The issues thus raised ought not to be ignored or impatiently dismissed, but they cannot be decided, it seems to me, by argument.  All we can profitably do is to consider narrowly our experience, and to ask ourselves this question:  If we feel these objections, do we feel them when we are reading the play with all our force, or only when we are reading it in a half-hearted manner?  For, however matters may stand in the former case, in the latter case evidently the fault is ours and not Shakespeare’s.  And if we try the question thus, I believe we shall find that on the whole the fault is ours.  The first, and least important, of the three passages—­that of the blow—­seems to me the most doubtful.  I confess that, do what I will, I cannot reconcile myself with it.  It seems certain that the blow is by no means a tap on the shoulder with a roll of paper, as some actors, feeling the repulsiveness of the passage, have made it.  It must occur, too, on the open stage.  And there is not, I think, a sufficiently overwhelming tragic feeling in the passage to make it bearable.  But in the other two scenes the case is different.  There, it seems to me, if we fully imagine the inward tragedy in the souls of the persons as we read, the more obvious and almost physical sensations of pain or horror do not appear in their own likeness, and only serve to intensify the tragic feelings in which they are absorbed.  Whether this would be so in the murder-scene if Desdemona had to be imagined as dragged about the open stage (as in some modern performances) may be doubtful; but there is absolutely no warrant in the text for imagining this, and it is also quite clear that the bed where she is stifled was within the curtains,[92] and so, presumably, in part concealed.

Here, then, Othello does not appear to be, unless perhaps at one point,[93] open to criticism, though it has more passages than the other three tragedies where, if imagination is not fully exerted, it is shocked or else sensationally excited.  If nevertheless we feel it to occupy a place in our minds a little lower than the other three (and I believe this feeling, though not general, is not rare), the reason lies not here but in another characteristic, to which I have already referred,—­the comparative confinement of the imaginative atmosphere. Othello has not equally with the other three the power of dilating the imagination by vague suggestions of huge universal powers working in the world of individual fate and passion.  It is, in a sense, less ‘symbolic.’  We seem to be aware in it of a certain limitation, a partial suppression of that element in Shakespeare’s mind which unites him with the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers.  In one or two of his plays, notably in Troilus and Cressida, we are almost painfully conscious of this suppression; we feel an intense intellectual activity, but at the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as though some power in his soul, at once