Misanthropy Read online

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  It is worth emphasizing that the two works we have begun with are plays. Drama is especially well suited to the expression of a misanthropic vision – but also, because of its lack of a mediating voice (a narrator’s, for instance) and its generic need for differentiation, variety of character and expression, to leavening it, qualifying its purchase, in other words, to the incompleteness of misanthropy. This is particularly evident in Elizabethan revenge drama and, above all, Jacobean tragedy. The great malcontents and revengers in these plays – Malevole, Hieronimo, Vindice, Bosola, Flamineo – are very often misanthropists or pass misanthropic judgements. Indeed, misanthropy tends at one and the same time to underwrite their cynicism and their role as moral cleansers, the lengths to which they are prepared to go in fulfilling that role. If the world is rotten, then it will necessarily corrupt or have corrupted the revenger, that is the presumption: at best, the revenger can claim that, rotten like the others, he has behaved like them for ends less rotten than theirs. Hence the sublime cheerfulness with which, having begun on the principle that ‘to be honest is not to be i’the world’ and murderously purged the court, Vindice in Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy accepts his come-uppance. (‘We die after a nest of dukes! Adieu’).7

  The misanthropic statements in revenge plays, however, are necessarily dramatic, with all that that implies for possible ironies and reversals. These may be the result of succession in time, but may also be structural. Take Hieronimo, in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy:

  O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,

  Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds! …

  How should we term your dealings to be just,

  If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust!8

  At this point the effect may seem to be cumulative. Only a few minutes before, in the preceding scene, after being condemned to death, Alexandro has made a very similar pronouncement:

  But in extremes what patience shall I use?

  Nor discontents it me to leave the world,

  With whom there nothing can prevail but wrong. …

  ‘Tis heaven is my hope.

  As for the earth, it is too much infect

  To yield me hope of any of her mould.

  (ST, III.i 12–13, 35–7, pp. 49–50)

  But almost immediately, irony shreds this. The Portuguese ambassador arrives back at court with unexpected news. The vile wolf Villuppo has set Alexandro up; the Viceroy frees him at once. Not surprisingly, this improves his mood. The demonstration that misanthropy can be so dependent on circumstance reflects not only on Alexandro’s but, at slightly longer range, on Hieronimo’s, too. Yet in fact the irony strikes more comprehensively at Alexandro’s failure to trust to fortune than it does at his misanthropy. Alexandro says what he says in circumstances poisoned by hatred, mistrust, inconstancy, betrayal and inconsequential malignity, the general atmosphere being determined by the Viceroy’s melancholy. The scene appears to bear Alexandro out, although the irony does not. We might even turn our interpretation round, thinking of Hieronimo’s soliloquy as confirming Alexandro’s disenchantment, after the brief delusion induced by his good luck.

  This is just one particularly striking instance of how far the world about which revenge drama and Jacobean tragedy tell us seems again and again to coincide with the malcontent’s judgement, and indeed other characters quite often also share it, or are converted to it. De Flores’s declaration, at the very end of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, that his thrillingly perverted relationship with Beatrice has been his sole and only good – ‘I thank life for nothing but that pleasure’; otherwise there was only ‘hell’9 – might seem like a drastic reaction to the fact that his life is now over. But what other goods has the play made evident and given flesh to? The ‘fellowship’ of man is only ‘a treacherous, bloody friendship’ (TC, V.ii 3–4, p. 80). Change the terms a little, and, as the play repeatedly says, the same applies in sexual relations, on both sides of the gender divide. All in all, Isabella’s view of Lollio’s bedlam – ‘Why, here’s none but fools and madmen’ (TC, III.ii 15–16, p. 37) – seems intended to sum up the play and, beyond it, the world it encapsulates.

