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There is for these men no fatality save the evil nature of man, no justice save the doubling of crime, no compensation save revenge: there is for Webster and Ford and Tourneur and Marston no heaven above, wrathful but placable; there are no Gods revengeful but just: there is nothing but this blood-stained and corpse-strewn earth, defiled by lust-burnt and death-hungering men, felling each other down and trampling on one another blindly in the eternal darkness which surrounds them.
The Italy of the Renaissance was, of all things that have ever existed or ever could exist, the most utterly unlike the nightmare visions of men such as Webster and Ford, Marston and Tourneur.
The business with Lucia's coffin is a kind of nightmare, in the taste of Webster or of Cyril Tourneur. All these shortcomings are slurred over by the enthusiastic critics of Scandinavia, yet they call for indulgence.
What a "Revenger's Tragedy" might not Cyril Tourneur have made, had he known all the details, of the story of Alessandro de' Medici's death! What a Vindici he would have made of the murderer Lorenzino; with what a strange lurid grandeur he would have surrounded the plottings of the pander Brutus.
Thus, in the complete prose and colourlessness of reality, has the evil of the Renaissance been understood and represented only by one man, and transmitted to us in one pale and delicate psychological masterpiece far more loathsome than any elaborately hideous monster painting by Marston or Tourneur.
If ever Englishman approached the temper of the Italian Renaissance, it was not Tourneur, nor Shelley with his cleansing hell fires of tragic horror, but this sweet and gentle Ford.
The men and women of Tourneur and Marston are scarcely men and women at all: they are mere vague spectres, showing their grisly wounds and moaning out their miserable fate.
He is a younger and tragic counterpart to Charles Lamb in the intensity with which he has imbibed the Elizabethan spirit, rather from the nightshade of Webster and Tourneur than from the vine of Shakespeare. But they contain passages, especially lyrics, of the most exquisite fancy and music, such as since the seventeenth century none but Blake and Coleridge had given.
I kept my own place steadily at the pumps, and Andre Le- tourneur worked at my side. I often noticed his father glance at him sorrowfully, as though he wondered what would become of him if he had to struggle with waves to which even the strongest man could hardly fail to succumb.
He based this opinion principally on the ground of style. From its similarity of subject he had at first been disposed to assign it to Cyril Tourneur, author of The Revenger's Tragedy; and he had drawn up in support of this theory a series of parallel passages extracted from the speeches of Vindice in that drama and of Oberon in the present play.
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