“... O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause.”
CHAPTER XII. THE DRAMA OF DESPAIR: “TIMON OF ATHENS”
“Timon” marks the extremity of Shakespeare's suffering. It is not to be called a work of art, it is hardly even a tragedy; it is the causeless ruin of a soul, a ruin insufficiently motived by complete trust in men and spendthrift generosity. If there was ever a man who gave so lavishly as Timon, if there was ever one so senseless blind in trusting, then he deserved his fate. There is no gradation in his giving, and none in his fall; no artistic crescendo. The whole drama is, as I have said, a scream of suffering, or rather, a long curse upon all the ordinary conditions of life. The highest qualities of Shakespeare are not to be found in the play. There are none of the magnificent phrases which bejewel “Lear”; little of high wisdom, even in the pages which are indubitably Shakespeare's, and no characterization worth mentioning. The honest steward, Flavius, is the honest Kent again of “Lear,” honest and loyal beyond nature; Apemantus is another Thersites. Words which throw a high light on Shakespeare's character are given to this or that personage of the play without discrimination. One phrase of Apemantus is as true of Shakespeare as of Timon and is worth noting:
“The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the
extremity of both ends.”
The tragic sonnet-note is given to Flavius:
“What viler thing upon the earth than friends
Who can bring noblest minds to basest ends!”
In so far as Timon is a character at all he is manifestly Shakespeare, Shakespeare who raves against the world, because he finds no honesty in men, no virtue in women, evil everywhere—“boundless thefts in limited professions.” This Shakespeare-Timon swings round characteristically as soon as he finds that Flavius is honest:
“Had I a steward
So true, so just, and now so comfortable?
It almost turns my dangerous nature mild.
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—mistake me not—but one ...”
I cannot help putting the great and self-revealing line {Footnote: This passage is among those rejected by the commentators as un-Shakespearean: “it does not stand the test,” says the egregious Gollancz.} in italics; a line Tolstoi would, no doubt, think stupid-pompous. Timon ought to have known his steward, one might say in Tolstoi's spirit, as Lear should have known his daughters; but this is still the tragedy, which Shakespeare wishes to emphasize that his hero was blind in trusting.
Towards the end Shakespeare speaks through Timon quite unfeignedly: Richard II. said characteristically: