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own neighbour, to love above all names that of a misanthrope, and if any man implores him to put out his burning house, to extinguish it with oil and pitch.' Presently the flattering friends of old arrive. Gnathonides, who had lately offered him a rope when he begged a dinner, now approaches him with a copy of dithyrambs. Timon's pick provides him with occasion for an elegy. Philiades, who had had from Timon two talents for his daughter's dowry, meets a similar reception. Then the orator Demeas comes to extol his victory in the Olympic games ('where I never attended even as a spectator,' interjects Timon), and to announce splendid honours to be paid him by the State. Finally Timon drives off his assailants with stones. Lucian's dialogue evidently comes nearer to the drama than either Plutarch or Painter. The entire scheme of the plot is already there, and the germ of Timon's character; his fierce invective against his countrymen on the completion of his ruin (cf. iv. 1.), his discovery of gold, the visits of the flattering friends and their discomfiture. What is more, the character of Timon himself first became a subject for tragedy when Lucian turned Plutarch's surly cynic, who talked misanthropy over a dinner-table with another surly cynic, into the frantic railer of Hymettus. Plutarch's Timon suffers from ingratitude; Lucian emphasises far more distinctly his blind credulity. But Lucian, pure satirist as he was, missed the fuller significance of his own invention; and in his zest for the exposure of wealthy misanthropes, made Timon abruptly change his ground, and substitute for a misanthropy founded on hatred of wealth one founded on avarice. He is the last man to make missiles of his gold hoard. It was reserved for Shakespeare to make Timon express his hatred for men by hurling the deadliest of evils at their heads.

It is easy to see that the story of Timon must have interested Shakespeare, in 1609, at a point all but wholly ignored in all these narratives. The tragic disillusion of a noble, expansive, and confiding nature, finding vent in half-frenzied invective against the world, had been exhibited with the utmost intellectual intensity in Hamlet, and with the utmost sublimity in Lear. There is a vein of misanthropy in both; but neither this nor any other formula comes near to defining either: it marks an approach to hardness and formalism in Shakespeare's conception of character that his Timon is adequately summed up in the label he adopts: 'I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind.' Lear is on the whole his nearest Shakespearean analogue. The sting of ingratitude is the common provocation of both; and in both its maddening effect is enhanced by naïve ignorance of men and equally naïve exaggeration of their own claims. Both are simple natures, finely gifted, but quite without subtlety and penetration; a single shock throws them off their balance. But Lear is testy, self-indulgent, arrogant and exacting from the first; while Timon is quixotically generous, and thinks his honour concerned to give more than is asked, and to repay tenfold what he receives. Lear's most imperious ethical instinct is that of the primitive Northern tribe-the duty of children to parent; Timon's is that of the philosophic schools and society of Athens-the duty of friend to friend. The Greek maxim of communism among friends (κοινὰ τὰ φίλων) is actually put into his mouth (i. 2. 104). In the Athens of Timon this noble communism is as dead as the duty of children in the heart of Regan. His disillusion, as terrible as Lear's, and far nearer, in kind, to common experience, is far less real, and is worked out with gravely diminished dramatic resource. His monologues, close packed,

knotty with phrase, but unbroken in their sombre monotony, take the place of the wonderfully varied and modulated temper of Lear. His anger pursues its way like a torrent, without pause or change. It is more penetrated than Lear's with the hunger for moral retribution, and the discovery of the gold puts the instrument of it in his grasp the

damned earth,

Thou common whore of mankind, that put'st odds
Among the rout of nations, I will make thee

Do thy right nature.

Of Timon's series of vindictive encounters before his cave, little but the idea is probably ultimately due to Lucian. The poet may be foreshadowed in Gnathonides, the envoys of repentant Athens in Demeas. But Flavius, the one honest man, is Shakespeare's characteristic creation, and in Apemantus and Alcibiades he adapted to the scheme of Lucian the suggestive hints of Plutarch. In Plutarch both figure only as the companions of Timon's misanthropic days, the one his fellow cynic, the other his destined avenger upon Athens. Shakespeare introduced both into the picture of Timon's prodigal festivities. The misanthrope by nature was thus set in sharp contrast with the misanthrope by disillusion, and the ground was laid for their encounter in the second part (iv. 3. 198 f.) with its profoundly imagined discrimination between the set hatred grounded in habit and creed and that kindled by fresh conviction, the misanthropy which is a form of intellectual self-indulgence, and that which is goaded with poignant memories. The Apemantus of the earlier Acts is obviously modelled on the cynic Diogenes, whose feats of ßpis were a commonplace, and had already, in Lyly's Campaspe, amused the Elizabethan stage. Apemantus tramples on the pride of Timon as Diogenes on the pride of Plato.

Far less has been made of Alcibiades.

The underplot in which he figures is conceived in Shakespeare's manner, but its execution suggests imitation. The great soldier, banished by his fellow-citizens in spite of his services, who avenges his wrongs not with the spoken daggers of Timon, but with energetic military reprisals, plays the part of Coriolanus, but plays it in the simple, straightforward temper of Fortinbras. The scene of his banishment (iii. 5.) is as remote in passion and force from the great climax of the Roman play as it is proximate in motive. In the closing scene-his vengeful return-the Coriolanus motive is still visible; but Fortinbras predominates. Alcibiades announces his impending vengeance to the trembling senators; but he is a gentle conqueror, and returns, with facile accommodation, to the citizenship of the 'coward and lascivious town' whose baseness had provoked Timon's annihilating hatred, as the Norwegian prince succeeds, blithe and high-hearted, to the rule of the rotten Denmark that had blasted the genius of Hamlet.

TIMON OF ATHENS

ACT I.

SCENE I. Athens. A hall in Timon's house.

Enter Poet, Painter, Jeweller, Merchant, and
others, at several doors.

Poet. Good day, sir.

Pain.

I am glad you're well.

Poet. I have not seen you long: how goes the

world?

Pain. It wears, sir, as it grows.

Poet.

Ay, that's well known : But what particular rarity? what strange, Which manifold recórd not matches? See, Magic of bounty! all these spirits thy power Hath conjured to attend. I know the merchant. Pain. I know them both; th' other's a jeweller. Mer. O, 'tis a worthy lord.

Jew.

Nay, that's most fix'd.

Mer. A most incomparable man, breathed, as it

were,

To an untirable and continuate goodness:

He passes.

10. breathed, exercised.

ΤΟ

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