proach her, for she is consecrated in his eye by the very feeling that draws him. Thus, with the instinct of a most delicate nature he almost feels it a sin to love her, and fears lest the avowal and even the indulgence of his passion may imply some desecration of her. It is this feeling that originates the delicate reverential courtesy, the ardent, yet distant, and therefore beautiful regards with which a truly honourable mind instinctively attires itself towards its best object;-a feeling that throws a majestic grace around the most unpromising figure, and puts an eloquent fascination into the plainest features. Othello and Desdemona are emphatically sacred things to each other; their feeling is more of a religious than a gregarious nature; prompts them rather to worship than to caress one another; and it is difficult. to say whether his nobleness be more awful to her, or her gentleness more awful to him. Of course, therefore, their manners are severely chaste and dignified, savoring not at all of that frivolous familiarity which, beginning in selfishness, generally ends in aversion; and assuredly their love is all the purer and nobler inasmuch as it prompts them to treat each other more as divinities than as lapdogs. The alleged unfitness of Othello's match has been a theme of much edifying remark among certain sticklers for dramatic decorum; and in some cases all the stupendous beauties of the play have not been enough to redeem it from this one potent drawback. I cannot help thinking the match to be every way as fit as is sometimes thought the reverse. With submission, the noble Moor and his sweet lady have the very sort of resemblance that people thus united ought to have; and their likeness is all the better for its co-existence with so much of unlikeness. Both are ennobled and exalted by their mutual passion; all the finest issues of two most refined natures are disclosed in their reciprocal attachment. It tells us much of their inward correspondence which could not be told so well but for their outward diversity, and eloquently reveals the beautiful correlation of courage and gentleness, both equally impotent against each other, and equally invincible against every thing else. It reminds us of what we are too apt to forget, that the stern, stout, valiant soul is the chosen home of reverence and tenderness, and that manly bravery never looks so brave as when kneeling to virgin innocence, like the lion at the feet of Una, in an attitude of worship, not of servility. Our heroic warrior's dark rough exterior is found to enclose a heart strong as a giant's, yet soft and sweet as infancy. There can be no richer display of manhood than when the neck and knee which peril but stiffens and strengthens, become weak and pliant as the sinews of a new-born babe at sight of one unarmed with aught save gentleness. It proclaims that beauty is an overmatch for strength; that true delicacy is among the highest forms of power; and that the heart which most scorns danger and suffering will soonest quail before innocence. Equally beautiful is the fact, that Desdemona has the eye and the heart to recognize the proper complement of herself beneath such an unprepossessing appearance. Perhaps none but so pure and gentle a being could have discerned the real gentleness of the Moor through so many obscurations. To one less delicate Othello might have seemed gross, and his attraction, if he had any for her, might have been the attraction of grossness. Iago -seems aware of this when, snatching the word out of Othello's mouth, he wrings an argument of her impurity out of what is really the strongest evidence of the reverse. To her fine sense that tale of "wild adventures and mischances" which "often did beguile her of her tears," a tale wherein another might have seen but the marks of a rude, coarse, animal strength,—to her fine sense that tale did but reveal the history of a most meek, brave, manly soul. "Methinks this tale would win my daughter too;" and so it would, were she worthy to be won by it. Nobly blind to every thing repulsive, but keenly alive to whatever is pure and good, the lady "sees Othello's visage in his mind;" his ungracious aspect is lost to her in his graces of character; the exterior form and semblance of the man takes its shape and colour from the indwelling spirit through which she views it; and the shrine which were else so ugly to look upon is made beautiful by the life with which her chaste eye sees it irradiated. In a word, her love for the Moor was but the instinct of female delicacy for its appropriate supplement of manly energy; "And to his honours, and his valiant parts, Much has been said, one where and another, about the instinctive dependence of female weakness on the strength and courage of the other sex; as though woman, in her involuntary admiration of heroism, were impelled and guided not so much by the love of excellence as by the logic of selfishness. In some such way as this do those who have more pride of intellect than intellect to be proud of, often seek to indemnify their conscious want of nobler qualities. Happily the instincts of womanhood are too strong for the vain babblings of this self-idolizing intellectuality. So long as God and nature have the making and teaching of wo man, there is little danger that bravery will have to succumb to the rhetoric and sophistry of philosophic dunces. Woman's natural preference of heroic qualities is right; infinitely better than all the logic of a canting, conceited philanthropy: it is among the best signs we have, by as much as a thirst for glory is better than a thirst for gain, that her thoughts and affections are not altogether of the earth, earthy; and woe befall us when she shall so far degenerate as to choose him who goes out into the market to wriggle and rust for money, rather than him who goes out into the field to fight for honour. "When I have borne in memory what has tamed We are told, “man shall not live by bread alone." Some there are, however, who seem to require nothing but bread to live on; that is, they seem to have no life, no hunger but what bread is every way sufficient for. But then there are other some who cannot live on bread alone; who are even worse than dead unless they be in conjunction and communion with something pure and noble and divine. Of this latter sort, I take it, are Othello and Desdemona; and that something so neces sary to cherish and support the life of their life they find in each other. The attachment on both sides springs simply from the instinct of a pure mind for what is best and noblest in itself. This it is that beautifies and sanctifies their union; that makes it, in the words of Jeremy Taylor, "a conjunction of the whole life and the noblest of friendships." They come together on a footing of interdependence indeed, but it is an interdependence of honour, not of interest;-an interdependence wherein the lady gives support to the being that protects her; partakes of his glory, and enhances it by the participation; shines by reflecting his light, yet doubles it by the reflection. For a woman's appropriate honour is the honour she derives from her husband, and a man's appropriate honour is the honour he imparts to his wife; and he stands as much in need of one to whom he may give it, as she does of one from whom she may receive it; and he is as dependent on her for a reflection of his light, as she is on him for an emission of it: for, though he cannot help giving it out if it be in him, still he enjoys not its brightness unless it be thrown back to him from another, thus at the same time revealing itself and the object on whom it falls. Such, I confess, has always been to me the true nature of the match in question;-a partnership, not of utility or of interest, but purely of honour; the chaste, beautiful wedlock of meekness and magnanimity: and when we see them together in the light of this their true relationship, we feel inclined to ask ourselves with a mixture of regret and admiration, “Were ever spirits could descend So graciously, each other's need to suit ?" |
