iently realized and vivified as active and distinct figures: true,
for instance, that the two elder sons of the duchess are little more
than conventional outlines of such empty violence and futile ambition
as might be inferred from the crude and puerile symbolism of their
respective designations: but the third brother is a type no less living
than revolting and no less dramatic than detestable: his ruffian
cynicism and defiant brutality are in life and death alike original and
consistent, whether they express themselves in curses or in jeers. The
brother and accomplice of the hero in the accomplishment of his manifold
revenge is seldom much more than a serviceable shadow: but there is a
definite difference between their sister and the common type of virginal
heroine who figures on the stage of almost every dramatist then writing;
the author's profound and noble reverence for goodness gives at once
precision and distinction to the outline and a glow of active life to
the color of this pure and straightforward study. The brilliant
simplicity of tone which distinguishes the treatment of this character
is less remarkable in the figure of the mother whose wickedness and
weakness are so easily played upon and blown about by every gust of
penitence or temptation; but there is the same life-like vigor of touch
in the smallest detail of the scenes between her children and herself.
It has been objected that her ready avowal of weakness as common to
all her sex is the undramatic epigram of a satirist, awkwardly
ventriloquizing through the mechanism of a tragic puppet; but it is
really quite in keeping with the woman's character to enlarge and
extenuate the avowal of her own infamy and infirmity into a sententious
reflection on womanhood in general. A similar objection has been raised
against the apparent change of character implied in the confession made
by the hero to the duke elect, at the close of the play, that he and his
brother had murdered the old duke--"all for your grace's good," and in
the cry when arrested and sentenced to instant execution, "Heart, was't
not for your good, my lord?" But if this seems incompatible with the
high sense of honor and of wrong which is the mainspring of Vindice's
implacable self-devotion and savage unselfishness, the unscrupulous
ferocity of the means through which his revenge is worked out may surely
be supposed to have blunted the edge of his moral perception, distorted
his natural instinct,