ief 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 goddesses, 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 illustration