Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/214

Rh It is not clearly made out to what degree Timon is in fluenced by spite. In the imprecation upon Athens, “Let me look back upon thee,” &c., he invokes social disorder of every kind as the punishment for his own treatment, and does not represent it as actually existing, and as the cause of his fierce anger. There is, some uncertainty in this passage, some confusion of thought between the depraved state of Athens which merits dire punishment, and the social disorders which in themselves constitute such punishment. The wall of Athens is thought to girdle in a mere troop of human wolves. To avenge his own injuries, he prays that the matrons may turn incontinent, that obedience may fail in children, and so forth, recognising that the contrary has existed, and that social disorder is invoked as the punishment of demerit towards himself. He acknowledges that “degrees, observances, customs, and laws,” have held their place, and that their “confounding contraries” would be a new state of things due to that human baseness which is now obvious to his distempered vision through the medium of his own wrongs. In the following scene, where he apos trophises “the blessed breeding sun,” in vehement declama tion, he does not so much invoke curses upon man, as describe his actual state as in itself a curse; moral depravity he depicts in its existing colors. “Tim. O blessed breeding sun, draw from the earth Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb Infect the air Twinn’d brothers of one womb,

Whose procreation, residence, and birth, Scarce is dividant,

touch them with several fortunes,

The greater scorns the lesser: Not nature, To whom all sores lay siege, can bear great fortune, But by contempt of nature:

Raise me this beggar, and deny 't that lord. The senator shall bear contempt hereditary, The beggar native honour:

It is the pasture lards the rother's sides,