But before the end there is again a change.  The supposed death of Cassio (V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance.  The Othello who enters the bed-chamber with the words,

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,

is not the man of the Fourth Act.  The deed he is bound to do is no murder, but a sacrifice.  He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love.  His anger has passed; a boundless sorrow has taken its place; and

                  this sorrow’s heavenly: 
     It strikes where it doth love.

Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt, these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten pity.[102] And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close.  Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still.  As he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his life—­long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice, and now in Cyprus—­seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in the power of ‘love and man’s unconquerable mind.’

3

The words just quoted come from Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint l’Ouverture.  Toussaint was a Negro; and there is a question, which, though of little consequence, is not without dramatic interest, whether Shakespeare imagined Othello as a Negro or as a Moor.  Now I will not say that Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do; but what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Othello as a black man, and not as a light-brown one.

In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze to which we are now accustomed in the Othellos of our theatres is a recent innovation.  Down to Edmund Kean’s time, so far as is known, Othello was always quite black.  This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration, and it almost settles our question.  For it is impossible that the colour of the original Othello should have been forgotten so soon after Shakespeare’s time, and most improbable that it should have been changed from brown to black.