baseness of Apemantus’s misanthropy, baseness of a soul that never knew how to trust, to make it dignified in our eyes. Timon, estranged from men, could only die; yet the least shade of wrong in this heaven-ruled world would have occasioned Hamlet a deeper pain than Timon was capable of divining. Yet Hamlet could not for a moment have been so deceived as to fancy man worthless, because many men were; he knew himself too well, to feel the surprise of Timon when his steward proved true.
“Let me behold
Thy face.—Surely this man was born of woman.—
Forgive my general and exceptless rashness,
You perpetual-sober gods! I do proclaim
One honest man.”
He does not deserve a friend that could draw higher inferences from his story than the steward does.
“Poor honest lord, brought low by his own heart,
Undone by goodness! Strange, unusual blood,
When man’s worst sin is, he does too much good!
Who then dares to be half so kind again?
For bounty that makes gods, doth still mar men.”
Timon tastes the dregs of the cup. He persuades himself that he does not believe even in himself.
“His semblable, even himself, Timon disdains.”
*****
“Who dares, who dares
In purity of manhood to stand up
And say this man’s a flatterer, if one be
So are they all.”
L. You seem to have fixed your mind, of late, on the subject of misanthropy!
A. Town that my thoughts have turned of late on that low form which despair assumes sometimes even with the well disposed. Yet see how inexcusable would it be in any of these beings. Hamlet is no misanthrope, but he has those excelling gifts,
