I will take a typical case, which sums up the whole of this absurd fashion.  There was a controversy in the columns of an important daily paper, some time ago, on the subject of the character of Shylock in Shakespeare.  Actors and authors of distinction, including some of the most brilliant of living Jews, argued the matter from the most varied points of view.  Some said that Shakespeare was prevented by the prejudices of his time from having a complete sympathy with Shylock.  Some said that Shakespeare was only restrained by fear of the powers of his time from expressing his complete sympathy with Shylock.  Some wondered how or why Shakespeare had got hold of such a queer story as that of the pound of flesh, and what it could possibly have to do with so dignified and intellectual a character as Shylock.  In short, some wondered why a man of genius should be so much of an Anti-Semite, and some stoutly declared that he must have been a Pro-Semite.  But all of them in a sense admitted that they were puzzled as to what the play was about.  The correspondence filled column after column and went on for weeks.  And from one end of that correspondence to the other, no human being even so much as mentioned the word “usury.”  It is exactly as if twenty clever critics were set down to talk for a month about the play of Macbeth, and were all strictly forbidden to mention the word “murder.”

The play called The Merchant of Venice happens to be about usury, and its story is a medieval satire on usury.  It is the fashion to say that it is a clumsy and grotesque story; but as a fact it is an exceedingly good story.  It is a perfect and pointed story for its purpose, which is to convey the moral of the story.  And the moral is that the logic of usury is in its nature at war with life, and might logically end in breaking into the bloody house of life.  In other words, if a creditor can always claim a man’s tools or a man’s home, he might quite as justly claim one of his arms or legs.  This principle was not only embodied in medieval satires but in very sound medieval laws, which set a limit on the usurer who was trying to take away a man’s livelihood, as the usurer in the play is trying to take away a man’s life.  And if anybody thinks that usury can never go to lengths wicked enough to be worthy of so wild an image, then that person either knows nothing about it or knows too much.  He is either one of the innocent rich who have never been the victims of money-lenders, or else one of the more powerful and influential rich who are money-lenders themselves.

All this, I say, is a fact that must be faced, but there is another side to the case, and it is this that the genius of Shakespeare discovered.  What he did do, and what the medieval satirist did not do, was to attempt to understand Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylock the money-lender, as he sympathised with Macbeth the murderer.  It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but