rs, feeling the repulsiveness of the passage,
have made it. It must occur, too, on the open stage. And there is not, I
think, a sufficiently overwhelming tragic feeling in the passage to make
it bearable. But in the other two scenes the case is different. There,
it seems to me, if we fully imagine the inward tragedy in the souls of
the persons as we read, the more obvious and almost physical sensations
of pain or horror do not appear in their own likeness, and only serve to
intensify the tragic feelings in which they are absorbed. Whether this
would be so in the murder-scene if Desdemona had to be imagined as
dragged about the open stage (as in some modern performances) may be
doubtful; but there is absolutely no warrant in the text for imagining
this, and it is also quite clear that the bed where she is stifled was
within the curtains,[92] and so, presumably, in part concealed.

Here, then, _Othello_ does not appear to be, unless perhaps at one
point,[93] open to criticism, though it has more passages than the other
three tragedies where, if imagination is not fully exerted, it is
shocked or else sensationally excited. If nevertheless we feel it to
occupy a place in our minds a little lower than the other three (and I
believe this feeling, though not general, is not rare), the reason lies
not here but in another characteristic, to which I have already
referred,--the comparative confinement of the imaginative atmosphere.
_Othello_ has not equally with the other three the power of dilating the
imagination by vague suggestions of huge universal powers working in the
world of individual fate and passion. It is, in a sense, less
'symbolic.' 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. In one
or two of his plays, notably in _Troilus and Cressida_, we are almost
painfully conscious of this suppression; we feel an intense intellectual
activity, but at the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as
though some power in his soul, at once the highest and the sweetest,
were for a time in abeyance. In other plays, notably in the _Tempest_,
we are constantly aware of the presence of this power; and in such cases
we seem to be peculiarly near to Shakespeare himself. Now this is so in
_Hamlet_ and _King Lear_, and, in a slighter degree, in _Macbeth_; but
it is much less so in _Othe