“I am misanthropos, and hate mankind.” The author of Rasselas, that prosaic reflection of Hamlet, was eminently a cynic; yet a more tender and pitiful soul never animated human clay, than that which dwelt in the burly Diogenes of Fleet Street. He of Sinope so zealously inculcated virtue as to derive from Plato the nickname of the mad Socrates.
Though he lived in a tub he loved mankind, and rudely taught them at how cheap a rate they might obtain hap piness. But misanthropy is quite a different thing, either from melancholic dissatisfaction or cynical content. It is a perversion of all human sympathy, incompatible with all nobility of soul, and, most of all, with that sympa thetic touch-stone of human emotions, the soul of the true
poet. We recognise this in Swift, who was a misan thropist pursung, and whose vast intellectual powers might have placed him among the first of his country's poets, had not his sympathies been utterly out of unison with those of his kind. The expression of universal hatred is not that of exalted passion, but that of the heartless sneer which is utterly anti-pathetic. Goëthe touches the point when he makes the man-hating demon excuse himself in the heavenly court from the use of pathetic speech. “Verzeih, ich kann nicht hohe Worte machen,
Mein Pathos brachte dich gewiss zum Lachen.” The poetic soul of Faust, on the contrary, swells with wide and warm human sympathy; although in despairing rage he curses all human desires, all hope, all faith, and, above all, all patience. In one of these characters we have true misanthropy serving as a foil to the other, to whom, as in Hamlet, not man but
man's position is hateful, and whose human sympathies are passionate, even in the despair which cries out in the life weary agony, and almost in the words of Hamlet: “Und so ist mir das Daseyn eine Last Der Tod erwiinscht, das Leben mir verhasst.”
