"O sweetest, fairest lily!" So Cymbeline speaks of one of these frail and lovely flowers which cannot be torn from the tree to which they have grown, whose least impurity would tarnish their whiteness. When Imogen learns that her husband means to kill her as being faithless, she does not revolt at the outrage; she has no pride, but only love. "False to his bed!" She faints at the thought that she is no longer loved. When Cordelia hears her father, an irritable old man, already almost insane, ask her how she loves him, she cannot make up her mind to say aloud the flattering protestations which her sisters have been lavishing. She is ashamed to display her tenderness before the world, and to buy a dowry by it. He disinherits her, and drives her away; she holds her tongue. And when she afterwards finds him abandoned and mad, she goes on her knees before him, with such a touching emotion, she weeps over that dear insulted head with so gentle a pity, that you might fancy it was the tender voice of a desolate but delighted mother, kissing the pale lips of her child: "O you kind gods, Cure this great breach in his abused nature! O my dear father! Restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips; and let this kiss Repair those violent harms that my two sisters ... Mine enemy's dog, ... How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty ?"1 1 King Lear, iv. 7. If, in short, Shakspeare comes across a heroic character, worthy of Corneille, a Roman, such as the mother of Coriolanus, he will explain by passion, what Corneille would have explained by heroism. He will depict it violent and thirsting for the violent feelings of glory. She will not be able to refrain herself. She will break out into accents of triumph when she sees her son crowned; into imprecations of vengeance when she sees him banished. She will descend to the vulgarities of pride and anger; she will abandon herself to mad effusions of joy, to dreams of an ambitious fancy,' and will prove once more that the impassioned imagination of Shakspeare has left its trace in all the creatures whom it has called forth. VII. Nothing is easier to such a poet than to create perfect villains. Throughout he is handling the unruly passions which make their character, and he never hits upon the moral law which restrains them; but at the same time, and by the same faculty, he changes the inanimate masks, which the conventions of the stage mould on an identical pattern, into living and illusory figures. 1 "O ye're well met: the hoarded plague o' the gods If that I could for weeping, you should hear Nay, and you shall hear some. . . . I'll tell thee what; yet go: Nay but thou shalt stay too: I would my son Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him, His good sword in his hand."-Coriolanus, iv. 2. See again, Coriolanus, i. 3, the frank and abandoned triumph of a woman of the people; "I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a manchild than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man." : How shall a demon be made to look as real as a man? Iago is a soldier of fortune who has roved the world from Syria to England, who, nursed in the lowest ranks, having had close acquaintance with the horrors of the wars of the sixteenth century, had drawn thence the maxims of a Turk and the philosophy of a butcher; principles he has none left. "O my reputation, my reputation!" cries the dishonoured Cassio. "As I am an honest man," says Iago, "I thought you had received some bodily wound; there is more sense in that than in reputation."1 As for woman's virtue, he looks upon it like a man who has kept company with slave-dealers. He estimates Desdemona's love as he would estimate a mare's that sort of thing lasts so long-then . . . And then he airs an experimental theory with precise details and nasty expressions like a stud doctor. "It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor, nor he his to her. These Moors are changeable in their wills; . . . the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must change for youth when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice." 2 Desdemona on the shore, trying to forget her cares, begs him to sing the praises of her sex. For every portrait he finds the most insulting insinuations. She insists, and bids him take the case of a deserving woman. "Indeed" he replies, "She was a wight, if ever such wight were, . . to suckle fools and chronicle small beer." 3 He also says, when Desdemona asks him what he would write in praise of her: "O gentle lady do not put me to't; for I am nothing, if not critical." 4 This is the key to his char1 Othello, ii. 3. 2 Ibid. i. 3. 3 Ibid. ii. 1. ▲ Ibid. acter. He despises man; to him Desdemona is a little wanton wench, Cassio an elegant word-shaper, Othello a mad bull, Roderigo an ass to be basted, thumped, made to go. He diverts himself by setting these passions at issue; he laughs at it as at a play. When Othello, swooning, shakes in his convulsions, he rejoices at this capital result: "Work on, my medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught." You would take him for one of the poisoners of the time, studying the effect of a new potion on a dying dog. He only speaks in sarcasms he has them ready for every one, even for those whom he does not know. When he wakes Brabantio to inform him of the elopement of his daughter, he tells him the matter in coarse terms, sharpening the sting of the bitter pleasantry, like a conscientious executioner, rubbing his hands when he hears the culprit groan under the knife. "Thou art a villain!" cries You are a senator!" answers Iago. But the feature which really completes him, and makes him take rank with Mephistopheles, is the atrocious truth and the cogent reasoning by which he likens his crime to virtue.2 Cassio, under his advice, goes to see Desdemona, to obtain her intercession for him; this visit is to be the ruin of Desdemona and Cassio. Iago, left alone, hums for an instant quietly, then cries: Brabantio. "And what's he then that says I play the villain? Probal to thinking and indeed the course To win the Moor again." 3 Othello, iv. 1. 2 See the like cynicism and scepticism in Richard III. Both begin by slandering human nature, and both are misanthropical of malice prepense. Othello, ii. 3. To all these features must be added a diabolical energy, an inexhaustible inventiveness in images, caricatures, obscenity, the manners of a guard-room, the brutal bearing and tastes of a trooper, habits of dissimulation, coolness, hatred, and patience, contracted amid the perils and devices of a military life, and the continuous miseries of long degradation and frustrated hope; you will understand how Shakspeare could transform abstract treachery into a concrete form, and how Iago's atrocious vengeance is only the natural consequence of his character, life, and training. VIII. How much more visible is this impassioned and unfettered genius of Shakspeare in the great characters which sustain the whole weight of the drama! The startling imagination, the furious velocity of the manifold and exuberant ideas, passion let loose, rushing upon death and crime, hallucinations, madness, all the ravages of delirium bursting. through will and reason: such are the forces and ravings which engender them. Shall I speak of dazzling Cleopatra, who holds Antony in the whirlwind of her devices and caprices, who fascinates and kills, who scatters to the winds the lives of men as a handful of desert dust, the fatal Eastern sorceress who sports with love and death, impetuous, irresistible, child of air and fire, whose life is but a tempest, whose thought, ever barbed and broken, is like the crackling of a lightning flash? Of Othello, who, beset by the graphic picture of physical adultery, cries at every word of Iago like a man on the rack; 1 See his conversation with Brabantio, then with Roderigo, Act i |