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OME time ago I reread this play, for the first time after many years, amid the scenes of its enactment. Standing on the hill brow over the traditional prison of Socrates, I had on my right the hill Museion and, beyond the intervening shadow filled ravines and sun swept uplands, the long, vast, purple blue mass of Hymettos, at the north seeming to break upon Pentelicon, at the south falling slowly to the plain of Marathon. To my left, Phaleron gleamed whitely against the dark blue of a wind troubled sea: the Piræus lay more southerly, cloudily pale brown; beyond, from the Bay of Salamis, the smoke of a Panhellenios steamer rose, hung, serpentinely trailed eastward, looking like a mourning banner hung upon the pale blue ramparts of the Argive mountains. In front of me, the sheer eastern ascent of the Acropolis, temple crowned, superb; on the northeastern slope the Dionysiac theatre and the Odeion of Herodes Atticus drowned in velvet purple shadow. A little leftward the Areopagus, then the Hill of the Nymphs; between these, the isolate, symmetrical beauty of the Theseion, and a great part of Athens.

The day was hot, and at that hour of noon few wayfarers were abroad. For a time I had been idly watching the wild and ragged figure of a wandering Epirote on the broad white dusty road which winds upward from the Olympicion and forks to right and left of the Pnyx, at the junction where a dishevelled tavern inaptly named Zwkpárns commands the two ways. My companion had drawn my attention to the man. Evidently famished, he snatched at any garbage by the wayside that could possibly break the edge of hunger. Beyond the tavern he disappeared from sight, but not long after we caught a glimpse of him on the Areopagus, his tattered, picturesque figure silhouetted against the sky, close to the spot traditionally held to be that

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where Orestes obtained absolution for the murder of Klytemnestra. That glimpse was one not to be forgotten. Although we could not hear any sound at that distance, the man was evidently cursing and railing, as with outstretched arms he shook his clenched fists, now upward to where the Wall of Themistocles overhangs the rude grottos of Pan and Apollo, as though imprecating the white immortal serenity of the Parthenon, now towards the humming gray brown city beneath and beyond him.

The same thought occurred to us both. My companion, an Athenian and an accomplished Shakespearian scholar, asked me what was in my mind. "That line in Timon of Athens," I answered, where Timon, confronted by Alcibiades and Phrynia and Timandra, cries out in bitter anger,

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I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind.''

"Yes, I too was thinking of Timon," he said, "but of a line still more apposite, I fancy-that when he is savagely eating a root while he is railing at Apemantus, and snarls out:

"That the whole life of Athens were in this!

Thus would I eat it.. .."

It seemed strange to me to sit there, between blue Hymettos and the azure Saronic Gulf, with the Parthenon overlooking all Athens before me, and discuss with an Athenian of to-day the beauties, the difficulties, and the problem of one of the lesser known plays of our English Shakespeare. Not that Shakespeare is an unfamiliar name in the Athens of to-day. A play that always draws hundreds of eager auditors is Popaloç kaι Iovλieta (Romeo and Juliet), and the uneducated as well as the educated throng to see О Еμжорос τηo Bevetiae (The Merchant of Venice). When, last spring, O Basiλeve Aŋp (King Lear) was

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"There is a clue," I said to my companion, that day I speak of "there is a clue to Timon in a single brief but pregnant statement. The whole problem is revealed in it."

My friend pondered a minute or two, and then with a smile remarked: "Just so: and what we have been stating and agreeing upon gives me the clue to that clue. It is in that bitter and moving third scene in the fourth act, is it not? Yes? . . . I thought so. And do you not agree with me that when Timon gives that clue in

'All is oblique'

it is Shakespeare speaking for himself, while in 'I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind,' it is Shakespeare the dramatist who speaks . . . that is, he who sees and he who speaks through another mind and another nature than his own?"

Truly, "All is oblique" is the keynote to the sad and wild music, now in grand harmonies, now in fierce and blatant, almost insanely fantastic discords, of this strange and perplexing play, Timon of Athens. Strange because it reveals to us the most proud, powerful, and joyous writer of our nation in the throes of weariness and disillusion, almost in the final dégringolade of despair. Perplexing, because, though all but unquestionably written in his magnificent maturity, just before, or contemporaneously with, or immediately after Macbeth, Othello, and Lear, it lacks the continuity of constructive technique and the continuity of fused emotion and imagination, of imagination become constantly creative, which supremely distinguishes these three marvellous plays. To deepen the perplexity, there are continuously frequent lines, many passages, whole pages even, which in metrical infelicity and startling lesion in dramatic craft all but compel the Shakespearian student to the conviction that these bewildering lapses are due to the mechanical art of a far inferior playwright.

"All is oblique": does it not sound a basic note that has already been heard echoing through Macbeth, through Othello, through Lear? It is the lamentation of the old king; it is the nocturnal storm

mona's passionate lord; it is the implicit plea in the shaken mind of the Thane of Cawdor, listening to Lilith beside him and to the ancient Serpent within him. Above all, it is the continual tidal monotone below the long tempestuous surge and seething calms of Hamlet. The same mind, perplexed by the veiled tragicomedy of the human soul and its possible yet almost paralyzingly incredible destiny, sighs, in the shapen and colored speech of imagination, in the monologue "To be, or not to be, . . ." or through the mouth of Claudio in Measure for Measure, in the superb lyrical meditation beginning, "Ay, but to die and go we know not where, . . .” or in that speech of the Third Servant to Flavius in the second scene of the fourth act of Timon of Athens:

Coleridge recognized this kinship of Timon with Hamlet when he spoke of the later play as an after-vibration" of its great predecessor. Other critics have been even more daring, and some have said that because of this or that metrical test Timon of Athens must have been written in the period of Lear; or that because of this or that intellectual test it must have been written in the ferment of a tempestuous adolescence; or that because of this or that spiritual test it must have followed the sombre bitterness of Lear and the tragical gloom of Macbeth, . . . or that by the law of suspense and reaction it must have been the backward stumbling in the dark before the blithe advance in the new and serene dawn of Cymbeline and The Tempest. But one of the ablest of Shakespearian critics has already in this series written so wisely of this inferential method that I may be excused for repeating Mr. Watts - Dunton's words, from his admirable essay on Hamlet: "In the metrical test [in Shakespearian criticism]

there may be something if the investigations are not pursued too far, for it is true, no doubt, that metre is a fine arttrue, no doubt, that there are thousands of new things to be learned by the poet in the exercise of that art as he passes through life, and, consequently, that what to him may have seemed good metre as a boy may seem bad metre at maturity, after he has made a thorough study of the great masters of the art. Keats's case is a notable instance of this; so is Tennyson's. But the test is a very unsafe one. As regards, however, evolving a spiritual order for Shakespeare's plays, this seems to me a more daring venture than that connected with the metrical test." And as, in this connection, the same acute and always suggestive critic has, in the same essay, also indicated the too prevalent tendency to ignore the difference between the dramatist and the lyrist, I may further quote these few words: "Does any one really think that such a man [i. e., the Shakespeare we know by the intuitive interpretation of significant facts] wrote plays. to bring out his thoughts and emotions as they arose? To think so is to ignore the difference between the dramatist and the lyrist, who sings because he must win sympathy for his joys and pains, must sing or die. The dramatic instinct being to give sympathy and not to ask it, the dramatist has no great need of expression unless the need comes from the outside. The external need was, with Shakespeare, the need of 'getting a living.' . . . Such a career makes it impossible to say, either from the metrical movement of his utterances or from their tone, 'This belongs to one period, this to another.'"

It has been contended that the characters of Hamlet, of Timon, and of King Lear are simply studies of insanity. The same argument would include Othello, Macbeth, and a score of other famous personages. If they are insane, it is with that terrible madness of the soul when it is in revolt against the tyranny of mortal things-of the body, of time and circumstance, of tradition and convention, of truth naked and wonderful, and of palpable and futile illusion. It is that cosmic madness which has uttered itself through many mouths, from Ecclesiastes

to

Only, as it happens, we do not always discern what is the weeping of a heart heavy with despair and disillusion, and what is the deep and terrible laughter of a heart filled with the iconoclastic wrath of a divine pity, the infinite yearning of fraternal sorrow, and the titanic humor of a mind which perceives every link in the vast and complicated chain of cause and effect.

In a sense these three plays are passionate protests against "the insanity of things," that madness from the individual to the many, or from the many to the individual, which invites and compels the clash of complex fatalities. In a sense, only; for more and more the Shakespearian student, the student of the man and the sources of his genius, as well as the reflection of both in the mirrors of imagination, becomes chary of "reading into " the "stage motives" of the great dramatist philosophical and symbolical preconceptions and intentions which possibly he never entertained. "Things more excellent than every image," says Iamblichus, "are expressed through images." And it may well be that the Imagination, that supreme maker of images, creates, through the great lords and princes of genius, suddenly and spontaneously, what to the rest of us may seem premeditated in intent and deliberate in expression. There must, of course, be in genius a virgin world, a new and unexploited world compact of deep knowledge and the clear air of a great mind and the swift and wide movement of spiritual intuition; but the outcome may be sudden as lightning, as unexpected, with all the finality of austere thought, with all the economy of deliberation. As "the Poet" in Timon of Athens says: