"
from the earliest records of history; personal injury in the defeat of
his usurious prospects of gain; and personal insult in the unmanly
treatment to which Antonio had subjected him. However excessive in
degree, his hatred is undoubtedly shown to have a perfectly
comprehensible, if not adequate cause and nature, and is a _reasonable_
hatred, except from such a moral point of view as allows of none.

An audience can therefore tolerate him with mitigated disgust through
the opening portions of the play. When, however, in the grand climax of
the trial scene Shakespeare intends that he shall be no longer tolerated
or tolerable, but condemned alike by his Venetian judges and his English
audience, he carefully avoids putting into his mouth any one of the
reasons with which in the opening of the play he explains and justifies
his hatred. He does not make him quote the centuries-old Hebrew scorn of
and aversion to the Gentiles, nor the merchant's interference with his
commercial speculations, nor the man's unprovoked spitting at, spurning,
and abuse of him; but he will and _can_ give _no_ reason for his
abhorrence of Antonio, whom he says he _loathes_ with the inexplicable
revulsion of nature that certain men feel toward certain animals; and
the mastery of the poet shows itself in thus making Shylock's cruelty
monstrous, and accounting for it as an abnormal monstrosity.

Hatred that has a reasonable cause may cease with its removal. Supposing
Antonio to have become a converted Jew, or to have withdrawn all
opposition to Shylock's usury and compensated him largely for the losses
he had caused him by it, and to have expressed publicly, with the utmost
humility, contrition for his former insults and sincere promises of
future honor, respect, and reverence, it is possible to imagine Shylock
relenting in a hatred of which the reasons he assigned for it no longer
existed. But from the moment he says he has _no_ reason for his hatred
other than the insuperable disgust and innate enmity of an antagonistic
nature--the deadly, sickening, physical loathing that in rare instances
affects certain human beings toward others of their species, and toward
certain animals--then there are no calculable bounds to the ferocity of
such a blind instinct, no possibility of mitigating, by considerations
of reflection or feeling, an inherent, integral element of a morbid
organization. And Shakespeare, in giving this aspect to the last
exhibition of