only of pity and admiration.

But, however noble and pathetic such a rendering may be, it consorts
better with the ideas and demands of the present time than with those
of the Elizabethan age. The dramatist who began by writing _Titus
Andronicus_ had at least no instinctive distaste to repulsive
subjects, no fear of shocking his audience by an exhibition of untamed
barbarity. Othello is "of a free and open nature," he is "great of
heart," he is above doing wrong without provocation, real or supposed.
But his nature admits no possibility of self-control, of reason in
the midst of doubts, of patience under injury. His temperament betrays
itself in physical exhibitions wild and portentous. "You are fatal
_then_ when your eyes roll so," is the suggestive cry of Desdemona. In
his perplexity and fury he swoons and foams. He overhears an insult to
Venice and slays the traducer. His language to the wife whom he
still loves while believing himself dishonored by her is such that "a
beggar, in his drink, could not have laid such terms upon his callet."
He outrages her kinsman and a throng of attendants by striking her in
their presence. Her protestations of innocence serve only to inflame
him, and he cuts short her last pleadings with his murderous hand in
a way which would have forced M. Dumas _fils_ himself to cry out, "Ne
tue la _pas_!"

How are this fury and this credulity, both equally insensate, to
be explained, how are they to be reconciled with traits that
compel sympathy and admiration, except as the workings of a nature
essentially uncivilized? The object of a great drama is to exhibit men
not as they appear in the ordinary affairs of life, but while subject
to those fiery tests under which all that is foreign or acquired melts
away, and the primal components of the character are revealed in their
bareness and in their depths. Othello's race is the hinge on which
the tragedy turns. It throws a fatality on that marriage which seems
unnatural even to those who yet do not suspect that the discordancy
lies deeper than in the complexion. It makes him the easy victim of a
plot which would otherwise only have ensnared its concoctor. It sweeps
away all impediments to the catastrophe, making it swift, inevitable
and dire. And it is by seizing upon this central fact that Salvini has
been enabled to render his performance artistically perfect. Were the
conception radically false, there could not be the same unity in the
executio