Library of Old Authors.--Works of John Webster

London: John Russell Smith. 1856-57.

WE turn now to Mr. Hazlitt’s edition of Webster. We wish he had chosen Chapman; for Mr. Dyce’s Webster is hardly out of print, and, we believe, has just gone through a second and revised edition. Webster was a far more considerable man than Marston, and infinitely above him in genius. Without the poetic nature of Marlowe, or Chapman’s somewhat unwieldy vigor of thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, untempered by a solid understanding, made his plays a strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declamation, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, a great dramatist. Shakspeare is the only one of that age. Marlowe had a rare imagination, a delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of Shakspeare and Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely a poet as any that England has produced; but his mind had no balance-wheel. Chapman abounds in splendid enthusiasms of diction, and now and then dilates our imaginations with suggestions of profound poetic depth. Ben Jonson was a conscientious and intelligent workman, whose plays glow, here and there, with the golden pollen of that poetic feeling with which his age impregnated all thought and expression; but his leading characteristic, like that of his great namesake, Samuel, was a hearty common sense, which fitted him rather to be a great critic than a great poet. He had a keen and ready sense of the comic in situation, but no humor. Fletcher was as much a poet as fancy and sentiment can make any man. Only Shakspeare wrote comedy and tragedy with truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only Shakspeare had that true sense of humor which, like the universal solvent sought by the alchemists, so fuses together all the elements of a character, (as in Falstaff,) that any question of good or evil, of dignified or ridiculous, is silenced by the apprehension of its thorough humanity. Rabelais shows gleams of it in Panurge; but, in our opinion, no man ever possessed it in an equal degree with Shakspeare, except Cervantes; no man has since shown anything like an approach to it, (for Molière’s quality was comic power rather than humor,) except Sterne, Fielding, and Richter. Only Shakspeare was endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose point of rest was midway between the imagination and the understanding,— that perfectly unruffled brain which reflected all objects with almost inhuman impartiality,—that outlook whose range was ecliptical, dominating all zones of human thought and action,—that power of verisimilar conception which could take away Richard III. from History, and Ulysses from Homer,—and that creative faculty whose equal touch is alike vivifying in Shallow and in Lear. He alone never seeks in abnormal and monstrous characters to evade the risks and responsibilities of absolute truthfulness, nor to stimulate a jaded imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. He is never, like many of his fellow-dramatists, confronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own making, whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given a human foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness of Slender, or make it loom gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet. We are tired of the vagueness which classes all the Elizabethan playwrights together as “great dramatists,”—as if Shakspeare did not differ from them in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets some of them were ; but though imagination and the power of poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon gifts, and even in combination not without secular examples, yet it is the rarest of earthly phenomena to find them joined with those faculties of perception, arrangement, and plastic instinct in the loving union which alone makes a great dramatic poet possible. We suspect that Shakspeare will long continue the only specimen of the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what they call “a humor” till it becomes fantastical, or hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in the sewers of human nature and of language. In their tragedies they become heavy without grandeur, like Jonson, or mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too often do. Every new edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the putting of another witness into the box to prove the inaccessibility of Shakspeare’s stand-point as poet and artist.

Webster's most famous works are “The Duchess of Malty” and “Vittoria Corombona,” but we are strongly inclined to call “The Devil’s Law-Case” his best play. The two former are in a great measure answerable for the odic” school of poets, since the extravagances of a man of genius are as sure of imitation as the equable self-possession of his higher moments is incapable of it. Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite of a poet, imagination, but in him it was truly untamed, and Aristotle admirable distinction between the Horrible and the Terrible in tragedy was never better illustrated and confirmed than in the “Duchess” and “Vittoria.” His nature had something of the sleuth-hound quality in it, and a plot, to keep his mind eager on the trail, must be sprinkled with fresh blood at every turn. We do not forget all the fine things that Lamb has said of Webster, but, when Lamb wrote, the Elizabethan drama was an El Dorado, whose minacious sand, even, was treasured as auriferous,—and no wonder, in a generation which admired the "Botanic Garden.” Webster is the Gherardo della Notte of his day, and himself calls his “Vittoria Corombona” a “night-piece.” Though he had no conception of Nature in its large sense, as something pervading a whole character and making it consistent with itself, nor of Art, as that which dominates an entire tragedy and makes all the characters foils to each other and tributaries to the catastrophe, yet there are flashes of Nature in his plays, struck out by the collisions of passion, and dramatic intensities of phrase for which it would be hard to find the match. The “prithee, undo this button” of Lear, by which Shakspeare makes us feel the swelling of the old king heart, and that the bodily results of mental anguish have gone so far as to deaden for the moment all intellectual consciousness and forbid all expression of grief, is hardly finer than the broken verse which Webster puts into the mouth of Ferdinand when he sees the body of his sister, murdered by his own procurement,—

