XIII. THE POUND OF FLESH.

Passing out of Rome by the Via Appia, one comes to many places of antiquarian interest, but presently arrives at a spot whose significance increases with time. This is the church called Domine quo vadis. There, says the legend, St. Peter, once more flying from danger, met Jesus, and said, “Lord, whither goest thou?” Jesus answered, ‘Venio Romam iterum crucifigi.’ Whereupon Peter returned, and met his fate—that hard one of a mythical martyrdom, followed by resurrection as a Pontifical Jupiter, wielding his keys as thunderbolts. A fac-simile of the holy footprints of Jesus is here in the church, the originals, sunk in marble, being preserved in Saint Sebastian’s Church.

Goethe had perhaps seen the worshippers around these footprints (near by the Jewish catacomb with its seven-branch candlestick), when there arose in him the idea of a poem which, alas, never got farther than the outline given in a further chapter. Writing from Terni, October 27th, 1786, he says: “Yesterday I felt inspired to undertake a work which at present would be ill-timed. Approaching nearer and nearer to the centre of Romanism, surrounded by Roman Catholics, boxed up with a priest in a sedan, and striving anxiously to observe and to study without prejudice true nature and noble art, I have arrived at a vivid conviction that all traces of original Christianity are extinct here. Indeed, while I tried to bring it before my mind in its purity, as we see it recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, I could not help shuddering to think of the shapeless, not to say grotesque, mass of heathenism which heavily overlies its benign beginnings. Accordingly, the ‘Wandering Jew’ again occurred to me as having been a witness of all this wonderful development and envelopment, and as having lived to experience so strange a state of things, that Christ himself, when he shall come a second time to gather his harvest, will be in danger of being crucified a second time. The legend Venio iterum crucifigi was to serve me as the material of this catastrophe.”⁠[30]

Perhaps Goethe also witnessed “Holy-Cross Day” in Rome, when the Jews were “compelled to come in” and hear the annual sermon—“haled,” as one said, “as it were by the head and hair, and against their obstinate hearts, to partake of the heavenly grace.” Had the two visionary Wanderers—Jesus and Ahasuerus—once more encountered each other in sight of the crosses, they could only have hung side by side; he who gave the blow in Jerusalem, now conceivably the one person in Rome able to recognise the freshly-crucified from a cross of his own—the cross of his race. From another poet have come the words which typical Ahasuerus might, after the experience of so many centuries, speak to the fellow-sufferer he once had insulted:

Holy-Cross Day was appropriate for this work of striking the Jewish race in the face, as they fainted at the Christian door, and showing them now themselves the crucified, by a High Priest Christ taught to hate his enemies and pierce them with nail and spear. For it was about the time of the alleged discovery of the True Cross, already noticed, that this fable of the Wandering Jew probably first began its career.⁠[32] Already at that time it was shown on the walls of imperial Christendom that Jesus and Ahasuerus, as types of Humanity, had changed places—the nails and the thorn-crown transferred from one to the other; and, what is more, the cruel dogmas and superstitions abandoned by the one made by the other into the established religion of Europe.

In the familiar legend of the True Cross, Helena is for a time baffled by a certain Judas, who has occult sources of knowledge, and warns the Jews that the empress is coming to find what, if found, will cause the downfall of their religion. But she having threatened a general massacre, the Jews inform her that this Judas can alone reveal the place of the cross. He refuses; is starved at the bottom of a dry well for six days; on the seventh, consents. When the cross appears, Judas is converted by its miracles and baptized.

In a paper read to the New Shakspeare Society, April 9th, 1875, Miss Toulmin Smith announced her discovery that the story of the “Pound of Flesh” is contained in the thirteenth century English poem, “Cursor Mundi,” there interwoven with the legend of the Finding of the Holy Cross. A Christian goldsmith, in the service of Queen Helena, owes a sum of money to a Jew; if he cannot pay it at a certain time he is to render the weight of the wanting money in his own flesh. The bond is forfeit; the Jew prepares to cut the flesh; but the judges decide that no drop of blood must be shed. The Jew being thus defeated, Queen Helena declares that he must give up all his goods to the State and lose his tongue. This sentence is remitted on his agreeing to tell her where the Holy Cross is hidden,—which he did.

