... Even Iago's assertions are by no means trusted at once; Othello demands proofs, striking, irresistible proofs. It is only when he thinks that he has the evidence clearly in his hands that there first springs forth that jealousy which had hitherto existed but as a germ; being, however, matured by his hot blood, by his excitable feelings, and the glowing power of his imagination, it spreads like wild-fire. . . . But the man who has reasons for being jealous is himself not actually jealous. The nature of the passion consists rather in the fact that it invariably seeks for something where nothing is to be found. The passion of pain and anger about actual infidelity is as justifiable as that excited by any other moral offence committed by the one we love. Nevertheless Othello's pain and rage have externally the appearance of jealousy, partly on account of the vehemence with which he expresses himself, partly because the proofs are as yet proofs only for him, in reality no proofs, or because it is his misfortune to be inexpressibly belied and deceived. . . . ... It is much the same as regards Othello's vindictiveness. In the first place, it is again Iago who testifies to his being of a "loving, noble nature." Now a noble loving person cannot possibly be revengeful; the spirit of revenge, like all other weaknesses, may indeed be in his nature as a germ, but it cannot be one of the fundamental features and motives of his character. . . . In the second place, how forbearing and conciliatory Othello is to Brabantio! Although the latter heaps upon him the severest and most unjust abuse, yet Othello answers him with gentleness and respect. In like manner he bears the mortification of his recall from Cyprus with calmness and resignation. In both cases, we rather perceive a manly pride, a noble dignity such as is usually coupled with true greatness, which, being conscious of its. own worth, overlooks unjust abuse. The seed of revenge shoots forth in his breast only after he is completely estranged from himself. Love and honour are the very founda tions of his life. In Desdemona he has found his own inmost self; in believing her lost, he loses himself, her infidelity makes him untrue to himself. . . . It is only when he supposes that love is lost to him, when he supposes himself betrayed by his wife and his friend, when he is desolate and unable to love any other being, it is then only that, with the blind despair of a shipwrecked man, he clutches hold of the last possession he has kept afloat, his sole remaining property-honour; this, at least, he intends to save for himself. His honour, as he thinks, demands the sacrifice of the lives of Desdemona and Cassio. The ideas of honour in those days, especially in Italy, inevitably required the death of the faithless wife as well as that of the adulterer. Othello therefore regards it as his duty to comply with this requirement, and accordingly it is no lie when he calls himself "an honourable murderer," doing "naught in hate, but all in honour." . . . Common thirst for revenge would have thought only of increasing the sufferings of its victim, of adding to its own satisfaction. But how touching, on the other hand, is Othello's appeal to Desdemona to pray and to confess her sins to Heaven, that he may not kill her soul with her body! Here, at the moment of the most intense excitement, in the desperate mood of a murderer, his love still breaks forth, and we again see the indestructible nobility of his soul. [From Dowden's "Shakspere."*] The tragedy of Othello is the tragedy of a free and lordly creature taken in the toils, and writhing to death. In one of his sonnets Shakspere has spoken of "Some fierce thing replete with too much rage, Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart." Such a fierce thing, made weak by his very strength, is Othello. *Shakspere: a Critical Study of his Mind and Art, by Edward Dowden (2d ed. London, 1876), p. 230 fol. There is a barbaresque grandeur and simplicity about the movements of his soul. He sees things with a large and generous eye, not prying into the curious or the occult. He is a liberal accepter of life, and with a careless magnificence wears about him the ornament of strange experience: memories of "antres vast, and desarts idle, Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven," memories of "disastrous chances, of moving accidents by flood and field." There is something of grand innocence in his loyalty to Venice, by which Mr. Browning was not unaffected when he conceived his Moorish commander, Luria. Othello, a stranger, with tawny skin and fierce traditions in his blood, is fascinated by the grave senate, the nobly ordered life (possessing a certain rich colouring of its own), and the astute intelligence of the City of the Sea.... With this loyalty to Venice, there is also an instinctive turning towards the barbaric glory which he has surrendered. He is the child of royal ancestry: "I fetch my life and being from men of royal siege." All the more joyous on this account it is to devote himself to the service of the State.... The nature of Othello is free and open; he looks on men with a gaze too large and royal to suspect them of malignity and fraud; he is a man 66 not easily jealous :" "My noble Moor Is true of mind, and made of no such baseness As jealous creatures are." He has, however, a sense of his own inefficiency in dealing with the complex and subtle conditions of life in his adopted country. Where all is plain and broad, he relies upon his own judgment and energy. He is a master of simple, commanding action. When, upon the night of Desdemona's departure from her father's house, Brabantio and the officers with torches and weapons meet him, and a tumult seems in evitable, Othello subdues it with the untroubled, large validity of his will: "Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them." But for curious inquiry into complex facts he has no faculty; he loses his bearings; "being wrought upon," he is "perplexed in the extreme." Then, too, his hot Mauritanian blood. mounts quickly to the point of boiling. If he be infected, the poison hurries through his veins, and he rages in his agony. Here upon the one side is material for a future catastrophe. And on the other there is Desdemona's timidity. When she could stand by Othello's side, Desdemona was able to confront her father, and, in presence of the Duke and magnificoes, declare that she would not return to the home she had abandoned. But during Othello's courtship Desdemona had shrunk from any speech upon this matter with Brabantio, and by innocent reserves and little dissemblings had kept him in ignorance of this great event in her history. The Moor had moved her imagination by his strange nobility, his exotic grandeur. But how if afterwards her imagination be excited by some strange terror about her husband? . . . The handkerchief she has lost becomes terrible to her, when Othello, with Oriental rapture into the marvellous, describes its virtues : "there 's magic in the web of it. A sibyl, that had number'd in the world In her prophetic fury sew'd the work; The worms were hallow'd that did breed the silk; Conserv'd of maidens' hearts." * A circumstance which Iago afterwards turns to account against the peace of Othello's mind: "She did deceive her father marrying you; And when she seem'd to shake and fear your looks, She lov'd them most. "Othello. And so she did." For Desdemona, with her smooth, intelligible girl's life in Venice, having at its largest its little pathetic romance of her maid Barbara, with her song of "Willow," here flowed in romance too stupendous, too torrid and alien, to be other than dreadful. Shall we wonder that in her disturbance of mind she trembles to declare to her husband that this talisman could not be found? Underneath the momentary, superficial falsehood remains the constancy and fidelity of her heart; through alarm and shock and surprise and awful alteration of the world her heart never swerves from loyalty to her husband. If she had deceived Brabantio, as in his anger he declares, and if in this matter of the handkerchief she had faltered from the truth, Desdemona atones for these unveracities; not by acquisition of a confident candour-such courageous dealing was impossible for Desdemona-but by one more falsehood, the sacred lie which is murmured by her lips as they grow forever silent : "Emilia. O, who hath done this deed? If the same unknowable force which manifests itself through man manifests itself likewise through the animal world, we might suppose that there were some special affinities between the soul of Othello and the lion of his ancestral desert. Assuredly the same malignant power that lurks in the eye and that fills with venom the fang of the serpent would seem to have brought into existence Iago. "It is the strength of the base element that is so dreadful in the serpent; it is the very omnipotence of the earth. . . . It scarcely breathes with its one lung (the other shrivelled and abortive); it is passive to the sun and shade, and is cold or hot like a stone; yet 'it can outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, outleap the zebra, outwrestle the athlete, and crush the tiger.' It is a divine hieroglyph of the de ... |