with this hatred. The mere name of misanthrope must not be understood to imply that he who bears it is the enemy of the human race. A hatred of this kind would not be a defect, but a depravity of nature, and the greatest of all vices, since all the social virtues are connected with benevolence, and nothing is so directly contrary to them as inhumanity. The true misanthrope, if his existence were possible, would be a monster who would not make us laugh; he would excite our horror."
The true misanthrope, in fact, is such a character as Iago, a malevolent devil, without belief in any human goodness, without human sympathies, one who has said in his heart, "evil, be thou my good." But the very nature of such inhuman hatred would impose not only silence as to evil thoughts, but hypocritical expression of humane sentiment. The honest wide-mouthed misanthropy of Timon is wholly explicable on neither of these theories. It is neither the rough garb of sincerity and virtue, as in Alceste, nor inhuman hatred as in Iago. It is a medium between the two, inconsistent with sane mind, and explicable alone as a depravation and perversion of nature arising from disease. It is a form of insanity.
Aretaeus, describing the conduct of maniacs "in the height of the disease," remarks, "some flee the haunts of men, and going into the wilderness live by themselves."
In Caius Cassius there is a fine psychological delineation of another character, who estimates man and his motives depreciatingly. Cassius is robustly sane and self-possessed, and therefore has little in common with Timon. He would approximate more closely to Jaques did not the strong intermixture of spleen pickle him as it were from the contagion of melancholy. In Caesar's unfriendly but graphic description, he figures as the type of cynicism, except that the envy of ambition is attributed to him which the true cynic would despise. Shakespeare's only true cynics are his fools and his madmen.
