ruths, not of fact, but of life, focussed and
arranged as an artist arranges them, and permeated with that strange
sense of wonder which only Life can give. We feel the suggestion of an
inevitable dim something beyond, to explain the unexplainable, the
tragedy of character, and the tragedy of circumstance.

These make the great crises which break up lives. But the play goes on
with all the wild force of life itself. We feel the Idea of jealousv
forming itself in the noble nature of Othello, and bringing with it
anguish, the bitterer throes of life, those intense and hopeless
moments when struggle only makes the coil close tighter round the
victim. And after we have felt these, no nature remains quite the same
as before. There has entered into us a power of imaginative sympathy
which Art alone can inspire and only when it most inwardly reveals
Life itself. Of all things, the "Too late" and the "Might have been"
are the most sorrowful, and the divine possibility, cruelly realised
too late, gives the sharpest edge to Othello's mental agony, when the
whole truth of Desdemona's life--an "objectification" of loyalty,
love, and purity--is only revealed to him as she lies there dead
before him, killed by his own hand. All that it means rushes then like
a torrent on his soul; when Othello falls on the bed, by Desdemona's
body, the remorse and love that rend him with their talons are beyond
even Shakespeare's power of expression.

With groans scarcely uttered, Othello gives the only outlet possible
to the blinding, scathing storm of passions within him. There is one
touch, and only the intuitive artist of humanity and of life could
have known it, and given it--only one touch of consolation that could
be left him, and it comes to Othello as he is dying! "I kiss'd thee,
'ere I kill'd thee."

He fastens on this as a starving man fastens on a crumb of bread.

Why is this so true as to be almost intolerable--and yet so beautiful?
The characters have art necessities. Schiller said Art has its
categorical Imperatives--its _must_, and Shakespeare's characters
fulfil them. We feel how inevitable is their fate. They make their own
tragedy. The Poet compresses a Life Tragedy into a few pages of
manuscript. He, with the great sense and Idea of Human Life in him,
has to choose what he will portray, and the greater an artist the more
unerring is his selection. Then begins his own absorption in the
characters. Conception and expression come