SCENE I.--_The Wren's Nest.

TIME--_Six_ A.M.

NORTH--TALBOYS--SEWARD.

NORTH.

You recollect the words of Edmund in Lear--

"A credulous father, and a brother noble Whose nature is so far from doing harm, That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty One's practices ride easy."

This is exactly Iago with Othello--believing in virtue, using, despising it. These idolators of self think the virtuous worship imaginary, unreal Gods. But they never doubt the sincerity of the worship; and therein show a larger intelligence, a clearer insight, than those other idolators who, shut up in their own character, ascribe their own motives to all; and in virtues can see only different shapes of hypocrisy.

TALBOYS.

The Devil himself knows better, sir. He knows that Virtue exists; only he flatters himself that he can undermine its foundations. "And ofttimes does succeed"--seeking Evil "as contrary to His High Will whom we resist!"

NORTH.

The Evil Principle at war with the Good.

TALBOYS.

In what war soever, sir, you are once engaged, you soon feel yourself pledged to it. A few blows given on both sides settle you fast, and you no longer inquire about the cause.

NORTH.

To an evil soul all good is a reproach; therefore he wars on it. To the self-dissatisfied the happiness of the good is a reproach; therefore, if he be thoroughly selfish, he pulls it down.

TALBOYS.

Every one's impulse is to throw off pain; and if no pity, no awe, no love be there to stay him, he pulls down of course.

NORTH.

My dear Talboys, believe me, that, for a moment, every man has motives fit for a fiend. Perhaps he obeys--perhaps rejects them. The true fiend is constant.

TALBOYS.

Every man has motives fit for a fiend! I beg you to speak for yourself, my dear sir.

NORTH.

I speak of myself, of you, and of Iago. What is the popular apprehension or theory of the malice disclosed in "mine Ancient"--not the Old One, but the Standard-bearer?

TALBOYS.

Why, the prompt, apt, and natural answer will be, he is a Devil.

NORTH.

And pray what is a Devil?

TALBOYS.

Iago.

NORTH.

Don't reason in a circle, sir.

TALBOYS.

I'd rather reason in a circle, sir, than not reason at all. I like reasoning in a circle--it is pleasant pastime in a cold, raw morning--far preferable to ascending Cruachan; for you are never far from home, and when tired can leap out at your own pleasure, and take some reasoning in a straight line.

NORTH.

You are always so pleasant, Talboys, circular or ziz-zag. Whence is the malice in the heart of a Devil?

TALBOYS.

I want data, sir. Milton has given some historical elucidation of it; but the People reason less, and are no philosophers.

NORTH.

Hate in a devil is like Love in an Angel--uncaused, or self-causing; it is his natural function--his Essence, his Being. Herein the seraph is a seraph--the fiend is a fiend.

TALBOYS.

"Evil! be Thou my good! By Thee at least Divided Empire with Heaven's King I hold, By Thee, and more perhaps than half will reign."

Reason--Motive--Cause.

NORTH.

Prospero calls Caliban a devil--a born Devil.

TALBOYS.

Also, a demi-Devil--as Othello calls Iago.

NORTH.

The Philosopher knows--_in humanity_--of no born devil. He follows, or tries to follow, the causes which have turned the imperfect nature into the worst. The popular sense takes things as it finds them, and acknowledges "born devils," Iago being one, and "of the prime." The _totality_ of monster in the moral world seems to that unphilosophical, sincere, and much-to-the-purpose intuition, expressed under the image of _a nativity_. The popular sense recognises a temper of man which elects evil for evil's sake--which inflicts pain, because it likes to see pain suffered--which destroys, because it revels in misery.

TALBOYS.

Coleridge calls Iago's "a motiveless malignity." He hated Othello for not promoting him, but Cassio. That seems to me the real, tangible motive--a haunting, goading, fretting preference--an affront--an insult--a curbing of power--wounding him where alone he is sensitive--in self-esteem and pride. See his contempt for Cassio as a book-warrior--and "for a fair life"--simply like our notion of a "milksop." Why Othello, who so prizes him for his honesty as to call him ever "honest Iago," keeps him down, I have not a guess--

NORTH.

Haven't you? And pray what right have you to interfere with the practice of promotion in the army of the Venetian State?

TALBOYS.

