well acquainted, at an age when we feel rather than reflect, that the very familiarity blunts our perception of the extraordinary skill which has been displayed in the whole conduct of the trial, the almost impossibility of altering a word or of adding or omitting a line without impairing the flawlessness of the perfect whole. For the task set before the poet was one of peculiar difficulty; it is his triumph that neither reader nor hearer observes how great a difficulty it is. For in spite of the evil repute in which the Jewish race had been held for centuries, Shakespeare could not but have felt that in following the story out to its conclusiona conclusion which was probably as well known to the audience as to himself he could hardly fail to outrage to a certain extent our latent natural sense of justice by a result which purports to be in strictest accordance with justice. Whatever may have been the guilt and bloodthirstiness of Shylock, one cannot get entirely over the impression that he is a hardly used man. In the matter of deriving profit from money lent, he is a long way ahead of Antonio, who is nothing more than the ignorant upholder of a sentimental notion about the taking of interest, the prevalence of which produces the very evils it ostentatiously professes to deplore; and it must be remembered that the taking of one per cent would have been then reckoned an offence against the moral law as well as the taking of a hundred. In the pursuance of his philanthropic zeal against usury he has accordingly treated the Jew as a dog, as a cur of the meanest kind; he has in particular endeavored to convince him of the error of his

ways in the usual manner then adopted by Christians with the chosen people, that is, by spitting upon him, buffeting him, and kicking him.

That a man subjected for years to treatment of this sort should be ready at the proper moment to make a lively exhibition of the Christian graces seems to have occurred only to critics of Shakespeare; it assuredly never occurred to Shakespeare himself. It was, therefore, all-important, from the point of view of art, that the malevolence of the Jew should be brought out in this trial scene in as impressive a manner as possible. To the production of this effect the poet paid special heed. Again and again is Shylock entreated to accept the money due him. Not the mere amount only, but three times the amount; not only three times, but practically any amount he chooses to demand. Again and again does Portia press upon him the cancellation of the bond. Again and again she brings up the question of releasing the merchant now in his power. By fine but steadily increasing gradations the refusal in each case is made more emphatic. Appeals to his clemency, appeals to his avarice are alike in vain. It is by these repeated offers and repeated denials that the malignity of Shylock forces itself upon the apprehension of the dullest of us all. It is our consciousness of this which alone reconciles us to the result of the trial, which in one sense is an utter travesty of justice.

No feeling of this sort will be awakened by Lansdowne's version. It has in one way an interest of its own, because it enables us to see how slight are the changes, how few are the omissions which are required

to convert a high-wrought scene into commonplace, which is always crude and sometimes offensive. The apparent leaning of the tribunal at the outset to the justice of Shylock's plea, heightening by contrast the dramatic effect of the subsequent action, is sensibly lessened in this alteration. To compensate for this abatement, Portia, at the end, casts off the judicial dignity, which in the original she never for a moment lays aside, and hastens to exhibit the feelings of a partisan and to proclaim herself such openly and even offensively. The railing invectives of Gratiano, thoroughly in keeping with the character, are transferred to Bassanio, in whose mouth they are inappropriate and unbecoming; while the dignity of the whole scene is impaired and indeed almost destroyed by the cheap expedients of the latter in seeking to interfere with the processes of the court, by making offers of self-sacrifice, which he must know cannot be accepted, and by attempting acts of violence which he must know equally well cannot prevail. Very little, in truth, of the skilful art of the original has been preserved in the version of the trial scene which Lansdowne perpetrated. It is throughout hurried and crude. The almost agonizing intensity of feeling, which slowly but steadily deepens and broadens on both sides, is no longer seen or felt. The repeated offers and repeated refusals to accept anything that will stand in the way of the accomplishment of revenge no longer force themselves upon the attention. These variations would of themselves settle the question of art, if there were a question in regard to it, independent of the genius of the writers.

But even more pronounced is the difference of light in which the Jew appears in the two productions. In the Shylock of Shakespeare is concentrated the wrath of a race turning upon its oppressors, a race conscious of the importance of the part it has played in the past, with its long line of lawgivers and prophets to which all nations turn, equally conscious of the misery it has endured and is continuing to endure in the present. As it has been great in suffering, so will it be great in vengeance. Entreaties are useless; threats are mere empty breath. Pity will not soften the heart nor obloquy cause it to yield. In Lansdowne, on the contrary, Shylock is no longer exalted by wrath. He is not indeed a comic character, as has been so persistently asserted; but he is essentially a vulgar one. He exhibits nothing of that sublimity of hate which awes us by its intensity, and gives to malignity a character almost of grandeur. Though he feels antipathy, his antipathy is purely of the nature of a business investment. He is willing to sacrifice the wealth he holds dear in order to free himself from the further interposition of a man who has hindered him in his gains, thwarted him in his bargains, and laughed at his losses. He is not, as in Shakespeare, the representative of the long martyrdom of a race. He is nothing but the Jew of the huckster's stall, of the old-clothes' shop, whose ideal in life is a profit of at least two hundred per cent, and whose Messiah is desired to come, not to effect the conquest of the world, but to give his people the possession of its traffic.

CHAPTER IX

CONFLICTING EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY VIEWS

ABOUT SHAKESPEARE

To the men of modern times there is something very amusing, when it is not exasperating, in the attitude exhibited by the eighteenth century towards the Elizabethan age. There was, to be sure, nothing new about it then; it had begun to be displayed with the beginning of the Restoration period. Strength and force, it was always confessed, had been shown by the writers of the past; but it was Charles who, on his return from exile, had brought with him correctness and grace and refinement. To use the language of Dryden, he had cured the rankness of the soil with the rules of husbandry; he had tamed the rudeness of the stage, and had imparted to it manners and decorum; he had, in fine, endowed boisterous English wit with art.1 But it was not until the so-called Augustan age was in full bloom that men rose to the full consciousness of their superiority to their fathers. The audience which Shakespeare addressed, it was then held, was the most incapable of judgment of any that ever existed. It was made up of the lowest and the meanest of the populace. It was the tastes and the wishes of this class which the 1 Epistle to Congreve.