fettered with the bonds of a long night, lay exiled, fugitives from the
eternal providence. For while they supposed to lie hid in their secret
sins, they were scattered under a dark veil of forgetfulness, being
horribly astonished, and troubled with sights.... Sad visions appeared
unto them with heavy countenances. No power of the fire might give them
light: neither could the bright flames of the stars endure to lighten
that horrible night. Only there appeared unto them a fire kindled of
itself, very dreadful: for being much terrified, they thought the things
which they saw to be worse than the sight they saw not.... The whole
world shined with clear light, and none were hindered in their labor:
over them only was spread an heavy night, an image of that darkness
which should afterward receive them: but yet were they unto themselves
more grievous than the darkness." In this wild world of fantastic
retribution and prophetic terror the genius of a great English
poet--if greatness may be attributed to a genius which holds absolute
command in a strictly limited province of reflection and emotion--was
born and lived and moved and had its being. The double mainspring of its
energy is not difficult to define: its component parts are simply
adoration of good and abhorrence of evil: all other sources of emotion
were subordinate to these: love, hate, resentment, resignation,
self-devotion, are but transitory agents on this lurid and stormy stage,
which pass away and leave only the sombre fire of meditative indignation
still burning among the ruins of shattered hopes and lives. More
splendid success in pure dramatic dialogue has not been achieved by
Shakespeare or by Webster than by Cyril Tourneur in his moments of
happiest invention or purest inspiration: but the intensity of his moral
passion has broken the outline and marred the symmetry of his general
design. And yet he was at all points a poet: there is an accent of
indomitable self-reliance, a note of persistence and resistance more
deep than any note of triumph, in the very cry of his passionate and
implacable dejection, which marks him as different in kind from the race
of the great prosaic pessimists whose scorn and hatred of mankind found
expression in the contemptuous and rancorous despondency of Swift or of
Carlyle. The obsession of evil, the sensible prevalence of wickedness
and falsehood, self-interest and stupidity, pressed heavily on his
fierce and indignant imagination; yet not so heavily that mankind came
to seem to him the "damned race," the hopeless horde of millions "mostly
fools" too foolish or too foul to be worth redemption, which excited the
laughing contempt of Frederic the Great and the raging contempt of his
biographer. On this point the editor to whom all lovers of high poetry
were in some measure indebted for the first collection and reissue of
his works has done much less than justice to the poet on whose text he
can scarcely be said to have expended an adequate or even a tolerable
amount of pains. A reader of his introduction who had never studied the
text of his author might be forgiven if he should carry away the
impression that Tourneur, as a serious or tragic poet, was little more
than a better sort of Byron; a quack less impudent but not less
transparent than the less inspired and more inflated ventriloquist of
"Childe Harold's Pilgrimage": whereas it is hardly too much to say that
the earnest and fiery intensity of Tourneur's moral rhetoric is no less
unmistakable than the blatant and flatulent ineptitude of Byron's.
It seems to me that Tourneur might say with the greatest of the popes,
"I have loved justice, and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile";
therefore, in other words, I am cast aside and left behind by readers
who are too lazy, too soft and slow of spirit, too sleepily sensual and
self-sufficient, to endure the fiery and purgatorial atmosphere of my
work. But there are breaths from heaven as surely as there are blasts
from hell in the tumultuous and electric air of it. The cynicism and
egotism which the editor already mentioned has the confidence to
attribute to him are rather the outer garments than the inner qualities
of his genius: the few and simple lines in which his purer and nobler
characters are rapidly but not roughly drawn suffice to give them all
due relief and all requisite attraction. The virtuous victims of the
murderous conspirator whose crimes and punishment are the groundwork of
"The Atheist's Tragedy" have life and spirit enough to make them
heartily interesting: and the mixed character of Sebastian, the
high-hearted and gallant young libertine whose fearless frankness of
generosity brushes aside and breaks away the best-laid schemes of his
father, is as vividly and gracefully drawn as any of the same kind on
the comic or the tragic stage.
In this earlier of the two plays extant which preserve the name of Cyril
Tourneur the magnificent if grotesque extravagance of the design may
perhaps be partly accounted for by the didactic or devotional aim of the
designer. A more appalling scarecrow or scarebabe, as the contemporaries
of his creator would have phrased it, was certainly never begotten by
orthodoxy on horror than the figure of the portentous and prodigious
criminal who here represents the practical results of indulgence in free
thought. It is a fine proof of the author's naturally dramatic genius
that this terrific successor of Vanini and precursor of Diderot should
be other than a mere man of straw. Huge as is the wilful and deliberate
exaggeration of his atrocity, there are scenes and passages in which his
daring and indomitable craft is drawn with native skill as well as force
of hand; in which it is no mere stage monster, but a genuine man,
plausible and relentless, versatile and fearless, who comes before us
now clothed in all the cajoleries of cunning, now exultant in all the
nakedness of defiance. But indeed, although the construction of the
verse and the composition of the play may both equally seem to bear
witness of crude and impatient inexperience, there is no lack of life in
any of the tragic or comic figures which play their part through these
tempestuous five acts. Even so small a figure as the profligate Puritan
parasite of the atheist who hires his hypocrisy to plead against itself
is bright with touches of real rough humor. There is not much of this
quality in Tourneur's work, and what there is of it is as bitter and as
grim in feature and in flavor as might be expected of so fierce and
passionate a moralist: but he knows well how to salt his invective with
a due sprinkling of such sharply seasoned pleasantry as relieves the
historic narrative of John Knox; whose "merry"[1] account, for instance,
of Cardinal Beaton's last night in this world has the very savor of
Tourneur's tragic irony and implacable disgust in every vivid and
relentless line of it.
[Footnote 1: These thingis we wreat mearelie.--_Works of John Knox_,
vol. i., p. 180.]
The execution of this poem is singularly good and bad: there are
passages of such metrical strength and sweetness as will hardly be found
in the dramatic verse of any later English poet; and there are passages
in which this poet's verse sinks wellnigh to the tragic level of a
Killigrew's, a Shadwell's, or a Byron's. Such terminations as "of,"
"to," "with," "in," "and," "my," "your," preceding the substantive or
the verb which opens the next verse, make us feel as though we were
reading "Sardanapalus" or "The Two Foscari"--a sensation not easily to
be endured. In a poet so far superior as Tourneur to the author of those
abortions we must seek for an explanation of this perverse error in a
transient and tentative theory of realism rather than in an incurable
infirmity or obliquity of talent: for no quality is more remarkable in
the execution of his masterpiece than his mastery of those metrical
properties in which the style of this play is so generally deficient.
Whether in dialogue or in monologue, "The Revenger's Tragedy" is so
equally admirable for instinctive obedience to nature and imaginative
magnificence of inspiration, so equally perfect in the passionate
harmony of its verse and the inspired accuracy of its locution, that
years of study and elaboration might have seemed necessary to bring
about this inexpressible improvement in expression of yet more sombre
and more fiery thought or feeling. There are gleams in "The Atheist's
Tragedy" of that clear light in which the whole Shakespearean world lay
shining, and here and there the bright flames of the stars do still
endure to lighten the gloom of it by flashes or by fits; the gentle and
noble young lovers, whose patient loyalty is at last rescued from the
toils of crime to be crowned with happiness and honor, are painted,
though rapidly and slightly, with equal firmness of hand and tenderness
of touch; and there is some vigorous and lively humor in the lighter
action of the comic scenes, however coarse and crude in handling: but
there is no such relief to the terrors of the maturer work, whose
sultrier darkness is visible only by the fire kindled of itself, very
dreadful, which burns in the heart of the revenger whom it lights along
his blood-stained way. Nor indeed is any relief wanted; the harmony of
its fervent and stern emotion is as perfect, as sufficient, as sublime
as the full rush and flow of its diction, the fiery majesty of its
verse. There never was such a thunder-storm of a play: it quickens and
exhilarates the sense of the reader as the sense of a healthy man or boy
is quickened and exhilarated by the rolling music of a tempest and the
leaping exultation of its flames. The strange and splendid genius which
inspired it seems now not merely to feel that it does well to be angry,
but to take such keen enjoyment in that feeling, to drink such deep
delight from the inexhaustible wellsprings of its wrath, that rage and
scorn and hatred assume something of the rapturous quality more
naturally proper to faith and hope and love. There is not a breath of
rant, not a pad of bombast, in the declamation which fills its dazzling
scenes with fire: the language has no more perfect models of style than
the finest of its more sustained and elevated passages. The verse is
unlike any other man's in the solemn passion of its music: if it reminds
us of Shakespeare's or of Webster's, it is simply by right of kinship
and equality of power with the most vivid and sonorous verse that rings
from the lips of Coriolanus or of Timon, of Brachiano or the Duchess of
Malfy; not by any servility of discipleship or reverberation of an
imitative echo. It is so rich and full and supple, so happy in its
freedom and so loyal in its instinct, that its veriest audacities and
aberrations have an indefinable harmony of their own. Even if we admit
that Tourneur is to Webster but as Webster is to Shakespeare, we must
allow, by way of exception to this general rule of relative rank, that
in his noblest hours of sustained inspiration he is at least the equal
of the greater dramatist on the score of sublime and burning eloquence,
poured forth in verse like the rushing of a mighty wind, with fitful
breaks and pauses that do but enhance the majestic sweetness and
perfection of its forward movement, the strenuous yet spontaneous energy
of its triumphant ardor in advance.