  In general, these plays present us with people desperately at the mercy of ferocious, ungovernable, black and destructive passions. Lust, rage, envy, unprincipled ambition, spontaneous combustions of mad violence and, above all, the imperative of wholesale and indeed extreme vengeance, these are the norms. Other values that might serve as a counterweight – family, for example; see the outbreak of fratricidal aggression and its necessary consequence, precipitate murder, in John Webster’s The White Devil10 – are snowflakes in the general conflagration (the consuming fire being a metaphor that recurs from play to play). The trouble is that people are changelings, in the original sense of the word, according to the OED, ‘one given to change’ (interestingly, it also formerly implied imbecility). The title of Middleton and Rowley’s play is not a chance matter; nor is the fact that the word ‘change’ or ‘changed’ occurs nine times in the last twenty-five lines. People are categorically unworthy of trust, because they do not know and cannot understand or get to grips with what may erupt from within them. To adapt Fabritio in Middleton’s Women Beware Women, they run mad, and ‘have no reason for’t for aught [one can] perceive’.11 They are, in the full, rich sense of another repeated word, at bottom wanton. It is impossible to decree a limit to the unpredictable, dismaying havoc this may cause.

  Yet this kind of vision seldom congeals into uncompromising misanthropy. Most of the relevant dramatists seek at least to pluck a brand or two from the burning. Admittedly, the rescue job may yield only modest gains: ‘Our mother turned, our sister true’, says Vindice (RT, V.iii 156, p. 415), providing what is in effect a final inventory, a statement of the play’s moral assets, as he is borne off to speedy execution. But his own last-ditch efforts alone make the ‘turning’ possible when both women are tending otherwise, with the concluding bloodbath helpfully ensuring that there is no need to pursue the issue further. Indeed, given the fact that Middleton seems to have been a rather rigorous Calvinist, he quite possibly felt that he had saved as much as he decently could – certainly more than from the inferno of Women Beware Women – in the teeth of what was otherwise a universal damnation. Nonetheless, in revenge drama, the misanthropic circle does not often quite close. Sometimes, indeed, it closes only to open up again. In John Marston’s The Malcontent, the snarling figure of Malevole, the deposed Duke of Genoa, surviving in disguise amidst the corrupted power of his former court, supposes that the chance of finding a man who loves ‘virtue only for itself’ in a ‘world most vile’ is one in ten million.12 Though the sample the play provides does not run to such numbers, it comprehensively bears him out. It would seem that ‘depraved nature stamps in hardest steel’ (TM, II.iii 49, p. 43). Furthermore, other characters – Pietro, Mendoza – increasingly share Malevole’s view. As misanthropists elsewhere have occasionally observed, misanthropy starts to spread, and even becomes epidemic. In more ways than one, as Malevole says himself, the world appears to be going to the devil. Yet the savage apocalypse that we expect is not forthcoming. As a revenger, Malevole turns out to be moderate and placable. Thanks to his new-found magnanimity and forgiveness, Pietro, Ferneze and Aurelia not only survive but are regenerated. Misanthropy, it seems, has produced a desire to get beyond, and even to disprove, it.

  Some may find this rather abrupt turnabout crude and unconvincing. However, elsewhere, there is also a very special finesse to revenge drama and Jacobean tragedy. This is to a large extent a question of the extraordinary sophistication with which it thinks in terms of ‘degrees of evils’ (WD, IV.ii 57, p. 80). The human world is composed of devils, white devils and intermediate shades of devil. This is part of what The White Devil tells us. Here again the malcontent (Flamineo) casts a long shadow over the whole play, serves in part as an ironic commentary on its world, his ineffably disabused tone making a ha
rsh worldly wisdom seem like a wholly plausible, necessary attitude and yet peremptory (not least because self-interested), throttling the possibility of believing differently from the start. In this respect, the play itself is like the ‘dead bodies’ to which Monticelso refers as ‘begg’d at gallows/and wrought upon by surgeons, to teach man/Wherein he is imperfect’ (WD, III.ii 96–8, p. 55), and begins as well as ends in deathliness. Everyone is deeply tainted and there is no escaping taint. That seems to be the premise on which the play proceeds. But there are those, notably Vittoria, who, even while sunk in their corruption, can also lift up their heads. See in particular – ‘brave spirit’ of a ‘counterfeit jewel’ (WD, III.ii 139–40, p. 57) – her compelling gravity and dignity during her arraignment, induced as it is by a mixture of guilt and a politic desire to lie about her misdeeds, not least because her accusers are so much worse and more false than she is. The scene might have been constructed specifically to drag us steadily towards misanthropy, but not let us tip over the edge.