It might easily arise, as a saga on this Jew’s knowledge, that he had personally participated in the hiding of the Cross, just after the crucifixion, and had been miraculously preserved through centuries as “a witness” to reveal its place of concealment, and thereby also to be “a witness” to the truth of the Christian legend. This might even have been in the minds of those who gave him the name of Judas, though perhaps that is merely a token of homage to the True Cross, as potent enough to convert a Judas. It is in harmony with the endless plots and counterplots of the True Cross Tale that the traitor of Christ should live to become traitor to Antichrist. At the same time there is a suggestion in it of precise retribution in kind which naturally combines with the story of the “Pound of Flesh.” It is highly probable that Shylock and the Eternal Jew are twins of the True Cross Mythology, though Ahasuerus be a later name and figure.

But this Holy Cross itself was, and is, a perpetual symbol of the pound-of-flesh principle which lay at the foundation of the ancient Jewish system, and from it, after that foundation had crumbled for the Jews, was adopted as the chief corner-stone of Christianity. This I have demonstrated elsewhere,⁠[33] and the history of the legend, with the conclusions based on it, though they may appear here as an episode, will be found closely related to the development of our subject.

Mr. Swinburne speaks of Marlowe’s Jew as the real man, while Shakspeare’s is a mouthpiece for the finest poetry.⁠[34] A surprising criticism! The genesis of the conventional stage-Jew in England has already been given in this work (XI.), and my reader will do well to refer to it at this point.

It is sufficiently remarkable that, in this year 1881, London should have witnessed on the stage, as acted by two eminent Shakspeare interpreters, the two stage-Jews which competed for popular favour in the time of Marlowe and Shakspeare. The “Shylock” of Mr. Booth is an odious, avaricious, bloodthirsty villain; that of Mr. Irving is a fatal, powerful and pathetic character. The fine acting of Mr. Booth cannot strive against the art of Shakspeare, who at no point could have raised sympathy with a man he meant should be utterly repulsive. Mr. Booth’s personation rests too much on the traditional make-up of Shylock, which is really that of Barabas. When Edmund Kean, as a poor unknown actor, first went to play Shylock at Drury Lane, he raised some laughter behind the scenes by taking from his small bundle a black wig! Black it was, not red; human, not diabolic: the smiling company said, “That will be a failure”; but it was not. One after another the outside traits of Shylock, costume borrowed from Barabas, have disappeared; not a word of Shakspeare’s text has had to disappear with them; the character which the poet conceived has been largely unsheathed by Mr. Irving.

We know that no such figure as that at the Lyceum appeared on Shakspeare’s own stage at the Globe. Shylock, as acted by Shakspeare’s friend Burbage, was a comic figure. His make-up consisted of exceedingly red hair and beard, a false nose preternaturally long and hooked, and a tawny petticoat. Such a figure must have been largely meant to make fun for the pit and gallery, of which Shakspeare was rarely oblivious, and Burbage never.

But a conventional stage-figure is generally an evolution, and this farcical Shylock was no exception. The famous Isaac of Norwich was a typical Jew in his time. A thirteenth century caricature, preserved in the Pell Office, shows us the popular notion of him. He is pictured as a three-faced idol surrounded by devils. The three faces are not especially ugly or comical, but repulsive enough; and we may detect in the figure the reflection of a period when the diabolical theory of the Jew was serious, and no laughing matter. Similarly, in the old Miracle Plays, Satan was a serious figure, though he gradually became a mere laughing-stock, like Pantaloon in the pantomimes. The stage-Jew shared the same decline as the stage-devil—his supposed inspirer. In his malignant and formidable aspect he was, indeed, in Shakspeare’s day, the main figure of Marlowe’s popular play; but even he had the long nose and sundry grotesque features; and it can hardly be doubted that, in the still more ludicrous make-up of Shylock, the Globe Theatre followed the popular feeling.

Perhaps there may be hidden in the name Shylock the idea of a lock-shearer, shaver of the last hair from his victim; at any rate “the shearer sheared” would include the whole significance of the story which Shakspeare took in hand. In the character of Shylock, he retained the grotesquerie which might please the rabble, at the same time turning their scowl to laughter. Even now, while Mr. Irving is giving his pathetic impersonation, the occasional laugh reminds us how easily some parts of the text would lend themselves to a farcical interpretation, if the painted nose and comic gestures were present. But it is more remarkable to observe how rare and superficial are these ludicrous incidents. The farcical Shylock has passed away from the English stage through force of the more real character which Shakspeare drew. Shakspeare may not have intended all the far-reaching moral belonging to the ancient legend of the pound of flesh, but surely no one can carefully compare his Shylock with the Barabas of his contemporary without recognising a purpose to modify and soften the popular feeling towards the Jew, to picture a man where Marlowe had painted a monster, if not indeed to mirror for Christians their own injustice and cruelty.

Let us take our stand beside Portia when she summons the Merchant and Shylock to stand forth. The two men have long legendary antecedents and have met many times before. There are eleven versions of the bond story in the early literature of Europe. In four of these versions no Jew appears. Karl Simrock believes that it is an ancient law-anecdote—an illustration of the law of retaliation pressed to an extreme. The evidences he gives of its use for this purpose are interesting, and it appears to me probable that it might have been in this way that the Jew was first introduced into the story. Where a Jew and a Christian confronted each other in any issue it might be assumed that all mitigations of the summum jus were removed from the question; only the naked technical terms of the law could then be conceived as restraining either from doing the utmost injury he could to the other. There is an old Persian version of the tale, in which, perhaps for a similar reason, a Moslem and an Armenian confront each other; and in this case the failure of the bond is not because of the blood, but because of the extreme exactness of weight demanded by the court. An Egyptian form of the story has a similar end.

Side by side, in all ages and races, have struggled with each other the principle of Retaliation and that of Forgiveness. In religion the vindictive principle has euphemistic names: it is called law and justice. The other principle, that of remission, has had to exist by sufferance, and in nearly all religions has been recognised only in subordinate alliance with its antagonist. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, blood for blood, is primitive law. Projected into heaven, magnified in the divine majesty, it becomes the principle that a deity cannot be just and yet a justifier of offenders. “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” Since finite man is naturally assumed to be incapable of directly satisfying an infinite law, all religions, based on the idea of a divine lawgiver, are employed in devising schemes by which commutations may be secured and vicarious satisfactions of divine law obtained. Nature never forgives. No deity inferred from the always relentless forces of nature has ever been supposed able to forgive the smallest sin until it was exactly atoned for. For this reason the divine mercifulness has generally become a separate personification. The story of the “Pound of Flesh” is one of the earliest fables concerning these conflicting principles.

The following legend was related to me by a Hindu, as one he had been told in his childhood. The chief of the Indian triad, Indra, pursued the god Agni. Agni changed himself to a dove in order to escape; but Indra changed himself to a hawk, to continue the pursuit. The dove took refuge with Vishnu, second person of the triad, the Hindu Saviour. Indra flying up, demanded the dove; Vishnu, concealing it in his bosom, refused to give up the dove. Indra then took an oath that if the dove were not surrendered he would tear from Vishnu’s breast an amount of flesh equal to the body of the dove. Vishnu still refused to surrender the bird, but bared his breast. The divine hawk tore from it the exact quantity, and the drops of blood—the blood of a Saviour—as they fell to the ground wrote the scriptures of the Vedas.

Among the various versions of this story in India I have not been able to find any in accepted sacred books preserving with the simplicity of this folk-tale the ancient moral antagonism between the deities afterwards found in alliance as a triad. Hindu orthodoxy has outgrown the phase of faith which could sanction that probably provincial legend. Its spirit survives in one of Vishnu’s titles, Yadjña Varâha, “the boar of sacrifice,” derived from Vishnu’s third incarnation, by which he saved the world from demons by becoming himself a victim. We may see in the fable reflection of a sacrificial age, an age in which the will and word of a god became inexorable fate, but also the dawning conception of a divineness in the mitigation of the law, which ultimately adds saving man-gods or demi-gods to nature-gods that cannot be appeased.

