APPENDIX A.-"APPIUS AND VIRGINIA" [THE original form of this appendix was rearranged and shortened by the author for separate publication in the Modern Languages Review, vol. viii. No. 4 (October, 1913). I have here combined the two versions, following the order of the second, but restoring most of the passages which were omitted from it to save space. E. M.] THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE LATER "APPIUS AND VIRGINIA." 1 IT is startlingly obvious, and has been remarked by every critic of Webster, that Appius and Virginia is quite different from his other plays. It "stands apart from the other plays," says Professor Vaughan. Dr. Ward recognises it as a work of Webster's "later manhood, if not of his old age." Mr. William Archer vastly prefers it to the ordinary crude Websterian melodrama. In fact, critics, whether of the Elizabethans in general or of Webster in particular, have always exhibited either conscious discomfort or unconscious haste and lack of interest, when they came to this play. As they have never questioned its authenticity, their perfunctory and unprofitable treatment of it is noteworthy. They cannot fit it in. In summing up Webster's characteristics, they have either quietly let it slide out of sight, or else brought it formally and unhelpfully in, to sit awkward and silent among the rest like a deaf unpleasant aunt at a party of the other side of the family. But never, so far as I am aware, has anyone suggested that it is not by Webster. We may sympathise with the critics. The more closely Appius and Virginia is looked at, the less it shows of the Webster we know. With Northward Ho 1 The only other Appius and Virginia known is the old-fashioned lumbering play by "R. B." (probably Richard Bower) of 1576. 'C. H. E. L., vol. vi, p. 182. and Westward Ho, one is not discomforted at finding almost no such mark. You may imagine Webster a young man, collaborating with an older, in a welldefined, not very congenial, type of play, contributing the smaller part. There are a hundred reasons against what we mean by Webster being prominent in those plays. Anyhow, a young man's work is frequently anybody's; especially his hack-work. Who could pick out Meredith's war correspondence from anyone else's? But once he has developed his particular savour, it can hardly fade into commonness again. It is as with faces. You can often mistake two young faces. But once the soul has got to work, wrinkling and individualising the countenance, it remains itself for ever, even after the soul has gone. The taste we recognise as Webster developed between 1607 and 1615. It is a clinging, unmistakable one. Later on he imitated models who provoked it less powerfully. But a close, long scrutiny, before which Appius and Virginia grows more cold and strange, increasingly reveals Webster in The Devil's Law-Case, even in A Cure for a Cuckold, of which he only wrote part. Examine Appius and Virginia æsthetically and as a whole. Webster is a dogged, slow writer, and romantic-in the sense that single scenes, passages, or lines have merit and intensity on their own account. As a rule, he finely proves that quintessence of the faith that the God of Romanticism revealed to his inattentive prophet. "Load every rift with ore." And there is a kind of dusty heat over all. Appius and Virginia is precisely the opposite. Its impression is simple and cool. It seems more an effort at classicism-uncon scious perhaps. There are not many lines or images you stop over. You see right to the end of the road. It is, of course, a very poor argument against attributing a play to any particular author, that he has not written this kind of play elsewhere. The very fact that he hasn't, makes it all the harder to know what his attempt in this manner would be like. And when such an argument is used, as it is, to prove that A Yorkshire Tragedy is not Shakespeare's, it is of no value, though it may be on the right side. What is permissible, however, is, when a writer has several distinct characteristics, to expect to recognise some of them, when he is seriously attempting a kind of play not very different from his ordinary one; especially if these characteristics are of certain kinds. A mere journalist, turning out his daily task, may sometimes write an indistinguishable undistinguished play in a different style. A great master of a certain type may possibly, his tongue just perceptibly bulging the cheek, flash out something quite good in an entirely other kind, as a tour de force. Or a very brilliant and not at all serious person, with a trick of writing, some Græculus of literature, may sink his own personality entirely in the manner of another. But that is only possible if he is able to aim entirely at parody, and not at all at art. Few artists could ever do this. In any case, Webster and Appius and Virginia do not fit into any of these potential explanations. He worked (as he tells us, and we can see) slowly and with trouble. Both his method and the result show that he was no easily adaptable writer. His clumsy, individual, passionate form betrays itself under borrowed clothes. This does not mean that he strode |