Webster, as man and artist, never descends to Tourneur's level. He selects his two great subjects from Italian story, deriving thence the pith and marrow of veracity. These subjects he treats carefully and conscientiously, according to his own conception of the dreadful depths in human nature revealed to us by sixteenth century Italy. He does not use the vulgar machinery of revenge and ghosts in order to evolve an action. In so far as this goes, he may even be said to have advanced a step beyond _Hamlet_ in the evolution of the Tragedy of Blood. His dramatic issues are worked out, without much alteration, from the matter given in the two Italian tales he used. Only he claims the right to view human fates and fortunes with despair, to paint a broad black background for his figures, to detach them sharply in sinister or pathetic relief, and to leave us at the last without a prospect over hopeful things. "One great Charybdis swallows all," said the Greek Simonides; and this motto might be chosen for the work of Shakespeare's greatest pupil in the art of tragedy. Yet Webster never fails to touch our hearts, and makes us remember a riper utterance upon the piteousness of man's ephemeral existence:-- Sunt lacrimæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt. It is just this power of blending tenderness and pity with the exhibition of acute moral anguish by which Webster is so superior to Tourneur as a dramatist. Both playwrights have this point in common, that their forte lies not in the construction of plots, or in the creation of characters, so much as in an acute sense for dramatic situations. Their plots are involved and stippled in with slender touches; they lack breadth, and do not rightly hang together. Their characters, though forcibly conceived, tend to monotony, and move mechanically. But when it is needful to develop a poignant, a passionate, or a delicate situation, Tourneur and Webster show themselves to be masters of their art. They find inevitable words, the right utterance, not indeed always for their specific personages, but for generic humanity, under the _peine forte et dure_ of intense emotional pressure. Webster, being the larger, nobler, deeper in his touch on nature, offers a greater variety of situations which reveal the struggles of the human soul with sin and fate. He is also better able to sustain these situations at a high dramatic pitch--as in the scene of Vittoria before her judges, and the scene of the Duchess of Malfi's assassination. Still Tourneur can display a few such moments by apocalyptic flashes--notably in the scenes where Vendice deals with his mother and sister.