n, like the jealous husbands in the daily papers.
But the conventions of the tragic stage are more favourable to
psychological truth than the conventions of real life. If we may
trust the imagination (and in imagination lies, as we have seen, the
test of propriety), this is what Othello would have felt. If he had
not expressed it, his dumbness would have been due to external
hindrances, not to the failure in his mind of just such complex and
rhetorical thoughts as the poet has put into his mouth. The height
of passion is naturally complex and rhetorical. Love makes us
poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
When a man knows that his life is over, he can look back upon it
from a universal standpoint. He has nothing more to live for, but if
the energy of his mind remains unimpaired, he will still wish to
live, and, being cut off from his personal ambitions, he will impute
to himself a kind of vicarious immortality by identifying himself
with what is eternal. He speaks of himself as he is, or rather as he
was. He sums himself up, and points to his achievement. This I
have been, says he, this I have done.

This comprehensive and impartial view, this synthesis and
objectification of experience, constitutes the liberation of the soul
and the essence of sublimity. That the hero attains it at the end
consoles us, as it consoles him, for his hideous misfortunes. Our
pity and terror are indeed purged; we go away knowing that,
however tangled the net may be in which we feel ourselves caught,
there is liberation beyond, and an ultimate peace.

_The sublime independent of the expression of evil._

Sec. 60. So natural is the relation between the vivid conception of
great evils, and that self-assertion of the soul which gives the
emotion of the sublime, that the sublime is often thought to depend
upon the terror which these conceived evils inspire. To be sure,
that terror would have to be inhibited and subdued, otherwise we
should have a passion too acute to be incorporated in any object;
the sublime would not appear as an aesthetic quality in things, but
remain merely an emotional state in the subject. But this subdued
and objectified terror is what is commonly regarded as the essence
of the sublime, and so great an authority as Aristotle would seem
to countenance some such definition. The usual cause of the
sublime is here confused, however, with the sublime itself. The
suggestion of terror makes us withdra