He has not the condensing power of Shakspeare, who squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could carve a cherry-stone with any of the concettisti, and abounds in imaginative quaintnesses that are worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that remind us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases of the purest crystallization. Here are a few examples :—

In editing Webster, Mr. Hazlitt had the advantage (except in a single doubtful play) of a predecessor in the Rev. Alexander Dyce, beyond all question the best living scholar of the literature of the times of Elizabeth and James I. If he give no proof of remarkable fitness for his task, he seems, at least, to have been diligent and painstaking. His notes are short and to the point, and—which we consider a great merit—at the foot of the page. If he had added a glossarial index, we should have been still better pleased. Mr. Hazlitt seems to have read over the text with some care, and he has had the good sense to modernize the orthography, or, as he says, has “observed the existing standard of spelling throughout.” Yet—for what reason we cannot imagine—he prints “I” for “ay,” taking the pains to explain it every time in a note, and retains “banquerout” and “coram” apparently for the sake of telling us that they mean “bankrupt” and “quorum.” He does not seem to have a quick car for scansion, which would sometimes have assisted him to the true reading. We give an example or two :—

We suggest that the change of an a to an r would make sense of the following:— “Come, my little punk, with thy two compositors, to this unlawful painting-house,” [printing-house,] which Mr. Hazlitt awkwardly endeavors to explain by this note on the word compositors :—“i. e. (conjecturally), making up the composition of the picture” ! Our readers can decide for themselves;—the passage occurs Vol. I. p. 214.

We think Mr. Hazlitt’s notes are, in the main, good ; but we should like to know his authority for saying that pench means “the hole in a bench by which it was taken up,”—that “descant” means “look askant on,”—and that “I wis" is equivalent to “I surmise, imagine,” which it surely is not in the passage to which his note is appended. On page 9, Vol. I., we read in the text,

“To whom, my lord, bends thus your awe,”

and in the note, “i. e. submission. The original has aue, which, if it mean ave, is unmeaning here.” Did Mr. Hazlitt never see a picture of the Annunciation with ave written on the scroll proceeding from the bending angel’s mouth ? We find the same word in Vol. III. p. 217,—

To the last verse Mr. Hazlitt appends this note, “Than that of burning men’s bones for fuel.” There is no allusion here to burning men’s bones, but simply to the desecration of graveyards by building warehouses upon them, in digging the foundations for which the bones would be thrown out. The allusion is, perhaps, to the “Churchyard of the Holy Trinity”;—see Stow’s Survey, ed. 1603, p. 126. Elsewhere in the same play, Webster alludes bitterly to “begging church-land.”

Vol. I. p. 73, “And if he walk through the street, he ducks at the penthouses, like an ancient that dares not flourish at the oathtaking of the prætor for fear of the signposts.” Mr. Hazlitt's note is, “Ancient was a standard or flag; also an ensign, of which Skinner says it is a corruption. What the meaning of the simile is the present editor cannot suggest.” We confess we find no difficulty. The meaning plainly is, that he ducks for fear of hitting the penthouses, as an ensign on the Lord Mayor’s day dares not flourish his standard for fear of hitting the signposts. We suggest the query, whether ancient, in this sense, be not a corruption of the Italian word anziano.

Want of space compels us to leave many other passages, which we had marked for comment, unnoticed. We are surprised that Mr. Hazlitt, (see his Introduction to “Vittoria Corombona,”) in undertaking to give us some information concerning the Dukedom and Castle of Bracciano, should uniformly spell it Brachiano. Shakspeare’s Petruchio might have put him on his guard. We should be glad also to know in what part of Italy he places Malfi.

Mr. Hazlitt’s General Introduction supplies us with no new information, but this was hardly to be expected where Mr. Dyce had already gone over the field. We wish that he had been able to give us better means of distinguishing the three almost contemporary John Websters one from the other, for we think the internal evidence is enough to show that all the plays attributed to the author of the "Duchess” and “Vittoria” could not have been written by the same author. On the whole, he has given us a very respectable, and certainly a very pretty, edition of an eminent poet.

In leaving the subject, we cannot but express our satisfaction in comparing with these examples of English editorship the four volumes of Ballads recently published by Mr. Child. They are an honor to American scholarship and fidelity. Taste, learning, and modesty, the three graces of editorship, seem to have presided over the whole work. We hope soon, also, to be able to chronicle another creditable achievement in Mr. White’s Shakspeare, which we look for with great interest.