Part 22

In Othello there are two individualities: in the first place, there is the savage, who has for a long time remained alone; who has for a long time lived the life of a brute, and who abandons himself, without even the smallest indication of an internal struggle, to the first effervescence of passion which crosses his soul; a man who is yet furnished with that interior goodness, that native generosity which the instinct of our poetic fictions has been pleased to attribute to the lion, the monarch of the deserts. In the second place, there is the civilized man, who has become such by war, and by war alone, by the greatness of his courage, by that self-possession which is educated and disciplined by constant, habitual, and regular familiarity with danger. In the amenities of a peaceful life the civilized man is naturally and spontaneously uppermost; Othello is calm, confident in the superiority of his character, in the haughtiness of his spirit, in the magnitude of his services; but he obeys the first signal, he marches at the first word of command--his discipline is that of the soldier, his moderation is that of the tamed animal. He has captivated Desdemona's young heart by an unexpected turn of fortune, the very possibility of which belongs solely to the region of poetry, the reality of which is inconceivable by vulgar minds: as Iago says, "What delight shall she have to look on the devil?" But this stroke of fortune appeared quite simple to him, an unreflecting and unsuspicious being; it has not cost him one step, not one moment of disquietude: he has not stopped to think of his age, his appearance, or the rudeness of his manners. {274} He possesses Desdemona as his property, as he possesses his good sword, not imagining that his claims to her can be disputed in any other way than by brute force. He is, therefore, at rest. If, however, he gives himself up to love; love is yet only an accident of his existence; war is his life, his element, the stage on which his character really acts; love can only thwart his true destiny; meanwhile, he neither knows how to rule it, nor how thoroughly to receive its influence.

Desdemona, on the other hand, is the most perfect ideal, the purest type of woman--of woman as she is in herself, a being inferior and yet divine, subordinate by the order of human life, free before her choice is made, but the slave of her choice when once she has made it. She is composed of modesty, tenderness, and submission. Her modesty is unsullied, her tenderness is unbounded, her submission is unlimited and absolute. That which distinguishes her among all other women is that she does not so much possess these qualities as they possess and absorb her. In her soul there is no place for any thing else, whether it be indifferent, or bad, or even good; there is no room for other inclinations, other feelings, or even other duties. She has given herself up entirely, body and soul, thought and will, hope and memory. Nothing remains in her nature which she can appropriate to any thing else whatever. She forsakes her father, she deceives him, she braves him, as far as she can brave any thing--his exasperated feelings, his exterior harshness--but without any exhibition of either hesitation or repentance. {275} The very appearance of the object of her choice may convince us how chaste are her thoughts. There is not the least allusion, either as to the kind of life that awaits her, nor as to the possible price which she may one day pay for such affection; from the first she is resigned--resigned to all--certain of what was to be her lot in the world--certain that, whatever may arrive, she will never cast back one look of regret--that she will never have to hesitate between two courses.

And, in order that we may be put in possession of all this, what was required from Shakspeare? Four strokes of his pen complete the work. See, for example, how he concludes the scene.

The Moor has been dragged from the very steps of the altar by Brabantio; since the moment of their union he has hardly been able to exchange two words with the object of his best love. The simple and pathetic recital of their passion has disarmed all hearts and drawn tears from every eye. Desdemona has just resisted the authority of her father with mildness and moderation, but with invincible firmness. The duke confirms their happiness--the father delivers his daughter up to the Moor; all the senators surround them and wish them joy; Desdemona is allowed to rejoin her husband at Cyprus as soon as he shall be settled there. The duke then says to the old soldier,

"The affair cries--haste! And speed must answer it. You must hence to-night."

The only words which escape Desdemona are

"To-night, my lord?"

Othello's answer is,

"With all my heart."

He has heard the sound of the trumpet, and all other thoughts are already far away. Desdemona, the tender, loving girl, so resolute when in the presence of her father--Desdemona, who has scarcely entered into the bonds of wedlock, casts down her eyes, and follows timidly after her husband, without uttering one word, without directing to him one significant look, without framing any reproach in her heart.

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Othello's narrative has been rapturously applauded--as was most natural; but the united impression of the three scenes must obtain, we think, an admiration of an entirely different kind. Imagine a man who has lived for a long time in rooms lighted only by wax-candles, chandeliers, or colored glasses--who has only breathed in the faint, suffocating atmosphere of drawing-rooms, who has seen only the cascades at the opera, calico mountains, and garlands of artificial flowers: imagine such a man suddenly transported, one magnificent July morning, to a region where he could breathe the purest air, under the tranquil and graceful chestnut-trees which fringe the waters of Interlachen, and within view of the majestic glaciers of the Oberland, and you will have a pretty accurate idea of the moral position of one accustomed to the dramatic representations which formerly occupied our stage, when he unexpectedly finds himself witnessing these so simple, grand, and natural beauties.