The earliest version, probably B.C. 300, is the story in the Mahábhárata (Vana parva) of the trial of the best of mankind, King Usinára. Indra and Agni, wishing to test his fidelity to the laws of righteousness, assume the forms of falcon and pigeon. The latter (Agni) pursued by the former (Indra) seeks and receives the king’s protection. The falcon demands the pigeon, and is refused on the ground that it is written that to kill a twice-born man, to kill a cow, and to abandon a being that has taken refuge with one, are equal sins. This is a quotation from the Laws of Manu. The falcon argues that it is the law of nature that it shall feed on pigeons, and a statute against nature is no law. He (the falcon) will be starved, consequently his mate and little ones must perish, and thus in preserving one the king will slay many. The falcon is offered by Usinára other food—a boar, bull, gazelle—but the falcon declares that it is not the law of its nature to eat such things. The king then declares that he will not give up the pigeon, but he will give anything else in his power which the falcon may demand. The falcon replies that he can only accept a quantity of the king’s own flesh equal in weight to the pigeon’s body. Usinára gladly accedes to this substitution. Balances are produced, and the pigeon is placed in one scale. The king cuts off a piece of his flesh that appears large enough, but is insufficient; he cuts again and again, but still the pigeon outweighs his piled-up flesh. Finally, all his flesh gone, the king gets into the scale himself. The two gods then resume their divine shape, announce to Usinára that for the sacrifice he has made he will be glorified in all worlds throughout eternity, and the king ascends transfigured into heaven.

This legend is repeated under the title Syena-Kapotiyam (Dove and Hawk) in the Purana Sarvasvan in the Bodleian Library, where it is in Bengali characters. There is another version in the Markandêyâ Purâna (ch. iii.), in which Indra appears to the sage Vipulasvan in the form of a large famished bird. Finding that this bird can only be nourished by human flesh, the sage appeals to his sons to give it some of their flesh; and on their refusal he curses them, and tells the bird that after he has performed certain funeral ceremonies his body shall be for its nourishment. Whereupon Indra bids the sage abandon his body only by the power of contemplation, reveals his divine nature, and offers Vipulasvan whatever he may ask.

Indra here says, “I eat no living creature,” which shows a moral advance. Perhaps his conversion may have been in some measure due to the teaching of Buddha. It is instructive to compare the Mahábhárata legend with an early Buddhist version cited by M. Focaux from the Dsang-loung,⁠[35] a version all the more significant because the hero of it, Sivi, was traditionally the son of Usinára and had already appeared in the fourth book of Mahábhárata as tried in the same way with his father, and with the same results. Sivi had become a popular type of self-sacrifice. According to the Buddhist legend, Indra, perceiving that his divine existence was drawing to a close, confided to Visvakarman⁠[36] his grief at not seeing in the world any man who would become a Buddha. Visvakarman declared King Sivi such a man. The falcon and pigeon test is then applied. But the Buddhist Sivi does not, like his Brahman prototype, offer to compensate the falcon with the flesh of other animals. He agrees to give his own flesh. The gods descend and weep tears of emotion at seeing the king as a skeleton outweighing the dove which all of his flesh could not equal. Nor is the Buddhist saint caught up to heaven. He is offered the empire and throne of Indra himself, but refuses it; he desires only to be a Buddha. Sivi’s body is restored to greater beauty than before, and he becomes the Buddha amid universal joy.

Other versions show the legend further detached from brahmanic ideas, and resting more completely upon Buddha’s compassionateness to all creatures. Of this description is one in the “Sermons” by Asphagosha, for the translation of which I am indebted to Professor Beal. Sakra (a name of Indra) tempted by a heretic to believe that the teaching of Buddha was false, and that men followed it from motives of self-interest, sought for a perfect man who was practising austerities solely for the sake of becoming a Buddha. Finding one, Sivaka Raja, he agreed with Visvakarman to tempt him. All happens as in the old legend, except that Sivaka rests his refusal not upon the law of Manu, nor upon the sanctity of asylum, but upon his love of all living things. To this his mercifulness the falcon appeals, reminding him of its own young, and Sivaka calls for a knife and cuts off a piece of his flesh, not caring whether it is more or less than the body of the dove. He then faints. All living creatures raise lamentations, and the deities, much affected, heal the wound.

