Except in Aeschylus, in
Dante, and in Shakespeare, I at least know not where to seek for
passages which in sheer force of tragic and noble horror--to the vulgar
shock of ignoble or brutal horror he never condescends to submit his
reader or subdue his inspiration--may be set against the subtlest, the
deepest, the sublimest passages of Webster. Other gifts he had as great
in themselves, as precious and as necessary to the poet: but on this
side he is incomparable and unique. Neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare had
so fine, so accurate, so infallible a sense of the delicate line of
demarcation which divides the impressive and the terrible from the
horrible and the loathsome--Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac from Eugene
Sue and Emile Zola. On his theatre we find no presentation of old men
with their beards torn off and their eyes gouged out, of young men
imprisoned in reeking cesspools and impaled with red-hot spits. Again
and again his passionate and daring genius attains the utmost limit and
rounds the final goal of tragedy; never once does it break the bounds of
pure poetic instinct. If ever for a moment it may seem to graze that
goal too closely, to brush too sharply by those bounds, the very next
moment finds it clear of any such risk and remote from any such
temptation as sometimes entrapped or seduced the foremost of its
forerunners in the field.
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