The Common Pursuit (21 page)

Ay, there's the point: as—to be bold with you— Not to affect many proposed matches Of her own clime, complexion and degree, Whereto we see in all things nature tends— Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural. But pardon me: I do not in position Distinctly speak of her, though I may fear Her will, recoiling to her better judgment, May fall to match you with her country forms, And happily repent.

To say that it's not jealousy here is hardly (one would have thought) to bring Othello off clean; but Bradley's conclusion is not (as might have seemed inevitable) that there may be other faults than jealousy that are at least as damaging to a man in the character of husband and married lover. He is quite explicit:

Up to this point, it seems to me, there is not a syllable to be said against Othello, (p. 194.)

With such resolute fidelity does Bradley wear these blinkers that he can say,

His trust, where he trusts, is absolute,

without realising the force of the corollary: Othello's trust, then, can never have been in Desdemona. It is the vindication of Othello's perfect nobility that Bradley is preoccupied with, and we are to see the immediate surrender to lago as part of that nobility. But to make absolute trust in lago—trust at Desdemona's expense—a manifestation of perfect nobility is (even if we ignore what it makes of Desdemona) to make lago a very remarkable person indeed. And that, Bradley, tradition aiding and abetting, proceeds to do.

However, to anyone not wearing these blinkers it is plain that no subtilization and exaltation of the lago-devil (with consequent subordination of Othello) can save the noble hero of Bradley's devotion. And it is plain that what we should see in lago's prompt success is not so much lago's diabolic intellect as Othello's readiness to respond. lago's power, in fact, in the temptation-scene is

that he represents something that is in Othello—in Othello the husband of Desdemona: the essential traitor is within the gates. For if Shakespeare's Othello too is simple-minded, he is nevertheless more complex than Bradley's. Bradley's Othello is, rather, Othello's; it being an essential datum regarding the Shakespearean Othello that he has an ideal conception of himself.

The tragedy is inherent in the Othello-Desdemona relation, and lago is a mechanism necessary for precipitating tragedy in a dramatic action. Explaining how it should be that Othello, who is so noble and trustful ('Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust'), can so immediately doubt his wife, Bradley says:

But he was newly married; in the circumstances he cannot have known much of Desdemona before his marriage, (p. 192.)

Again we read:

But it is not surprising that his utter powerlessness to repel it page's insinuation] on the ground of knowledge of lus wife ... should complete his misery ... (p. 193.)

Bradley, that is, in his comically innocent way, takes it as part of the datum that Othello really knows nothing about his wiife. Ah, but he was in love with her. And so poetically. 'For', says Bradley, 'there is no love, not that of Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othello's'. Othello, however, we are obliged to remark (Bradley doesn't make the point in this connection) is not in his youth; he is represented as middle-aged—as having attained at any rate to maturity in that sense. There might seem to be dangers in such a situation, quite apart from any intervention by an lago. But then, we are told Othello is 'of a great openness and trust&lness of nature'.—It would be putting it more to the point to say that he has great consciousness of worth and confidence of respect.

The worth is really and solidly there; he is truly impressive, a noble product of the life of action—of

The big wars That make ambition virtue.

'That make ambition virtue'—this phrase of his is a key one: his virtues are, in general, of that kind; they have, characteristically,

something of the quality suggested. Othello, in his magnanimous way, is egotistic. He really is, beyond any question, the nobly massive man of action, the captain of men, he sees himself as being, but he does very much see himself:

Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.

In short, a habit of self-approving self^dramatization is an essential element in Othello's make-up, and remains so at the very end.

It is, at the best, the impressive manifestation of a noble egotism. But, in the new marital situation, this egotism isn't going to be the less dangerous for its nobility. This self-centredness doesn't mean self-knowledge: that is a virtue which Othello, as soldier of fortune, hasn't had much need of. He has been well provided by nature to meet all the trials a life of action has exposed him to. The trials facing him now that he has married this Venetian girl with whom he's 'in love' so imaginatively (we're told) as to outdo Romeo and who is so many years younger than himself (his colour, whether or not * colour-feeling' existed among the Elizabethans, we are certainly to take as emphasizing the disparity of the match)—the trials facing him now are of a different order.

And here we have the significance of the storm, which puts so great a distance between Venice and Cyprus, between the old life and the new, and makes the change seem so complete and so momentous. The storm is rendered in that characteristic heroic mode of the play which Professor Wilson Knight a calls the 'Othello music':

For do but stand upon the foaming shore,

The chidden billows seem to chide the clouds;

The wind-shaked surge, with high and monstrous mane,

Seems to cast water on the burning bear,

And quench the guards of the ever-fixed pole:

I never did like molestation view

On the enchafed flood. [II, i]

This mode (Professor Wilson Knight, in his own way, describes it well) gives the effect of a comparatively simple magnificence; the characteristic verse of Othello is firm, regular in outline,

1 See that valuable book, The Wheel of Fire

buoyant and sonorous. It is in an important sense Othello's own verse, the 'large-mouthed utterance' of the noble man of action. Bradley's way of putting it is that Othello, though he 'has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet/ is 'in the strictest sense of the word' *more poetic than Hamlet* (p. 188). We need not ask Bradley what the 'strictest sense of the word' is, or stop to dispute with him whether or not Othello is 'the greatest poet' of all Shakespeare's heroes. If characters in poetic drama speak poetry we ought to be able to notice the fact without concluding that they are poets. In Othello, which is poetic drama, Shakespeare works by poetic means: it is through the characteristic noble verse described above that, very largely, we get our sense of the noble Othello. If the impression made by Othello's own utterance is often poetical as well as poetic, that is Shakespeare's way, not of representing him as a poet, but of conveying the romantic glamour that, for Othello himself and others, invests Othello and what he stands for,

'For Othello himself—it might be said that to express Othello's sense of himself and make us share it is the essential function of this verse, the 'Othello music'. But, of course, there are distinctions to be noted. The description of the storm quoted above, though it belongs to the general heroic mode of the play, cannot be said to exhibit the element of self-dramatization that is characteristic of Othello's own utterances. On the other hand, the self-dramatizing trick commands subtle modulations and various stops. It is not always as assertive as in

Behold, I have a weapon. [V, ii, 257]

or the closing speech. In these speeches, not only is it explicit, it clearly involves, we may note, an attitude towards the emotion expressed—an attitude of a kind we are familiar with in the analysis of sentimentality.

The storm, within the idealizing mode, is at the other extreme from sentimentality; it serves to bring out the reality of the heroic Othello and what he represents. For his heroic quality, realized in this verse (here the utterance of others) is a real thing, though it is not, as Othello takes it to be, the whole of the reality. Another way of making the point would be to say that the distinctive style under discussion, die style that lends itself to Othello's self-

dramatization and conveys in general the tone and ideal import of this, goes, in its confident and magnificent buoyancy, essentially with the outer storm that both the lovers, in their voyage to Cyprus, triumphantly outride.

With that kind of external stress the noble Othello is well qualified to deal (if he went down—and we know he won't— he would go down magnificently). But it is not that kind of stress he has to fear in the new life beginning at Cyprus. The stresses of the spiritual climate are concentrated by lago (with his deflating, unbeglamouring, brutally realistic mode of speech) into something immediately apprehensible in drama and comparable with the storm. In this testing, Othello's inner timbers begin to part at once, the stuff of which he is made begins at once to deteriorate and show itself unfit. There is even a symbolic foundering when, breaking into incoherent ejaculations, he 'falls in a trance'. [IV, i, 35.]

As for the justice of this view that Othello yields with extraordinary promptness to suggestion, with such promptness as to make it plain that the mind that undoes him is not lago's but his own, it does not seem to need arguing. If it has to be argued, the only difficulty is the difficulty, for written criticism, of going in detailed commentary through an extended text. The text is plain enough. lago's sustained attack begins at about line 90 in Act III, Sc. iii, immediately upon Desdemona's exit and Othello's exclamation:

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul, But I do love dice! and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again.

In seventy lines Othello is brought to such a state that lago can, without getting any reply but

O misery, say

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy,

and use the word 'cuckold'. In ninety lines Othello is saying Why did I marry a

The explanation of this quick work is given plainly enough here:

lago: I would not have your free and noble nature Out of self-bounty be abused ; look to't: I know our country disposition well; In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks They dare nor show their husbands; their best conscience Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown.

Othello: Dost thou say so ?

lago: She did deceive her father, marrying you;

And when she seem'd to shake and fear your looks, She loved them most.

Othello: And so she did.

There in the first two lines is, explicitly appealed to by lago, 1 Othello's ideal conception of himself: it would be a pity if He let it be his undoing (as it actually was—the full irony lago can hardly be credited with intending). And there, in the last line we have the noble and magnanimous Othello, romantic hero and married lover, accepting as evidence against his wife the fact that, at the willing sacrifice of everything else, she had made with him a marriage of romantic love. lago, like Bradley, points out that Othello didn't really know Desdemona, and Othello acquiesces in considering her as a type—a type outside his experience—the Venetian wife. It is plain, then, that his love is composed very largely of ignorance of self as well as ignorance of her: however nobly he may feel about it, it isn't altogether what he, and Bradley with him, thinks it is. It may be love, but it can be only in an oddly qualified sense love of her: it must be much more a matter of self-centred and self-regarding satisfactions—pride, sensual possessiveness, appetite, love of loving—than he suspects.

