ng before it but powerless to deny it entrance,
gasping inarticulate images of pollution, and finding relief only in a
bestial thirst for blood? This is what we have to witness in one who was
indeed 'great of heart' and no less pure and tender than he was great.
And this, with what it leads to, the blow to Desdemona, and the scene
where she is treated as the inmate of a brothel, a scene far more
painful than the murder scene, is another cause of the special effect of
this tragedy.[86]

(3) The mere mention of these scenes will remind us painfully of a third
cause; and perhaps it is the most potent of all. I mean the suffering of
Desdemona. This is, unless I mistake, the most nearly intolerable
spectacle that Shakespeare offers us. For one thing, it is _mere_
suffering; and, _ceteris paribus_, that is much worse to witness than
suffering that issues in action. Desdemona is helplessly passive. She
can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not
even in silent feeling. And the chief reason of her helplessness only
makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely painful. She is
helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute. I
would not challenge Mr. Swinburne's statement that we _pity_ Othello
even more than Desdemona; but we watch Desdemona with more unmitigated
distress. We are never wholly uninfluenced by the feeling that Othello
is a man contending with another man; but Desdemona's suffering is like
that of the most loving of dumb creatures tortured without cause by the
being he adores.

(4) Turning from the hero and 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. Iago's plot is Iago's
character in action; and it is built on his knowledge of Othello's
character, and could not otherwise have succeeded. Still it remains true
that an elaborate plot was necessary to elicit the catastrophe; for
Othello was no Leontes, and his was the last nature to engender such
jealousy from itself. Accordingly Iago's intrigue occupies a position in
the drama for which no parallel can be found in the other tragedies; the
only approach, and that a distant one, being the intrigue of Edmund in
the secondary plot of _King Lear_. Now in any novel or play, even if