Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece Part 22

Her next appearance is before the court, on trial for her husband's murder. The scene is celebrated, and has been much disputed by critics. Relying on her own dauntlessness, on her beauty, and on the protection of Brachiano, Vittoria hardly takes the trouble to plead innocence or to rebut charges. She stands defiant, arrogant, vigilant, on guard; flinging the lie in the teeth of her arraigners; quick to seize the slightest sign of feebleness in their attack; protesting her guiltlessness so loudly that she shouts truth down by brazen strength of lung; retiring at the close with taunts; blazing throughout with the intolerable l.u.s.tre of some baleful planet. When she enters for the third time, it is to quarrel with her paramour. He has been stung to jealousy by a feigned love-letter. She knows that she has given him no cause; it is her game to lure him by fidelity to marriage. Therefore she resolves to make his mistake the instrument of her exaltation.

Beginning with torrents of abuse, hurling reproaches at him for her own dishonour and the murder of his wife, working herself by studied degrees into a tempest of ungovernable rage, she flings herself upon the bed, refuses his caresses, spurns and tramples on him, till she has brought Brachiano, terrified, humbled, fascinated, to her feet.

Then she gradually relents beneath his pa.s.sionate protestations and repeated promises of marriage. At this point she speaks but little.

We only feel her melting humour in the air, and long to see the scene played by such an actress as Madame Bernhardt. When Vittoria next appears, it is as d.u.c.h.ess by the deathbed of the Duke, her husband.

Her attendance here is necessary, but it contributes little to the development of her character. We have learned to know her, and expect neither womanish tears nor signs of affection at a crisis which touches her heart less than her self-love. Webster, among his other excellent qualities, knew how to support character by reticence.

Vittoria's silence in this act is significant; and when she retires exclaiming, 'O me! this place is h.e.l.l!' we know that it is the outcry, not of a woman who has lost what made life dear, but of one who sees the fruits of crime imperilled by a fatal accident. The last scene of the play is devoted to Vittoria. It begins with a notable altercation between her and Flamineo. She calls him 'ruffian' and 'villain,'

refusing him the reward of his vile service. This quarrel emerges in one of Webster's grotesque contrivances to prolong a poignant situation. Flamineo quits the stage and reappears with pistols. He affects a kind of madness; and after threatening Vittoria, who never flinches, he proposes they should end their lives by suicide. She humours him, but manages to get the first shot. Flamineo falls, wounded apparently to death. Then Vittoria turns and tramples on him with her feet and tongue, taunting him in his death agony with the enumeration of his crimes. Her malice and her energy are equally infernal. Soon, however, it appears that the whole device was but a trick of Flamineo's to test his sister. The pistol was not loaded. He now produces a pair which are properly charged, and proceeds in good earnest to the a.s.sa.s.sination of Vittoria. But at this critical moment Lodovico and his masquers appear; brother and sister both die unrepentant, defiant to the end. Vittoria's customary pride and her familiar sneers impress her speech in these last moments with a trenchant truth to nature:

_You_ my death's-man!

Methinks thou dost not look horrid enough, Thou hast too good a face to be a hangman: If thou be, do thy office in right form; Fall down upon thy knees, and ask forgiveness!

I will be waited on in death; my servant Shall never go before me.

Yes, I shall welcome death As princes do some great amba.s.sadors: I'll meet thy weapon half-way.

'Twas a manly blow!

The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant; And then thou wilt be famous.

So firmly has Webster wrought the character of this white devil, that we seem to see her before us as in a picture. 'Beautiful as the leprosy, dazzling as the lightning,' to use a phrase of her enthusiastic admirer Hazlitt, she takes her station like a lady in some portrait by Paris Bordone, with gleaming golden hair twisted into snakelike braids about her temples, with skin white as cream, bright cheeks, dark dauntless eyes, and on her bosom, where it has been chafed by jewelled chains, a flush of rose. She is luxurious, but not so abandoned to the pleasures of the sense as to forget the purpose of her will and brain. Crime and peril add zest to her enjoyment. When arraigned in open court before the judgment-seat of deadly and unscrupulous foes, she conceals the consciousness of guilt, and stands erect, with fierce front, unabashed, relying on the splendour of her irresistible beauty and the subtlety of her piercing wit. Chafing with rage, the blood mounts and adds a l.u.s.tre to her cheek. It is no flush of modesty, but of rebellious indignation. The Cardinal, who hates her, brands her emotion with the name of shame. She rebukes him, hurling a jibe at his own mother. And when they point with spiteful eagerness to the jewels blazing on her breast, to the silks and satins that she rustles in, her husband lying murdered, she retorts:

Had I foreknown his death, as you suggest, I would have bespoke my mourning.

She is condemned, but not vanquished, and leaves the court with a stinging sarcasm. They send her to a house of Convert.i.tes:

_V.C_. A house of Convert.i.tes! what's that?

_M_. A house of penitent wh.o.r.es.

_V.C_. Do the n.o.blemen of Rome Erect it for their wives, that I am sent To lodge there?

Charles Lamb was certainly in error? when he described Vittoria's att.i.tude as one of 'innocence-resembling boldness.' In the trial scene, no less than in the scenes of altercation with Brachiano and Flamineo, Webster clearly intended her to pa.s.s for a magnificent vixen, a beautiful and queenly termagant. Her boldness is the audacity of impudence, which does not condescend to entertain the thought of guilt. Her egotism is so hard and so profound that the very victims whom she sacrifices to ambition seem in her sight justly punished. Of Camillo and Isabella, her husband and his wife, she says to Brachiano:

And both were struck dead by that sacred yew, In that base shallow grave that was their due.

IV

It is tempting to pa.s.s from this a.n.a.lysis of Vittoria's life to a consideration of Webster's drama as a whole, especially in a book dedicated to Italian byways. For that mysterious man of genius had explored the dark and devious paths of Renaissance vice, and had penetrated the secrets of Italian wickedness with truly appalling lucidity. His tragedies, though worthless as historical doc.u.ments, have singular value as commentaries upon history, as revelations to us of the spirit of the sixteenth century in its deepest gloom.

Webster's plays, owing to the condensation of their thought and the compression of their style, are not easy to read for the first time.

He crowds so many fantastic incidents into one action, and burdens his discourse with so much profoundly studied matter, that we rise from the perusal of his works with a blurred impression of the fables, a deep sense of the poet's power and personality, and an ineffaceable recollection of one or two resplendent scenes. His Roman history-play of 'Appius and Virginia' proves that he understood the value of a simple plot, and that he was able, when he chose, to work one out with conscientious calmness. But the two Italian dramas upon which his fame is justly founded, by right of which he stands alone among the playwrights of all literatures, are marked by a peculiar and wayward mannerism. Each part is etched with equal effort after luminous effect upon a back-ground of lurid darkness; and the whole play is made up of these parts, without due concentration on a master-motive. The characters are definite in outline, but, taken together in the conduct of a single plot, they seem to stand apart, like figures in a _tableau vivant_; nor do they act and react each upon the other in the play of interpenetrative pa.s.sions. That this mannerism was deliberately chosen, we have a right to believe. 'Willingly, and not ignorantly, in this kind have I faulted,' is the answer Webster gives to such as may object that he has not constructed his plays upon the cla.s.sic model.

He seems to have had a certain sombre richness of tone and intricacy of design in view, combining sensational effect and sententious pregnancy of diction in works of laboured art, which, when adequately represented to the ear and eye upon the stage, might at a touch obtain the animation they now lack for chamber-students.

When familiarity has brought us acquainted with his style, when we have disentangled the main characters and circ.u.mstances from their adjuncts, we perceive that he treats poignant and tremendous situations with a concentrated vigour special to his genius; that he has studied each word and trait of character, and that he has prepared by gradual approaches and degrees of horror for the culmination of his tragedies. The sentences which seem at first sight copied from a commonplace book, are found to be appropriate. Brief lightning flashes of acute perception illuminate the midnight darkness of his all but unimaginably depraved characters. Sharp unexpected touches evoke humanity in the _fantoccini_ of his wayward art. No dramatist has shown more consummate ability in heightening terrific effects, in laying bare the innermost mysteries of crime, remorse, and pain, combined to make men miserable. It has been said of Webster that, feeling himself deficient in the first poetic qualities, he concentrated his powers upon one point, and achieved success by sheer force of self-cultivation. There is perhaps some truth in this. At any rate, his genius was of a narrow and peculiar order, and he knew well how to make the most of its limitations. Yet we must not forget that he felt a natural bias toward the dreadful stuff with which he deals.

The mystery of iniquity had an irresistible attraction for his mind.

He was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal elements of spiritual anguish. The materials with which he builds his tragedies are sought for in the ruined places of lost souls, in the agonies of madness and despair, in the sarcasms of criminal and reckless atheism, in slow tortures, griefs beyond endurance, the tempests of remorseful death, the spasms of fratricidal bloodshed. He is often melodramatic in the means employed to bring these psychological conditions home to us. He makes too free use of poisoned engines, daggers, pistols, disguised murderers, and so forth. Yet his firm grasp upon the essential qualities of diseased and guilty human nature saves him, even at his wildest, from the unrealities and extravagances into which less potent artists of the _drame sanglant_--Marston, for example--blundered.

With Webster, the tendency to brood on horrors was no result of calculation. It belonged to his idiosyncrasy. He seems to have been suckled from birth at the breast of that _Mater Tenebrarum_, our Lady of Darkness, whom De Quincey in one of his 'Suspiria de Profundis'

describes among the Semnai Theai, the august G.o.ddesses, the mysterious foster-nurses of suffering humanity. He cannot say the simplest thing without giving it a ghastly or sinister turn. If one of his characters draws a metaphor from pie-crust, he must needs use language of the churchyard:

You speak as if a man Should know what fowl is coffined in a baked meat Afore you cut it open.

Hideous similes are heaped together in ill.u.s.tration of the commonest circ.u.mstances:

Places at court are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and lower.

When knaves come to preferment, they rise as gallowses are raised in the Low Countries, one upon another's shoulders.

I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the feet of one sick of the plague than kiss one of you fasting.

A soldier is twitted with serving his master:

As witches do their serviceable spirits, Even with thy prodigal blood.

An adulterous couple get this curse:

Like mistletoe on sear elms spent by weather, Let him cleave to her, and both rot together.

A bravo is asked:

Dost thou imagine thou canst slide on blood, And not be tainted with a shameful fall?

Or, like the black and melancholic yew-tree, Dost think to root thyself in dead men's graves, And yet to prosper?

It is dangerous to extract philosophy of life from any dramatist. Yet Webster so often returns to dark and doleful meditations, that we may fairly cla.s.s him among const.i.tutional pessimists. Men, according to the grimness of his melancholy, are:

Only like dead walls or vaulted graves, That, ruined, yield no echo.

O this gloomy world!

In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

We are merely the stars' tennis-b.a.l.l.s, struck and banded Which way please them.

Pleasure of life! what is't? only the good hours of an ague.

A d.u.c.h.ess is 'brought to mortification,' before her strangling by the executioner, in this high fantastical oration:

Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What's this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste, &c. &c.

Man's life in its totality is summed up with monastic cynicism in these lyric verses:

Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?

Sin their conception, their birth weeping, Their life a general mist of error, Their death a hideous storm of terror.