  But the superlative example of the kind of ambiguity at stake, teetering on the brink of misanthropy without succumbing to it, almost but not quite wishing that ‘th’estate of the world were now undone’, in Macbeth’s phrase,13 is Webster’s masterwork The Duchess of Malfi. The complications of its characterization and plot to one side, The Duchess of Malfi pits the moral grandeur of the Duchess herself against that most sombre, meditative and articulate of malcontents, Bosola. We know who Bosola is at once; in Delio’s words,

  The only court-gall: yet I observe his railing

  Is not for simple love of piety:

  Indeed he rails at those things which he wants,

  Would be as lecherous, covetous, or proud,

  Bloody, or envious, as any man,

  If he had means to be so.14

  Bosola does not so much ‘rail’, however, as everywhere caustically observe, and he is well aware that he is himself implicated as an object of his own disgust, which, in any case, the play largely suggests that he is right to feel. Indeed, he rises above the others in his reflective attitude towards it. Yet finally Bosola is inexcusable; inexcusable because, while he can perceive the exception to the misanthropic rule, he misanthropically assumes, not only that it must be doomed, but that he must act according to that assumption. Hence he cannot take its side, but rather becomes the instrument of its persecution. He is in that respect the moral victim of his own pessimism.

  The exception is the Duchess (and her steward Antonio, whom she stoops to marry, with disastrous consequences). ‘In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness’, asks Bosola, ‘Doth, womanish and fearful, mankind live’ (DM, V.v 100–1, p. 101)? By the end of the play, the question seems appropriate enough. But ‘womanish’ is ironic. The Duchess of Malfi disproves Bosola’s terms in one sole respect – the existence of a fearless woman. The Duchess’s towering presence ensures that the misanthropic dimension to the play is never close to being comprehensive. Yet in another respect she actually confirms and even enhances the play’s misanthropy, insofar as, like Bosola, she herself implicitly accepts a misanthropic logic according to which, even as she embarks on it, her progress will be catastrophic: ‘Wish me good speed’, she says to Cariola, as she determines to marry Antonio,

  For I am going into a wilderness,

  Where I shall find nor path, nor friendly clew

  To be my guide.

  (DM, I.ii 277–80, p. 18)

  The condition of the exception can only be a cruel lostness. By the third act, the Duchess finds herself standing ‘As if a mine, beneath my feet, were ready/To be blown up’ (DM, III.ii 156–7, p. 48). Hence the extraordinary intimacy that develops between her and Bosola. Both believe in the absolute reality of the unregenerate world he represents and to which she, in her ‘spirit of greatness, or of woman’ (DM, I.ii 417, p. 23), refuses to belong (‘I account this world a tedious theatre,/ For I do play a part in’t, ‘gainst my will’, DM, IV.i 83–4, p. 66). Both therefore, in a way, conspire in her mortification. There is no appeal against her fellow humans, as she makes clear in her great speech shortly before her death; she must suffer as profoundly and hopelessly as those at the bottom of the heap, the less than or marginally human. Her terminal melancholy, furthermore, is sane:

  Th’heaven o’er my head seems made of molten brass,

  The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.

  I am acquainted with sad misery,

  As the tann’d galley-slave is with his oar.

  Necessity makes me suffer constantly,

  And custom makes it easy.

  (DM, IV.ii 26–30, p. 68)

  From others she can expect nothing. ‘Call for help’, Cariola urges her, as her executioners approach, to which she replies, ‘To whom, to our next neighbours? They are mad-folks’ (DM, IV.ii 193–5, pp. 73–4). In the play, this is literally the case; but Webster’s meaning is more than literal.

