6

The characters of Cassio and Emilia hardly require analysis, and I will touch on them only from a single point of view.  In their combination of excellences and defects they are good examples of that truth to nature which in dramatic art is the one unfailing source of moral instruction.

Cassio is a handsome, light-hearted, good-natured young fellow, who takes life gaily, and is evidently very attractive and popular.  Othello, who calls him by his Christian name, is fond of him; Desdemona likes him much; Emilia at once interests herself on his behalf.  He has warm generous feelings, an enthusiastic admiration for the General, and a chivalrous adoration for his peerless wife.  But he is too easy-going.  He finds it hard to say No; and accordingly, although he is aware that he has a very weak head, and that the occasion is one on which he is bound to run no risk, he gets drunk—­not disgustingly so, but ludicrously so.[120] And, besides, he amuses himself without any scruple by frequenting the company of a woman of more than doubtful reputation, who has fallen in love with his good looks.  Moralising critics point out that he pays for the first offence by losing his post, and for the second by nearly losing his life.  They are quite entitled to do so, though the careful reader will not forget Iago’s part in these transactions.  But they ought also to point out that Cassio’s looseness does not in the least disturb our confidence in him in his relations with Desdemona and Othello.  He is loose, and we are sorry for it; but we never doubt that there was ‘a daily beauty in his life,’ or that his rapturous admiration of Desdemona was as wholly beautiful a thing as it appears, or that Othello was perfectly safe when in his courtship he employed Cassio to ‘go between’ Desdemona and himself.  It is fortunately a fact in human nature that these aspects of Cassio’s character are quite compatible.  Shakespeare simply sets it down; and it is just because he is truthful in these smaller things that in greater things we trust him absolutely never to pervert the truth for the sake of some doctrine or purpose of his own.

There is something very lovable about Cassio, with his fresh eager feelings; his distress at his disgrace and still more at having lost Othello’s trust; his hero-worship; and at the end his sorrow and pity, which are at first too acute for words.  He is carried in, wounded, on a chair.  He looks at Othello and cannot speak.  His first words come later when, to Lodovico’s question, ’Did you and he consent in Cassio’s death?’ Othello answers ‘Ay.’  Then he falters out, ’Dear General, I never gave you cause.’  One is sure he had never used that adjective before.  The love in it makes it beautiful, but there is something else in it, unknown to Cassio, which goes to one’s heart.  It tells us that his hero is no longer unapproachably above him.