meditative mockery and forewarn him of his impending death, Webster has given such reality and seriousness to an old commonplace of contemporary fancy or previous fashion in poetry that we are fain to forget the fantastic side of the conception and see only the tragic aspect of its meaning.  A weightier objection than any which can be brought against the conduct of the play might be suggested to the minds of some readers—­and these, perhaps, not too exacting or too captious readers—­by the sudden vehemence of transformation which in the great preceding act seems to fall like fire from heaven upon the two chief criminals who figure on the stage of murder.  It seems rather a miraculous retribution, a judicial violation of the laws of nature, than a reasonably credible consequence or evolution of those laws, which strikes Ferdinand with madness and Bosola with repentance.  But the whole atmosphere of the action is so charged with thunder that this double and simultaneous shock of moral electricity rather thrills us with admiration and faith than chills us with repulsion or distrust.  The passionate intensity and moral ardor of imagination which we feel to vibrate and penetrate through every turn and every phrase of the dialogue would suffice to enforce upon our belief a more nearly incredible revolution of nature or revulsion of the soul.

It is so difficult for even the very greatest poets to give any vivid force of living interest to a figure of passive endurance that perhaps the only instance of perfect triumph over this difficulty is to be found in the character of Desdemona.  Shakespeare alone could have made her as interesting as Imogen or Cordelia; though these have so much to do and dare, and she after her first appearance has simply to suffer:  even Webster could not give such individual vigor of characteristic life to the figure of his martyr as to the figure of his criminal heroine.  Her courage and sweetness, her delicacy and sincerity, her patience and her passion, are painted with equal power and tenderness of touch:  yet she hardly stands before us as distinct from others of her half-angelic sisterhood as does the White Devil from the fellowship of her comrades in perdition.  But if, as we may assuredly assume, it was on the twenty-third “nouell” of William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure that Webster’s crowning masterpiece was founded, the poet’s moral and spiritual power of transfiguration is here even more admirable than in the previous case of his other and wellnigh coequally consummate poem.  The narrative degrades and brutalizes the widowed heroine’s affection for her second husband to the actual level of the vile conception which the poet attributes and confines to the foul imagination of her envious and murderous brothers.  Here again, and finally and supremely here, the purifying and exalting power of Webster’s noble and magnanimous imagination is gloriously unmistakable by all and any who have eyes to read and hearts to recognize.