HORRIBLE PUNISHMENTS

Strangling, stoning, burning, impaling, flaying alive, tearing limb from limb, throwing from a tower, burying alive, disemboweling, enslaving, drowning, mutilating, are some of the punishments inflicted by savages and barbarians in all parts of the world on adulterous men or women.  Specifications would be superfluous.  Let one case stand for a hundred.  Maximilian Prinz zu Wied relates (I., 531, 572), that the Indians (Blackfeet),

“severely punished infidelity on the part of their wives by cutting off their noses.  At Fort Mackenzie we saw a number of women defaced in this hideous manner.  In about a dozen tents we saw at least half a dozen females thus disfigured.”

Must we not look upon the state of mind which leads to such terrible actions 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