The rage of Swift, without his insanity and
impurity, seems to utter in every word the healthier if no less
consuming passion of a heart lacerated by indignation and envenomed by
contempt as absolute, as relentless, and as inconsolable as his own. And
in the very torrent of the man's meditative and solitary passion, a very
Phlegethon of agony and fury and ravenous hunger after the achievement
of a desperate expiation, comes the sudden touch of sarcasm which serves
as a momentary breakwater to the raging tide of his reflections, and
reveals the else unfathomable bitterness of a spiritual Marah that no
plummet even of his own sinking can sound, and no infusion of less fiery
sorrow or less venomous remembrance can sweeten. The mourner falls to
scoffing, the justicer becomes a jester: the lover, with the skull of
his murdered mistress in his hand, slides into such reflections on the
influence of her living beauty as would beseem a sexless and malignant
satirist of her sex. This power of self-abstraction from the individual
self, this impersonal contemplation of a personal wrong, this
contemptuous yet passionate scrutiny of the very emotions which rend
the heart and inflame the spirit and poison the very blood of the
thinker, is the special seal or sign of original inspiration which
distinguishes the type most representative of Tourneur's genius, most
significant of its peculiar bias and its peculiar force.
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