admiration for his sure-footed walk on the border line.
Timon of Athens, too, is a wonderful character—the wonder of the play. A good-natured, generous and wealthy noble, he has attracted to him crowds of parasites whom he calls friends, but who in reality do nothing but receive his favours. At length he discovers their essential baseness, and becoming, in his own words, “misanthropos” who “hates mankind,”[159:1] leaves Athens, with oaths and curses, for a cave near the sea-shore. There he ends his days—the manner of his death is uncertain. His friends consider him beyond all doubt insane. A creditor says that his debts “may well be called desperate ones, for a madman owes ’em”;[159:2] others sum the matter up tersely by saying “Lord Timon’s mad.”[159:3] Alcibiades excuses Timon’s behaviour on the ground that
“his wits
Are drown’d and lost in his calamities.”[159:4]
Only Flavius, his faithful steward, gives no hint that he considers his lord insane, though even he is struck with Timon’s unhappy condition, so “full of decay and failing.”[159:5] Flavius, in this as in other particulars, seems, like Ulysses, in “Troilus and Cressida” and other characters in different plays, to be Shakespeare’s mouthpiece.
There is nothing in his representation of Timon which gives us cause to impute madness to the protagonist. His state of mind is one of acute depression, which we should call melancholia, were there any hint that such a conception entered into the mind of the author. The condition of Timon is not unlike that of Hamlet, and we could easily understand his feigning madness to avoid the real evil coming upon him.
If any further proof were needed that Timon is not a maniac his speeches would suffice. The objection that “all satire upon the hollowness of the world would lose much of its point if it came from the lips of an undoubted lunatic,”[160:1] is perfectly valid. In “King Lear” the speeches which contain the most sarcasm, as well as the most poetry, are those of the earlier scenes, in which Lear has not yet become entirely a maniac. This kind of speech is characteristic of Timon to the end. His very last words, though lacking the force of the first outburst, are equally coherent and contain far more poetry:
“Come not to me again: but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;