The influence of Buddhism is traceable in the modifications of the original legend, which show the sacrifice not accepted as it was in the case of Vishnu, and to some extent in that of Usinára, whose earthly life terminates. With Buddha the principle of remission supersedes that of sacrifice. His argument against the Brahmanic sacrifice of life was strong. When they pointed to these predatory laws of nature in proof of their faith that the gods approved the infliction of pain and death, he asked them why they did not sacrifice their own children; why they did not offer to the gods the most valuable lives. The fact was that they were outgrowing direct human sacrifices—preserving self-mortifications—and animals were slain in commutation of costlier offerings. This moral revolution is traceable in the gradual constitution of Vishnu as a Saviour. There is a later legend that Vishnu approached Sivi in the form of a Brahman in want of food, but would accept none except the flesh of Sivi’s son Vrihad-Garbha. The king killed and cooked his son and placed the food before the Brahman, who then bade him eat it himself. Sivi prepared to do so, when Vishnu stayed his hand, revealed himself, restored the son to life, and vanished. This legend belongs to a transitional period. Its outcome is found in several Hindu folk-tales, one of which has been told by the charming story-teller, Mr. W. R. S. Ralston. The king of a country is dying, and a poor man is informed of the fact by a disguised “fate.” He asks if there is no way to save the king’s life, and is told there is but one way; if a child should be sacrificed, with its own consent, that would save the king. The man returns home and proposes to his wife to slay their beautiful little boy. She consents; the boy having also consented, the knife is about to descend on the child, when the fates appear, announcing that they only wished to try his loyalty to his king, who had already recovered.

We may feel pretty certain that originally that king was a deity, though not so certain that the knife was arrested without killing anything at all. In several popular fables we find the story preserved essentially in the old sacrificial form, to teach the rewards of self-sacrifice, though, in order to escape the scandal of a human sacrifice, the self-devotion is ascribed to animals. Thus, in the Panchatantra, a pigeon roasts itself to save a famished bird-catcher, who had just captured his mate; and the bird-catcher presently seeing its radiant form rising to heaven, spends his life consuming his flesh in the fire of devotion, in order that he also may ascend there.

In the Hebrew story corresponding to that of Vishnu and Sivi, the Hindu Abraham, we may see that where a god is concerned the actual sacrifice cannot be omitted. That may do in the case of a dying king or hungry hawk, but not for a deity. In the case of Abraham and Isaac the demand is not remitted but commuted. The ram is accepted instead of Isaac. But even so much concession could hardly be recognized by the Hebrew priesthood as an allowable variation from a direct demand of Jahve, and so the command is said to have been given by Elohim, its modification by Jahve. The cautious transformation is somewhat in the spirit of the disguises of the Aryan deities, who may partially revoke as gods the orders they gave as hawks. It would indicate a more advanced idea if we found Jahve remitting a claim of his own instead of one made by the Elohim.

It is worthy of a remark that in some regions where this change of names in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice is overlooked or unknown by Semitic religionists, there has sprung up a tradition that the sacrifice was completed, and the patriarch’s son miraculously restored to life. Thus, in another branch of the Jewish religion we find Mohammed flinching at the Biblical story. He does not like to admit that Allah altered his word and purpose except for a serious consideration, so he says, “We ransomed him with a noble victim.” The Moslems believe that Isaac was not then born, and that it was Ishmael across whose throat Abraham actually drew the knife, which was miraculously kept from killing the lad, according to some, but others say resulted in a death and resurrection.

