Part 13 (1/2)

The issues thus raised ought not to be ignored or impatiently dismissed, but they cannot be decided, it seems to me, by argument. All we can profitably do is to consider narrowly our experience, and to ask ourselves this question: If we feel these objections, do we feel them when we are reading the play with all our force, or only when we are reading it in a half-hearted manner? For, however matters may stand in the former case, in the latter case evidently the fault is ours and not Shakespeare's. And if we try the question thus, I believe we shall find that on the whole the fault is ours. The first, and least important, of the three pa.s.sages--that of the blow--seems to me the most doubtful. I confess that, do what I will, I cannot reconcile myself with it. It seems certain that the blow is by no means a tap on the shoulder with a roll of paper, as some actors, feeling the repulsiveness of the pa.s.sage, have made it. It must occur, too, on the open stage. And there is not, I think, a sufficiently overwhelming tragic feeling in the pa.s.sage to make it bearable. But in the other two scenes the case is different. There, it seems to me, if we fully imagine the inward tragedy in the souls of the persons as we read, the more obvious and almost physical sensations of pain or horror do not appear in their own likeness, and only serve to intensify the tragic feelings in which they are absorbed. Whether this would be so in the murder-scene if Desdemona had to be imagined as dragged about the open stage (as in some modern performances) may be doubtful; but there is absolutely no warrant in the text for imagining this, and it is also quite clear that the bed where she is stifled was within the curtains,[92] and so, presumably, in part concealed.

Here, then, _Oth.e.l.lo_ does not appear to be, unless perhaps at one point,[93] open to criticism, though it has more pa.s.sages than the other three tragedies where, if imagination is not fully exerted, it is shocked or else sensationally excited. If nevertheless we feel it to occupy a place in our minds a little lower than the other three (and I believe this feeling, though not general, is not rare), the reason lies not here but in another characteristic, to which I have already referred,--the comparative confinement of the imaginative atmosphere.

_Oth.e.l.lo_ has not equally with the other three the power of dilating the imagination by vague suggestions of huge universal powers working in the world of individual fate and pa.s.sion. It is, in a sense, less 'symbolic.' We seem to be aware in it of a certain limitation, a partial suppression of that element in Shakespeare's mind which unites him with the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers. In one or two of his plays, notably in _Troilus and Cressida_, we are almost painfully conscious of this suppression; we feel an intense intellectual activity, but at the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as though some power in his soul, at once the highest and the sweetest, were for a time in abeyance. In other plays, notably in the _Tempest_, we are constantly aware of the presence of this power; and in such cases we seem to be peculiarly near to Shakespeare himself. Now this is so in _Hamlet_ and _King Lear_, and, in a slighter degree, in _Macbeth_; but it is much less so in _Oth.e.l.lo_. I do not mean that in _Oth.e.l.lo_ the suppression is marked, or that, as in _Troilus and Cressida_, it strikes us as due to some unpleasant mood; it seems rather to follow simply from the design of a play on a contemporary and wholly mundane subject. Still it makes a difference of the kind I have attempted to indicate, and it leaves an impression that in _Oth.e.l.lo_ we are not in contact with the whole of Shakespeare. And it is perhaps significant in this respect that the hero himself strikes us as having, probably, less of the poet's personality in him than many characters far inferior both as dramatic creations and as men.

2

The character of Oth.e.l.lo is comparatively simple, but, as I have dwelt on the prominence of intrigue and accident in the play, it is desirable to show how essentially the success of Iago's plot is connected with this character. Oth.e.l.lo's description of himself as

one not easily jealous, but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme,

is perfectly just. His tragedy lies in this--that his whole nature was indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to deception, and, if once wrought to pa.s.sion, likely to act with little reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.

Let me first set aside a mistaken view. I do not mean the ridiculous notion that Oth.e.l.lo was jealous by temperament, but the idea, which has some little plausibility, that the play is primarily a study of a n.o.ble barbarian, who has become a Christian and has imbibed some of the civilisation of his employers, but who retains beneath the surface the savage pa.s.sions of his Moorish blood and also the suspiciousness regarding female chast.i.ty common among Oriental peoples, and that the last three Acts depict the outburst of these original feelings through the thin crust of Venetian culture. It would take too long to discuss this idea,[94] and it would perhaps be useless to do so, for all arguments against it must end in an appeal to the reader's understanding of Shakespeare. If he thinks it is like Shakespeare to look at things in this manner; that he had a historical mind and occupied himself with problems of 'Culturgeschichte'; that he laboured to make his Romans perfectly Roman, to give a correct view of the Britons in the days of Lear or Cymbeline, to portray in Hamlet a stage of the moral consciousness not yet reached by the people around him, the reader will also think this interpretation of _Oth.e.l.lo_ probable. To me it appears hopelessly un-Shakespearean. I could as easily believe that Chaucer meant the Wife of Bath for a study of the peculiarities of Somersets.h.i.+re. I do not mean that Oth.e.l.lo's race is a matter of no account. It has, as we shall presently see, its importance in the play.

It makes a difference to our idea of him; it makes a difference to the action and catastrophe. But in regard to the essentials of his character it is not important; and if anyone had told Shakespeare that no Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.

Oth.e.l.lo is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence--almost as if from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men of royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn in Aleppo.

And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet; but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet.

Indeed, if one recalls Oth.e.l.lo's most famous speeches--those that begin, 'Her father loved me,' 'O now for ever,' 'Never, Iago,' 'Had it pleased Heaven,' 'It is the cause,' 'Behold, I have a weapon,' 'Soft you, a word or two before you go'--and if one places side by side with these speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that Oth.e.l.lo is the greatest poet of them all. There is the same poetry in his casual phrases--like 'These nine moons wasted,' 'Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,' 'You chaste stars,' 'It is a sword of Spain, the ice-brook's temper,' 'It is the very error of the moon'--and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever since have been taken as the absolute expression, like

If it were now to die, 'Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear, My soul hath her content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate,

or

If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself.

I'll not believe it;

or

No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand,

or

But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!

or

O thou weed, Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born.

And this imagination, we feel, has accompanied his whole life. He has watched with a poet's eye the Arabian trees dropping their med'cinable gum, and the Indian throwing away his chance-found pearl; and has gazed in a fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rus.h.i.+ng, never to return, to the Propontic and the h.e.l.lespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt (for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride, pomp, and circ.u.mstance of glorious war.

So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave, self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils, hards.h.i.+ps and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth, proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unelated by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and all rebellion from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as any pa.s.sage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness and his imagination with ecstasy. For there is no love, not that of Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Oth.e.l.lo's.

The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by the story. In the first place, Oth.e.l.lo's mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is ignorant of European women.

In the second place, for all his dignity and ma.s.sive calm (and he has greater dignity than any other of Shakespeare's men), he is by nature full of the most vehement pa.s.sion. Shakespeare emphasises his self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the First Act, but by references to the past. Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims:

Is this the n.o.ble Moor whom our full Senate Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature Whom pa.s.sion could not shake? whose solid virtue The shot of accident nor dart of chance Could neither graze nor pierce?

Iago, who has here no motive for lying, asks: