When familiarity has brought us acquainted with his style, when we have disentangled the main characters and circumstances from their adjuncts, we perceive that he treats poignant and tremendous situations with a concentrated vigour special to his genius; that he has studied each word and trait of character, and that he has prepared by gradual approaches and degrees of horror for the culmination of his tragedies.  The sentences which seem at first sight copied from a commonplace book, are found to be appropriate.  Brief lightning flashes of acute perception illuminate the midnight darkness of his all but unimaginably depraved characters.  Sharp unexpected touches evoke humanity in the fantoccini of his wayward art.  No dramatist has shown more consummate ability in heightening terrific effects, in laying bare the innermost mysteries of crime, remorse, and pain, combined to make men miserable.  It has been said of Webster that, feeling himself deficient in the first poetic qualities, he concentrated his powers upon one point, and achieved success by sheer force of self-cultivation.  There is perhaps some truth in this.  At any rate, his genius was of a narrow and peculiar order, and he knew well how to make the most of its limitations.  Yet we must not forget that he felt a natural bias toward the dreadful stuff with which he deals.  The mystery of iniquity had an irresistible attraction for his mind.  He was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal elements of spiritual anguish.  The materials with which he builds his tragedies are sought for in the ruined places of lost souls, in the agonies of madness and despair, in the sarcasms of criminal and reckless atheism, in slow tortures, griefs beyond endurance, the tempests of remorseful death, the spasms of fratricidal bloodshed.  He is often melodramatic in the means employed to bring these psychological conditions home to us.  He makes too free use of poisoned engines, daggers, pistols, disguised murderers, and so forth.  Yet his firm grasp upon the essential qualities of diseased and guilty human nature saves him, even at his wildest, from the unrealities and extravagances into which less potent artists of the drame sanglant—­Marston, for example—­blundered.

With Webster, the tendency to brood on horrors was no result of calculation.  It belonged to his idiosyncrasy.  He seems to have been suckled from birth at the breast of that Mater Tenebrarum, our Lady of Darkness, whom De Quincey in one of his ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ describes among the Semnai Theai, the august goddesses, the mysterious foster-nurses of suffering humanity.  He cannot say the simplest thing without giving it a ghastly or sinister turn.  If one of his characters draws a metaphor from pie-crust, he must needs use language of the churchyard: 

                         You speak as if a man
  Should know what fowl is coffined in a baked meat
  Afore you cut it open.