“is but smoke and lukewarm water.”
He overwhelms them
with a torrent of curses by no means lukewarm, throws the dishes at them, and driving them from the hall, takes his own
farewell of house and home, bursting with rage and general hate.
“Burn house, sink Athens ! henceforth hated be,
Of Timon, man, and all humanity.” The conclusion of the “smiling, smooth, detested parasites,” is the same as that already arrived at by the servants, namely “Lord Timon's mad.”
Nothing indeed is less safe than to adopt the opinion of some of Shakespeare's characters upon others. He makes them speak of each other according to their own light, which is often partial and perverted, obscured by ignorance, or blinded by prejudice. The spectator sees the whole field, and experiences difficulty of judgment, not from narrowness of vision, but from its extent. In Timon, as in the early parts of Lear, the psychological opinion is embarrassed by the very circumstance which constitutes the difficulty in actual cases of dubious insanity, namely, that the operations of diseased mind are not retrograde to those of normal function, but merely divergent from them, in the same direction. Timon's eloquent declamations against his kind, are iden
tical in spirit with those of ‘Lear.’ They are, indeed, inter rupted by no vagrancy of thought, but are always true to the passion which now absorbs him, namely, intense hatred of the human race in whom he believes baseness and wickedness
inherent.
Here lies the great intellectual error which may
indeed be called delusion; that, because some few men have
been base and thankless parasites, the whole race is steeped in infamy. His emotional being is absorbed by indignation, and this re-acting on the intellect, represents human nature in the darkest colours of treachery and villainy.
