SOURCE: “Cyril Tourneur,” in The Review of English Studies, Vol. 17, No. 65, January, 1941, pp. 21-36.

[In the following essay, Jenkins argues that Tourneur's two major works, The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy, are reflections of his intellectual and artistic interests and personal circumstances at different periods of his life, and that The Revenger's Tragedy was written in a fevered burst of passion while The Atheist's Tragedy was more carefully pondered.]

Cyril Tourneur is known as the author of two tragedies: The Revenger's Tragedy, published in 1607, and The Atheist's Tragedy, published in 1611. They reveal one of the most fiery and energetic imaginations possessed by any Elizabethan writer; yet the personality of their author is also one of the most mysterious. Recent biographical discoveries have served to enlarge our knowledge of his soldiering exploits, but these are totally irrelevant to the remarkable mind which illumines the tragedies. Not only do these two tragedies stand apart from the rest of Elizabethan drama, but they are themselves sufficiently unlike in style and temper for it sometimes to have been held that they cannot have been written by the same hand. The Atheist's Tragedy had Tourneur's name on the title-page, and any uncertainty of authorship therefore attaches to The Revenger's Tragedy. Yet almost all attempts to characterize the genius of Tourneur have been based upon The Revenger's Tragedy, which is admittedly the finer of the two. Writers who have not thought the disparity between the two plays too great to believe in their common authorship have repeatedly shirked the difficulty of reconciling the views they give of the personality behind them. The only notable exception is Miss Ellis-Fermor, whose interest in the philosophic ideas underlying Jacobean drama has led her to attach special importance to the thought of Tourneur in The Atheist's Tragedy. Fascinating as is the sombre magnificence of the verse and imagery of The Revenger's Tragedy and the light it casts on the nature of the author, obsessed with a burning hatred of the vicious humanity he depicts, the supremely interesting thing about Tourneur is seen when one sets side by side the morbid passion of The Revenger's Tragedy and the deliberate reasoning of The Atheist's Tragedy. The Revenger's Tragedy remains Tourneur's masterpiece in drama, but between the composition of the two plays his mind progressed enormously. In The Atheist's Tragedy an instinctive disgust with humanity has been replaced by a searching inquiry into the foundations of human life, a desire to understand its purpose and to formulate a view of man's position in the universe. A calmer and more balanced view of life is presented, and while Tourneur has not succeeded in resolving his conflict with the world, The Atheist's Tragedy shows him at least strenuously attempting to resolve it.

In studying a dramatist one has always to beware of reading a statement of the author's own point of view or a record of his own experience into what is intended only as dramatic fiction. But in Tourneur we are less fascinated by the dramatic presentation of men and women objectively realized than with the nature of the mind in which such conceptions could have arisen. What manner of man was this who filled a diabolic picture-gallery with image after image of horror? “Never, indeed,” wrote Churton Collins, “with the single exception of Byron, has a dramatist … so obviously and so defiantly interwoven and interpenetrated objective embodiment with an intense and all-absorbing subjectivity.” Some fragment of a spiritual autobiography has evidently been left to us in the tormented creations of Tourneur's brain. Yet I do not understand how Churton Collins, so finely sensible of this, can have felt that “these two plays have the same dreary burden, the same melancholy moral. … One chord is struck and there are no variations”; nor how Mr. Eliot, whose brilliant approach to the spirit of Tourneur in the mood in which he wrote The Revenger's Tragedy expresses once and for all the quality of that play, can have found that “The Atheist's Tragedy adds nothing at all to what the other play has given us; there is no development, no fresh inspiration.”

The development of Tourneur's mind has been largely obscured by the dispute over the chronology of his two extant plays. The date of publication need have no relation to the date of composition, and The Revenger's Tragedy, intenser in its vision, finer in its imagination, more overwhelming in its passion, has often been thought the later. Churton Collins finds in the bitterness of The Revenger's Tragedy the fruit of much experience and praises the firmness of its workmanship and the maturity of its outlook. But Mr. Eliot shows that for all its firmness and its sure control, maturity is precisely what The Revenger's Tragedy has not. Its “intense and unique and horrible vision of life” is “such a vision as might come, as the result of few or slender experiences, to a highly sensitive adolescent with a gift for words.” The “narrowness of range might be that of a young man. The cynicism, the loathing and disgust of humanity, expressed consummately in The Revenger's Tragedy, are immature in the respect that they exceed the object.” Mr. Eliot thinks, therefore, that the greater play need not have been the later. This view is also stated by Professor Allardyce Nicoll in the introduction to his edition of Tourneur, and it is the one to which recent criticism seems to have returned. Most of the evidence is only negative: there being nothing tangible to show that The Atheist's Tragedy was composed before The Revenger's Tragedy, should one not naturally assume that the order of publication is the order of composition? All Elizabethan scholars will know exactly how negative such an argument is. But Miss Ellis-Fermor has brought positive evidence in a detailed study of the imagery of the two plays.¹ She shows that the imagery of The Atheist's Tragedy has a “clearer habit of thought”, with “a complete elimination of confused or turbulent emotion”; and concludes that “for all its greater passion and force, its greater co-ordination of plot, and its amazing synthesis of passions into unity of mood”, The Revenger's Tragedy is the work of a less mature mind than The Atheist's Tragedy.²

Some confirmation of this point of view I find in a comparison of the style of the two plays. The verse of The Revenger's Tragedy, energetic, fiery, rapid, and passionate, in keeping with the fierceness of the emotion, has been generally admired. But the brilliant reproduction of the passion in the rhythms of the poetry is intuitive. It springs from the intense sincerity of Tourneur's mood. The triumphant variations from the blank verse pattern, the vibrant strength of movement, are the work of a poet of genius translating passion instinctively into phrase and image without the mediation of deliberate thought. The palpitating speed is not the result of conscious experiment. The greater precision that Miss Ellis-Fermor finds in the imagery of The Atheist's Tragedy and the tendency there to work out an image at length in minute detail, rather than to depend on brilliant flashes of imagination, are the result of a more laborious workmanship. And the greater deliberation is reflected in the rhythms. The tempo on the whole is slower. And the blank verse is more regular—not because the poet is less experienced but because he is composing with more studied purpose. The regularity is formal only; there is no monotony of rhythm, and there is a skilful modulation of the sense rhythm with the pattern of the verse. A passage like Castabella's mourning speech in Act iii, Scene i may be fairly regular in mere scansion, but it is the work of a man sufficiently master of blank verse to experiment deliberately with its rhythmic movement, seeking to achieve flexibility for the natural expression of thought and feeling:

O thou that knowest me iustly Charlemonts,
Though in the forc'd possession of another;
Since from thine own free spirit wee receiue it,
That our affections may; be not displeas'd, if on
The altar of his Tombe, I sacrifice
My teares. They are the jewels of my loue
Dissolued into griefe: and fall vpon
His blasted Spring; as Aprill dewe, vpon
A sweet young blossome shak'd before the time.

As the scene progresses, with a remarkable increase in the run-on lines and the weak endings already present here, the verse grows rapidly freer in movement until we reach a point where the intensity and heightened expressiveness of verse is combined with the ease and fluency of a sort of rhythmic prose:

Married? had not my mother been a woman,
I should protest against the chastitie
Of all thy sexe. How can the Marchant, or
The Marriner, absent whole yeares (from wiues
Experienc'd in the satisfaction of
Desire) promise themselues to find their sheetes
Vnspotted with adultery, at their
Returne? when you that neuer had the sense
Of actual temptation; could not stay
A few short months.

Such another passage occurs in Castabella's violent protest when D'Amville suggests to her an incestuous relationship.³ With less speed of utterance and less urgency of passion, when thoughtful exposition is required, the verse often approximates yet more closely to prose rhythms. Charlemont's attempt to explain his father's apparition as a dream may serve as an example:

Tush. These idle dreames
Are fabulous. Our boyling phantasies
Like troubled waters falsifie the shapes
Of things retain'd in them; and make 'em seeme
Confounded, when they are distinguish'd. So
My actions daily conuersant with warre;
(The argument of bloud and death) had left
(Perhaps) th'imaginary presence of
Some bloudy accident vpon my minde:
Which mix'd confusedly with other thoughts,
(Whereof th'remembrance of my Father, might
Be one) presented all together, seeme
Incorporate; as if his body were
The owner of that bloud, the subiect of
That death; when hee's at Paris, and that bloud
Shed here. It may be thus. I would not leaue
The warre, for reputation's sake, vpon
An idle apprehension; a vaine dreame.(4)

