And yet how all this, and all her defects, vanish into nothingness when we see her face to face with that which she can understand and feel!  From the moment of her appearance after the murder to the moment of her death she is transfigured; and yet she remains perfectly true to herself, and we would not have her one atom less herself.  She is the only person who utters for us the violent common emotions which we feel, together with those more tragic emotions which she does not comprehend.  She has done this once already, to our great comfort.  When she suggests that some villain has poisoned Othello’s mind, and Iago answers,

     Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible;

and Desdemona answers,

     If any such there be, Heaven pardon him;

Emilia’s retort,

     A halter pardon him, and Hell gnaw his bones,

says what we long to say, and helps us.  And who has not felt in the last scene how her glorious carelessness of her own life, and her outbursts against Othello—­even that most characteristic one,

     She was too fond of her most filthy bargain—­

lift the overwhelming weight of calamity that oppresses us, and bring us an extraordinary lightening of the heart?  Terror and pity are here too much to bear; we long to be allowed to feel also indignation, if not rage; and Emilia lets us feel them and gives them words.  She brings us too the relief of joy and admiration,—­a joy that is not lessened by her death.  Why should she live?  If she lived for ever she never could soar a higher pitch, and nothing in her life became her like the losing it.[122]

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 107:  It has been held, for example, that Othello treated Iago abominably in preferring Cassio to him; that he did seduce Emilia; that he and Desdemona were too familiar before marriage; and that in any case his fate was a moral judgment on his sins, and Iago a righteous, if sharp, instrument of Providence.]

[Footnote 108:  See III. iii. 201, V. i. 89 f.  The statements are his own, but he has no particular reason for lying.  One reason of his disgust at Cassio’s appointment was that Cassio was a Florentine (I. i. 20).  When Cassio says (III. i. 42) ’I never knew a Florentine more kind and honest,’ of course he means, not that Iago is a Florentine, but that he could not be kinder and honester if he were one.]

[Footnote 109:  I am here merely recording a general impression.  There is no specific evidence, unless we take Cassio’s language in his drink (II. ii. 105 f.) to imply that Iago was not a ‘man of quality’ like himself.  I do not know if it has been observed that Iago uses more nautical phrases and metaphors than is at all usual with Shakespeare’s characters.  This might naturally be explained by his roving military life, but it is curious that almost all the examples occur in the earlier scenes (see e.g. I. i. 30, 153, 157; I. ii. 17, 50; I. iii. 343; II. iii. 65), so that the use of these phrases and metaphors may not be characteristic of Iago but symptomatic of a particular state of Shakespeare’s mind.]