s as genuine jealousy? Is there any difference between it and
the feeling we ourselves know under that name? There is--a world-wide
difference. Take Othello, who though a Moor, acts and feels more like
an Englishman. The desire for revenge animates him too: "I'll tear her
to pieces," he exclaimed when Iago slanders Desdemona--"will chop her
into messes," and as for Cassio,

Oh, that the slave had forty thousand lives!
One is too poor, too weak for my revenge.

* * * * *

Arise, black vengeance from the hollow hell.

ESSENCE OF TRUE JEALOUSY

But this eagerness for revenge is only one phase of his passion.
Though it leads him, in a frenzy of despair, to smother his wife, it
is yet, even in his violent soul, subordinate to those feelings of
_wounded honor and outraged affection_ which constitute the essence of
true jealousy. When he supposes himself betrayed by his wife and his
friend he clutches, as Ulrici remarks (I., 404), with the blind
despair of a shipwrecked man to his sole remaining property--_honor_:

"His honor, as he thinks, demands the sacrifice of the
lives of Desdemona and Cassio. The idea of honor in
those days, especially in Italy, inevitably required
the death of the faithless wife as well as that of the
adulterer. Othello therefore regards it as his duty to
comply with this requirement, and, accordingly it is no
lie when he calls himself 'an honorable murderer,'
doing 'naught in hate, but all in honor,'.... Common
thirst for revenge would have thought only of
increasing the sufferings of its victim, of adding to
its own satisfaction. But how touching, on the other
hand, is Othello's appeal to Desdemona to pray and to
confess her sins to Heaven, that he may not kill her
soul with her body! Here, at the moment of the most
intense excitement, in the desperate mood of a
murderer, his love still breaks forth, and we again see
the indestructible nobility of his soul."

Schlegel erred, therefore, when he maintained that Othello's jealousy
was of the sensual, Oriental sort. So far as it led to the murder, it
was; but Shakspere gave it touches which allied it to the true
jealousy of the heart of which Schlegel himself has aptly said that it
is "compatible with the tenderest feeling and adoration of the beloved
object." Of such tender feeling and adoration there is not a tr