Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/384

370 and those of the civilizations into which it was afterward transplanted. The inadequacy of the treatment which the anecdote has hitherto received is forcibly illustrated by an article in a late number of the "Nineteenth Century," in which Moncure D. Conway essays to unfold the principles lying at its root. Mr. Conway precipitately assumes that it is the product of theological conceptions, and, by confusing it with purely religious Hindoo legends, designed to inculcate the virtue of self-sacrifice, forecloses at the threshold of his inquiry all hope of conducting it to a successful issue.

He regards it as one of the earliest fables concerning the ever-conflicting principles of retaliation and forgiveness. To him Shylock is Indra tearing Vishnu's breast; Elohim demanding Isaac's death; the First Person exacting the Second Person's atoning blood. Antonio stands for the Christ, the forgiver, the sufferer. Antonio suffering for Bassanio is the just suffering for the unjust. The representative figures of the Venetian court-room are only transformations from the flying doves and pursuing hawks, bound victims and exacting deities of ancient mythology. Portia 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. She is made to assume the ermine because, with his wonted felicity, Shakespeare perceived that the genius of this human sentiment, slipping through the technicalities of priest-made law, could be most fitly impersonated by a woman.

Now, while we can not concede the soundness of this interpretation, it is justly entitled to the praise which next to a positive indorsement will be most gratifying to one of Mr. Conway's philosophic turn of mind, that it is so palpably and almost comically unsound as to be perfectly harmless. It so obviously rests upon a systematic belittlement of the essential and exaggeration of the non-essential in the story, that, though interesting reading for all, there is little danger of its misleading any.

The widely diffused story of the bond originated in strictly legal conceptions. It embalms in an excellent state of preservation several interesting phases of early law.

Whether it is the record of an actual occurrence, it is alike immaterial and impossible to determine. Certain it is that both the facts and the law of the case are substantially historical. They precisely represent views concerning contract, criminal liability, and law reform, which, however absurd they may appear to us, have widely prevailed, and must be regarded as characteristic of certain early stages of intellectual development. In the bond itself, as it was regarded by the interested parties, we recognize the substance of the debtor's life-pledging contract which filled so large a place in the commercial economy of ancient societies. As a means of securing the payment of debt, the pledging one's life and the lives of the members of one's family, in the