JOHN WEBSTER

There were many poets in the age of Shakespeare who make us think, as we read them, that the characters in their plays could not have spoken more beautifully, more powerfully, more effectively, under the circumstances imagined for the occasion of their utterance:  there are only two who make us feel that the words assigned to the creatures of their genius are the very words they must have said, the only words they could have said, the actual words they assuredly did say.  Mere literary power, mere poetic beauty, mere charm of passionate or pathetic fancy, we find in varying degrees dispersed among them all alike; but the crowning gift of imagination, the power to make us realize that thus and not otherwise it was, that thus and not otherwise it must have been, was given—­except by exceptional fits and starts—­to none of the poets of their time but only to Shakespeare and to Webster.

Webster, it may be said, was but as it were a limb of Shakespeare:  but that limb, it might be replied, was the right arm.  “The kingly-crowned head, the vigilant eye,” whose empire of thought and whose reach of vision no other man’s faculty has ever been found competent to match, are Shakespeare’s alone forever:  but the force of hand, the fire of heart, the fervor of pity, the sympathy of passion, not poetic or theatric merely, but actual and immediate, are qualities in which the lesser poet is not less certainly or less unmistakably pre-eminent than the greater.  And there is no third to be set beside them:  not even if we turn from their contemporaries to Shelley himself.  All that Beatrice says in The Cenci is beautiful and conceivable and admirable:  but unless we except her exquisite last words—­and even they are more beautiful than inevitable—­we shall hardly find what we find in “King Lear” and “The White Devil,” “Othello” and “The Duchess of Malfy”—­the tone of convincing reality; the note, as a critic of our own day might call it, of certitude.

There are poets—­in our own age, as in all past ages—­from whose best work it might be difficult to choose at a glance some verse sufficient to establish their claim—­great as their claim may be—­to be remembered forever; and who yet may be worthy of remembrance among all but the highest.  Webster is not one of these:  though his fame assuredly does not depend upon the merit of a casual passage here or there, it would be easy to select from any one of his representative plays such examples of the highest, the purest, the most perfect power, as can be found only in the works of the greatest among poets.  There is not, as far as my studies have ever extended, a third English poet to whom these words might rationally be attributed by the conjecture of a competent reader: 

   We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune’s slaves,
   Nay, cease to die, by dying.