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  The opening sequence in Act III i–ii of The Spanish Tragedy epitomizes an ambivalent relation to misanthropy that is quite characteristic of the revenge plays. More significantly in this context, since the point is that there is a misanthropic insistence or discourse within the genre, but one that, if not cancelled out, is not quite confirmed as an all-encompassing truth either, it also captures an aporia at the very heart of misanthropy itself. Misanthropy is a flawed, uneven, partial or sporadic thought. Some of the names and titles in the book may surprise readers, and there will no doubt be disagreement with my selections. Surely Jean Rhys is not exactly misanthropic? The man who gave us Tom Sawyer, really? Certain readers may also feel that, on occasions, the book has simplified complex texts. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates objects to misanthropy on the grounds that it is simple-minded where, as moral creatures, human beings are complex (‘few are the good and few the evil … the great majority are in the interval between them’).15 But the argument that follows is not supposed to be at all simple, and if it has occasionally simplified particular subjects of discussion, in intention, at least, this is in the interest of a large, nuanced, complex pattern that responds to the equivocal status of misanthropy itself.

  In any case, if, on the one hand, calling anyone a misanthropist is probably in some degree a simplification, on the other, in a novel, a novelist, a philosopher, a tradition and so on, misanthropy nonetheless has a regularity or structure to it, though not one that pervades or informs the whole of a thought. Its emphases are relatively homogeneous and recurrent. Misanthropy is not just the Weltschmerz I feel when a man in a white van cuts me up on the South Circular at 5 pm on a dreary autumn day. It may not be a philosophy, but it aspires in that direction. A grumpy mood does not. Indeed, it is possible to go further, and suggest that, in its lack of rational finality and the impossibility of its historical completion, misanthropy even indicates a path that philosophy might take rather more often. In the wake of the various recent deconstructions, we may wonder whether the rationality that underwrites Molière’s perception of Alceste’s contradictions as comic and ironic need be our basis for judgement. Otherwise, if there is a problem with Moliere’s play, it is that, in his urbanity, he seems not to have entertained the thought that the incompleteness of misanthropy need not necessarily disqualify it, but, hypothetically at least, might rather just specify the conditions under which one is most likely to think most tellingly, those of a creature clinging to life in spite of its better knowledge.

  What may be peculiarly relevant is the fact that, in consulting people about Misanthropy, I was struck, first by the general interest in the topic, and secondly by how frequently my interlocutors humorously suggested that I should begin with or at least include them. Both responses seemed to me partly to reflect how far, for many people, there is something oddly anomalous, familiar but unresolved, in the idea of misanthropy, something that remains to be thought through in it. This book attempts to think with, about, for and against misanthropy. It is specifically structured round a set of contras and one of pros. Thus, in
particular, on the one hand, misanthropy seems open to question as repeatedly the product of anti- or undemocratic cultures (or cultures in which democracy is coming under threat, like Timon’s Athens). It also tends to go together with a problematic and even diseased attitude to the body, and its generalizing discourse leaves it vulnerable to the obvious stricture that its generalizing claims are in fact historically determined. These are major objections. However, on the other hand, I also ask whether certain forms of misanthropy – the misanthropy of the terminally defeated, the misanthropy that emerges out of or along with (yet another) new set of progressivisms, like the misanthropy of modern women, and the misanthropy that doggedly opposes boosterism, ‘talking up’ – do not themselves enter certain reservations about any too facile assumption that we can by now consign misanthropy to the historical dustbin. Indeed, in my final chapter, I look at how the logic of my arguments against misanthropy might suggest that contemporary culture or, at least, contemporary Western culture, ought to have left misanthropy behind, declared its obsolescence; then ask in detail whether it has done so, and even has any right to see itself thus.

  My omission, however, of one particular argument against misanthropy may seem disquieting and even shocking: the argument from love. The trouble is, however, that no evidence has ever been forthcoming of the possibility of a durable, universal or even wide-ranging human love of a kind that would have major historical and political consequences, thereby rendering misanthropic suspicion null and void. But otherwise love is perfectly reconcilable with misanthropy. ‘I hate and detest that animal called man’, wrote the greatest misanthropist of them all, Jonathan Swift, ‘though I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth’.16 This classic statement is not an example of Swiftian derangement. It is rather a more banal reflection of how love, if sometimes a very intense form of continuing connection with humanity, can also be, perhaps quite often is, an extremely minimal one. Indeed, one might even wonder how much bourgeois love and equally the contemporary notion of ‘partnership’ have been more or less surreptitiously founded on precisely this double attitude.