Still, Jaques in defending himself makes disclaimers of ill-nature: as thus, Who is hit by my speech? It means so and so. If the coat does not fit, who is wronged? If a man be above my estimate, "why, then, my taxing like a wild goose flies, unclaimed of any man."
Yes, but he really delights himself with the conviction that every man is a wild goose upon the wing, and that virtue is the last game that ventures to alight and feed on the wild celery of our ponds.
Jaques reserves his last and cruelest thrust for Touchstone, to whom he predicts a marriage victualled for two months, and wrangling ever after; which is hard on the wise fool, who has taken up with Audrey as if to show the under side of court manners and the comparative cheapness of mere breeding. This ought to have endeared him to the heart of the cynic.
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.