A second point with respect to which the involuntary feeling of the French public has found itself at issue with Shakspeare's admirers is the character of Iago. This character, which is the concealed agent producing the catastrophe of the piece, is greatly celebrated in England and elsewhere; all the critics, without exception, English, German, or French, are unwearying in their eulogies upon it. When acted, it appeared to us that this character was generally disapproved, and that in a very marked way, which kept on increasing with every act: so much so that, had it not been played with great firmness and determination, it would certainly have received some decided rebuff. Why was this?

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It was rather curious, at the end of every act, to hear each spectator give the reason of his repugnance, the cause of his aversion. One thought Iago too immoral; another, on the contrary, thought he was not a sufficiently accomplished hypocrite; he should not boast so offensively of his wickedness, said a third censor; while a fourth was revolted at seeing him perpetrate his crimes with so much pleasantry. And so on.

In our judgment, the part was disapproved because it is in itself bad; because it is, we do not say inconsistent, (for what is more natural to man than inconsistency?), but incoherent; because the parts of which it is composed do not naturally associate; and because, in regard to it, we are uncertain which idea to adopt. Such, at least, is our mode of viewing it. Let Shakspeare's devotees anathematize us, if they feel disposed.

What really is Iago? Is he the Evil Spirit, or at least his representative on earth? Is Othello right when he looks down to his feet to see whether they are not cloven? Is he a being who can do evil from the mere love of it, and who deliberately breathes a poisonous atmosphere into the union of Othello and Desdemona solely because Desdemona is a being of angelic purity, and Othello is a loyal, brave, and generous man.

If so, why ascribe to Iago any human and interested motives? Why are we pointed to his low cupidity, the resentment which he feels for an injury done to his honor, his envy of a position more elevated than his own? Why must we see him plundering poor Roderigo, as Scapin or Sbrigani jiggle the purse out of the pocket of some imbecile? {278} The introduction of these passions destroy every thing that is fantastic in the part. The devil has neither humor nor honor; he has neither rancor, nor rage, nor covetousness; he is a disinterested person; he does evil because it is evil, and because he is the Evil One.

Iago, on the other hand, is, as he himself boasts, the type of an egotist--a man who is perfected in the art of self-love--a being who can arrange his desires in hierarchical subordination, according to the degree of their importance, and then so plan his actions as that they shall invariably turn out to his infinite satisfaction, whatever may be the consequences to other people, without scrupulosity, without remorse, and also without allowing himself to be diverted from his aim by any temptation of an inferior order.

Why, then, does he pursue, at the same time, three or four different ends, which are to him of very unequal importance? Why does he undertake successively twenty different projects which he abandons one after the other? Why especially does he, on every occasion, lavish his villainy with a hundred times greater prodigality than is called for by the circumstances? Jonathan Wild the Great, notorious in the lists of rascality, was much more expert when he said, "Be chary with your crimes; they are far too good things to be squandered away in pure waste."

Moreover, how are we to reconcile the different ideas which are given us of this character? He is first represented to us as an intrepid, intelligent soldier, worthy of all the confidence of Othello and the Senate, who might judiciously have been promoted to a high rank; and then he is exhibited before us as a sharper of the first quality, and as a miserable ruffian.

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He has a profound contempt for the human race, and, in the human race, he has a profound contempt for women; he shrugs his shoulders at the bare suggestion of the possibility of female honor. His own wife, especially, is an insupportable burden to him. His only aim in the world is fortune--his enjoyments are palpable and material--and yet we are required to see, in the mere suspicion of an old intrigue between his wife and Othello, a force powerfully acting upon and moving his soul!

He is presented as the most artful villain that ever existed, and yet all his projects are so ill-contrived, so clumsy, so destitute of foresight, that not one of them succeeds--neither was it possible that they could be successful.

He is presented as an impostor of fearful penetration, capable of impenetrable dissimulation; and yet the traps that he sets are so palpable that, although he has to do with an idiot, in comparison with whom any pig-headed imbecile would be a marvel of perspicacity, every one possessed of the smallest relic of sense would not allow himself to be decoyed by them for the space of two minutes.

