prosperity that was high enough to attract attention. Poly- CHAP. I. crates is the typical victim of such Nemesis: cast off by his firmest ally for no offence but an unbroken career of good luck, in the reaction from which his ally feared to be involved; essaying as a forlorn hope to propitiate by voluntarily throwing in the sea his richest crown-jewel; recognising when this was restored by fishermen that heaven had refused his sacrifice, and abandoning himself to his fate in despair. But Nemesis, to the moral sense of antiquity, could go even beyond visitation on innocent prosperity, and goodness itself could be carried to a degree that invited divine reaction. Heroes like Lycurgus and Pentheus perished for excess of temperance; and the ancient Drama startles the modern reader with an Hippolytus, whose passionate purity brought down on him a destruction prophesied beforehand by those to whom religious duty suggested moderate indulgence in lust.

Such malignant correction of human inequalities is not Modern a function to harmonise with modern conceptions of Deity. conception: artistic Yet the Greek notion of Nemesis has an element of per- connection between sin manency in it, for it represents a principle underlying human and retrilife. It suggests a sort of elasticity in human experience, a bution. tendency to rebound from a strain; this is the equilibrium of the moral world, the force which resists departure from the normal, becoming greater in proportion as departure from the normal is wider. Thus in commercial speculation there is a safe medium certain to bring profit in the long run; in social ambition there is a certain rise though slow: if a man hurries to be rich, or seeks to rise in public life by leaps and bounds, the spectator becomes aware of a secret force that has been set in motion, as when the equilibrium of physical bodies has been disturbed, which force threatens to drag the aspirant down to the point from which he started, or to

CHAP. I. but if it be crowned with the expected fall the whole is recognised as 'Nemesis.' This Nemesis is deeply embedded in the popular mind and repeatedly crops up in its proverbial wisdom. Proverbs like 'Grasp all, lose all,' 'When things come to the worst they are sure to mend,' exactly express moral equilibrium, and the 'golden mean' is its proverbial formula. The saying 'too much of a good thing' suggests that the Nemesis on departures from the golden. mean applies to good things as well as bad; while the principle is made to apply even to the observation of the golden mean itself in the proverb 'Nothing venture, nothing have.' Nevertheless, this side of the whole notion has in modern usage fallen into the background in comparison with another aspect of Nemesis. The grand distinction of modern thought is the predominance in it of moral ideas: they colour even its imagination; and if the Greeks carried their art-sense into morals, modern instincts have carried morals into art. In particular the speculations raised by Christianity have cast the shadow of Sin over the whole universe. It has been said that the conception of Sin is unknown to the ancients, and that the word has no real equivalent in Latin or Classical Greek. The modern mind is haunted by it. Notions of Sip have invaded art, and Nemesis shows their influence: vague conceptions of some supernatural vindication of artístic proportion in life have now crystallised into the interest of watching morals and art united in their treatment of Sin. The link between Sin and its retribution becomes a form of art-pleasure; and no dramatic effect is more potent in modern Drama than that which emphasises the principle that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.

Dramatic Nemesis latent in

Now for this dramatic effect of Nemesis it would be difficult to find a story promising more scope than the Story Lof the Cruel Iew. It will be seen at once to contain a

victim. The two moreover represent the different conceptions CHAP. I. of Nemesis in the ancient and modern world; Antonio's excess of moral confidence suffers a nemesis of reaction in his humiliation, and Shylock's sin of judicial murder finds a nemesis of retribution in his ruin by process of law. The nemesis, it will be observed, is not merely two-fold, but double in the way that a double flower is distinct from two flowers: it is a nemesis on a nemesis; the nemesis which visits Antonio's fault is the crime for which Shylock suffers his nemesis. Again, in that which gives artistic character to the reaction and the retribution the two nemeses differ. Let St. Paul put the difference for us: 'Some men's sins are evident, going before unto judgment; and some they follow after.' So in cases like that of Shylock the nemesis is interesting from its very obviousness and the impatience with which we look for it; in the case of Antonio the nemesis is striking for the very opposite reason, that he of all men seemed most secure against it.

of Sur

Antonio must be understood as a perfect character: for Antonio; we must read the play in the light of its age, and intolerance perfection and selfwas a mediæval virtue. But there is no single good quality sufficiency, the Nemesis that does not carry with it its special temptation, and the sum of them all, or perfection, has its shadow in self- prise. sufficiency. It is so with Antonio. Of all national types of character the Roman is the most self-sufficient, alike incorruptible by temptation and independent of the softer influences of life: we find that 'Roman honour' is the iii. ii. 297. idea which Antonio's friends are accustomed to associate with him. Further the dramatist contrives to exhibit Antonio to us in circumstances calculated to bring out this drawback to his perfection. In the opening scene we see the dignified merchant-prince suffering under the infliction of frivolous visitors, to which his friendship with the young nobleman exposes him: his tone throughout the interview is

CHAP. I. are felt rather as what is due to himself than what is due to those on whom they are bestowed. When Salarino makes i. i. 60-64. flattering excuses for taking his leave, Antonio replies, first with conventional compliment,

i. i. 8.

i. i. 41.

Your worth is very dear in my regard,

and then with blunt plainness, as if Salarino were not worth
the trouble of keeping up polite fiction:

I take it, your own business calls on you
And you embrace the occasion to depart.

The visitors, trying to find explanation for Antonio's serious-
ness, suggest that he is thinking of his vast commercial
speculations; Antonio draws himself up :

Believe me, no: I thank my fortune for it,
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year:

Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.

Antonio is saying in his prosperity that he shall never be moved. But the great temptation to self-sufficiency lies in his contact, not with social inferiors, but with a moral out[cast such as Shylock: confident that the moral gulf between the two can never be bridged over, Antonio has violated dignity as well as mercy in the gross insults he has heaped upon the Jew whenever they have met. In the Bond Scene we see him unable to restrain his insults at the very moment in which he is soliciting a favour from his enemy; the effect i. iii. 107- reaches a climax as Shylock gathers up the situation in a

i. iii. 99,

&c.

130.

single speech, reviewing the insults and taunting his op

pressor with the solicited obligation:

Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to, then; you come to me, and you say,
Shylock, we would have moneys': you say so;
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold; moneys is your suit.

taunto that

for a moment our sympathies are transferred to Shylock's CHAP. I. side. But Antonio, so far from taking warning, is betrayed beyond all bounds in his defiance; and in the challenge to fate with which he replies we catch the tone of infatuated confidence, the hybris in which Greek superstition saw the signal for the descent of Nemesis.

I am as like to call thee so again,

To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not

As to thy friends

But lend it rather to thine enemy,

Who, if he break, thou may'st with better face
Exact the penalty.

To this challenge of self-sufficiency the sequel of the story
is the answering Nemesis: the merchant becomes a bank-
rupt, the first citizen of Venice a prisoner at the bar, the
morally perfect man holds his life and his all at the mercy of
the reprobate he thought he might safely insult.

i. iii. 131.

So Nemesis has surprised Antonio in spite of his perfect- Shylock: ness: but the malice of Shylock is such as is perpetually malignant crying for retribution, and the retribution is delayed only Nemesis of that it may descend with accumulated force. In the case of Measure for this second nemesis the Story of the Jew exhibits dramatic Measure. capability in the opportunity it affords for the sin and the retribution to be included within the same scene. Portia's iv. i. happy thought is a turning-point in the Trial Scene on the two sides of which we have the Jew's triumph and the Jew's retribution; the two sides are bound together by the principle of measure for measure, and for each detail of vindictiveness that is developed in the first half of the scene there is a corresponding item of nemesis in the sequel. To begin Charter v. with, Shylock appeals to the charter of the city. It is one of statute. iv. i. 38; the distinctions between written and unwritten law that no compare flagrant injustice can arise out of the latter. If the analogy 102, 219.

of former precedents would seem to threaten such an: