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not able to ascertain that he himself saw it. An artist (Shakspere, or someone before him) found somewhere the two stories of the pound of flesh and of the caskets. Whether it was mere artistic inspiration which induced him to put them side by side, or whether he was conscious of any definite moral purpose in their juxtaposition, it is not my object to decide. And as I have no pretension to the character of a literary critic, I may, I hope, be allowed for the present to speak of Shylock and Portia as if they were living persons-children of Shakspere, owing to him their existence, their vitality, their form, but in whom strangers can perhaps discover characteristics, likenesses, differences, which their own father may never have consciously observed.

In the character of Portia Shakspere has painted a wonderful picture of a certain popular type of goodness; she is a pious, dutiful, well-educated young woman, intelligent, graceful, and gracious. He suggests no imperfections in her, he leaves her to make her own impression on his readers; she is allowed to affect us now as she would have affected her circle of friends. Everyone likes Portia ; we are evidently meant to like her. Any parent to whom had been given such a daughter would feel proud and thankful. If she is rather freer in her language than well-brought-up girls of our own day, we make allowances for her, because such licence was in fashion in her time. Our impression of her personally is extremely pleasant; yet, when we come to analyse her deeds and motives, we see that it would be possible to represent her on one side of her character as a very fiend. Beside her stands an ugly reflection of herself, in which we can see what she might look like to the angels. No caricature

of her, but a sort of grim and ghastly likeness of her, with, as it were, her outer skin off. Shylock has much of Portia's virtue, but without her graces; and the crime which she prevents him from committing seems like a sort of fantastic shadow projected by the crime committed by her father and herself.

But he is a Jew; one of a persecuted and abhorred race; lacking therefore in that superficial kindliness,-that amiable unconsciousness of ill-will against anybody in particular, which is so easy and cheap to those accustomed from infancy to be happy and admired, so impossible to those who have been perpetually stung by a sense of injustice; and which, where it exists, is not incompatible with much selfishness and lack of true sympathy.

And not only has the general course of Shylock's life been such as to bring his worst qualities to the surface, but the circumstances in which we see him are such as to exhibit them at their worst. is, during the action of the play, shown almost entirely in intercourse with his enemies; Portia is throughout surrounded by her servants and friends.

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And, lastly, we are made to look at Shylock from Portia's point of view; we are allowed to see Portia from her own; we hear all that Portia has to say about Shylock; we are not told what Shylock thinks of her; probably he knew nothing of her history.

The essential characteristic of Jews, as such, the virtue on which narrow-minded Jews mainly pride themselves, is their reverence for their national traditions, for the laws and customs handed down from their ancestors, for those laws especially which separate them from other nations. A good Jew sacrifices himself to keep intact

these traditions; if he cannot do this without sacrificing others as well as himself, the motive is held to exonerate him from blame. We Gentiles see only the evil side of such a sacrifice of the living in reverence for a far-off past; we call it "superstition" and "barbarism." In Portia what is essentially the same feeling takes the shape, to us more attractive, of unreasoning and measureless devotion on the part of a daughter to the mere will of her father. Portia is quite sure that it is right for her to obey her father at the cost of her own inclinations; if other people suffer also for her obedience, she is not to blame.

Shylock's national feeling, his reverence for the traditions according to which Jews were bound not to be too familiar with Gentiles, is only once expressed in words; but it is evidently the key-note of his whole life. His detestation of Antonio, though complicated and intensified by personal considerations, is to a large extent an outcome of his patriotism. Antonio, it is true, had injured Shylock's trade; but if a brother Jew had done so, Shylock would not have wanted to cut his heart out; revenge and greed would have been kept in check by conscience. But Antonio had not only injured him personally, he had insulted him as a Jew. In the person of Shylock he had insulted the Hebrew nation.

