And now, after a _régime_ more or less of the experimental and unnecessary, we have again a great man’s work. The Independent Theatre has once more realised that to be revolutionary is not to be sufficing. We have had a taste of Webster--Webster, it is true, with the lime-light turned on at the appropriate moment; Webster with a skirt-dance; Webster with a measure of scenic effect, dexterously shocking, or dexterously entertaining, as the case may be, to the modern taste. But still a classic--a giant in conception and writing--a strong tower in comparison with a puny earth-work. Excellently has Mr. Swinburne said of him, ‘There is no poet morally nobler than Webster.’ Fearlessly has Mr. Gosse asserted that _The Duchess of Malfi_ is ‘a masterpiece excelled only by _King Lear_.’ And, if I take down my volumes of Lamb’s _Specimens_, I find that, in a little footnote, Elia becomes most eloquent and most descriptive when he descants upon this play. ‘To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear ... this only a Webster can do.’ And again, contrasting inferior writers with this potent if imperfect master, ‘They know not how a soul is capable of being moved; their terrors want dignity; their affrightments are without decorum.’ But Webster, with all his qualities, had faults that were of his time, along indeed with faults, or deficiencies, that were his own. Among the latter I would note some absence of clearness in exposition. The relation of character to character, the how and wherefore of the minor events--these things are not invariably made plain: Webster himself, perhaps, could hardly have passed creditably through a searching examination in them. And among the faults, or accidents, if you will, of his time, were--one need hardly say it, but that it affects his acceptability upon the modern stage--the permitted coarseness, the absence of reticence on matters we are not accustomed to amplify and define; and, in mechanical arrangement, the frequent shifting from scene to scene within the compass of a single act--a point in which no English dramatist, as far as my remembrance carries me, went wholly right, until the trick had been learned from the French masters of construction of our own time.