Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/295

 indirect influence of the Hebrew Bible has been actually as great as the influences of the country and the century in which they happened to be born. The single-hearted fury of unselfish and devoted indignation which animates every line of his satire is more akin to the spirit of Ezekiel or Isaiah than to the spirit of Juvenal or Persius: though the fierce literality of occasional detail, the prosaic accuracy of implacable and introspective abhorrence, may seem liker the hard Roman style of impeachment by photography than the great Hebrew method of denunciation by appeal. But the fusion of sarcastic realism with imaginative passion produces a compound of such peculiar and fiery flavour as we taste only from the tragic chalice of Tourneur or of Shakespeare. The bitterness which serves but as a sauce or spice to the meditative rhapsodies of Marston's heroes or of Webster's villains is the dominant quality of the meats and wines served up on the stage which echoes to the cry of Vindice or of Timon. But the figure of Tourneur's typic hero is as distinct in its difference from the Shakespearean figure which may possibly have suggested it as in its difference from the Shakespearean figure which it may not impossibly have suggested. There is perhaps too much play made with skulls and cross-bones on the stage of Cyril Tourneur: he