One property of superstition, as distinguished from true human religion, is that, by localising and restricting the action of the moral sense, it leaves the passions to act unbalanced in certain directions. The effect of Shylock's exaggerated nationality was that he felt it quite a virtuous deed to treat a Gentile enemy as his worst self would, perhaps, have been disposed to treat any enemy.

We notice the same tendency in

Portia. The natural vanity which tempts a woman to let men for whom she does not care make reckless sacrifices for her sake, exists to some extent in nearly all girls; but under ordinary circumstances it is kept in check, in all but the worst, by pity and compunction. In Portia's case the father's command neutralises the pity and the sense of responsibility.

So perhaps with the father-he has an exaggerated idea of the duty which he supposes laid on him to protect his daughter from all possibility of being a prey to mercenary speculators; and this prevents his feeling constrained, as he otherwise would, to ask himself at what probable cost he is indulging in the pleasure of thinking that, after his death, men whom he never saw will be made aware of, and forced to submit to, his eccentric commands.

Portia is so absorbed in the mere question of obedience to her father, that she does not seem to see that anything but disobedience can be wrong. It may seem absurd to regard her rejected suitors (that fiery Prince of Morocco especially) as feeling bound by a vow never to marry. But how recklessly have promises never to marry been imposed, almost within the recollection of persons now living, as a serious business transaction, and from motives of family interest. That men have thought themselves bound to keep such promises is also a fact. In what manner they are kept, and with what results, we need not inquire.

Portia saves herself the pain which thinking seriously might have cost her; she has evidently never considered the matter at all. She has counted the cost-to herself-of obedience; a something which is half heroism to face an evil fate, half faith that, in some mysterious manner, her heroism

will be rewarded by escaping that fate, sustains her through her own share of the trial. If she had ever attempted to realise the consequences of her virtue to other people, she would either have disobeyed her father, or, more likely, have escaped by suicide the responsibility of needing to disobey. But she lacks what has been called "that power of imagination which forms so large a part of the divine charity," and as long as she is conforming to the law-the special law which she thinks binding on herself-she feels that all is right. If her lovers choose voluntarily to make rash vows, they, not she, are responsible for the consequences.

Shylock also keeps strictly to the letter of the law, even of the Gentile law; and very surprised he seems to be to find that good Christians do not consider that amount of virtue all that could be required of him. Antonio voluntarily promised a pound of flesh; it does not occur to Shylock that anyone has a right to require at his hands the blood which may have to flow in the cutting of it. Surely the author, whoever he was, to whom it first occurred to present in sharp contrast the exact pound of flesh, which could be bargained for and weighed, and to which the man had, by the confession of the judge, an indisputable right-and the hot life-blood to which no one had any claim, which would flow incidentally, of which no account had been taken, which no one could measure, and which nothing could staunch, must have been one of the sublimest artists of all time.

Besides being hardened by superstitious reverence for some special form of duty, Shylock is perhaps, like Portia, still further deadened by reaction after an effort of selfsacrifice. For it needed an effort for a man like him to break through his habits so far as to lend

money to a Gentile, with no hope of interest, without security even for the principal, and with the doubt, which must have been all along on his mind, whether, in any case, the Gentile authorities would let him have his pound of flesh. And we much mistake the Jews if we think that their love of accumulating money is only the same thing as the mere sordid avarice of a Gentile miser. To the Jews of old time, forbidden as they were to purchase land, or to distinguish themselves in political life, the accumulation of wealth was the only road to power or distinction; and money thus came to have for them, as it indeed still has for some foreign Jews, a sort of emotional value, such as has for the aristocrat his ancestral estate. This subject is too wide a one to enter upon here; but it may be suggested that, if we could truly realise what money had become to the Jews, and what associations it had for them, we should feel that Shylock's "Oh! my ducats, oh! my daughter," which, as reported by Salanio, seems so grotesque a medley, was as truly human and pathetic as would be the lament of an officer in an army of patriots, whose child, in deserting him, had carried over to the camp of the oppressors, along with a store of ammunition, the standard of his regiment, and the sword handed down to him from his ancestors.

