e: but as much may be said of the whole
part--and indeed of the whole play. Violent and extravagant as the mere
action or circumstance may be or may appear, there is a trenchant
straightforwardness of appeal in the simple and spontaneous magnificence
of the language, a depth of insuppressible sincerity in the fervent and
and restless vibration of the thought, by which the hand and the brain
and the heart of the workman are equally recognizable. But the crowning
example of Cyril Tourneur's unique and incomparable genius is of course
to be found in the scene which would assuredly be remembered, though
every other line of the poet's writing were forgotten, by the influence
of its passionate inspiration on the more tender but not less noble
sympathies of Charles Lamb. Even the splendid exuberance of eulogy which
attributes to the verse of Tourneur a more fiery quality, a more
thrilling and piercing note of sublime and agonizing indignation, than
that which animates and inflames the address of Hamlet to a mother less
impudent in infamy than Vindice's cannot be considered excessive by any
capable reader who will candidly and carefully compare the two scenes
which suggested this comparison. To attempt the praise or the
description of anything that has been praised or described by Lamb would
usually be the veriest fatuity of presumption; and yet it is impossible
to write of a poet whose greatness was first revealed to his countrymen
by the greatest gritic of dramatic poetry who ever lived and wrote, and
not to echo his words of righteous judgement and inspired applause with
more or less feebleness of reiteration. The startling and magical power
of single verses, ineffaceable and ineradicable from the memory on which
they have once impressed themselves, the consciousness in which they
have once struck root, which distinguishes and denotes the peculiar
style of Cyril Tourneur's tragic poetry, rises to its highest tidemark
in this part of the play. Every other line, one might almost say, is an
instance of it; and yet not a single lineis undramatic, or deficient in
the strictest and plainest dramatic propriety. It may be objected that
men and women possessed by the excitement of emotions so desparate and
so dreadful do not express them with such passionate precision of
utterance: but, to borrow the saying of a later and bearer of the name
which Cyril sometimes spelled as Turner, "don't they wish they could?"
or rather, ought they not