peculiar presence, the
original tone or accent, of John Webster. If the epithet unique had not
such a tang of German affectation in it, it would be perhaps the aptest
of all adjectives to denote the genius or define the manner of this
great poet. But in this tragedy, though whatever is said is well said
and whatever is done well done, we miss that sense of positive and
inevitable conviction, that instant and profound perception or
impression as of immediate and indisputable truth, which is burnt in
upon us as we read the more Websterian scenes of Webster's writing. We
feel, in short, that thus it may have been; not, as I observed at the
opening of these notes, that thus it must have been. The poem does him
no discredit; nay, it does him additional honor, as an evidence of
powers more various and many-sided than we should otherwise have known
or supposed in him. Indeed, the figure of Virginius is one of the finest
types of soldierly and fatherly heroism ever presented on the stage:
there is equal force of dramatic effect, equal fervor of eloquent
passion, in the scene of his pleading before the senate on behalf of the
claims of his suffering and struggling fellow-soldiers, and in the scene
of his return to the camp after the immolation of his daughter. The mere
theatric effect of this latter scene is at once so triumphant and so
dignified, so noble in its presentation and so passionate in its
restraint,