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:
I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest for death.
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:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
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:
There will come a Christian by
Will be worth a Jewess’ eye.
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.
XIV.
THE WANDERING JEW IN FOLK-LORE.
In the East and South, beneath climes that suggest an ideal paradise
of repose or idle felicity, the undying saints were represented as
dwelling in enchanted islands far from the toiling world, or slumbering
in secret grottoes, while those whose immortality was a doom were
compelled to roam restlessly over the earth. But when these myths
had migrated into the active regions of Europe they were steadily
transformed. It was felt to be hardly a satisfactory distribution of
parts for the saintly immortals to be sleeping or enjoying themselves
with fairies while the evil ones were so busy careering through earth
and air. So, gradually the saintly sleepers awake. The Seven Sleepers
sally forth as the Seven Champions of Christendom. Joseph of Arimathea
cannot lie down in his sacred sepulchre which he had given for the body
of Jesus, and becomes a holy wanderer. St. James emerges from the rock
which had closed around his body like soft wax, and leads Spain against
the Moors. St. John does not rest in his grotto at Ephesus, but makes
pilgrimages, on one of which he asks alms of Edward the Confessor,
near Westminster Abbey, who gives to the mendicant a gold ring,
afterwards sent him from the East, with the saint’s benediction. St.
Peter goes abroad also. When the first Abbot of Westminster is about
to be ordained in the Abbey, St. Peter appears in the night, crosses
the Thames in a boat, himself ordains the Abbot, and leaves a wondrous
fish to convince the Archbishop next day that the consecration has
been performed, rendering the future Deans of Westminster responsible
to Peter alone, and able to preach what heresies they like, without
episcopal interference. Popular superstition is sometimes good-hearted,
and liberated even the sorcerer Merlin from his prison of air, as
appears in the lines of Southey:
“In his crystal ark
Whither sail’d Merlin with his band of bards,
Old Merlin, master of the mystic lore;
Belike his crystal ark, instinct with life,
Obedient to the mighty Master, reached
The land of the Departed.”[37]
But while Merlin thus finds freedom again ending in repose, Arthur
comes forth from his subterranean palace to lead the hunt, or from his
Avalon to wing his way in form of a raven.
Thus the doomed Wandering Jew, under whatever name, finally
found himself wandering in good company. This opens the way for
human compassion to proffer those little mitigations of divine
remorselessness which, as they gradually appear in folk-lore, are such
severe, because unconscious, satires upon the deity of theology. The
sentence of the deity, or of the sadly deified Jesus, once uttered
cannot be revoked; but the human heart is no such victim of its own
egotism or passionate impulse. Thus, Kuhn (2, 32) mentions the belief
in Westphalia that the Jew may obtain a night’s repose if there be left
in a field two harrows with the teeth downward. If one wishes to do
the god-like thing he must leave the teeth of his harrow upward; then
the Jew must wander on. In some other regions of Germany (Wüttke, 759)
the Jew can find rest at any place where two oaks grow together in
such a way as to form a cross. In Oldenburg it is said he can rest from
the middle of May to the end of July, which is also the time when the
Wild Huntsman may find repose. An old Metz picture shows the Jew with
Wodan’s flying hair and mantle, but with a kindly countenance. It is
only in a recent instance that anything diabolical has been associated
with him pictorially, this being in a Lorraine engraving of 1842, where
he has the hat and feather of Fra Diavolo.
There is a tone of pity in the old verses which spread abroad the fable
in Flanders, and has thence gone through many lands as _The Wandering
Jew’s Complaint_, though with many variations. I find them quoted in
Mr. Hoffman’s book, referred to elsewhere. The burgesses of Brabant
address the Wanderer:
“We used to think your story
Was but an idle dream;
But when thus wan and hoary
And broken down you seem,
The sight can not deceive
And we the tale believe.
“Are you that man of sorrow
Of whom our authors write--
Grief comes with every morrow,
And wretchedness at night;
Oh, let us know are you
Isaac, the Wandering Jew?
“Then he replied, ‘Believe me,
I suffer bitter woe;
Incessant travels grieve me--
No rest’s for me below;
A respite I have never,
But onward MARCH forever!
“’Twas by my rash behaviour
I wrought this fearful scathe:
As Christ our Lord and Saviour
Was passing to the grave,
His mild request I spurned,
His gentle pleading scorned.
“A secret force expelled me
That instant from my home,
And since the Doom hath held me
Unceasingly to roam--
But neither day nor night
Must check my onward flight.
“I have no home to hide me,
No wealth can I display;
Yet Unknown Powers provide me
Five farthings every day;
This always is my store,
’Tis never less nor more.’”