I cannot approve of this particular instance--it looks like favouritism. Othello fancied Cassio--Cassio was the genteeler young fellow of the two--the better-born--Iago had risen from the ranks--and was a stout soldier--

NORTH.

You don't take your character of Cassio, from Iago?

TALBOYS.

I do. Iago was a liar--but here I think he spoke truth--there is nothing in the Play indicating that Cassio had seen much service--he had never been at Cyprus--nor anywhere else--he had never seen a Turk--he had never--

NORTH.

Hold your tongue.

TALBOYS.

A more disgraceful Brawl--

NORTH.

Hold your tongue, I say.

TALBOYS.

Don't keep pouring out your excuses for him, sir, with such overwhelming volubility--it won't do. He knew his own wretched head. "I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking," yet drink he would,--"I have drunk but one cup to-night, and that was craftily qualified too"--worse than shirking--"behold what innovation it makes here,"--and yet he would not join the Teetotallers. Out on such a Lieutenant! Iago _was_ an ill-used man.

NORTH.

Talboys--

TALBOYS.

O that ceaseless volubility! Shakspeare afterwards makes Iago say that Cassio "has a daily beauty in his life." Where do we see it? In his _liaison_ with that "fitchew?" From pleading with the Divine Desdemona on a question to him of life or death, to go straight to sup--and sleep with Bianca!

NORTH.

Othello's "Now thou art my Lieutenant," shows the importance meant by Shakspeare to be attached to the previous oppression--or "holding down" of Iago. Alas! how that allocution instigating Iago to murder by more than a promise of promotion, sadly lowers Othello to me--I hardly know why. I feel a descent from his own passion to a sympathy with Iago's desire to step into his superior officer's shoes. I can fancy that Shakspeare meant this. Ay, that he did; for I believe that turbulent passion, in some of its moods, lowers--degrades--debases a great and generous nature.

TALBOYS.

Iago, was jealous of Othello. He says he was, and either believes it, or tries to believe it. His own words intimate the doubt, and the determination to believe. Malignity and hate indulge in giving acceptance to slight grounds--such he says, in his own coarse way, was the rumour--and perhaps it was true--

NORTH.

Certainly it was false. High characters, as Coriolanus, Hotspur, Othello, are, by a native majesty of spirit, saved and exalted from the pursuit of illicit pleasure.

TALBOYS.

They are. But let his jealousy of Othello--sincere or assumed--or mixed or alternating--enter as an element into the hatred.

NORTH.

Let it. Iago was, you said truly, a stout Soldier--and I add, a hard, unfeeling, unprincipled Soldier. Of all trades in the world, that of a Soldier is the worst and the best--witness an Iago--an Othello. The same trade helped to make both. In Othello we almost see Wordsworth's _Happy Warrior_--in Iago one--

"Yet ill he lived, much evil saw, 'Mongst men to whom no better law Nor better life was known; Deliberately and undeceived, Those bad men's vices he received And gave them back his own!"

You are convinced, without a hint, that he is infidel--atheist: everything shaped like religion, like moral conscience--his mind shakes off and rejects with scorn. He does not, however, as I said, disbelieve in Virtues. He believes in them, and uses them to the destruction of the havers. What he disbelieves is the worth of Virtues. To that savage Idol, Self, the more bleeding and noble victims, the more grateful the sacrifice.

TALBOYS.

A singular combination in him, sir, is his wily Italian wit--like Iachimo's--and his rough--soldierlike--plain, blunt, jovial manners--the tone of the Camp, and of the wild-living, _reckless_ Camp--plenty of hardihood--fit for toil, peril, privation. You never for a moment doubt his courage--his presence of mind--his resources--he does not once quail in presence of Othello at his utmost fury. He does not stir up the Lion from without, through the bars of his cage, with an invisible rod of iron--that is, a whip of scorpions; he lashes up the Wild Beast, and flinches not an inch from paw that would smite, or tusk that would tear--a veritable Lion Queller and King.

NORTH.

I cannot but believe that the Othello of Shakspeare is black, and all black. I cannot conceive the ethnography of that age drawing--on the stage especially--the finer distinction which we know between a Moor and a Blackamoor or Negro. The opposition, entertained by nature, is between White and Black--not between White and Brown. You want the opposition to tell with all its power. "I saw Othello's visage in his mind" is nothing, unless the visible visage is one to be conquered--to be accepted by losing sight of it. I say again, that I cannot myself imagine the contemporary audience of Shakspeare deciding colour between a Moor and a Negro. The tradition of the Stage, too, seems to have made Othello jet black. Such, I opine, was the notion of the Moor, _then_, to the People, to the Court, to the Stage, to Shakspeare.