To these magnificent qualities of poetry and passion no critic of the
slightest note or the smallest pretention to poetic instinct has ever
failed to do ample and cordial justice: but to the truthfulness and the
power of Cyril Tourneur as a dramatic student and painter of human
character not only has such justice not generally been done, but grave
injustice has been too generally shown. It is true that not all the
agents in the evolution of his greater tragedy are equally or
sufficiently realized and vivified as active and distinct figures: true,
for instance, that the two elder sons of the duchess are little more
than conventional outlines of such empty violence and futile ambition
as might be inferred from the crude and puerile symbolism of their
respective designations: but the third brother is a type no less living
than revolting and no less dramatic than detestable: his ruffian
cynicism and defiant brutality are in life and death alike original and
consistent, whether they express themselves in curses or in jeers. The
brother and accomplice of the hero in the accomplishment of his manifold
revenge is seldom much more than a serviceable shadow: but there is a
definite difference between their sister and the common type of virginal
heroine who figures on the stage of almost every dramatist then writing;
the author's profound and noble reverence for goodness gives at once
precision and distinction to the outline and a glow of active life to
the color of this pure and straightforward study. The brilliant
simplicity of tone which distinguishes the treatment of this character
is less remarkable in the figure of the mother whose wickedness and
weakness are so easily played upon and blown about by every gust of
penitence or temptation; but there is the same life-like vigor of touch
in the smallest detail of the scenes between her children and herself.
It has been objected that her ready avowal of weakness as common to
all her sex is the undramatic epigram of a satirist, awkwardly
ventriloquizing through the mechanism of a tragic puppet; but it is
really quite in keeping with the woman's character to enlarge and
extenuate the avowal of her own infamy and infirmity into a sententious
reflection on womanhood in general. A similar objection has been raised
against the apparent change of character implied in the confession made
by the hero to the duke elect, at the close of the play, that he and his
brother had murdered the old duke--"all for your grace's good," and in
the cry when arrested and sentenced to instant execution, "Heart, was't
not for your good, my lord?" But if this seems incompatible with the
high sense of honor and of wrong which is the mainspring of Vindice's
implacable self-devotion and savage unselfishness, the unscrupulous
ferocity of the means through which his revenge is worked out may surely
be supposed to have blunted the edge of his moral perception, distorted
his natural instinct, and infected his nobler sympathies with some taint
of contagious egotism and pessimistic obduracy of imagination. And the
intensity of sympathy with which this crowning creation of the poet's
severe and fiery genius is steadily developed and displayed should make
any critic of reasonable modesty think more than twice or thrice before
he assumes or admits the likelihood or the possibility of so gross an
error or so grave a defect in the conception of so great an artist. For
if the claim to such a title might be disputed in the case of a claimant
who could show no better credentials than his authorship of "The
Atheist's Tragedy"--and even in that far from faultless work of genius
there are manifest and manifold signs, not merely of excellence, but of
greatness--the claim of the man who could write "The Revenger's Tragedy"
is questionable by no one who has any glimmering of insight or
perception as to what qualities they are which confer upon a writer the
indisputable title to a seat in the upper house of poets.
This master work of Cyril Tourneur, the most perfect and most terrible
incarnation of the idea of retribution impersonate and concentrated
revenge that ever haunted the dreams of a tragic poet or the vigils of a
future tyrannicide, is resumed and embodied in a figure as original and
as impossible to forget, for any one who has ever felt the savage
fascination of its presence, as any of the humaner figures evoked and
immortalized by Shakespeare. 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. Such a
conception, clothed in mere prose or in merely passable verse, would be
proof sufficient of the mental power which conceived it; when expressed
in such verse as follows, it proves at once and preserves forever the
claim of the designer to a place among the immortals:
Thou sallow picture of my poisoned love,
My study's ornament, thou shell of death,
Once the bright face of my betrothed lady,
When life and beauty naturally filled out
These ragged imperfections;
When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set
In these unsightly rings;--then 'twas a face
So far beyond the artificial shine
Of any woman's bought complexion
That the uprightest man (if such there be,
That sin but seven times a day) broke custom
And made up eight with looking after her.
The very fall of the verse has a sort of fierce and savage pathos in the
note of it; a cadence which comes nearer to the echo of such laughter as
utters the cry of an anguish too deep for weeping and wailing, for
curses or for prayers, than anything in dramatic poetry outside the
part of Hamlet. It would be a conjecture not less plausible than futile,
though perhaps not less futile than plausible, which should suggest that
the influence of Shakespeare's Hamlet may be responsible for the
creation of Tourneur's Vindice, and the influence of Tourneur's Vindice
for the creation of Shakespeare's Timon. It is a certainty indisputable
except by the blatant audacity of immedicable ignorance that the only
poet to whose manner and style the style and manner of Cyril Tourneur
can reasonably be said to bear any considerable resemblance is William
Shakespeare. The more curt and abrupt style of Webster is equally unlike
the general style of either. And if, as his first editor observes, "the
parallel" between Tourneur and Marston, "as far as it goes, is so
obvious that it is not worth drawing," it is no less certain that the
diverence between the genius which created Andrugio and the genius which
created Vindice is at least as wide as the points of resemblance or
affinity between them are vivid and distinct. While Marston's
imaginative and tragic power was at its highest, his style was crude
and quaint, turgid and eccentric; when he had cured and purified
it--perhaps, as Gifford suggests, in consequence of Ben Jonson's
unmerciful but salutary ridicule--he approved himself a far abler
writer of comedy or tragicomedy than before, but his right hand had
forgotten its cunning as the hand of "a tragic penman." Now the
improvement of Tourneur's style, an improvement amounting to little less
than transfiguration, keeps time with his advance as a student of
character and a tragic dramatist as distinguished from a tragic poet.
The style of his earlier play has much of beauty, of facility, and of
freshness: the style of his later play, I must repeat, is comparable
only with Shakespeare's. In the superb and inexhaustible imprecations of
Timon there is a quality which reminds us of Cyril Tourneur as
delightfully as we are painfully reminded of John Marston in reading
certain scenes and passages which disfigure and deface the magnificent
but incomprehensible composition of "Troilus and Cressida."
Of Tourneur's two elegies on the death of Sir Francis Vere and of Henry
Prince of Wales, it may be said that they are about as good as Chapman's
work of the same order: and it may be added that his first editor has
shown himself, to say the least, unreasonably and unaccountably virulent
in his denunciation of what he assumes to be insincere and sycophantic
in the elegiac expression of the poet's regret for a prince of such
noble promise as the elder brother of Charles I. The most earnest and
fervent of republicans, if not wanting in common-sense and common
courtesy, would not dream of reflecting in terms of such unqualified
severity on the lamentation of Lord Tennyson for the loss of Albert the
Good: and the warmest admirer of that loudly lamented person will
scarcely maintain that this loss was of such grave importance to England
as the loss of a prince who might probably have preserved the country
from the alternate oppression of prelates and of Puritans, from the
social tyranny of a dictator and the political disgrace of the
Restoration.
The existence of a comedy by the author of "The Revenger's Tragedy," and
of a comedy bearing the suggestive if not provocative title of "Laugh
and Lie Down," must always have seemed to the students of Lowndes one of
the most curious and amusing pieces of information to be gathered from
the "Bibliographer's Manual"; and it is with a sense of disappointment
proportionate to this sense of curiosity that they will discover the
non-existence of such a comedy, and the existence in its stead of a mere
pamphlet in prose issued under that more than promising title: which
yet, if attainable, ought surely to be reprinted, however dubious may be
its claim to the honor of a great poet's authorship. In no case can it
possibly be of less interest or value than the earliest extant
publication of that poet--"The Transformed Metamorphosis." Its first
editor has given proof of very commendable perseverance and fairly
creditable perspicacity in his devoted attempt at elucidation of this
most astonishing and indescribable piece of work: but no interpretation
of it can hope to be more certain or more trustworthy than any possible
exposition of Blake's "Jerusalem" or the Apocalypse of St. John. All
that can be said by a modest and judicious reader is that any one of
these three effusions may unquestionably mean anything that anybody
chooses to read into the text; that a Luther is as safe as a Loyola,
that a Renan is no safer than a Cumming, from the chance of confutation
as a less than plausible exponent of its possible significance: but
that, however indisputable it may be that they were meant to mean
something, not many human creatures who can be trusted to go abroad
without a keeper will be likely to pretend to a positive understanding
of what that significance may be. To me, the most remarkable point in
Tourneur's problematic poem is the fact that this most monstrous example
of senseless and barbarous jargon that ever disfigured English type
should have been written--were it even for a wager--by one of the
purest, simplest, most exquisite and most powerful writers in the
language.