Apemantus, in "Timon of Athens," is a cynic of a different breed, and
his temper is so acid that, as was once said of Douglas Jerrold, he
must have been suckled on a lemon. There is spleen in it when he says:
"Would I had a rod in my mouth, that I might answer thee profitably."
The cynicism of Apemantus is partly justified by the generous folly
of Timon: "Now, Apemantus, if thou wert not sullen, I'd be good to
thee." "No, I'll nothing: for if I should be bribed too, there would be
none left to rail upon thee, and then thou would'st sin the faster."
Shakspeare seems to indicate how a virtue, pushed to excess, provokes
excessive criticism. We are continually generating these extremes, when
our social virtue piques some social fault into parading itself. Money
maxims and manners are good things, but they may all be strained to
bankruptcy. So when Timon becomes a fanatic of good-nature we see him
developing a monstrous Apemantus: his virtue, like an overgrown fruit,
becomes stringy and deprived of proper flavor. We taste its coarseness
in the colossal spleen of the cynic who says, as Timon turns away from
the repulsive tone which was really sired by himself:--
"Thou wilt not hear me now: thou shalt not then, _I'll lock Thy heaven
from thee_."
So it will always be: if the kingdom of heaven is claimed by one
violence, it will be competed for by another.
Apemantus is specially reared to be this bitter foil to Timon's
profuseness. He leads an isolated life, and thus like all solitaries
acquires the vice of exaggerating his own opinions. They have never
passed between the fine emery of social contact. So he is a caltrop
in men's path, with a spike always uppermost to impale the over-hasty
feet. Poverty drives Timon directly upon it, to wince at every step he
takes on such a bristly virtue, till he matches his smart with curses
quite as pointed; and Shakspeare shows us the two fanatics of two
virtues exhausting the vituperations of the English tongue to banish
each other into an oblivion, "where the light foam of the sea may beat"
their gravestones daily with a bitter lip.
TIM. When there is nothing living but thee, thou shalt be welcome. I
had rather be a beggar's dog, than Apemantus.
APEM. Thou art the cap of all the fools alive.
TIM. Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon.
APEM. A plague on thee, thou art too bad to curse.
TIM. Away, thou issue of a mangy dog!
Choler does kill me, that thou art alive;
I swoon to see thee.
APEM. Beast!
TIM. Slave!
APEM. Toad!
TIM. Rogue, rogue, rogue!
So people who never know "the middle of humanity," but "the extremity
of both ends," batter each other's virtue out of shape and capacity to
be recognized.
Julian Hawthorne likens the cynic to a chimney-sweeper, "that eccentric
misanthrope who vents his spite against the race by plucking defilement
from the very flame which makes bright the household hearth."
But Jaques was expressly plunged into social estimates and manners that
he may be withdrawn from them in a less splenetic temper. The wild crab
has sunned itself in orchards, and, nodding among mellower branches,
is not all flavored with their rottenness. So far from secluding
himself in the conceited fashion of all hermits from the manifold
culture of life, he has expended himself upon every phase of it, and
withdraws with the pensiveness of satiety toning the sharpness of
experience in his speech. Some men turn cynics when the first serious
disappointment of their lives drifts over them. Of a sudden the whole,
nature is drenched from the leaden cloud. The revulsion from a sunny
day to this pitiless blackening of heaven chills the very marrow of
their common-sense. Then they rail at the sky which is but for a while
retired, and insist that its old grace and clearness were a subterfuge.
So when the accursed plot of Iachimo to make the chastity of Imogen a
naughty thing has its effect, her husband, Posthumus, sets the key for
all the woman-haters since:--
"Could I find out
The woman's part in me! For there's no motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman's part: Be it lying, note it,
The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,
Nice longings, slanders, mutability,
All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows,
Why, hers, in part, or all; but, rather, all;
For ev'n to vice
They are not constant, but are changing still
One vice, but of a minute old, for one
Not half so old as that. _I'll write against them._"