This, forsooth, is his scheme! Desdemona has espoused Othello; she has chosen him, as he is, out of a thousand others more worthy of her; she has left all for him; to all appearance she loves him; Iago himself does not doubt it; hardly have they received the nuptial benediction before they are separated; Othello sets out with Cassio--observe, with Cassio; Desdemona also departs for Cyprus; by accident the two parties, who had left Venice at different times, arrive in Cyprus the same day, within half an hour of one another. To the knowledge and in the sight of all, Othello included, Cassio, the companion of his voyage, has not been able to speak to Desdemona more than ten minutes on the public road. {280} And yet on the afternoon of this same day, in the midst of the first transports of a union which has been for so long a time retarded, Iago takes upon himself to persuade the amorous Othello that Desdemona, the gentle Desdemona, has betrayed him, before even she has belonged to him--that she has delivered up her heart and her person--to whom?--to Cassio, who has been able neither to see her nor to converse with her. And Iago speaks of his passion as a thing already ancient, and yet--and yet as a thing posterior to her marriage with Othello; for he represents Cassio as exclaiming,

"Cursed fate, that gave thee to the Moor!"

and Iago speaks of Cassio's intrigue with innumerable details and interminable explanations.

Which is the greatest simpleton, the man who conceives such a project, or the man who allows himself to be entrapped by it?

Will it be said that he succeeded? He succeeded according to the representation of the author; but what will common sense say of the matter?

The author is himself successful: but why? Because, such is the intensity and vivacity of his original conception, that the most revolting improbabilities, the most inconceivable absurdities, pass by unperceived; because no one is so ungracious, no one has time to notice the stratagems of the drama. It is, however, another thing to offer these absurdities to be admired as merits.

And yet that is not without truth: from that moment when the first insinuation escapes the lips of Iago, and reaches the ears of the Moor--from the utterance of those fatal words, "Ay, well said, whisper; with as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio"--to that awful moment when the curtain falls on the corpses of the two lovers, the spectator is in a state of breathless expectation. You might hear the flight of a gnat across the room, and those are ill-judged spirits whose zeal compels them to interrupt by their applause the anxiety which is momentarily increasing.

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In that first word all has been said, all has been determined. Farewell forever to Desdemona! Farewell to Othello! Desdemona only appears henceforth as the innocent bird struggling feebly in the grasp of a vulture, but of a vulture who is himself furiously struggling under the grasp of another vulture, and who avenges himself by his treatment of his unhappy victim for the frightful tortures which he is suffering in his own person.

The spectator looks upon this picture, not with that restless curiosity which passes alternately from fear to hope, but, if we may say so--and we do it fully sensible that there are important differences--with something of that inexpressible anguish which absorbs us when, in a court of justice, we are watching the vain efforts of a criminal who is being hurried along to a fatal and inevitable condemnation.

Othello has never thought, has never had occasion to think, how strange, how incomprehensible is the sentiment which he has inspired in Desdemona; now for the first time he thinks of it:

"Haply, for I am black, And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberers have; or, for I am declined Into the vale of years."

One irregular taste, Iago suggests to him, indicates other irregularities. Beyond a doubt she is lost--"she's gone."

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This first suspicion, to use Schlegel's energetic language, is "a drop of poison in his veins, and sets his whole blood in the wildest ferment." The savage is again uppermost. The civilized portion of his nature, which has never met him in this region, which has only subdued him on the field of battle, is powerless to hold him in check. The struggle goes on for some moments; for some moments does Othello, the warrior, the statesman, the lord of others and of himself, attempt to treat his own love as a sportive flame, his jealousy as a folly.

"Exchange me for a goat, When I shall turn the business of my soul To such exsufflicate and blown surmises. * * * * * No, Iago; I'll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove; And, on the proof, there is no more but this-- Away at once with love and jealousy. * * * * * Look here, Iago; All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven. 'Tis gone!"

But his efforts are vain; his defiance is fruitless; at the first onslaught he sees his mighty courage fail, at the first shock of battle he knows himself to be vanquished; he turns a last fond look toward that which has so long charmed him; he remembers dreamily the courser and the trumpet, the assault and the victory:

"O now forever Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content! Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars, That make ambition virtue! O, farewell! Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, The royal banner; and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! And O, you mortal engines, whose rude throats The immortal Jove's dread clamors counterfeit, Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone!"

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After this cry, all the struggle within him ceases. In proportion as jealousy spreads its ravages in this spirit which is already wrecked, we can watch the reappearance under all the most hideous forms of the semi-brutish nature; we may see its growth; we may hear its roar; a creature not to be controlled by reason, deaf to the accents of truth, insensible to utterances of tenderness, unapproachable by moral evidence, which, in the wildness of its fury, passes from one extreme to another, now delighting, with savage joy, in its own detailed recital, in terms of the most revolting barbarity, of the outrage which it contemplates, crying out,

"O, blood, Iago, blood!"

And then, in conclusion, falling, without knowing how or why, from rage down to despair.

Humanity has altogether forsaken him, except it be in his frequently returning fits of emotion, pity, or regret; but these are always provoked by the remembrance of Desdemona's charms--by ideas which are connected with sensual enjoyments; and perhaps, also, it may yet lurk in certain glimmerings of a rough equity, such as may be found under the Bedouin's tent or in a bandit's cavern: "For she had eyes and chose me." And when Iago proposes to him to "strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated," he replies, "Good, good; the justice of it pleases; very good."

There is, however, no trace of the sentiments which he ought to have imbibed by his connection with civilized and polite society; no respect for himself or for others, no remembrance of kindnesses; he gives directions for a base act of assassination--that of Cassio; he strikes Desdemona brutally, in presence of the messengers of the Senate and of his own officers, in public, and in his own private interviews with her; he treats her as the most abandoned of women, heaping upon her the bitterest sarcasms and the most degrading epithets.

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The sight of an heroic soul thus debased by its ferocity down to the level of the mere animal would almost of necessity contaminate the dignity of art, had not the poet brought it into constant contrast with the graceful, pure, and truly celestial figure of Desdemona. Never has any artist portrayed with greater delicacy that astonishment which is felt by an innocent soul when, for the first time, the overflow of its warm affection is repulsed by a hard word or a severe look--its timid efforts to turn the repulse into wanton playfulness, to renew a tender and free exchange of sentiment and thought, to exercise for some moments that pleasant and transient ascendency which shall afford the young spouse many bright recollections in days yet to come.

In proportion as this new character of Othello develops itself, we may see (so to speak)--through that transparent poetry of which Shakspeare alone possesses the secret--the mild countenance of Desdemona gradually lose its serenity. The first idea that presents itself to her mind is, that Othello's roughness--that roughness for which she had prepared herself long before--has somewhat too soon made its appearance. But her heart is immediately resigned--she has an excuse ready at hand:

"Nay, we must think men are not gods; Nor of them look for such observances As fit the bridal."

And when Othello strikes her in public, she is content only to weep and to say, "I have not deserved this."

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But when Othello bursts out into rage against her, when he loads her with outrageous reproaches, when he reviles her as a shameless prostitute, her voice fails her, the blood which rushes to her face stifles all utterance; she sinks rather under the confusion of hearing such language than because it is Othello who addresses her: some feeble sighs, some useless protests, are her only defense; she has seen her fate written in the terrific looks of her husband. She lowers her head, and directs Emilia to spread upon her couch her wedding-dress, in which she desires to be enshrouded; she offers her breast to the knife as a "stainless sacrifice" (another of Schlegel's happy expressions), as a lamb which has been accustomed only to bound and frolic in its native meadows, and which walks to the altar without knowing why, and licks the hand which is conducting it thither.

This it is precisely which explains the inexpressible charm and painful interest of this scene, which we have already alluded to; a scene which, placed entirely apart from this, would transgress the proper limits of a work of art.

Othello, when he has taken leave of the messengers of the Senate, says, with a rugged, severe tone of voice, to Desdemona, "Get you to bed on the instant; I will be returned forthwith; look it be done." Her reply is, "I will, my lord." This is the sentence of death, and she knows it; but not even a thought of disobedience enters her mind; she does not dream of securing the least assistance: Othello has spoken.

The scene in which she undresses herself, before retiring to her bed, is then most truly for her that respite of a quarter of an hour which is granted to criminals before they are conducted to punishment. In vain does she attempt to suggest a different mood to Emilia, or to practice deception upon herself by turning her thoughts to any trifling subjects that may arise: the inmost conviction of her soul rises in rebellion against every word. {286} And, for the agitated spectator, this scene is of a similar character; he counts the minutes, he clings to the least thing, he asks impatiently why there is still no other knot to untie, no other clasp to unloose; his wishes would almost urge him to take hold on Desdemona's robe and save her from impending fate.

Tragic poets, behold your master! learn a lesson from him, if you can!

The scene in which the Moor kills Desdemona surprised the public; but their surprise was not of long duration, and was soon changed into fullest approval. Accustomed as they were to see this scene lengthened out in Rossini's opera--to watch the imposing attitudes of Madame Pasta, or the efforts of Madame Malibran, to save her life, the brevity of the English original at first astonished them. But, at the same time, the dialogue, so concise, so rapid, moving so directly to the mark--those ambiguous, and, at the same time, distracted words which Othello mutters in suppressed tones of voice; that inexorable determination which he has made, and which he executes with agitated haste, with bursting heart and teeth closely set, hardly daring to look upon his victim, but without even a momentary wavering--Desdemona's entreaties, short, tender, timid: so much so, that they only show her concern for life; her replies, in which all the bold confidence of innocence declares itself, when Othello alludes to her handkerchief, which had been found on Cassio:

"He found it there!"

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