It has been needful to dwell upon the gloomy and fantastic side of Webster’s genius.  But it must not be thought that he could touch no finer chord.  Indeed, it might be said that in the domain of pathos he is even more powerful than in that of horror.  His mastery in this region is displayed in the creation of that dignified and beautiful woman, the Duchess of Malfi, who, with nothing in her nature, had she but lived prosperously, to divide her from the sisterhood of gentle ladies, walks, shrined in love and purity and conscious rectitude, amid the snares and pitfalls of her persecutors, to die at last the victim of a brother’s fevered avarice and a desperado’s egotistical ambition.  The apparatus of infernal cruelty, the dead man’s hand, the semblances of murdered sons and husband, the masque of madmen, the dirge and doleful emblems of the tomb with which she is environed in her prison by the torturers who seek to goad her into lunacy, are insufficient to disturb the tranquillity and tenderness of her nature.  When the rope is being fastened to her throat, she does not spend her breath in recriminations, but turns to the waiting-woman and says: 

                        Farewell, Cariola! 
  I pray thee look thou givest my little boy
  Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl
  Say her prayers ere she sleep.

In the preceding scenes we have had enough, nay, over-much, of madness, despair, and wrestling with doom.  This is the calm that comes when death is present, when the tortured soul lays down its burden of the flesh with gladness.  But Webster has not spared another touch of thrilling pathos.

The death-struggle is over; the fratricide has rushed away, a maddened man; the murderer is gazing with remorse upon the beautiful dead body of his lady, wishing he had the world wherewith to buy her back to life again; when suddenly she murmurs ‘Mercy!’ Our interest, already overstrained, revives with momentary hope.  But the guardians of the grave will not be exorcised; and ‘Mercy!’ is the last groan of the injured Duchess.

Webster showed great skill in his delineation of the Duchess.  He had to paint a woman in a hazardous situation:  a sovereign stooping in her widowhood to wed a servant; a lady living with the mystery of this unequal marriage round her like a veil.  He dowered her with no salient qualities of intellect or heart or will; but he sustained our sympathy with her, and made us comprehend her.  To the last she is a Duchess; and when she has divested state and bowed her head to enter the low gate of heaven—­too low for coronets—­her poet shows us, in the lines already quoted, that the woman still survives.

The same pathos surrounds the melancholy portrait of Isabella in ‘Vittoria Corombona.’  But Isabella, in that play, serves chiefly to enhance the tyranny of her triumphant rival.  The main difficulty under which these scenes of rarest pathos would labour, were they brought upon the stage, is their simplicity in contrast with the ghastly and contorted horrors that envelop them.  A dialogue abounding in the passages I have already quoted—­a dialogue which bandies ’O you screech-owl!’ and ’Thou foul black cloud!’—­in which a sister’s admonition to her brother to think twice of suicide assumes a form so weird as this: