I prithee, yet remember,
  Millions are now in graves, which at last day
  Like mandrakes shall rise shrieking.—­

such a dialogue could not be rendered save by actors strung up to a pitch of almost frenzied tension.  To do full justice to what in Webster’s style would be spasmodic were it not so weighty, and at the same time to maintain the purity of outline and melodious rhythm of such characters as Isabella, demands no common histrionic power.

In attempting to define Webster’s touch upon Italian tragic story, I have been led perforce to concentrate attention on what is painful and shocking to our sense of harmony in art.  He was a vigorous and profoundly imaginative playwright.  But his most enthusiastic admirers will hardly contend that good taste or moderation determined the movement of his genius.  Nor, though his insight into the essential dreadfulness of Italian tragedy was so deep, is it possible to maintain that his portraiture of Italian life was true to its more superficial aspects.  What place would there be for a Correggio or a Raphael in such a world as Webster’s?  Yet we know that the art of Raphael and Correggio is in exact harmony with the Italian temperament of the same epoch which gave birth to Cesare Borgia and Bianca Gapello.  The comparatively slighter sketch of Iachimo in ‘Cymbeline’ represents the Italian as he felt and lived, better than the laboured portrait of Flamineo.  Webster’s Italian tragedies are consequently true, not so much to the actual conditions of Italy, as to the moral impression made by those conditions on a Northern imagination.

* * * * *

AUTUMN WANDERINGS

I.—­ITALIAM PETIMUS

Italiam Petimus! We left our upland home before daybreak on a clear October morning.  There had been a hard frost, spangling the meadows with rime-crystals, which twinkled where the sun’s rays touched them.  Men and women were mowing the frozen grass with thin short Alpine scythes; and as the swathes fell, they gave a crisp, an almost tinkling sound.  Down into the gorge, surnamed of Avalanche, our horses plunged; and there we lost the sunshine till we reached the Bear’s Walk, opening upon the vales of Albula, and Julier, and Schyn.  But up above, shone morning light upon fresh snow, and steep torrent-cloven slopes reddening with a hundred fading plants; now and then it caught the grey-green icicles that hung from cliffs where summer streams had dripped.  There is no colour lovelier than the blue of an autumn sky in the high Alps, defining ridges powdered with light snow, and melting imperceptibly downward into the warm yellow of the larches and the crimson of the bilberry.  Wiesen was radiantly beautiful:  those aerial ranges of the hills that separate Albula from Julier soared crystal-clear above their forests; and for a foreground, on the green fields starred with lilac crocuses, careered a group of children on their sledges.  Then came the row of giant peaks—­Pitz d’Aela, Tinzenhorn, and Michelhorn, above the deep ravine of Albula—­all seen across wide undulating golden swards, close-shaven and awaiting winter.  Carnations hung from cottage windows in full bloom, casting sharp angular black shadows on white walls.