In the year 1879 the highly educated State of Massachusetts was thrilled with horror by the tidings that a man named Freeman had offered up his beautiful and only child, Edith Freeman, as a sacrifice to God. It occurred in the historical town of Pocasset. A thousand years ago the Northmen who first discovered America wintered there, and possibly they there offered human sacrifices to their god Odin—that is, if they got hold of one or two red men; for there has been a notable tendency among men in such cases to prefer other victims than themselves for their gods. Since that first landing of white men in America the religion of Odin had yielded to that of Christ; Pocasset and all New England had been converted to Christianity; the Bible had found its way into every home. Yet this well-to-do citizen, Mr. Freeman, and his wife, had learned in Sunday School about Abraham’s touching proof of his faith. They had pondered the lesson until they heard the voice of Abraham’s God summoning them to a similar sacrifice, and they committed a deed which probably would have shocked even those rude Vikings who wintered at Pocasset a thousand years before. So much might the worship of a pitiless primitive deity arrest the civilisation of a household in the land of Channing and Parker. They prayed over the little girl, then the knife was plunged into her heart. Little Edith is now in her grave. The God of Abraham and Isaac got his pound of flesh this time. The devout priest of that horrible altar has just passed from his prison to an asylum. To the many who have visited him he puts questions hard to be answered. “Do you believe the Bible or not?” he says. “If you do, and have read the account of Abraham, why should you deny that God could require a man to sacrifice his child? He so required of me. I did hope and believe that he would stay my hand before the blow fell. When he did not I still believed he would raise my child to life. But that is his own affair. I have given that which I loved most to God because He commanded me.” The American people waited to see whether a Christian community which trains up children to admire the faith of Abraham would hang them when they grow up to imitate that faith so impressed upon them. The embarrassing dilemma was escaped after eight months, by getting Freeman into an asylum for the insane, without trial. A rather mean way of confessing that theocratic piety is republican insanity!

I observed, soon after the occurrence of this tragedy, a picture of it in the Police News exposed in the shop windows of London. The designer had placed a crucifix near the little victim’s head. It is probable that Freeman and his wife never saw a crucifix in their lives; they belong to the hardest, baldest dogmatic Protestantism. The rude artist perhaps placed the crucifix in his picture because the Abrahamic sacrifice was supposed to be typical of a holier one—a sacrifice in which a Son was offered up to satisfy the fatal law of a Father. In the human sacrifice symbolised by that crucifix culminated all these sacrifices of which mention has been made; and there was embodied that principle which has maintained through the ages that though to forgive may be human, to avenge is divine.

Let us return now to Shylock and the Merchant whose life is forfeit. Shylock is a primæval Jew; he represents the law, the letter and rigour of it. He is Indra tearing Vishnu’s breast; Elohim demanding Isaac’s death; the First Person exacting the Second Person’s atoning blood. His bond, his oath registered in heaven, its sanction by Venetian law, are by him identified with eternal justice. It is the irrevocable “thing spoken,” fatum, weird, or word. Portia is exact in telling him that he represents that “justice” in whose course, “none of us should see salvation.” The Jew personates his ancient god precisely. Nor is there wanting a certain majesty in his position. There is nothing mean about Shylock now, whatever there may have been at first. He has been called avaricious. But, as we have already seen (XII.), the wealth of the Jews was the main factor in their survival. There is, indeed, an illustration of this in the only version of the Bond legend which makes any pretension to be considered historical. A Jew named Cenéda forfeited a pound of his flesh to a Christian merchant, on a wager; the case was brought before the Pope, Sixtus V., who decided that the Christian must pay two thousand scudi to his treasury for attempting manslaughter, and the Jew pay in an equal sum for having hazarded his life, that being a taxable property belonging to the Pope. Balzac tells us of a mediæval seneschal in France who declared the Jews to be the best taxgatherers in his region. It was his custom to let them gain money as bees collect honey: then he would swoop down on their hive and take it all away. The Jews were driven by oppressive statutes to the dealings in money which brought opprobrium upon them; and in hating Antonio because he lent money without interest, and so lowered the rate of usance in Venice, Shylock was hating him for undermining the existence of his tribe. Shylock scorns thrice his principal. For now he has been summoned by his own woes, the taking away of his daughter and his property, including that ring mourned because given by his lost Leah—artfully contrasted with the surrender by the Christian lovers of the rings they had vowed never to part with—to stand forth as an avenger of the ages of wrong heaped upon his race. That is an Elohistic moment for Shylock, and ducats become dross in its presence. When the full tidings of his woes and wrongs are told him he cries, “The curse never fell upon our nation till now: I never felt it till now.” Thenceforth we may see in Shylock the impersonation of the divine avenger of a divinely chosen people, and the majesty of his law confronting an Edomite world.

