The horror of most American critics (Mr. Furness is a bright exception) at the idea of a black Othello is very amusing, and their arguments are highly instructive.  But they were anticipated, I regret to say, by Coleridge, and we will hear him.  ’No doubt Desdemona saw Othello’s visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro.  It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated.’[104] Could any argument be more self-destructive?  It actually did appear to Brabantio ‘something monstrous to conceive’ his daughter falling in love with Othello,—­so monstrous that he could account for her love only by drugs and foul charms.  And the suggestion that such love would argue ‘disproportionateness’ is precisely the suggestion that Iago did make in Desdemona’s case: 

     Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank,
     Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural.

In fact he spoke of the marriage exactly as a filthy-minded cynic now might speak of the marriage of an English lady to a negro like Toussaint.  Thus the argument of Coleridge and others points straight to the conclusion against which they argue.

But this is not all.  The question whether to Shakespeare Othello was black or brown is not a mere question of isolated fact or historical curiosity; it concerns the character of Desdemona.  Coleridge, and still more the American writers, regard her love, in effect, as Brabantio regarded it, and not as Shakespeare conceived it.  They are simply blurring this glorious conception when they try to lessen the distance between her and Othello, and to smooth away the obstacle which his ‘visage’ offered to her romantic passion for a hero.  Desdemona, the ‘eternal womanly’ in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint, radiant with that heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more because nature so rarely permits it to themselves, had no theories about universal brotherhood, and no phrases about ’one blood in all the nations of the earth’ or ‘barbarian, Scythian, bond and free’; but when her soul came in sight of the noblest soul on earth, she made nothing of the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took part with it, and ‘loved him with the love which was her doom.’  It was not prudent.  It even turned out tragically.  She met in life with the reward of those who rise too far above our common level; and we continue to allot her the same reward when we consent to forgive her for loving a brown man, but find it monstrous that she should love a black one.[105]