Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/205

190 undergo the rough discipline of public school and college; their sensibilities are indurated, and their wits sharpened, in societies where, if they find sycophant spirits, they also find independent and even tyrannical ones. But young Croesus, brought up at home, what must be his destiny in these latter days When the twenty-first birthday emancipates him from mamma and the mild tutor, well for him if reckless hospitality be his worst offence against prudence; well for him if that old man of the woods, the land steward does not suffocate him in his tenacious embrace; well for him if the turf and the card-table do not attract his green state of social initiation, devour wealth and destroy morality. Men who most need knowledge of the selfishness of their fellow men, have too often the least of it. Bred up on the sunny parterres of life, they have no experience of the difficulties and dangers of the rough thicket. The human pigeon has not even the resource of fear and swift flight to save him from the accipitres of his race. The fascination of false confidence lends him a willing victim to their talons, and under the chloroform of self-esteem he does not even feel being rent and devoured. So it is with Timon, with intelligence quick enough on all other matters, he is utterly incapable of seeing his relation to men and theirs to him, of appreciating the real value of deed and motive. The kind of knowledge most imperatively needed to guide our conduct is that of relation. It is the first to which the mind opens. The child under ever recurring penalties is compelled to acquaint himself with the relation existing between his person and the physical world; he burns himself, and thereafter dreads the fire. The man under penalties more sharp and lasting, must discover his moral relations in this world, must learn to estimate himself and those around him, according to the actualities of motive. As the child ascertains that fire and blows cause pain, so the man must learn that flattery is not friendship, that imprudence exacts regret, that the prevalent