Such verse is marked by a slow reflectiveness quite unexpected from the author of The Revenger's Tragedy. There is skill in its exposition, in the variation of long sentences and short, and in the ease with which the long involved sentences spread out their formidable array of clauses with complete and fluent clarity. It is the nearest we get before Massinger to that masterly lucidity of exposition which is one of Massinger's principal merits in dramatic poetry, though it often at the same time brings his verse down to the lower key of prose. In Tourneur it arises because the emotion is for the time being overlaid with serious thought. The thought is master of the metre, just as in The Revenger's Tragedy the passion stretches the elastic verse; neither thought nor emotion are in Tourneur ever cramped by the demands of the metre, but they brilliantly transform the metre to serve their immediate needs. And the contrast in the style of the two plays is conditioned by the striking difference of the poet's mood. Churton Collins sees in these plays different phases in the development of Tourneur's art. To me they seem rather different phases in the development of his mind. The difference in technique is less remarkable than the supplanting of a fiery instinct by a reasoning purpose, of which this new verse, more consciously and deliberately contrived, is but the manifestation.

Another manifestation of it is to be seen, I think, in a comparison of the two plots. Both show a good deal of ingenuity, together with a fine sense of theatrically effective situation. In this respect The Revenger's Tragedy is superior, though it is also the more derivative.

Even where most derivative it is still brilliantly original. It obviously owes much to the long line of revenge tragedies, though it strains their conventions to breaking-point. Tourneur gives us a new kind of revenge and a new kind of revenger; while the vengeance of as individual for wrongs he has suffered seems to expand into the greater motive of revenge upon perverted humanity for its revolting wickedness. The situations themselves are startling, but in them the dramatist modifies, perhaps unwittingly, scenes from earlier plays. The opening scene, with Vendici's address to the skull, inevitably recalls Chettle's Hoffman. The final scene, showing vengeance carried out by masked revellers, is equally close to Marston's Antonio's Revenge, which may also have suggested the taunting of the dying Duke by his murderers and his being forced to silence, though in The Revenger's Tragedy the silence is very much less crudely contrived. The idea of revenge for the seduction of the beloved may also derive subconsciously from Antonio's Revenge, where much play is made of Mellida's alleged unchastity; while Hoffman precedes The Revenger's Tragedy in entrapping its villain by a lustful assignation, Chettle's cave and “queachy plot” corresponding to Tourneur's “unsunned lodge”. Tourneur is nowhere imitating, but his mind draws forth from its well of impressions remembered hints of these earlier plays for his imagination to work on. The Atheist's Tragedy in its central situation resembles many revenge tragedies, but shows no such parallels with earlier plays in its particular episodes; for the plot of The Atheist's Tragedy is not so much a plot wrought by the imagination as one intellectually constructed to develop a certain train of thought. Tourneur takes over familiar materials like the ghost—the ghost of a man murdered by his brother appearing to the victim's son—and works them into his plan; but he does not here use scraps of incidents from other plays, remembered and transformed, as he had done in the more spontaneous play, when his subconscious mind had greater freedom to throw up its impressions. He does not now strain the conventions of the revenge tragedy; he deliberately and ruthlessly snaps them. For he denies the validity of the whole revenge morality. He intentionally places his hero in the stock situation which demands revenge: D'Amville is both the murderer of Charlemont's father and the usurper of his inheritance as well as the lustful wooer of his beloved. But Tourneur's purpose is to suggest that Charlemont should abstain from revenge and leave it to a higher than earthly hand. The working out of the story of The Atheist's Tragedy was a calculating process. It is perhaps just because the imagination is there dominated by reason that the play is inferior as a work of art. Even when there are in The Atheist's Tragedy reminiscences of the language of Shakespeare or sometimes of the thought of Chapman,⁵ these seem less like unconscious echoes than a studied attempt to achieve the dignified philosophic utterance of a chosen model.

It is interesting, and, if one is really to understand Tourneur, important to inquire what it was that Tourneur wanted so anxiously to express in this later play, when the habit of thought had taken charge of his mind; and to see how the Tourneur of The Revenger's Tragedy could develop into the Tourneur of The Atheist's Tragedy.

We do not know the date of Tourneur's birth; but though The Revenger's Tragedy may be the work of his immaturity, he can hardly have been very young when he wrote it, for his poem The Transformed Metamorphosis was published in 1600. Its satiric tone owes something to the vogue for satire established by Hall and Donne and Marston, but it has also a very personal note. It reveals in daring imagery a world full of sin and vice. In the very first lines of the author's address to his book, Tourneur exclaims:

O were thy margents cliffs of itching lust;
Or quotes to chalke out men the way to sinne
Then were there hope, that multitudes wold thrust
To buy thee.

The Epistle to the Reader shows a similar obsession with the idea of sin as well as with death and decay. The imagination of the poem is extravagant, the diction stiff; but it is violently original and shows a power of macabre imagery, as Tourneur in “accents of soule-terrifying paine” describes “This hellish ill o'ermask'd with holinesse.” There is nothing here which would foreshadow the really “soule-terrifying” accents of The Revenger's Tragedy; but there is thus early a preoccupation with the wickedness of men. The wildly distorted vision which sees all humanity as vicious and inspires a bitter loathing was already, well before The Revenger's Tragedy, a habit of Tourneur's mind. In The Revenger's Tragedy the hatred of sin has become white-hot, until it sears Tourneur's very soul, and his morbid concentration gives to his imagination a hectic brilliance.

A militant morality is apparent in everything of Tourneur's that we know. It colours his Character of Salisbury and his funeral poems of Prince Henry and Sir Francis Vere, who are celebrated for their merit in putting down vice or, as Tourneur's characteristic superlative would phrase it, their ability “to suppresse the strong'st Commotions of licenciousness”. But the obsession is at its height in The Revenger's Tragedy, where it stamps on Tourneur's brain distorted, elongated shapes revelling in every kind of lasciviousness and lust.

Mr. E. H. C. Oliphant⁶ has pointed out that the moral passion which marks The Revenger's Tragedy distinguishes it from the work of Middleton, to whom he would otherwise ascribe the play. Perhaps nothing can more plainly bring out this quality of Tourneur's mind than a comparison of his characters with Middleton's. Middleton's wicked people revel in their wickedness as enthusiastically as do Tourneur's—only nowhere in Middleton is there any suggestion, tacit or overt, that it is wickedness at all. Guardiano, in Women Beware Women, is a prince of panders. He takes a joyous delight in his craft, without ever feeling that it is not a particularly noble one. What he has to do he does superlatively well. Bringing Bianca to be seduced by the Duke, with an artist's subtlety he “showed her naked pictures by the way”. The Duke is similarly an artist in his way, a connoisseur in seduction. He affects “a passionate pleading” above “an easy yielding”; and although he “can command”, he prefers the “infinite pleasure” of

                    gentle, fair entreatings, when love's businesses
Are carried courteously 'twixt heart and heart.

The villainous crew of The Revenger's Tragedy are also epicures in lust, but their palates enjoy not so much the richness of its sensuality but the added spice that comes with the consciousness of sin. The Duchess assures her incestuous lover that “there's no pleasure sweet but it is sinfull”; and Lussurioso explains his preference: “Giue me my bed by stealth—theres true delight”; while the Duke enjoys the fine flavour of a “sin thats rob'd in Holines”. These people are all moral perverts; they wring a more exquisite delight out of a sensation because they feel it to be sinful. Middleton's men and women know only the sensation itself: they have the thrill of a thing well done, but they ask no question of right and wrong. Middleton in detachment analyses thoughts and passions; his only emotion is an aesthetic one. In Tourneur even the irony, which is otherwise very close indeed to Middleton's in kind, may be reinforced by its moral appropriateness. That Beatrice should be entrapped into having to surrender her virginity to the man she abhors is a situation which should appeal to the most fastidious taste for piquant drama; but Middleton does not for a moment suggest that this refinement of torture is a punishment for her guilt. When Tourneur's Duke, however, is poisoned by the skull of the woman he seduced, when Lussurioso is slain in vengeance by the man he sought to employ as a pander and a murderer, one feels not only the pungent irony but the poetic justice of it all.

The Revenger's Tragedy is sustained by a frenzied morality of this kind. It sees all life as wickedness and turns all its wickedness into horror. It is aggressive, fierce in its scorn and detestation, and seems to have been composed in a fevered burst of passion—a passion suddenly flaring up beyond the poet's control, hurling itself forth in mandrake shrieks. The Atheist's Tragedy is altogether more carefully pondered. There are still figures of monstrous vice—Levidulcia, Cataplasma, Soquette, though a less morbidly excited mind makes the last two little different from many of the bawds and courtesans known to us in Elizabethan drama. Yet that does not prevent Tourneur's scathing indignation from treating them with righteous savagery. The harshness of their sentence is perhaps only matched in Volpone. It is not, however, a passionate vengeance; it is a penalty exacted with all the calm dignity of the law. For during the years since the composition of The Revenger's Tragedy Tourneur has reduced his instinctive hatred of vice to a fairly rational code. He has ceased scorching mankind with his passion and has paused to examine this thing that he loathes more closely. His mind shows no relenting towards depravity, but his eye can now perceive other than nightmare shapes. The virtuous Castiza of The Revenger's Tragedy is succeeded by the much fuller portrait of Castabella, and the heroine is now matched by a virtuous hero, Charlemont, who, pale as he is beside the sinister Vendici, has greater moral stability. The other figures of the play include also the quite innocuous Montferrers and Belforest. Disillusion is still strong, but with a cooling off of passion cynicism is less bitter. In the person of Sebastian it is almost urbane—in the soliloquy at the end of Act 1, or in his reply to the question, “How many mistresses ha' you i'faith?”

In faith; none. For I think none of 'em are faithfull, but otherwise, as many as cleane Shirts. The loue of a woman is like a Mushroom; it growes in one night, and will serue somwhat pleasingly, next morning to breakfast but afterwards waxes fulsome and vnwholesome.”

Sebastian is the healthiest of all Tourneur's people. He could almost have stepped out of a Middleton comedy. There is something comic—if savagely comic—too in the discomfiture of Languebeau Snuffe in the churchyard, whereas the only approach to humour in The Revenger's Tragedy lay in the grimmest of irony and double entendre.

The persistent reasoning in The Atheist's Tragedy shows that Tourneur, when finally nauseated with horror, must have striven to discover the cause of the wickedness he saw around him. From the first he sought the universal; and the passion of The Revenger's Tragedy is the more awful for being directed against humanity at large. It is not men Tourneur hates, but man. Man is an indivisible monster of sin—a single spectre of decay.⁷ In The Atheist's Tragedy Tourneur again seeks the universal; the whole play represents an attempt to distinguish a design in the universe and man's life. A mind so blinded by the fascination of evil that it perceived no virtue in the world might naturally tend to atheism, and the atheism of D'Amville may conceivably represent a philosophy which Tourneur himself toyed with—only to reject, as D'Amville's own philosophy is finally rejected in the play. D'Amville sees no sign of a benign power shaping human ends—the mind which conceived The Revenger's Tragedy could never even have expected to discover one—but he ranks Nature supreme in the universe. Man—a bestial enough creature in the imagination of the earlier Tourneur—is for D'Amville distinguished from the beasts by powers superior only in degree, not in kind.

The contrast between the philosophic discussion which opens The Atheist's Tragedy and the passionate eloquence of Vendici in the first scene of The Revenger's Tragedy illustrates the difference in the motives that lie behind the two plays. D'Amville, monster as he is works out his villainous schemes rationally, directs them systematically towards a preconceived end. He is in that a most formidable villain, though at the same time less revolting than the creatures of The Revenger's Tragedy, who sensually give way to every sudden lustful impulse. But D'Amville is not, of course, a real person at all. He is simply a means to embody an idea. The play derives its main interest from the struggle between antagonistic beliefs. From the very beginning D'Amville's faith in “Nature” is set against the belief in a world designed and ordered by a benevolent deity. Castabella, separated from her beloved Charlemont, submits with hardly a protest to the will of Heaven.⁹ In The Revenger's Tragedy Tourneur could only hate the wicked world; he could not calm himself to begin to understand it. He now sees that the world was not intended to be wicked, but has become so because men have abandoned God. He has hope for mankind because he has faith in an ultimate good. But that does not make him hate mankind the less. He hates men now for their perversity; they were not made evil by nature, but they have chosen wickedness themselves. And he cynically observes that the professing good are as rotten as the rest. “The nearer the Church; the further from God”, he makes Sebastian quote. And hence the bitterly satiric portrait of the Puritan Languebeau Snuffe. Snuffe is easily won over to aid in D'Amville's machinations, and this only helps to confirm D'Amville in his atheism, his belief in the power of his own nature. Is it perhaps possible that Tourneur's perception of the worldly selfishness for which the profession of religion was too often only a hypocritical cloak had been a serious obstacle in the way of his accepting the principle of good?

The submission of Castabella to the Divine will is echoed by Belforest after the death of Montferrers.⁸ He refuses to lament, since Nature has not “purpos'd any thing for nothing”. By “Nature”, of course, he means what Castabella means by “Heaven” and what D'Amville has just referred to as “the King of nature”. Actually D'Amville does not believe there is any “King of nature”, as his talks with Borachio make clear; but Nature for Belforest implies the eminence of some sovereign power. For D'Amville it is simply the motive force of man without the presence of a controlling power inherent in the idea of God. Strong in this belief, D'Amville himself aims at controlling Nature. In the earlier part of the play, while D'Amville is in the ascendant, the belief in Nature as uncontrolled by any higher being or any force of reason or design dominates the action; and the success of D'Amville's schemes seems at first to justify his confidence. He can afford to ridicule those who ascribe the “power of rule” to “him they call the supreame of the Starres”. As if to prove him wrong, thunder and lightning interrupt his meditation; but he has a natural explanation of the phenomenon and easily persuades himself that Nature “fauoured our Performance”. D'Amville has a Macchiavellian faculty of turning everything to his own advantage, and the view of Nature as favouring those “that strengthen their estate” is not entirely uninfluenced by the Elizabethan perversion of the Macchiavellian doctrine of expediency. But the thunder is not intended by Tourneur as a natural coincidence; still less is it the conventional melodrama of the Elizabethan theatre, though it does in part derive from that. It pleases Tourneur to make use of this theatrical device as a manifestation of a supernatural power. Thunder and lightning also herald the appearance of Montferrers' ghost,¹⁰ and the apparition itself is equally symbolic. Again a rational explanation is offered and rejected. Charlemont accounts for the apparition by the psychology of dreams; but the return of the ghost convinces him of its reality. It does not follow from this that Tourneur does not understand the natural phenomena which produce thunder and lightning nor that he literally believes in ghosts. But he does believe in a power above the material, and he uses these very stagy circumstances as symbols of it, investing them with a highly extraordinary significance.

The purpose of the ghost is quite different from that of the ghost familiar in revenge tragedy. This ghost does not incite Charlemont to revenge; but instead it advises patience and counsels him to “leaue revenge vnto the King of kings”.

Let him reuenge my murder, and thy wrongs,
To whom the Iustic of Reuenge belongs.

Charlement accepts the view that revenge belongs to a superhuman power, to whose dictates he willingly resigns himself. His soliloquy in prison,¹¹ though it rebels against having to suffer afflictions greater than the crimes they punish, shows an implicit belief in “the sacred iustice of my God”. And Charlemont can bear more than Sebastian has power to inflict on him if it is the will of Fate to have him suffer it. The surrender to the decree of Fate and the fortitude to endure unprotesting whatever Fate enacts, which we have already seen in Castabella and Belforest, are especially characteristic of Charlemont The completeness of his surrender and the ever-present note of resignation in his conduct have a good deal of stoicism about them Tourneur has come under the influence of the Stoic philosophy which absorbed so much of the attention of Jacobean writers, and his Charlemont has, I think, a debt to Chapman's heroes.¹² But the Fate of which Charlemont speaks is yet another name for Castabella's “Heaven”, the supernatural force which orders the world in which mere mortals live. In the graveyard scene¹³ this force, which gradually identifies itself with divine providence, assumes complete control and goes on to an emphatic triumph at the end of the play. Having killed Borachio, Charlemont is willing to die by the hand of the law; but be is at the same time compelled to take the opportunity which offers of escape. For

                                                                                                                        It may
Be Heau'n reserues me to some better end.

