(1) Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust.  He put entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who had not only been his companion in arms, but, as he believed, had just proved his faithfulness in the matter of the marriage.  This confidence was misplaced, and we happen to know it; but it was no sign of stupidity in Othello.  For his opinion of Iago was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him:  and that opinion was that Iago was before all things ‘honest,’ his very faults being those of excess in honesty.  This being so, even if Othello had not been trustful and simple, it would have been quite unnatural in him to be unmoved by the warnings of so honest a friend, warnings offered with extreme reluctance and manifestly from a sense of a friend’s duty.[97] Any husband would have been troubled by them.

(2) Iago does not bring these warnings to a husband who had lived with a wife for months and years and knew her like his sister or his bosom-friend.  Nor is there any ground in Othello’s character for supposing that, if he had been such a man, he would have felt and acted as he does in the play.  But he was newly married; in the circumstances he cannot have known much of Desdemona before his marriage; and further he was conscious of being under the spell of a feeling which can give glory to the truth but can also give it to a dream.

(3) This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his powers of perception.  In Othello’s case, after a long and most artful preparation, there now comes, to reinforce its effect, the suggestions that he is not an Italian, not even a European; that he is totally ignorant of the thoughts and the customary morality of Venetian women;[98] that he had himself seen in Desdemona’s deception of her father how perfect an actress she could be.  As he listens in horror, for a moment at least the past is revealed to him in a new and dreadful light, and the ground seems to sink under his feet.  These suggestions are followed by a tentative but hideous and humiliating insinuation of what his honest and much-experienced friend fears may be the true explanation of Desdemona’s rejection of acceptable suitors, and of her strange, and naturally temporary, preference for a black man.  Here Iago goes too far.  He sees something in Othello’s face that frightens him, and he breaks off.  Nor does this idea take any hold of Othello’s mind.  But it is not surprising that his utter powerlessness to repel it on the ground of knowledge of his wife, or even of that instinctive interpretation of character which is possible between persons of the same race,[99] should complete his misery, so that he feels he can bear no more, and abruptly dismisses his friend (III. iii. 238).