TALBOYS.

Woolly-headed?

NORTH.

Why, yes--if you choose--in opposition to the "curled darlings."

TALBOYS.

Yet Coleridge has said it would be "something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl failing in love with a veritable Negro."

NORTH.

Coleridge almost always thought, felt, wrote, and spoke finely, as a Critic--but may I venture, in all love and admiration of that name, to suggest that the removal which the stage makes of a subject from reality must never be forgotten. In life you cannot bear that the White Woman shall marry the Black Man. You could not bear that an English Lady Desdemona--Lady Blanche Howard--should--under any imaginable greatness--marry General Toussaint or the Duke of Marmalade. Your senses revolt with offence and loathing. But on the Stage some consciousness that everything is not as literally meant as it seems--that symbols of humanity, and not actual men and women, are before you--saves the Play.

TALBOYS.

I believe that Wordsworth's line--

"The gentle Lady married to the Moor,"

expresses explicitly the feeling of the general English heart--pity for the contrast, and a thought of the immense love which has overcome it.

NORTH.

White and Black is the utter antithesis--as, at intensity, Night and Day. Yes--Talboys--Every jot of soot you take from his complexion, you take an iota from the signified power of love.

TALBOYS.

As you say, sir, the gap which is between the Stage and Reality must prevent, in our hearts, anything like loathing of the conjunction.

NORTH.

The touch of such an emotion would annul the whole Tragedy. A disparity, or a discrepancy, vast as mysterious--but which love, at the full, is entitled to overlook--overstep! Whether Fate dare allow prosperity to a union containing so mighty an element of disruption, is another question. It seems like an attempt at overruling the "Æterna fœdera rerum."

TALBOYS.

For half an hour after her death, Othello believes her guilty. You must take it for a representation of what his feelings would have been, if she had really been guilty.

NORTH.

Unless the fact of her innocence have a secret potency that reaches, through all appearance and evidence of her guilt, into his innermost soul. Be that as it may, he is, after the deed, perplexed and unmanned, totally unlike a man who has performed a great sacrifice to the offended gods. You may say that the convulsion of uptorn love is too fresh, and that he would in time have regained his strength--that had she been guilty, the first half-hour must have been just what it was. All I know is, that his mind first becomes clear, when he knows her innocent. Then he is, in a measure, himself, and sees his way. Had she been guilty, he would have lived two years with a stern, desolate soul--not harsh, perhaps, to honest folks, though--and have then fallen in battle.

TALBOYS.

But how is Iago affected by the blackness? No doubt, with more hate and aversion at being commanded by and outshone by him. High military rank and command--high favour by the Senate--high power and esteem in the world--high royalty of spirit--happiness in marriage--all these in Othello are proper subjects of envy, and motives of hate in Iago. The Nigger!

NORTH.

Antipathy of bad to good--of base to noble--exacerbated by physical antipathy of colour! But I never could fathom the hate and malice and revenge of Iago.

TALBOYS.

It is unfathomable--and therefore fit agent in Tragedy.

NORTH.

Even so. I don't believe that Shakspeare always means you to be able to lay motives in the balance and weigh them. Far otherwise.

TALBOYS.

Ay--Think how the Murder of Duncan leaps up, Hell-born, into the heart of Macbeth--at the breath of the Weird Sisters!

NORTH.

Perhaps. Poetry shaping out an action, distinguishes herself, amongst other points of distinction herein, from History, that while she shows lucidly, and of her own clear knowledge, the concatenation of Cause and Effect, yet passion and imagination require the indefinite. There is then a conflict of claims and powers; and the part of logic is hence imperfectly rendered. You see the river sweeping by you, without knowing all the springs that have fed it.

TALBOYS.

Say that again, sir.

NORTH.

_There_ IS the hatred--a tragical power, which the Poet is principally concerned to use--less to explain.

TALBOYS.

You said, sir, the noble Moor must have been much disennobled ere he could have cried to Iago, "Now thou art my lieutenant."

NORTH.

I did, and you think so too.

TALBOYS.

I do. Othello and Iago, are joint conspirators to two double murders. Can you conspire to a murder--a private assassination--without lowering yourself--even on the Stage? Othello takes on himself the murder of Desdemona--act, responsibility, consequences; but does he not seem to hire Iago to assassinate Cassio?

NORTH.

What did Othello intend to do--after all was accomplished? Consequences indeed! He was stone-blind to the future. What does he expect? that when he has killed his wife, everything is to go on as smoothly as before? That no notice will be taken of it? or that he will have to make another speech to the Senate? He has told them how he married her--the counterpart will be to relate "a plain unvarnished tale of my whole course" of smothering and stabbing her with bolster and dagger. "Now thou art my lieutenant"--shows--if not stone-blindness--a singular confidence in the future.

TALBOYS.

The Personages who come in at the End look at the matter contrariwise. Othello exalts the killing of his wife into a sacrifice to Justice. But Cassio? That is mere--pure Revenge. "O that the slave had forty thousand lives,--one is too poor, too weak for my revenge."

NORTH.

Upon what pedestal does Othello stand _now_--engaging another to kill Cassio in the dark, for his own revenge? I repeat it, surely the Noble Moor is now very much disennobled.

TALBOYS.

I rejoice, my dear sir, that you have so completely got rid of that nasty cough--your voice is as clear as a bell. Lungs sound--

NORTH.

As those of a prize bagpiper. Talboys, I cannot help thinking that Shakspeare shows up in Othello, foul passions--that you see in him two natures conjoined--the moral Caucasian White, and the animal tropical Black. In the Caucasian, the spiritual or angelical in us attains its manifestation. In the offspring of the tropics, amongst the sands, and under the suns of Africa, the animal nature takes domination. The sands and suns that breed Lions, breed Men with Lion's hearts in them. The Lion is for himself noble, but blood of the Irrational in the veins of the Rational is a contradiction. The noblest moral nature and the hot blind rage of animal blood!

TALBOYS.

Ay, the noblest moral nature, and high above every other evidence of it, his love of HER--which, what it was, and what it would have remained, or become--and what he was and would have been, had Iago not been there--we may imagine! With all the power of a warrior, and a ruler, he has the sensibility of a Lover--with all spontaneous dignity and nobility, he has the self-mastery of reason--before his overthrow.

NORTH.

Wherefore, my dear Sheriff, I prefer Othello as a specimen of the _Ethical Marvellous_. Like, as in another kingdom, a Winged Horse or a Centaur--the meeting of two natures which readily hold asunder. All this has under the Æthiop complexion its full force--less if you mitigate--if not mitigate merely, but take away, where are we all? The innate repugnance of the White Christian to the Black Moorish blood, is the ultimate tragic substratum--the "_must_" of all that follows. Else--_make_ Othello White--and, I say again, _see_ where we are!

TALBOYS.

Shakspeare, sir, is not one to flinch from the utmost severity of a Case.

NORTH.

Not he, indeed--therefore I _swear_ Othello is a Blackamoor.

TALBOYS.

And I take it, sir, that Othello's natural demeanour is one of great gravity, to which the passionate moods induced are in extremity of contrast. I conceive that, by these mixtures and contrasts, he is rendered picturesque and poetical.

NORTH.

I swear Othello was a Blackamoor--and that Desdemona was the Whitest Lady in Europe.

TALBOYS.

Had he lived to be tried for murder, I think his counsel might have successfully set up the plea of insanity.

NORTH.

They might have successfully set it up--but I, the Judge, would have successfully put it down. Honestly, I don't think Othello mad; and for this reason, that the thought never before came into my head. An incident that appears to me most wonderful in dramatic invention is--the Swooning. Look at the precise words preceding his falling down. To me it has no other effect or sense, than that of the blood being driven up into the head, and oppressing with physical pressure that bodily organ--the brain. The soul strikes the body like a hammer, and knocks it down.

TALBOYS.

Ay, how his words waver--"That's not so good now"--from a man believing, or on the point of believing. There is to me a physical faintness in these words, and in the play upon the words "lie with her," &c., intellect reeling to fall.

NORTH.

Good. But I believe body and soul of Othello--or the relation between body and soul--to be physiologically right and sound. The swooning goes soon off--the accident of an hour--the mind is else in full vigour, sound, and misled. You must recollect that a mind of supereminent physical (may one say so?) and moral power--a mind that would have been strong and calm through the Russian Campaign of Napoleon--is not in a day stricken into a state which requires the medical skill and attention of Dr Willis. Othello had an immensely strong physical constitution undoubtedly--had he not, the adventures related would long ago have extinguished him. This is one meaning of that sudden and strange narrative which children are taught by rote, and which men may not have quite fathomed; but a strong body and strong soul conjoined, do not lightly admit of disjunction. Madness, properly so called, is a disjunction, in some way or kind, of the natural union between soul and body. A few days disrupt the ties in the aged Lear. You may think that in Othello--I suppose Ætat. 40 or 45--the ties would bear some wrenching of the rack, ere snapping. I think that they held firm.

TALBOYS.

True, sir, insanity would even detract from the moral majesty and splendour of Othello.

NORTH.

It would. The time comes back to me when I did _not care for the Play or the Man_. The Play now seems to me wonderful, more even than Hamlet or Lear--and the Man, in poetical invention, a match for Achilles or Satan.

TALBOYS.

Sir--sir.

NORTH.

Passion in the blood like that of a Negro--and right in the soul as of Socrates or Epaminondas. Yes, Talboys, the Majesty of the Moral soul in Othello seems to me the most prophetic, or divining, or inconceivable of Shakspeare's conceptions.

TALBOYS.

Nay--nay--my dear sir.

NORTH.

Everything else might seem to offer its own reason--

TALBOYS.

Nay--nay--my dear sir. Compare the gross Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus with Ours.

NORTH.

Well, do--but Othello--you don't know whence he is derived. He is a tropical animal--kindred to the lion--the tiger--the dragon--and, on the other hand, he has the rational equipoise of the faculties that stamp the Philosopher--and he is everything between the two.

TALBOYS.

An Eloge, indeed--perhaps a _leetle_ too eulogistic.

NORTH.

No. What a simple sincerity colours the narrative of his love-making! Is your _imagination_ bewitched by the wild story of his adventurous life? Hers, doubtless, was fascinated. But your _soul_, methinks, is won to approving the Venetian Maiden's choice by a profounder, a more legitimate charm. Who ever heard Othello relate, and hung back from believing him? He is honest, and she is honest. That is the bond whereby the Parcæ united their souls and their threads. Why they disunited both--how that infernal intervention of Lachesis and Atropos crossed their pure souls in their pure conjunction, let Clotho--if she can--tell.

TALBOYS.

Let's be more cheerful.

NORTH.

Ay--let's.

TALBOYS.

Othello shows that our Good--our excellence--our capacity of happiness--lies all in Love. That our light in which we walk--our light which we give forth--is Love. He declares this, by cleaving to this Good--by having it--by losing it--by recovering it. The self-consciousness of Othello returns to its unison with universal being--with heaven's harmony of the worlds. Iago denies this Good--never acknowledges it--although he serves involuntarily to demonstrate the truth--of which Othello perishes the self-sacrificed witness. It is great, sir, in the Tragedy, but in him the House of Love is divided against itself. His jealousy, child of his love, lifts up a parricidal hand, wounds and is wounded--but only unto its own death. And what is the feeling left by the catastrophe?

NORTH.

Say, my friend, say.

TALBOYS.

Peace--rest--repose--depth of tranquillity--like the sea stilled from storms.

NORTH.

The charmed calm that reflects heaven.

TALBOYS.

Peace grounded in this proved thought--that LOVE IS BEST. Of all the Persons, whose stars will you accept to be your own? If you are a man, Othello's; if woman, the wronged and murdered Desdemona's. Study for ever the two closing and summing up verses--"I _kissed_ thee ere I _killed_ thee; no way but this--Killing myself to die upon a kiss!" To gather up all the terror that is past, as if not only the winds were upgathered like sleeping flowers, but upgathered into the sleeping flowers. I don't know how to avoid comparing--all unlike as the characters are--the end of Romeo and Juliet--Lear and Cordelia--Othello and Desdemona. I never can separate them. LOVE the mightiest torn asunder in life--reunited in death. Love--the solace of lapsed and mortal humanity.

NORTH.

Lend the Old Hobbler your arm.