And this imagination, we feel, has accompanied his whole life.  He has watched with a poet’s eye the Arabian trees dropping their med’cinable gum, and the Indian throwing away his chance-found pearl; and has gazed in a fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rushing, never to return, to the Propontic and the Hellespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt (for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.

So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave, self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils, hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth, proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unelated by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and all rebellion from within.  And he comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as any passage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness and his imagination with ecstasy.  For there is no love, not that of Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othello’s.

The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by the story.  In the first place, Othello’s mind, for all its poetry, is very simple.  He is not observant.  His nature tends outward.  He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection.  Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect.  On this side he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness and trustfulness of nature.  In addition, he has little experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is ignorant of European women.

In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has greater dignity than any other of Shakespeare’s men), he is by nature full of the most vehement passion.  Shakespeare emphasises his self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the First Act, but by references to the past.  Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims: 

     Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
     Call all in all sufficient?  Is this the nature
     Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
     The shot of accident nor dart of chance
     Could neither graze nor pierce?

Iago, who has here no motive for lying, asks: 

     Can he be angry?  I have seen the cannon
     When it hath blown his ranks into the air,
     And, like the devil, from his very arm
     Puffed his own brother—­and can he be angry?[95]

This, and other aspects of his character, are best exhibited by a single line—­one of Shakespeare’s miracles—­the words by which Othello silences in a moment the night-brawl between his attendants and those of Brabantio: