in a transport of fury
This phrase stands with a startling contradictory purity against
the elder De Lacey's amiable platitudes concerning "brotherly
love" (2.7.8). Even worse, it
undercuts all the ideals for which Felix has stood as well as the
intellectual command by which he has restored his family's
happiness and tranquillity. In a pinch Volney's ideal of an open,
accepting humanity gives way to an unthinking recidivism, a
protective and brutal tribalism, a masculinist belligerence, that
is the moral equivalent of war.
