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you meaningless or rather it angers you.

The methods that poets show in dealing with fact and truth where these obstruct or oppress, form an instructive page., Tennyson, full of the scientific spirit, made gracious submission or forgot them; Shelley railed against them, and affection came to him in the stress of battle as Thetis came to Achilles; Shakespeare put a great many hateful facts into his Iagos, etc., and into Falstaff - each time with a kind of laughter touched with pity for Falstaff, and with anger and pity also for Iago, since affection has a quality all its own by which it defies the moralist.

Intellect and the senses and temperance: there is yet another sign of the true poet-fantasy. Though a poet should not deny, or yet submit to fact, why should he not imagine a paradise in which with conscious and deliberate purpose facts are rearranged and the world's laws turned topsy-turvy so as to give fair play to the life of the affections? Yet, even here, neither the poet nor his readers can permit themselves to be deceived. It is part of my enjoyment of Virgil to know that Venus, when she talks with Æneas and gives her mothercounsel, is not really a young girl of nineteen, or in fact Venus at all, for it is honest fantasy and deception practised with my eyes open and the poet and I coöperate; but at other times I expect the poet to think straight, neither deceiving nor being deceived.

Tennyson and Wordsworth and the rest had little fantasy, their respect for fact and the laws of truth kept them locked up fast in their prison. That is why they could not write drama; drama which, of the right kind, is all fantasy and dream and the licensed extravagance of the freed imagination.

January 19, 1916.

When a poet writes with high enthusiasm for duty and moral ideas and 'uplift,' he loses all his royal liberty of choice and becomes a slave and the eloquent servant of his age: Wordsworth, for instance. I find that in reading Wordsworth I have always made a practice quite unconsciously of hurrying over the ethical part and read with attention only certain things said, as it were, accidentally or incidentally in these great and muchadmired passages. I used to think that this was a fault in myself, and that I ought to have responded when I did not respond. I now know differently; the poet in me was offended. I would not have humanity, which has come into all its rights by virtue of poetry, speak with this artificial and ashamed kind of speech.

Browning is a great sinner after this fashion; he is always an ethical fellow, and he is popular because he persuades people that he likes it, and that everyone ought to like it. That line of Wordsworth's Ode to Duty, 'Stern daughter of the voice of God,' is merely Old Testament rhetoric. You cannot put the Ten Commandments into poetry any more than you could the fifth Proposition of Euclid. Wailing and lamentation and anger at hard necessity as of a spirit in exile is poetry, and it is that of the great masters. Man should be free as everything should be free, and must abate none of his pretentions. That is the creed of poetry. Wordsworth and such like are slaves, and their language is that of slaves namely, rhetoric. They are not uttering themselves, they are preaching and exhorting their fellow slaves and flattering their masters. To read Wordsworth is to sink back into willing captivity and pride.

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September 20, 1917.

I believe that the future of poetry will concern itself more and more with psychology. We are becoming tremendously interested in each other and in the drama of life. We used to divide people into the sheep and the goats, and that ended it. We are now all abroad in the world of speculation, and we look to the poets, for we want not merely to know. We can leave knowledge to the men of science. We want to feel or, rather - since we do feel, as is shown by the passionate interest, almost too great for endurance, with which we watch in the newspapers, and in novels and stories, the fate of sinners and their disastrous histories - we look to the poets that they may, by some 'heavenly alchemy' touch these feelings so as to make them creative and not as now a mere barrenness and an exhaustion.

Of late I have been constantly reading Spenser's Faerie Queene, and I feel that he was intensely interested in psychology, and that he accepted none of the conventions. In appearance he did so, but not in reality.

January 10, 1917.

Poetry is the champion and the voice of the inner man. Had we not this champion to speak for us in the gate, externality would swamp the world, and nothing would be heard but the noise of its machinery, of its wheels and pulleys and their deafening uproar, and in its loneliness the inner man would be almost extinct, not entirely so since he is one of the immortals.

