]
There are among poets, as there are among prose writers, some whose
peculiar power finds vent only in a broad and rushing stream of speech
or song, triumphant by the general force and fulness of its volume, in
which we no more think of looking for single lines or phrases that may
be detached from the context and quoted for their separate effect than
of selecting for peculiar admiration some special wave or individual
ripple from the multitudinous magnificence of the torrent or the tide.
There are others whose power is shown mainly in single strokes or
flashes as of lightning or of swords. There are few indeed outside the
pale of the very greatest who can display at will their natural genius
in the keenest concentration or the fullest effusion of its powers. But
among these fewer than few stands the author of "The Revenger's
Tragedy." The great scene of the temptation and the triumph of Castiza
would alone be enough to give evidence, not adequate merely but ample,
that such praise as this is no hyperbole of sympathetic enthusiasm, but
simply the accurate expression of an indisputable fact. No lyrist, no
satirist, could have excelled in fiery flow of rhetoric the copious and
impetuous eloquence of the lines, at once luxurious and sardonic,
cynical and seductive, in which Vindice pours forth the arguments and
rolls out the promises of a professional pleader on behalf of aspiring
self-interest and sensual self-indulgence: no dramatist that ever lived
could have put more vital emotion into fewer words, more passionate
reality into more perfect utterance, than Tourneur in the dialogue that
follows them:
_Mother_.
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