CHAPTER VI.

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.

THE Merchant of Venice' is one of the most popular creations of the great poet, and unites within itself all the charms of Shakspeare's poetry. In the first place let us consider the characterisation. Apart from the numerous other characters, which are as true to life as they are clearly and consistently developed, and which balance and set off one another in organic contrasts :-the noble, high-minded but passive and melancholy Antonio, who is little suited to bear the burden of an active, energetic life, and is so well described in the words a princely merchant';—his gay and sincere friend Bassanio, who is certainly somewhat frivolous, but amiable and intelligent, a true Italian gentiluomo in the best sense of the word;-his comrades Lorenzo and Gratiano ;-further, Portia, who is no less amiable than she is intellectual, and her graceful maid Nerissa ;-also Jessica, that child of nature, who loses herself in the enthusiasm of her Eastern passion of love -apart from all these firmly and accurately delineated characters, down to the silly Launcelot Gobbo and his childish old father, we have in Shylock, the Jew, a true masterpiece of characterisation.

Shylock is, in the first place, a very successful representation of the Jewish national character in general, not of that venerable, grand, even though one-sided spirit which animated the people in the days of Moses, David and the Prophets, but of that low, undignified, degenerate way of thinking into which the fallen people had sunk during the time of their dispersion over the face of the earth—those centuries of long persecution and sore oppression. Their grand endurance and steadfastness, their strict adherence to religion, custom and law, had during those times changed

into obstinacy and self-will; their shrewd intellect into finesse and a talent for speculative combinations; their enthusiasm for prophecy into superstition; their love of inheritance-which was in so far praiseworthy as it was united with a religious devotion to the land which God had given them, for which they themselves had fought hard, and maintained with trouble and anxiety-had gradually turned into covetousness, into mean, revolting avarice; their feeling of superiority over all other nations-from whom they were distinguished by a purer religious faith-had degenerated into bitter hatred and contempt, and heartless cruelty towards their persecutors. Nothing had escaped the universal degradation except that unconquerable perseverance, that dry mummy-like tenacity of the Jewish nature. Thus Shylock may be said to be the pitiful, decayed ruin of a grand past, the glimmering spark of a vanished splendour, which, although it can no longer give warmth and life, can nevertheless burn and destroy; we can as little deny him our sympathy, as we can repress our disgust at his sentiments and mode of action. And yet Shylock is not a mere Jew in the general sense; in him the Jewish national character appears, at the same time, to be represented in an entirely individual form, in full personal vividness and definiteness. Hatred and revenge, in him, are directed more especially against Christian merchants, who lend money without interest and security so as to help unfortunate debtors and to exercise charity and generosity; Shylock thinks himself thereby more oppressed than by the dog-like manner in which they treat him. For this reason the princely merchant Antonio is a very thorn in his sight. His hatred of him even surpasses his avarice, and he plays the part of a high-minded and generous character merely to work a dastardly trick upon him. He contrives with juristic shrewdness and legal knowledge to give this trick the semblance of lawfulness, and in the same way as he holds strictly to the Jewish law, he insists stubbornly upon the letter of the foreign law. Common-sense and shrewdness, in him, clothe themselves in the garb of that peculiarly subtle humour and cutting sarcasm of wit, which he has so freely at his command. Lastly, his love for his

daughter, whom he guards as the apple of his eye, and seeks to protect against the baneful influences of her surroundings, and his faithful attachment to the religion and customs of his ancestors, which he considers as more important than profit and honour, show us a couple of purely human motives, which, to some extent, moderate what is repulsive in his sentiments and mode of action. In describing special, personal features of this kind, not only is that which is general in the national character individualised, but that which would make him a caricature is likewise avoided; the man is saved by the element of humanity.*

Next to Shylock, Portia is the one amid all the other figures who stands in the fullest light of the foreground; it is not Antonio and Shylock, but, in reality, the latter and Portia, that are the principal parties in the strange lawsuit which forms the centre of the action. Mrs. Jameson, in her usual graceful and ingenuous way, has, with special care, given us a copy of the exquisitely beautiful original. I entirely agree with what she says in the following passage: 'Portia is endued with her own share of those delightful qualities, which Shakspeare has lavished on many of his female characters; but, besides the dignity, the sweetness and tenderness which should distinguish her sex generally, she is individualised by qualities peculiar to herself: by her high mental powers, her enthusiasm of temperament, her decision of purpose, and her buoyancy of spirit. These are innate: she has other distinguishing qualities more external, and which are the result of the circumstances in which she is placed.

* Some recent critics will not admit that Shylock's character possesses either this human trait or any national features and relations. According to them, Shakspeare's intention was to represent him as a monster of avarice, hatred and revengefulness, and to describe his Jewish nature only from a ludicrous and contemptible point of view, without any secondary conditions to lessen the bad impression, and to form some excuse for his actions. But is this like Shakspeare? Why does he make Shylock a Jew? Why does he so frequently make him complain loudly and bitterly of the injustice which his people have to endure from the Christians? Why does he so expressly emphasise his hatred, not merely of Antonio, but of Christians in general?

Thus she is the heiress of a princely name and countless wealth; a train of obedient pleasures have ever waited round her; and from infancy she has breathed an atmosphere redolent of perfume and blandishment. Accordingly there is a commanding grace, a high-bred, airy elegance, a spirit of magnificence in all that she does and says, as one to whom splendour had been familiar from her birth. She is full of penetrative wisdom, and genuine tenderness, and lively wit; but as she has never known want or grief, or fear or disappointment, her wisdom is without a touch of the sombre or the sad; her affections are all mixed up with faith, hope, and joy; and her wit has not a particle of malevolence or causticity.' In fact her wit is ever as graceful as it is poetic, a beneficent, warming fire, which, without doing harm, throws a brilliant light upon all surrounding objects. Notwithstanding her practical cleverness, we see at a glance that her hand has never touched the meanness of life; notwithstanding her noble birth, she is not in the remotest degree affected by any senseless aristocratic pride; and notwithstanding her great wealth, she is no way blasé, no withered hot-house plant, but free and fresh in spirit, joyous and pure in heart. She is in the full bloom of life, a rare, beautiful and fragrant flower in a luxurious garden, where the sunbeams of love have just unfolded her into a most perfect blossom. Her wealth and high birth serve only to adorn the noble, beautiful womanliness of her character with all the charms, all the splendour and glory that surround the aristocracy; she is noble in the highest sense of the word, because, at the same time, she is genuinely human and genuinely feminine. Portia, accordingly, forms the sharpest contrast to her opponent Shylock; in her we have the glory of birth and inherited possessions, in him the darkness of a low, despised descent, and masses of gold accumulated with difficulty; in her the wit of poetry and the intelligence of a free, highly-cultivated mind, in him the wit of malevolence, and the acuteness of practical shrewdness tutored by oppression and persecution; in her faith and hope, in him distrust and fear; in her love and devotion, gentleness and a spirit of forgiveness, in him hate, harshness, unmercifulness, and a thirst of revenge. It is round these two poles

that the dramatic action turns, and round which the other figures of the piece are grouped.

*

As we here have the most brilliant display of Shakspeare's masterly skill in characterisation, so his skill as regards the composition, the arrangement and the development of the complicated substance of the action is no less admirable. The invention, it is true, is not altogether his own; the greater part of it is taken from a novel of Giovanni Fiorentino's Il Pecorone (which was written in 1378, but not printed till 1558), and the subject of this novel again was borrowed from the Gesta Romanorum, another part of which contains the principal features of the story of the three caskets, which, however, is different in point. Still, these sources, and more especially the Gesta Romanorum, which probably Shakspeare alone made use of, would have furnished the poet with but a thin skeleton which he would have had to clothe with flesh and blood;† besides which, he has freely added several characters, and increased the complication by the introduction of a new episode. Accordingly we here find three strange and already complex knots wound one into another: first, the lawsuit between Antonio and Shylock; then Bassanio's courtship and that of the other three suitors' for Portia, and Gratiano's for Nerissa: lastly, Jessica's love for and elopement with Lorenzo. These manifold relations, actions and incidents, are arranged with such great clearness (the one developed out of and with the other) that we nowhere lose the thread, that every separate part is harmoniously connected with the other, and that, in the end, all is rounded off into an organic whole. Schlegel justly remarks that in the same way as the noble Antonio is made an agreeable contrast to the hateful Shylock, so we find that

*The Gesta Romanorum was translated into English by Robinson in 1577.-Compare Echtermeyer and Simrock, l.c. i. 145 f. iii. 183.Collier's Shakespeare's Library, ii. No. 7.

† It may be that Shakspeare first became acquainted with part of the subject from the ballad of the Jew Gernutus, which is reprinted in Percy's Relics of Ancient English Poetry, and is probably older than Shakspeare's play. On the other hand, is more than doubtful whether the old lost play which Stephen Gosson speaks of in his School of Abuse (1579) treated of the same subject, as Gervinus supposes. Compare Ch. Knight's Studies of Shakspere, p. 229.