We profess to represent the whole of the inner man, and we give only part of it. Even Tennyson enervates and the American poets, except when they take to shouting with Whitman, seem to have no other object than the joys of a pensive enervation. To read much

in them is to experience a sudden loss of dignity and courage. With them I contrast Blake, in whom I find all that delights in the poets that enervate, but my dignity does not suffer, and my energies are not weakened. Though there is much sounding of the trumpet, the flute notes are not lost, but are there all the time with their penetrating sweetness, and the whole man rejoices. I do not complain of any violent assault being made on me by these other poets, that is not their way, but I am drugged with some pleasant opiate; and these poets themselves are aware of it, for thence comes their predilection for the shouting Whitman.

Meantime, here we have this external world. It is impossible for me to do justice in words to its power and splendor. It has captured G. B. Shaw so that he can see nothing else, and all the newspapers work for it, partly that they are in its pay but chiefly that they love it. Now the machinery of this vast and intricate world is driven by the animal in man-this blinded animal, strong and blind as Samson, toils mightily in the mills, and G. B. Shaw and everyone else tells us that they are the mills of God. And perhaps they are-I know not except that we cannot or will not do without them; yet I and those of us who have not been like Samson, blinded, will not work in them. All this terrible unrest, those anarchists and socialists, are part of this world, and a sign that matters are not going very smoothly in these 'Mills of God' among these blinded people.

As to Whitman, no doubt he does not enervate; he only deceives, filling his readers with a kind of windy conceit of themselves, so that windy conceit is now accepted among the cardinal doctrines of a true democracy. Yet he is a great deal more than this, for though he is not the poet, he

is the bard, the prophet (which we are told is not the man who predicts, but the man who speaks out), and he is emphatically the voice and the champion of the man, occupied with externality. If Rachel, bereaved of her children and refusing to be comforted because they are not, could be induced to go forth and rouse all bereaved mothers to listen to her voice and share her thoughts, she would have been their bard and the bard of all bereaved motherhood. Had she been left to The Irish Statesman

her own sorrow and to a loneliness into which no one else could enter, not God himself, and had the gift of utterance been bestowed upon her, she would have become for all time the poet of bereaved mothers.

Well, I do not know how to say what I would say, but I remember Blake's doggerel: ‘A picture should be like a lawyer presenting a writ,' and Bacon wrote that it is not enough that a thing be beautiful, it must be wonderful.

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A NEW SHYLOCK

BY W. L. COURTNEY

MR. MAURICE MOSCOVITCH's signal success as Shylock at the Court Theatre has, I see, raised all the old controversies concerning the character of the Jew and his behavior in The Merchant of Venice. Two things always astonish one in Shakespeare's treatment of this much-discussed play. The first is his knowledge of Italy, and the second is his appreciation of certain aspects in the Jewish character. Gobbo, for instance, is a genuine Venetian name; and Shakespeare also knew that the Exchange was held on the Rialto Island. And the other passage which seems to indicate that our Elizabethan dramatist had a personal acquaintance with the city of lagoons is the directions given by Portia to her servant Balthasar with an important message to Padua, bidding him ride quickly and meet her at 'the common ferry which trades to Venice.' Such intimate acquaintance with the topography of the place would only belong to a man who had seen with his own eyes at least, it is argued some of the scenes which he depicted.

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But the really marvelous thing is Shakespeare's knowledge of the Jewish character. One would have thought that such a study was impossible in England, for no Jews were permitted by law to reside here since their expulsion, which was begun in the time of Richard Cœur de Lion and completed in 1290. It was not till Cromwell's time that the embargo was removed. In Venice about this time there were more than 1,100 Jews. Ben Jonson, in the fourth act of his Volpone, tells us that the first procedure of a traveler who arrived in Venice was to rent apartments, and his second to apply to a Jew dealer for the furniture.

In this way some opportunity would be offered, which was wholly lacking in England, of studying Jewish idiosyncrasies, and that is sometimes urged as another reason why Shakespeare must have visited Italy.

What Shakespeare has done in The Merchant of Venice is precisely what a number of enthusiasts do with regard to famous or infamous characters like Nero or Richard III. He has accepted the facts at their face value and has sought to go beneath them to discover the real lineaments of humanity buried under a mountain of prejudice. The ordinary Elizabethan regarded the Jew as an outcast, as a man capable of a variety of different crimes, as a usurer at an exorbitant interest, as an enemy of the human race, only of value to necessitous noblemen and others who could extract from him some of his ill-gotten wealth. We may be sure that the sympathies of an Elizabethan audience were entirely with Antonio, with Gratiano, with Bassanio, and they would not think to criticize the extraordinary injustice with which Shylock was treated, and the sad lack of good breeding among his persecutors.

Bassanio, who goes out of his way to assure Portia that he is a gentleman, is a man whose primary desire to marry the lady of his choice is based on the fact that she could relieve him of his debts. Gratiano in the Court scene is an amusing and worthless little cad, no more and no less; while it is the solemn and dignified Antonio who decides that part of Shylock's punishment must be his conversion to Christianity. Conversions of this kind could hardly have been considered very serious matters if Lorenzo and Jessica and Launcelot could make a jest of the future that awaited Jessica now that she had abjured her father's tenets.

Shakespeare has been at work here, as on many other occasions, as a psy

chologist. Was the Jew as black as he was painted? The poet had before him Marlowe's Jew of Malta, a devil incarnate. Barabas is represented at the opening of the play as sitting in his counting-house with piles of gold before him, and reveling in treasures which it takes a soliloquy of some fifty lines to enumerate piece by piece. Barabas is a Jew, a usurer, and, like Shylock, he has a daughter who is in love with a poor Christian, and, again like him, he thirsts for revenge. But he is not a man at all; he is a monster. After his ill-treatment by the Christians he becomes a criminal. He uses his own daughter as an instrument for his revenge, and then poisons her, together with all the nuns in whose cloister she has taken refuge. He talks, at all events in the earlier acts, in the magnificent language of Marlowe; in the later acts he is just a fiend in a fairy tale. And notice that most of his allusions in his speeches, his images and his similes, are drawn from classical archæology.

One of the points which prove how carefully Shakespeare studied the character before him is that he puts in the mouth of Shylock allusions to the Hebraic Scriptures, and lays stress on that quality of the Hebraic nature, which might be at once so useful and so dangerous, a careful adherence to a bond once signed. The Jew is ugly enough, rancorous enough, but he is veritably human. We cannot laugh at him as our Elizabethan forefathers could when he goes mad over his daughter's defection, and gloats over the ruin of Antonio's ships. We listen with something akin to sympathy when he recites his various claims to be a man like other men, to have organs and senses like theirs, to suffer when he is wounded, and secure his revenge when his opportunity comes. And for this reason there attaches to his fig

ure a sort of dignified melancholy, the proud bearing of a man who, whatever might be the conduct of these Christian husbands, knew that he was mentally their superior, and cherished in his heart the memory of his dead wife. The only difficulty is that if we lay too much stress on the humanity of Shylock, and on his claims to our sympathy, we are apt to upset the real balance of the play. For with the Jew treated as a hardly-used martyr the play becomes a tragedy instead of as the fifth act shows us was the author's intention - a joyous comedy with a background of danger and distress.

If Burbage played the Jew with a red wig, and suggested more or less a comic personality, it is quite impossible for any modern actor to do so. The times have changed, the social conditions are wholly different, our interest in psychology leads us to an entirely different plane of study. On November 8, 1879, Henry Irving produced The Merchant of Venice, and gave a presentation of the character of the Jew which made the deepest impression on his contemporaries. He provided a background to the action, which was striking and natural, and yet unobtrusive. Of course, constant attention has been paid by various theatrical managers to the trial scene, and actor after actor has contributed something or other to the fidelity or the dramatic value of the representation.

Henry Irving found something new and striking. He included in the crowd of spectators in the trial scene a knot of eager and highly interested Jews. on them the sentence condemning Shylock to deny his religion fell like a thunderbolt, especially as it was succeeded by an explosion of popular wrath on the part of the Christian spectators as the immediate result of

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