remained to be taken by “the most tragic” of all English poets.  With Shakespeare—­and assuredly not with Aeschylus—­righteousness itself seems subject and subordinate to the masterdom of fate:  but fate itself, in the tragic world of Webster, seems merely the servant or the synonyme of chance.  The two chief agents in his two great tragedies pass away—­the phrase was, perhaps, unconsciously repeated—­“in a mist”:  perplexed, indomitable, defiant of hope and fear; bitter and sceptical and bloody in penitence or impenitence alike.  And the mist which encompasses the departing spirits of these moody and mocking men of blood seems equally to involve the lives of their chastisers and their victims.  Blind accident and blundering mishap—­“such a mistake,” says one of the criminals, “as I have often seen in a play”—­are the steersmen of their fortunes and the doomsmen of their deeds.  The effect of this method or the result of this 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 Honore de Balzac from Eugene Sue and Emile Zola.  On his theatre we find no presentation of