The single-hearted
fury of unselfish and devoted indignation which animates every line of
his satire is more akin to the spirit of Ezekiel or Isaiah than to the
spirit of Juvenal or Persius: though the fierce literality of occasional
detail, the prosaic accuracy of implacable and introspective abhorrence,
may seem liker the hard Roman style of impeachment by photography than
the great Hebrew method of denunciation by appeal. But the fusion of
sarcastic realism with imaginative passion produces a compound of such
peculiar and fiery flavor as we taste only from the tragic chalice of
Tourneur or of Shakespeare. The bitterness which serves but as a sauce
or spice to the meditative rhapsodies of Marston's heroes or of
Webster's villains is the dominant quality of the meats and wines served
up on the stage which echoes to the cry of Vindice or of Timon. But the
figure of Tourneur's typic hero is as distinct in its difference from
the Shakespearean figure which may possibly have suggested it as in its
difference from the Shakespearean figure which it may not impossibly
have suggested. There is perhaps too much play made with skulls and
cross-bones on the stage of Cyril Tourneur: he cannot apparently realize
the fact that they are properties of which a thoughtful poet's use
should be as temperate and occasional as Shakespeare's: but the
graveyard meditations of Hamlet, perfect in dramatic tact and instinct,
seem cool and common and shallow in sentiment when set beside the
intensity of inspiration which animates the fitful and impetuous music
of such passages as these:
Here's an eye
Able to tempt a great man--to serve God;
A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble.
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