Later in the scene, when he rescues Castabella from “the arme of lust” in the person of D'Amville, it becomes clear what this “better end”, “this blessed purpose”, was. He has availed himself of the disguise afforded by the sheet and beard left in his way by “the purpose of a friendly accident” against which he must “not expostulate”. This is again the stoic, but at the same time the believer in Divine providence, for his feeling that the “accident” is “friendly” shows his instinctive belief that it was not really an “accident” at all. If it were an accident, it would be a crude piece of melodrama; but the striking coincidences in the action of this play are redeemed from melodrama by being represented as the mysterious ways in which the hand of God moves. Both Charlemont and Castabella firmly believe in Heaven's guidance of events and in the “protection that still guards the innocent”. That is why they are quite unafraid of death, and why they can so peacefully lie down to sleep among the death's heads. D'Amville himself, when he sees them, has to confess that there is a “happiness within the freedome of the conscience”.

This scene, which unites Charlemont and Castabella in happiness, also shows the beginning of the wreckage of D'Amville's schemes and of D'Amville's loss of faith in Nature as the supreme power. Characteristically macabre and theatrically the most remarkable scene in the play, it is the climax of the action and is crucial to the thought. Here the atheist's interpretation of the universe is brought into direct conflict with the belief in a benevolent deity, and it is typical of the way in which action is subordinated throughout to the interest of philosophic argument that D'Amville and Castabella have an argument on Nature when he is trying to seduce her. Forced and unreal as this sounds, it is nevertheless dramatically effective because at the crucial moment a reasoning belief is supported by passion, and ultimately the whole play achieves a certain success because, although it aims at the exposition of a philosophy, the philosophy is less logically expounded than passionately felt. D'Amville can speak of God as a “suppos'd protectour”; but Castabella believes that the wrath of Heaven manifests itself in thunderbolts.¹⁴ Then, after he has been frightened away by Charlemont, D'Amville comes, in spite of himself, instinctively to feel the same. He who but now has held that man should obey the instincts of his nature and work only for his own profit and pleasure begins to feel remorse of conscience. Here Tourneur's superb imagination takes control. A pale cloud in the sky appears as

                    the Ghoast of olde Montferrers in
A long white sheete, climbing yond' loftie mountaine
To complaine to Heau'n of me.

Languebeau Snuffe, arriving with the Watch, is

                                                            Black Beelzebub,
And all his hell-hounds come to apprehend me.

D'Amville is quickly calmed, but his disintegration has begun, and we have been given a glimpse of the breakdown of his mind which comes with the overthrow of his schemes. The whole of the fifth act is to be devoted to the representation of this overthrow. It is heralded by the Ghost of Montferrers, which enters pat to confute D'Amville when he still clings to his belief that “Mans high wisedome” is the “superiour power”, unruled by any stars of Heaven. And the significance of D'Amville's overthrow is emphasized by irony. Upon his words,

My reall wisedome has rais'd vp a State,
That shall eternize my posteritie,

the dead body of his son Sebastian is brought in. This is followed immediately by the appearance of the bed bearing the dying form of his other son Rousard—a coincidence which again is not melodramatic but perfectly logical, since it is to be interpreted as the work of the omnipotent Being whom D'Amville has denied. This working of the hand of God has already been pointedly anticipated when Rousard has had to confess that his sickness dated from the day when, through D'Amville's scheming, he married Castabella,

As if my sicknesse were a punishment,
That did arrest me for some iniurie
I then committed.

