But there is another element in Webster’s workmanship which, I think, has helped to deprive the play of life. I mean his obtrusive ingenuity. I am not referring to the ingenuity of the tortures practised upon the unhappy Duchess—the severed hand thrust into hers, the wax figure purporting to be her slain husband, and so forth. This fiendish ingenuity is proper to the character of the tyrant Ferdinand, and its exercise does add a grisly horror to the play. I mean the ingenuity of Webster himself, a perverted, wasted ingenuity, in his play-construction. He seems to have ransacked his fancy in devising scenic experiments. There is the “echo” scene. It is theatrically ineffective. It gives you no tragic emotion, but only a sense of amused interest in the author’s ingenuity, and you say, “How quaint!” Then there is the little device for giving a touch of irony to the Cardinal’s murder. He has warned the courtiers, for purposes of his own, that if they hear him cry for help in the night they are to take no notice; he will be only pretending. And so, when he cries for help in real earnest, he is hoist with his own petard, and the courtiers only cry, “Fie upon his counterfeiting.” Again the theatrical effect is small; you are merely distracted from the tragic business in hand by the author’s curious ingenuity. For any one interested in the theatrical _cuisine_ these experiments, of course, have their piquancy. Webster seems to have been perpetually seeking for “new thrills”—like the Grand Guignol people in our own day. He had some lucky finds. The masque of madmen, for instance, is a tremendous thrill, one of the biggest, I daresay, in the history of tragedy. But there were experiments that didn’t come off. At any rate they fail with us. Webster, no doubt, had his true “posterity” (was it perchance contemporary with Pepys?), but we are his post-posterity. In a sense every masterpiece is in advance of its time. “The reason,” says Marcel Proust (“A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs”)— “The reason why a work of genius is admired with difficulty at once is that the author is extraordinary, that few people resemble him. It is his work itself that in fertilizing the rare minds capable of comprehending it makes them grow and multiply. Beethoven’s quartets (XII., XIII., XIV., and XV.) have taken fifty years to give birth and growth to the Beethoven quartet public, thus realizing like every masterpiece a progress in the society of minds, largely composed to-day of what was not to be found when the masterpiece appeared, that is to say, of beings capable of loving it. What we call posterity is the posterity of the work itself. The work must create its own posterity.”