On the other hand stands Antonio, representing rather feebly, until he too is summoned from being a mere rich merchant to become a shorn victim, the opposite principle. He stands for the Christ, the Forgiver, the Sufferer. In the course of its travels the legend had combined with one told by Hyginus. The patriot Moros having conspired to rid his country of its tyrant, falls into the hands of that tyrant, Dionysius of Sicily, who orders him to be crucified. But Moros is allowed a respite and absence of three days to visit his sister, his friend Selenuntius having agreed to become his hostage. On his way back, Moros is impeded by a swollen river, and when he reaches the place of execution finds his friend on the point of being nailed to the cross. The two friends now insist each on being crucified for the other, at which sight Dionysius is so affected that he releases both, resolves to be a more humane king, and asks the friends to take him as “the third in their bond of friendship.” It is remarkable that this legend (which suggested to Schiller his ballad Die Bürgschaft, the Suretyship) should have been a popular one at the beginning of the Christian era, introducing as it does an exactor of vicarious suffering—that too by a cross—and ending with the tyrant becoming one in a trinity of friendship.

Shakespeare has brought this vicarious feature into a prominence it never had in any version he could ever have seen, and his art, creating as it must in organic consistency, has dramatised the psychological history of mankind.

Antonio, the merchant called on to suffer, is the man who gained nothing at all from the bond. He has incurred the danger and penalty in order that his rather worthless friend Bassanio may get the money necessary to secure a rich marriage which shall free him from his debts. It is the just suffering for the unjust. Antonio is the man who gives, hoping for nothing again; in low simplicity he lends out money gratis; and, when Shylock agrees to lend the three thousand ducats, the merchant says, “This Hebrew will turn Christian; he grows kind.” At the trial, Antonio speaks like the predestined victim:

And, when the trial is over, Antonio is the only man who offers to relax his hold on the Jew’s property. He gives up his own half, and takes the other only to give it away to Shylock’s daughter and her husband.

To be kind Antonio calls Christian; but it was not that spirit which finally brought Shylock into the same fold with his judges. His life is spared on condition of his becoming a Christian. Professor Morley and other critics say that was harsh. But Shylock is no longer a genuine Jew, and Shakespeare properly relieves that race of his connection. The Jews had indeed, in primitive ages, begun with the eye-for-an-eye principle, but fiery trials had long taught them patience under injury. Shylock, reminding Antonio, when he asks help, of his outrages, says:

So had it been for many ages, and the Jew had relegated the principle of vengeance to his fossil theology, practically becoming the patient victim; while, on the other hand, Christianity, reaching the throne, had antiquated Christ’s principle of mercy, and was dealing out the rigours of the Judaic law which Israel had outgrown by suffering. Shylock had grandly asserted the humanity of the Jew, in the first words of that kind ever heard in Europe; but he had gone on to assert his Christianized nature. “If we are like you in the rest, we will be like you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? revenge; if a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute.” But when Shylock thus repairs back to the old eye-for-an-eye spirit, when he draws from the armoury of the ancient law the old weapon of retaliation, it is only to find that the sacrificial knife grown rusty for a Jew is bright and keen enough in Christian hands. In pressing to practise the blood-atonement and vicarious principle he enters upon Christian ground, and Shakspeare rightly baptizes him a Christian.

We may naturally question whether Shakspeare meant this irony. Did he intend any subtle hit when he made these Christians claim as a co-religionist, ripe for baptism, a man who had just attempted to take a fellow-man’s life? That cannot be affirmed; but it is notable that there should be in the play another passage liable to that construction. Shylock’s enemies have just converted his daughter Jessica into a good Christian; and the first sign of the work of grace in her heart is the facility with which she steals and squanders her father’s money. Shakspeare does not fail to connect with this pious robbery the Christian customs of the time towards Jews. When the robbery and elopement have been planned, the Jew’s Christian servant, Lancelot, says to Jessica:

That seems to be a play upon the then familiar phrase “worth a Jew’s eye”—a Jew having often to pay an enormous sum in order to avoid having his eye put out. With that Christian usage the poet apparently connects the robbery of Shylock’s treasure. So by adopting the Christian usage of the time, by saying to Antonio what King John said to the Jews—“Your money or your flesh”—Shylock had given evidence of a change of heart, and his right place was in the Christian fold.