The death of his two sons and the collapse of the edifice he was seeking to build for his posterity compel D'Amville to admit the existence of a power greater than Nature which “controules her force”. Nature is “a forger of false assurances”, and D'Amville confesses what the Ghost has already told him, that, with all his wisdom, be is a fool. The superiority of the creed of Charlemont and Castabella is apparent in the last scene, when D'Amville envies the courage and resolution which they have in face of death and which he himself lacks. Divine providence now again takes a hand and saves Charlemont and Castabella while putting D'Amville to death. The mode of his death—on the surface a very stagy accident—is again no accident, since God “commanded it”, and D'Amville's death bears witness to the truth of what he all his life denied. It is a supreme example of Tourneur's irony. And upon a similar note of irony the play closes:

Thus by the worke of Heau'n; the men that thought
To follow our dead bodies without teares;
Are dead themselues, and now we follow theirs.

Justice has been done and all testifies to the power of “eternall prouidence”. Goodness triumphs, and faith in order and in a benevolent disposition of the universe is vindicated. This is a highly surprising conclusion from the author of The Revenger's Tragedy. His mind, instinctively aware only of the sin everywhere rife in the world, found, when it sought consciously to examine the causes of sin's preeminence, the most rational explanation in a denial of a benevolent providence; but he was then compelled to abandon his disbelief, seeing signs of goodness and of a noble design behind the universe. Finally he attributes the wickedness of the world to men's betrayal of the Divine purpose, while affirming his belief in an ultimate good which transcends all evil.

Instinctive passion has given way to thought, and the effort to express thought has left its mark on every detail of The Atheist's Tragedy, from the manipulation of the plot and characters to the structure of the verse. But in spite of the lucidity of the language, the play is not a successful exposition of a philosophy. It affirms, but it cannot logically prove. The overthrow of atheism and the triumph of faith represent something that Tourneur passionately feels—and even more passionately wants to feel; for, perhaps, in face of the vice that still crowds in upon his sight, he has not even yet entirely persuaded himself of the truth of what he so anxiously asserts. In any case, for all the show of reason, the ultimate appeal must still be to passion. And it is because here passion is not spontaneously expressed, but is overlaid by the thought-driven argument of one who strives to prove what can only be believed, that the play is less successful than Tourneur's earlier masterpiece, where passion dominated the conception and swept headlong through the verse.¹⁵ The nightmare of the mind produced greater poetry, a grander and more terrible art; but the later play is an important sequel for the reader fascinated by Tourneur's horror, suggesting where the revulsion he felt for human wickedness was to lead him, and affording a valuable clue to the development of his mind.

Notes

1. Modern Language Review, xxx., 1935, 289-301.

2. Miss Ellis-Fermor also makes the excellent point that some of the most powerful images in The Atheist's Tragedy echo the passionate interest in lust and lechery which was the main motive-force of The Revenger's Tragedy. It is as though this youthful obsession has permanently coloured Tourneur's imagination and woven itself into the very fabric of his thought.

3. iv. iii.

4. Consider also similar passages like the long speech of Languebeau Snuffe in i. iv. or Charlemont's soliloquy at the opening of iii. iii.

5. I agree with Mr. Eliot in suspecting an influence of Chapman on this play.

6. Times Literary Supplement, December 18, 1930.

7. And this is felt to be a complete view of life. The unbiased observer, of course knows it to be partial; but Tourneur, and the reader swayed by Tourneur's passion do not know it. That is what makes it so terrifying, so hopeless, and, when presented with Tourneur's magnificent imagery, so tragically grand:

   Dos euery proud and selfe-affecting Dame
   Camphire her face for this? and grieue her Maker
   In sinfull baths of milke,—when many an
             infant starues,
   For her superfluous outside, all for this?

   This is not an ordinary rhetorical question: it is a riddle of the sphinx, eternally unanswerable.

8. ii. iii.

9. ii. iv.

10. ii. vi.

11. iii. iii.

12. See especially The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, iv. i, the speech of Clermont's burning: “Good sir, believe that no particular torture”.

13. iv. iii.

14. The dramatist implies here a further comment on D'Amville's attempt to explain away the thunder and lightning in the scene of Montferrers' murder.

15. It is to be noted that when imagination is dominant in The Atheist's Tragedy, as in the hallucinations of D'Amville, Tourneur retains his former skill in the delineation of passion. And it is then that the play achieves its greatest tragic strength.