Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/714

662 her husband, when she gives him the stolen handkerchief, but utterly dauntless when his murderous hand is lifted against her to silence her witness to the truth.

The crowning mark of difference between such a nature as this and such a nature as that of the mistress for whose sake she lays down her life too late to save her is less obvious even in their last difference of opinion—as to whether there are or are not women who abuse their husbands as Othello charges his wife with abusing him—than in the previous scene when Emilia most naturally and inevitably asks her if he has not just shown himself to be jealous, and she answers:

This would be a most noble stroke of pathos if the speaker were wrong—misled by love into loving error; but the higher Shakespearian pathos, unequalled and impossible for man to conceive as ever possibly to be equalled by man, consists in the fact that she was right. And the men of Shakespeare's age could see this: they coupled together with equally assured propriety and justice of epithet

The jealousy of the one and the honesty of the other must stand or fall together. Othello, when overmastered by the agony of the sudden certitude that the devotion of his love has been wasted on a harlot who has laid in ashes the honor and the happiness of his life, may naturally or rather must inevitably so bear himself as to seem jealous in the eyes of all—and they are all who know him—to whom Iago seems the living type of honesty: a bluff, gallant, outspoken fellow, no conjurer and no saint, coarse of speech and cynical of humor, but true and tried as steel: a man to be trusted beyond many a far cleverer and many a more refined companion in peril or in peace. It is the supreme triumph of his superb hypocrisy so to disguise the pride of intellect which is the radical instinct of his nature and the central mainspring of his action as to pass for a man of rather inferior than superior intelligence to the less blunt and simple natures of those on whom he plays with a touch so unerring at the pleasure of his merciless will. One only thing he cannot do: he cannot make Desdemona doubt of Othello. The first terrible outbreak of his gathering passion in a triple peal of thunder fails to convince her that she has erred in believing him incapable of jealousy. She can only believe that he has vented upon her the irritation aroused by others, and repent that she should have charged him even in thought with unkindness on no more serious account than this. "Nay, we must think men are not gods": and she had been but inconsiderate and overexacting, an "unhandsome warrior " unfit to bear the burden and the heat of the day—of a lifelong union and a fellowship in battle and struggle against the trials and the tests of chance, to repine internally for a moment on such a score as that.

Were no other proof extant and flagrant of the palpable truth that Shakespeare excelled all other men of all time on record as a poet in the most proper and literal sense—as a creator of man and woman, there would be overflowing and overwhelming proof of it in the creation and interaction of these three characters. In the more technical and lyrical sense of the word, no less than in height of prophetic power, in depth of reconciling and atoning inspiration, he is excelled by Æschylus: though surely, on the latter score, by Æschylus alone. But if the unique and marvellous power which at the close of the Oresteia leaves us impressed with a crowning and final sense of high spiritual calm and austere consolation in face of all the mystery of suffering and of sin—if this supreme gift of the imaginative reason was no more shared by Shakespeare than by any poet or prophet or teacher of Hebrew origin, it was his and his alone to set before us the tragic problem of character and event, of all action and all passion, all evil and all good, all natural joy and sorrow and chance and change, in such fulness and perfection of variety, with such harmony and supremacy of justice and of truth, that no man known to historic record ever glorified the world whom it would have been so utterly natural and so comparatively rational to fall down before and worship as a God.