by F. R. Leavis
DIABOLIC INTELLECT AND THE NOBLE HERO:
or The Sentimentalist's Othello
OTHELLO, it will be very generally granted, is of all Shakespeare's great tragedies the simplest: die theme is limited and sharply defined, and the play, everyone agrees, is a brilliantly successful piece of workmanship. The effect is one of a noble, 'classical' clarity—of firm, clear outlines, unblurred and undis-tracted by cloudy recessions, metaphysical aura, or richly symbolical ambiguities. 1 There would, it seems, be something like a consensus in this sense. And yet it is of Othello that one can say bluntly, as of no other of the great tragedies, that it suffers in current appreciation an essential and denaturing falsification.
The generally recognized peculiarity of Othello among the tragedies may be indicated by saying that it lends itself as no other of diem does to the approach classically associated with Bradley's name: even Othello (it will be necessary to insist) is poetic drama, a dramatic poem, and not a psychological novel written in dramatic form and draped in poetry, but relevant discussion of its tragic significance will nevertheless be mainly a matter of character-analysis. It would, that is, have lent itself uniquely well to Bradley's approach if Bradley had made his approach con-sistendy and with moderate intelligence. Actually, however, the section on Othello in Shakespearean Tragedy is more extravagant in misdirected scrupulosity dian any of the others; it is, with a concentration of Bradley's comical solemnity, completely wrong-headed—grossly and palpably false to the evidence it offers to weigh. Grossly and palpably ?—yet Bradley's Othello is substan-
1 Cf. 'We seem to be aware in it of a certain limitation, a partial suppression of that element in Shakespeare's mind which unites him with the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers/—A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 185.
'Othello is a story of intrigue rather than a visionary statement/—G. Wilson Knigk, The Wheel of Fire, p. 107.
tially that of common acceptance. And here is the reason for dealing with it, even though not only Bradley but, in its turn, disrespect for Bradley (one gathers) has gone out of fashion (as a matter of fact he is still a very potent and mischievous influence).
According to the version of Othello elaborated by Bradley the tragedy is the undoing of the noble Moor by the devilish cunning of lago. Othello we are to see as a nearly faultless hero whose strength and virtue are turned against him. Othello and Desde-mona, so far as their fate depended on their characters and un-tampered-with mutual relations, had every ground for expecting the happiness that romantic courtship had promised. It was external evil, the malice of the demi-devil, that turned a happy story of romantic love—of romantic lovers who were qualified to live happily ever after, so to speak—into a tragedy. This—it is the traditional version of Othello and has, moreover, the support of Coleridge—is to sentimentalize Shakespeare's tragedy and to displace its centre.
Here is Bradley:
Turning from the hero and the heroine to the third principal character we observe (what has often been pointed out) that the action and catastrophe of Othello depend largely on intrigue. We must not say more than this. We must not call the play a tragedy of intrigue as distinguished from a tragedy of character, (p. 179.)
And we must not suppose that Bradley sees what is in front of him. The character he is diinking of isn't Othello's. 'lago's plot', he goes on,
lago's plot is lago's character in action.
In fact the play (we need hardly stop short of saying) is lago's character in action. Bradley adds, it is true, that lago's plot 'is built on his knowledge of Othello's character, and could not otherwise have succeeded'. But lago's knowledge of Othello's character amounts pretty much to Bradley's knowledge of it (except, of course, that lago cannot realize Othello's nobility quite to the full): Othello is purely noble, strong, generous, and trusting, and as tragic hero is, however formidable and destructive in his agonies, merely a victim—the victim of lago's devilish 'intellectual superiority' (which is 'so great that we watch its advance fascinated and appalled'). It is all in order, then, that lago
should get one of the two lectures that Bradley gives to the play, Othello sharing the other with Desdemona. And it is all in the tradition; from Coleridge down, lago—his motivation or his motivelessness—has commonly been, in commentaries on the play, the main focus of attention.
The plain fact that has to be asserted in the face of this sustained and sanctioned perversity is that in Shakespeare's tragedy of Othello Othello is the chief personage—the chief personage in such a sense that the tragedy may fairly be said to be Othello's character in action. lago is subordinate and merely ancillary. He is not much more than a necessary piece of dramatic mechanism— that at any rate is a fit reply to the view of Othello as necessary material and provocation for a display of lago's fiendish intellectual superiority. lago, of course, is sufficiently convincing as a person; he could not perform his dramatic function otherwise. But something has gone wrong when we make him interesting in this kind of way:
His fate—which is himself—has completely mastered him: so that, in the later scenes, where the improbability of the entire success of a design built on so many different falsehoods forces itself on the reader, lago appears for moments not as a consummate schemer, but as a man absolutely infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.
We ought not, in reading those scenes, to be paying so much attention to the intrinsic personal qualities of lago as to attribute to him tragic interest of that kind.
This last proposition, though its justice is perhaps not self-evident, must remain for the time being a matter of assertion. Other things come first. Othello has in any case the prior claim on our attention, and it seems tactically best to start with something as easy to deal with as the view—Bradley's and Coleridge's x — and of course, Othello's before them—that Othello was 'not easily jealous'. Easy to deal with because there, to point to, is the text, plain and unequivocal. And yet the text was there for
1 * Finally, let me repeat that Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of lago, such a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed lago's honesty as Odiello did.'—Coleridge, Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare.
Coleridge, and Bradley accompanies his argument with constant particular reference to it. It is as extraordinary a history of triumphant sentimental perversity as literary history can show. Bradley himself saves us the need of insisting on this diagnosis by carrying indulgence of his preconception, his determined sentimental preconception, to such heroic lengths:
Now I repeat that any man situated as Othello was would have been disturbed by lago's communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where lago is dismissed [III, iii, 238] Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word.
The 'proper sense of that word' is perhaps illustrated by these lines (not quoted by Bradley) in which, Bradley grants, 'the beginning of that passion may be traced':
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—yet that's not much— 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.
Any reader not protected by a very obstinate preconception would take this, not for a new development of feeling, but for the fully explicit expression of something he had already, pages back, registered as an essential element in Othello's behaviour—something the evoking of which was essential to lago's success. In any case, jealous or not jealous 'in the proper sense of that word*, Othello has from the beginning responded to lago's
'communications' in the way lago desired and with a promptness that couldn't be improved upon, and has dismissed lago with these words:
Farewell, farewell:
If more thou dost perceive, let me know more; Set on thy wife to observe
HO THE COMMON PURSUIT
—to observe Desdemona, concerning whom lago has just said:
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.
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