Part 14 (1/2)

It is enough. And if it were not enough, has he not sometimes seen a handkerchief spotted with strawberries in his wife's hand? Yes, it was his first gift to her.

I know not that; but such a handkerchief-- I am sure it was your wife's--did I to-day See Ca.s.sio wipe his beard with.

'If it be that,' he answers--but what need to test the fact? The 'madness of revenge' is in his blood, and hesitation is a thing he never knew. He pa.s.ses judgment, and controls himself only to make his sentence a solemn vow.

The Oth.e.l.lo of the Fourth Act is Oth.e.l.lo in his fall. His fall is never complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the Temptation-scene he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur remains almost undiminished. Even in the following scene (III. iv.), where he goes to test Desdemona in the matter of the handkerchief, and receives a fatal confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation. But in the Fourth Act 'Chaos has come.' A slight interval of time may be admitted here. It is but slight; for it was necessary for Iago to hurry on, and terribly dangerous to leave a chance for a meeting of Ca.s.sio with Oth.e.l.lo; and his insight into Oth.e.l.lo's nature taught him that his plan was to deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to recover from the confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval; and when Oth.e.l.lo reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He is physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed.[100] He sees everything blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago, perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Ca.s.sio has confessed his guilt, Oth.e.l.lo, the hero who has seemed to us only second to Coriola.n.u.s in physical power, trembles all over; he mutters disjointed words; a blackness suddenly intervenes between his eyes and the world; he takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the horror he has just heard,[101] and he falls senseless to the ground.

When he recovers it is to watch Ca.s.sio, as he imagines, laughing over his shame. It is an imposition so gross, and should have been one so perilous, that Iago would never have ventured it before. But he is safe now. The sight only adds to the confusion of intellect the madness of rage; and a ravenous thirst for revenge, contending with motions of infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The delay till night-fall is torture to him. His self-control has wholly deserted him, and he strikes his wife in the presence of the Venetian envoy. He is so lost to all sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths of Ca.s.sio and his wife. An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia; but nothing could convince him now, and there follows the dreadful scene of accusation; and then, to allow us the relief of burning hatred and burning tears, the interview of Desdemona with Iago, and that last talk of hers with Emilia, and her last song.

But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Ca.s.sio (V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Oth.e.l.lo who enters the bed-chamber with the words,

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,

is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has pa.s.sed; a boundless sorrow has taken its place; and

this sorrow's heavenly: It strikes where it doth love.

Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt, these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten pity.[102] And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close.

Chaos has come and gone; and the Oth.e.l.lo of the Council-chamber and the quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and n.o.bler Oth.e.l.lo still. As he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his life--long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice, and now in Cyprus--seem to pa.s.s before us, like the pictures that flash before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in the power of 'love and man's unconquerable mind.'

3

The words just quoted come from Wordsworth's sonnet to Toussaint l'Ouverture. Toussaint was a Negro; and there is a question, which, though of little consequence, is not without dramatic interest, whether Shakespeare imagined Oth.e.l.lo as a Negro or as a Moor. Now I will not say that Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do; but what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Oth.e.l.lo as a black man, and not as a light-brown one.

In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze to which we are now accustomed in the Oth.e.l.los of our theatres is a recent innovation. Down to Edmund Kean's time, so far as is known, Oth.e.l.lo was always quite black. This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration, and it almost settles our question. For it is impossible that the colour of the original Oth.e.l.lo should have been forgotten so soon after Shakespeare's time, and most improbable that it should have been changed from brown to black.

If we turn to the play itself, we find many references to Oth.e.l.lo's colour and appearance. Most of these are indecisive; for the word 'black' was of course used then where we should speak of a 'dark'

complexion now; and even the nickname 'thick-lips,' appealed to as proof that Oth.e.l.lo was a Negro, might have been applied by an enemy to what we call a Moor. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that, if Oth.e.l.lo had been light-brown, Brabantio would have taunted him with having a 'sooty bosom,' or that (as Mr. Furness observes) he himself would have used the words,

her name, that was as fresh As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black As mine own face.

These arguments cannot be met by pointing out that Oth.e.l.lo was of royal blood, is not called an Ethiopian, is called a Barbary horse, and is said to be going to Mauritania. All this would be of importance if we had reason to believe that Shakespeare shared our ideas, knowledge and terms. Otherwise it proves nothing. And we know that sixteenth-century writers called any dark North-African a Moor, or a black Moor, or a blackamoor. Sir Thomas Elyot, according to Hunter,[103] calls Ethiopians Moors; and the following are the first two ill.u.s.trations of 'Blackamoor'

in the Oxford _English Dictionary_: 1547, 'I am a blake More borne in Barbary'; 1548, '_Ethiopo_, a blake More, or a man of Ethiope.' Thus geographical names can tell us nothing about the question how Shakespeare imagined Oth.e.l.lo. He may have known that a Mauritanian is not a Negro nor black, but we cannot a.s.sume that he did. He may have known, again, that the Prince of Morocco, who is described in the _Merchant of Venice_ as having, like Oth.e.l.lo, the complexion of a devil, was no Negro. But we cannot tell: nor is there any reason why he should not have imagined the Prince as a brown Moor and Oth.e.l.lo as a Blackamoor.

