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 execution, the same harmony in the details.  We shall not assert that his is the ideal Othello, or that such an Othello is possible.  Shakespeare’s creations cannot be bounded by the limit of another idiosyncrasy.  But we hold that, if he does not put into the character all that belongs to it, he puts nothing into it that does not belong to it.  We may miss in the accents of his despair a pathos capable of assuaging our horror; but this latter emotion, equally legitimate, is commonly stifled altogether, leaving us more disposed to linger lovingly beside the dead than to shudder and exclaim with Ludovico, “The object poisons sight;—­let it be hid.”

A.F.

A LETTER FROM NEW YORK.

I have come from the country.  I have seen Salvini.  All emotion has to be expressed now in the above form, for Salvini rules.  He is simply the greatest actor since Rachel, and his troupe the most perfect ever seen in this country.  The whole plane of their acting is forty steps higher than we are accustomed to; therefore it has been slow of gaining appreciation, and the panic having burst over the devoted city just as Salvini opened, the houses have been poor.  He should play, too (all actors should), in a smaller house than the Academy of Music.  His first great success may therefore date from a matinee at Wallack’s, where he had the most distinguished audience I have