Galerie Flechtheim [Contr.]: Der Querschnitt (4.1924)

Rudolf Schlichter (Litho des Malik-Verlags)

LAW ANDTHE
MERCHANT OFVENICE
by
EZRA POUND
■artly as the result of the appalling, bigoted, spinsterly era through
which our immediate forebears persisted; and from which we have so
sporadic, faint, and apparently unavailing a series of hopes to escape;
partly as the result of the tedesco-american system of higher learning
wherein all students are subjugated, utilitarianized, id est, specialized to
the point of knowing nothing save the data contained in the Zeitschrifts
dealing with their particular branch of philology, and defended from
reflecting upon anything therein implied, or connecting it mentally with
anything else whatsoever; we have löst the flavour of a much discussed
Shakespearean play (The Merchant of Venice).
The badwy Elizabethan audience would have needed no foot-notes.
Heinrich Leo, writing between 1820 and 1840 was possibly depre-
cated by his contemporaries; he did not treat history as a series of
barroque and romantic incidents, and in one of his moments of reflection
upon the development of laws and institutions he remarks that: Venice,
in the eighth century plunged actively into the slave trade "and was then
as is Siout in our day, the most important eunuch factory in the world".

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