_t.i.tus Andronicus_ appeared in the Folio among Shakespeare's works. It is believed by some good critics to be his: hardly anyone doubts that he had a hand in it: it is certain that he knew it, for reminiscences of it are scattered through his plays. Now no one who reads _t.i.tus Andronicus_ with an open mind can doubt that Aaron was, in our sense, black; and he appears to have been a Negro. To mention nothing else, he is twice called 'coal-black'; his colour is compared with that of a raven and a swan's legs; his child is coal-black and thick-lipped; he himself has a 'fleece of woolly hair.' Yet he is 'Aaron the Moor,' just as Oth.e.l.lo is 'Oth.e.l.lo the Moor.' In the _Battle of Alcazar_ (Dyce's _Peele_, p. 421) Muly the Moor is called 'the negro'; and Shakespeare himself in a single line uses 'negro' and 'Moor' of the same person (_Merchant of Venice_, III. v. 42).

The horror of most American critics (Mr. Furness is a bright exception) at the idea of a black Oth.e.l.lo is very amusing, and their arguments are highly instructive. But they were antic.i.p.ated, I regret to say, by Coleridge, and we will hear him. 'No doubt Desdemona saw Oth.e.l.lo's visage in his mind; yet, as we are const.i.tuted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated.'[104] Could any argument be more self-destructive? It actually _did_ appear to Brabantio 'something monstrous to conceive' his daughter falling in love with Oth.e.l.lo,--so monstrous that he could account for her love only by drugs and foul charms. And the suggestion that such love would argue 'disproportionateness' is precisely the suggestion that Iago _did_ make in Desdemona's case:

Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank, Foul _disproportion_, thoughts unnatural.

In fact he spoke of the marriage exactly as a filthy-minded cynic now might speak of the marriage of an English lady to a negro like Toussaint. Thus the argument of Coleridge and others points straight to the conclusion against which they argue.

But this is not all. The question whether to Shakespeare Oth.e.l.lo was black or brown is not a mere question of isolated fact or historical curiosity; it concerns the character of Desdemona. Coleridge, and still more the American writers, regard her love, in effect, as Brabantio regarded it, and not as Shakespeare conceived it. They are simply blurring this glorious conception when they try to lessen the distance between her and Oth.e.l.lo, and to smooth away the obstacle which his 'visage' offered to her romantic pa.s.sion for a hero. Desdemona, the 'eternal womanly' in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint, radiant with that heavenly purity of heart which men wors.h.i.+p the more because nature so rarely permits it to themselves, had no theories about universal brotherhood, and no phrases about 'one blood in all the nations of the earth' or 'barbarian, Scythian, bond and free'; but when her soul came in sight of the n.o.blest soul on earth, she made nothing of the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took part with it, and 'loved him with the love which was her doom.' It was not prudent. It even turned out tragically. She met in life with the reward of those who rise too far above our common level; and we continue to allot her the same reward when we consent to forgive her for loving a brown man, but find it monstrous that she should love a black one.[105]

There is perhaps a certain excuse for our failure to rise to Shakespeare's meaning, and to realise how extraordinary and splendid a thing it was in a gentle Venetian girl to love Oth.e.l.lo, and to a.s.sail fortune with such a 'downright violence and storm' as is expected only in a hero. It is that when first we hear of her marriage we have not yet seen the Desdemona of the later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive how astonis.h.i.+ng this love and boldness must have been in a maiden so quiet and submissive. And when we watch her in her suffering and death we are so penetrated by the sense of her heavenly sweetness and self-surrender that we almost forget that she had shown herself quite as exceptional in the active a.s.sertion of her own soul and will. She tends to become to us predominantly pathetic, the sweetest and most pathetic of Shakespeare's women, as innocent as Miranda and as loving as Viola, yet suffering more deeply than Cordelia or Imogen. And she seems to lack that independence and strength of spirit which Cordelia and Imogen possess, and which in a manner raises them above suffering. She appears pa.s.sive and defenceless, and can oppose to wrong nothing but the infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not how to resist or resent. She thus becomes at once the most beautiful example of this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare's world. If her part were acted by an artist equal to Salvini, and with a Salvini for Oth.e.l.lo, I doubt if the spectacle of the last two Acts would not be p.r.o.nounced intolerable.

Of course this later impression of Desdemona is perfectly right, but it must be carried back and united with the earlier before we can see what Shakespeare imagined. Evidently, we are to understand, innocence, gentleness, sweetness, lovingness were the salient and, in a sense, the princ.i.p.al traits in Desdemona's character. She was, as her father supposed her to be,

a maiden never bold, Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion Blushed at herself.