But, though money was thus dear and sacred in Shylock's eyes, he is willing to sacrifice it for the smallest chance of destroying the man whom he hates, and who hates "our sacred nation." Charming gentleman as Antonio seems to his Gentile friends, there were many reasons why a Jew of his city should, when attacking him, have much of the same feeling as David when he went forth alone to fight the giant; and we may be

sure that when the agent of Bellario pronounced at first in Shylock's favour, he sent up a silent thanksgiving to the God of his fathers for delivering into his hands the enemy of his race. Need we doubt that, in that moment of triumph, Shylock was as naïvely unconscious of any reason for being morally dissatisfied with himself as ever Portia was in her life?

On this narrow self-righteousness Portia looks, and leads us to look on it, from the point of view of a true and divine humanity. It is easy for her to do so. Everything tends, just at the time of the trial, to put her into a generous frame of mind. She is happy in her love; she has an opportunity of earning the gratitude of her husband and his friends; and, as far as the trial itself is concerned, she feels herself, beforehand, to be completely master of the situation. Her religious faith, such as it is, has been, so far, justified by the course of events. Moreover, she can think of Shylock-and, what is even more to the purpose, she

knows that all around her think of him-as an inferior being, a poor, untaught miscreant, who has everything to gain by being made in any respect more like herself. Her little sermon is evidently the expression of the genuine feeling of the moment; and it is so beautiful and true in itself that we almost forget, as completely as she herself did, how impertinent is any attempt on the part of a young girl to give

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religious instruction to a man old enough, even in years, to be her father, older in suffering and experience than she will probably ever be in her life. Mercy droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven." "We do pray for mercy, and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy," sweetly remarks this amiable young lady, who had cut the heart out of more than one man, making flippant jests about them with her maid the while. They were guilty of the crime, not of hating her nation, but of liking her better than she liked them; and, provided her own father's commands are obeyed, she can leave them, bleeding morally, without

morse.

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Mercy! A girl of Portia's type would have offered human sacrifices with the greatest cheerfulness if she had been brought up where Moloch worship was in fashion; and we, if we had lived in the same age and country, should have felt no more horror of her for doing so than we do of any woman of our own day, who is content with accurately performing whatever duties happen to have been brought under her notice by the persons who have had charge of her in childhood, and does not think it necessary to ask herself unpleasant questions about the cost to others at which her supposedly virtuous existence is being carried on.*

*Since the above was written, Mr. Irving has made Shylock a living person to thousands. We may be grateful to the great actor for bringing out with such vividness Shylock's patient submission to everything which he understands to be law, and the absence in him of anything like miserliness or greed.

MY SCOTCH LASSIE.

If I had the brush of angel,
Dipt in colours rich and rare,
I would paint with choicest limning
My Scotch lassie fresh and fair.
Fresh is she as dewy morning,
Fair as blossom on the spray,
Fragrant as the birch tree waving
In the fresh breeze of the May.

O, my bright and blooming lassie !
Maids more stately well may be ;
But no stateliest maiden ever
Breathed a smile so sweet as she.

O, my bonnie blithe fond lassie,
Mild as bloom on hawthorn tree,
Rich as June, and ripe as Autumn,
Flower and fruit in one is she.

Saw you ever cowslip warmer
When the zephyrs came to woo?
Saw you bright-eyed speedwell peeping
'Neath the hedge with purer blue ?

Warmer than her keen pulse keeping
Time to all things true and good,
Bluer than her blue eye swelling
In young love's divinest mood?

Softer floats no plumy sea-gull
Than her bosom's heaving charms,
Swan on lake not whiter swimmeth
Than the whiteness of her arms.

If I had the brush of angel,
Dipt in colours rich and rare-
No! no trick of brush or pigment
Ever limned a form so fair.

Let them limn who live in dreamland,

Where the brain-born phantoms sway;

I have feasted on the substance,
And the shadow pales away.

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