But among all these representative figures of the Venetian court-room, transformations from the flying doves and pursuing hawks, bound victims and exacting deities of ancient mythology, there is one who possesses a significance yet to be considered. That is Portia. Who is this gentle woman in judicial costume? She is that human heart which in every age, amid hard dogmatic systems and priestly intolerance, has steadily appealed against the whole vindictive system—whether Jewish or Christian—and, even while outwardly conforming, managed to rescue human love and virtue from it. With his wonted yet ever-marvellous felicity, Shakspeare has made the genius of this human sentiment slipping through the technicalities of priest-made law a woman. In the mythology of dooms and spells it is often that by the seed of the woman they are broken: the Prince must remain a Bear till Beauty shall offer to be his bride; the Flying Dutchman shall find repose if a maiden shall voluntarily share his sorrow. It is, indeed the woman-soul which has silently veiled the rude hereditary gods and laws of barbarism—the pitiless ones—with a host of gentle saints and intercessors, until the heartless systems have been left to theologians. Inside the frowning buttresses of dogmatic theology the heart of woman has built up for the home a religion of sympathy and charity.

Portia does not argue against the technique of the law. She agrees to call the old system justice—so much the worse for justice. In the outcome she shows that this so-called justice is no justice at all. And when she has shown that the letter of “justice” kills, and warned Shylock that he can be saved from the fatal principle he has raised only by the spirit that gives life, she is out of the case, save for a last effort to save him from the blind law he has invoked. The Jew now sues before a Christian Shylock. And Portia—like Mary, and all sweet interceding spirits that ever softened stern gods in human hope—turns from the judicial Jahves of the bench to the one forgiving spirit there. “What mercy can you render him, Antonio?” The Christian Gratiano interposes, “A halter gratis: nothing else, for God’s sake.” A natural appeal for the victim-loving God; but the forgiving Christ is heard, however faintly, above the Christian, and Antonio forgives his part of Shylock’s penalty.

“Vengeance is mine,” says the deity derived by fear from the remorseless course of sun and star, ebb and flow, frost and fire. Forgiveness is the attribute of man. We may reverse Portia’s statement, and say that, instead of Mercy dropping as the gentle rain from heaven, it is projected into heaven from compassionate human hearts beneath. And heavenly power doth then show likest man’s when mercy seasons the vengeance of nature. From the wild forces above not only droppeth gentle rain, but thunder and lightning, famine and pestilence; it is man with his lightning-rod, his sympathy, his healing art, who turns them from their path and interposes a shield from their fury. When, as the two walked together in the night, Leigh Hunt looked up to the heaven of stars, and said, “God, the Beautiful,” Carlyle looked, and said, “God, the Terrible.” It was the ancient worshipper of the Laws of Nature beside Abou ben Adhem, who loving not the Lord, yet loved his fellow men, and sees a human sweetness in the stars. All religions, beginning with trembling sacrifices to elemental powers personified—powers that never forgive—end with the worship of an ideal man, the human lover and Saviour. That evolution is invariable. Criticism may find this or that particular deified man limited and imperfect, and may discard him. It may take refuge in pure theism, as it is called. But it amounts to the same thing. What it worships is still a man—an invisible, vast man, but still a man. To worship eternal love, supreme wisdom, ideal moral perfection, is still to worship man, for we know such attributes only in man. Therefore the Shylock-principle is non-human nature, hard natural law moving remorselessly on its path from cause to effect; the Portia-principle, the quality of Mercy, means the purely human religion, which, albeit for a time using the terms of ancient nature-worship and alloyed with its spirit, must be steadily detached from these, and on the ruins of every sacrificial altar and dogma build the temple whose only services shall be man’s service to man.