Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/277

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 de-