comedy. And by 1612 even Tourneur had written a tragi-comedy, The Nobleman.

But even when the triumph of prettiness was on its way to completion, there was one slightly old-fashioned figure still faithful to that larger prime. Serious tragedy seems only to have X reached Webster, after it had left everybody' else. In 1612 and 1613 he wrote two of the most amazing products of that amazing period. His powerful personality coloured what he wrote, and yet these two plays are more representative than any that had led to them, of the period behind them. The stream swept straight on from Marston and Tourneur to Webster. With him the sinister waves, if they lost something of their strange iridescence, won greater gloom and profundity. After him they plunged into the depths of earth. He stands in his loneliness, first of that long line of "last Elizabethans." As the edge of a cliff seems higher than the rest for the sheer descent in front of it, Webster, the Webster of these two plays, appears even mistier and grander than he really is, because he is the last of Earth, looking out over a sea of saccharine.

CHAPTER IV

JOHN WEBSTER

JOHN WEBSTER is one of the strangest figures in our literature. He was working for quite twenty years. We have at least four plays in which he collaborated, and three by him alone; but through all the period and in all his work he is quite ordinary and undistinguished, except for two plays which come quite close together in the middle. For two or three years, about 1612, he was a great genius; for the rest he was, if not indistinguishable, entirely commonplace. Coleridge does not more extraordinarily prove Apollonian fickleness. Webster makes one believe successful art depends as much on a wild chance, a multiple coincidence, as Browning found love did. If he had not had time in that middle period; if it had come a little later, under the Fletcherian influence; if he had been born twenty years later; if . . . He was just in time; the subject just suited him; the traditional atmosphere of the kind of play called out his greatest gifts; the right influence had preceded

him; he was somehow not free to write the "true dramatic poem" or "sententious tragedy" he wanted to. And so these two great tragedies happened to exist. That easy and comfortable generalisation of the Philistine "genius will out!" finds signal refutation in Webster. I shall give a short general account of his life and activities, and then examine his work more closely.

We know a great deal about Webster's life. He was born in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and died some time before the end of the seventeenth. He was an Elizabethan dramatist, a friend of Dekker and Chapman and Heywood. He was an odd genius who created slowly and borrowed a great deal. He was not very independent. .

It is, unimportantly, true that fewer "facts" than truths are known about him. We are luckily spared the exact dates of his uninteresting birth and death, and his unmeaning address and family. We have not even enough to serve as a frame-work for the elaborate structure of "doubtless" and "We may picture to ourselves young" that stands as a biography of Shakespeare and others. It could, of course, be done by throwing our knowledge of Elizabethan conditions and our acquaintance with the character of the author of The Duchess of Malfi together.

It would not be worth it. We know that Webster was a member of the Merchant Tailors' Company, and born free of it. There is a late legend that he was clerk of St. Andrew's, Holborn. At one time it seemed possible to identify him (contemporary enemies tried to) with an ex-army chaplain who wrote fanatical religious tracts and was a University reformer, in the middle of the seventeenth century. Superb thought! It is hard to degenerate nobly; and his contemporaries, after reaching their summit, went downhill (as writers) in various ways. Some became dropsical; others entered the Church; others went on writing; a few drank. But this, this would have been an end worthy of a fantastic poet! Alas! Mr. Dyce investigated too thoroughly, and pretty certainly disproved the identification. After his last play, Webster slips from us inscrutably round the corner. He may have lived on for years and years. He may have died directly. It does not matter to us.

For the life of Webster the dramatist, however, as opposed to Webster the private man, we have a few facts. He comes into our notice -fairly young, it is to be presumed-in 1602. He was then very busily one of the less important of a band of hack playwrights employed by Henslowe. He had a hand in several plays that

we know of during that year: Caesar's Fall, Two Shapes,1 Christmas comes but once a year, and at least one part of Lady Jane. His collaborators were Munday, Drayton, Middleton, Heywood, Chettle, Smith, and Dekker. It was the beginning, as far as we know, of a close connection with Dekker and a long one with Heywood. Webster was writing for both Henslowe's companies, Cæsar's Fall and Two Shapes for the Admiral's men, Christmas comes but once a year and Lady Jane for Worcester's men. Writing for Henslowe was not the best school for genius. No high artistic standard was exacted. It rather implies poverty, and certainly means scrappy and unserious work. It may have given Webster-it would have given some people-a sense of the theatre. But he emerged with so little facility in writing, and so little aptitude for a good plot (in the ordinary sense), that one must conclude that his genius was not best fitted for theatrical expression, into which it was driven. There are other periods and literary occupations it is harder to imagine him in. But I can figure him as a more or less realistic novelist of the present or the last eighty years, preferably from Russia. His literary skill, his 1Perhaps the same play. See Appendix B.