I may here mention an extremely important work, _Histoire de l’Imagerie
Populaire, par Champfleury_ (Paris: Dentu, 1869), which contains
a number of pictures taken from the old ballads and folk-books
concerning the Wandering Jew. The early pictures represent the Jew
as a man of noble form, and generally of a handsome and melancholy
countenance. The only picture in the volume which betrays anti-Jewish
feeling is a modern one from Sweden (where the Wandering Jew is still
believed in), which represents him in semi-caricature, carrying
top-boots at his back. In most of the pictures the boots worn
constitute a prominent feature. This work of Champfleury is of value
beyond its pictorial representations, on account of the curiosities
which the author has discovered concerning the adventures of the legend
among rustic populations. The author does not give us his authority
for saying that the Wandering Jew appeared in some of the mediæval
miracle-plays, but he shows that he was introduced into a French
ballet, _Mariage de Pierre de Provence et de la belle Maguelonne, dancé
par son Altesse Royale dans la Ville de Tours, le 21, en son Hostel_,
and at Paris in 1638. There may also be found in this work the Breton
ballad of the Wandering Jew, consisting of 180 verses, sung at country
fairs, to the popular air _Güerz, Santez Anna_. This ballad is very
ancient, and much more interesting than that in _Percy’s Reliques_. The
Wanderer calls himself Boudedeo, and tells of the many countries he has
visited. He has always five sous in his pocket, and is never disturbed
by sickness or hunger. The ballad ends,
“Chrétiens, priez Dieu pour le malheureux Boudedeo!”
Champfleury describes a Wissembourg picture which shows a beggar
raising his hat to the Wanderer and the latter drops his five sous into
the beggar’s cap. This incident tells much of the popular sympathy
felt for persons believed to be the doomed man, and is remembered by
Béranger in his poem:
“Plus d’un pauvre vient implorer
Le denier que je puis répandre,
Qui n’a pas le temps de serrer
La main qu’au passant j’aime à tendre.”
Champfleury remarks that, in popular belief, it was always for
inhumanity that Ahasuerus was punished; and the meaning of this
Wissembourg picture is that as he was punished for lack of charity,
he is saved by his charity. The picture shows a citizen giving the
Wanderer a glass of beer. It is all a lesson of humanity, but is
pictured on a background of such inhumanity on the part of Christ, that
Ahasuerus, giving away his sous, seems to have taken the place in human
sympathy of the Jew who cursed him.
Dr. Coremans, in his _Bulletin de la Commission royale d’histoire de
Belgique_ (X., No. 1) says that most of the Belgian villages have their
legend of the passage of the Wandering Jew through them, and that there
is a general notion that he rejuvenates old women.
The Man in the Moon with his thornbush--if, as some think, he
represents the doom of a Jew, who picked up fire-wood on the Sabbath,
doomed to go on picking up sticks forever, and be bayed at by Gabriel’s
hounds--might typify the shrivelling up in English folk-lore of the
great myths of earthly immortals, including Ahasuerus.
Mr. William Henderson gives the following example from the
North-country: “An old woman of the North Riding once asked a friend of
mine whether it was wrong to wash on Good Friday. ‘I used to do so,’
she said, ‘and thought no harm of it, till once, when I was hanging
out my clothes, a young woman passed by (a dressmaker she was, and a
Methodist); and she reproved me, and told me this story. While our Lord
Jesus was being led to Calvary, they took him past a woman who was
washing, and the woman “blirted” the thing she was washing in his face;
on which he said, “Cursed be everyone who hereafter shall wash on this
day!” And never again,’ added the old woman, ‘have I washed on Good
Friday.’ Now it is said in Cleveland that clothes washed and hung out
to dry on Good Friday will become spotted with blood; but the Methodist
girl’s wild legend reminds me more of one which a relation of mine
elicited from a poor Devonshire shoemaker. She was remonstrating with
him for his indolence and want of spirit, when he astonished her by
replying, ‘Don’t ’ee be hard on me. We shoemakers are a poor slobbering
race, and so have been ever since the curse that Jesus Christ laid on
us.’ ‘And what was that?’ she asked. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘when they were
carrying him to the cross, they passed a shoemaker’s bench, and the
man looked up and spat at him; and the Lord turned and said, “A poor
slobbering fellow shalt thou be, and all shoemakers after thee, for
what thou hast done to me.”’”[38]
Such, by the blessing of Protestantism, is the outcome of the great
legends of Veronica and Ahasuerus! Tithonus, outliving his time, is
changed to a grasshopper. Another instance of the chirpings to which
great myths are reduced may be heard from our above-mentioned “Seven
Whistlers,” of which ingenious use is made by the authoress of “That
Lass o’ Lowrie.” Mr. James Pearson contributed to “Notes and Queries”
(September 30, 1871) the following: “One evening, a few years ago, when
crossing one of our Lancashire moors, in company with an intelligent
old man, we were suddenly startled by the whistling overhead of a
covey of plovers. My companion remarked that when a boy the old people
considered such a circumstance a bad omen, ‘as the person who heard
_the Wandering Jews_’--as he called the plovers--‘was sure to be
overtaken with some ill luck.’ On questioning my friend on the name
given to the birds, he said, ‘There is a tradition that they contain
the souls of those Jews who assisted at the crucifixion, and in
consequence were doomed to float in the air forever.’ When we arrived
at the foot of the moor, a coach, by which I had hoped to complete my
journey, had already left its station thereby causing me to finish the
distance on foot. The old man reminded me of the omen.”
This superstition is connected with the Gabriel-hounds, believed in
Yorkshire to be human-headed dogs, or sky-yelpers, as Wordsworth calls
them. That poet tells of an aged peasant--
“With ample sovereignity of eye and ear;
Rich were his walks with supernatural cheer;
He the seven birds hath seen that never part,
Seen the Seven Whistlers on their nightly rounds,
And counted them! And oftentimes will start,
For overhead are sweeping Gabriel’s hounds,
Doomed with their impious lord the flying hart
To chase for ever on aërial grounds.”