" It is
superfluous to add that "Volpone" was an achievement only less far out
of his reach than "Hamlet." But this is not to say or to imply that he
does not deserve an honorable place among English poets. His savage and
unblushing violence or vehemence of satire has no taint of gloating
or morbid prurience in the turbid flow of its fitful and furious
rhetoric. The restless rage of his invective is as far as human
utterance can find itself from the cynical infidelity of an Iago. Of him
we may say with more rational confidence what was said of that more
potent and more truculent satirist:
An honest man he is, and hates the slime
That sticks on filthy deeds.
We may wish that he had not been so much given to trampling and stamping
on that slime as to evoke such malodorous exhalations as infect the
lower and shallower reaches of the river down which he proceeds to steer
us with so strenuous a hand. But it is in a spirit of healthy disgust,
not of hankering delight, that he insists on calling the indignant
attention of his readers to the baser and fouler elements of natural or
social man as displayed in the vicious exuberance or eccentricity of
affectation or of self-indulgence.
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