creations hold, and that we, ourselves, are capable of holding in our own hearts.  In this presentation, Shakespeare flashes the sense of life with all its complexities of heart and brain into us.  He does not stand, as it were aside, as a commentator on the faults or weaknesses of his characters, but he wafts us out of our circumscribed lives, out of our limitation of thought, we know not how, into an atmosphere quivering with passion, and felt by us all the keener, because we recognise that the Poet never thought about us at all.  He excites our sympathies by his own intuitions into the clashing ideas, which he represents in the tragedy of a passionately loving and a jealous nature.  We learn truths, not of fact, but of life, focussed and arranged as an artist arranges them, and permeated with that strange sense of wonder which only Life can give.  We feel the suggestion of an inevitable dim something beyond, to explain the unexplainable, the tragedy of character, and the tragedy of circumstance.

These make the great crises which break up lives.  But the play goes on with all the wild force of life itself.  We feel the Idea of jealousv forming itself in the noble nature of Othello, and bringing with it anguish, the bitterer throes of life, those intense and hopeless moments when struggle only makes the coil close tighter round the victim.  And after we have felt these, no nature remains quite the same as before.  There has entered into us a power of imaginative sympathy which Art alone can inspire and only when it most inwardly reveals Life itself.  Of all things, the “Too late” and the “Might have been” are the most sorrowful, and the divine possibility, cruelly realised too late, gives the sharpest edge to Othello’s mental agony, when the whole truth of Desdemona’s life—­an “objectification” of loyalty, love, and purity—­is only revealed to him as she lies there dead before him, killed by his own hand.  All that it means rushes then like a torrent on his soul; when Othello falls on the bed, by Desdemona’s body, the remorse and love that rend him with their talons are beyond even Shakespeare’s power of expression.

With groans scarcely uttered, Othello gives the only outlet possible to the blinding, scathing storm of passions within him.  There is one touch, and only the intuitive artist of humanity and of life could have known it, and given it—­only one touch of consolation that could be left him, and it comes to Othello as he is dying!  “I kiss’d thee, ’ere I kill’d thee.”

He fastens on this as a starving man fastens on a crumb of bread.