This comes out unmistakably when he begins to let himself go; for instance, in the soliloquy that follows lago's exit:

She's gone; I am abused, and my relief Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage, That we can call these delicate creatures ours, And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad, And live upon the vapour of a dungeon, Than keep a corner in the thing I love For others' uses.

1 Who has described Othello [I, i, 12] as 'loving his own pride and purposes.'

Even the actual presence of Desdemona, who enters immediately upon the close of this soliloquy, can avail nothing against the misgivings of angry egotism. Pointing to his forehead he makes an allusion to the cuckold's horns, and when she in her innocence misunderstands him and offers to soothe the pain he rebuffs her. The element of angry sensuality is insistent:

What sense had I of her stol'n hours of lust ?

I had been happy if the general camp, Pioners and all, had tasted her sweet body,

It is significant that, at the climax of the play, when Othello, having exclaimed

O blood, blood, blood,

kneels to take a formal vow of revenge, he does so in the heroic strain of the 'Othello music*. To lago's

Patience, I say; your mind perhaps may change, he replies:

Never, lago. Like to the Pontic sea,

Whose icy current and compulsive course

Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

To the Propontic and the Hellespont;

Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,

Shall ne'er look back* ne'er ebb to humble love,

Till that a wide and capable revenge

Swallow them up. Now, by yond marble heaven,

La the due reverence of a sacred vow

I here engage my words.

At this climax of the play, as he sets himself irrevocably in his vindictive resolution, he reassumes formally his heroic self-dramatization—reassumes the Othello of'the big wars that make ambition virtue'. The part of this conscious nobility, this noble egotism, this self-pride that was justified by experience irrelevant to the present trials and stresses, is thus underlined. Othello's self-idealization, his promptness to jealousy and his blindness are shown in their essential relation. The self-idealization is shown as blindness and the nobility as here no longer something real, but the disguise of an obtuse and brutal egotism. Self-pride becomes

stupidity, ferocious stupidity, an insane and self-deceiving passion* The habitual 'nobility' is seen to make self-deception invincible, the egotism it expresses being the drive to catastrophe, Othello*s noble lack of self-knowledge is shown as humiliating and disastrous.

Bradley, however, his knowledge of Othello coinciding virtually with Othello's, sees nothing but the nobility. At the cost of denaturing Shakespeare's tragedy, he insistently idealizes. The 'feelings of jealousy proper', he says (p. 194),* are not the chief or deepest source of Othello's suffering. It is the feeling, "If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;" the feeling, "O lago, the pity of it, lago !"* It is Shakespeare's tragedy of Othello that the man who exclaims this can exclaim three lines later, when he next speaks [IV, i, 204] :

I will chop her into messes* Cuckold me!

Again, three lines further on he says:

Get me some poison, lago; this night. I'll not expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again: this night, lago.

This surely has some bearing on the nature of'the pity of it': to equate Bradley's knowledge of Othello with Othello's own was perhaps unfair to Othello.

In any case, this association of strong sensuality with ugly vindictive jealousy is insistent in Shakespeare's play:

Now he tells how she plucked him to my chamber. O, I see that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw it to. [IV, i, 140]

I would have him nine years a-killing. A fine woman! a fair woman! a sweet woman! [IV, i, 181]

'O lago, the pity of it, lago !': it is plain here that 'fine', 'fair' and 'sweet' apply, not to Desdemona as a complete person (the immediate provocation is lago's remark, 'she gave it him and he hath given it [the handkerchief] his whore'), but to her person in abstraction from the character of the owner, whom Othello hardly, at this point, respects. And the nature of this regret, this

tragically expressed regret, bears an essential relation to the nature of the love with which Othello, however imaginatively and Romeo-like, loved Desdemona. That romantic idealizing love could be as dubiously grounded in reality as this is an essential condition of the tragedy. But Bradley's own idealizing is invincible. He can even say (p. 197) :

An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia.

That's no doubt how Othello would have put it; but for the reader—the unidealizing reader—what the questioning of Emilia [IV, ii] shows in brutal, resolute, unrestricted predominance is the antithesis of any instinct of justice.

With obtuseness to the tragic significance of Shakespeare's play goes insensibility to his poetry—to his supreme art as exhibited locally in the verse (it is still not superfluous to insist that the poetic skill is one with the dramatic). This is Bradley's commentary on Act V, Sc. ii: