And yet that is not without truth: from that moment when the first insinuation escapes the lips of Iago, and reaches the ears of the Moor—from the utterance of those fatal words, "Ay, well said, whisper; with as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio"—to that awful moment when the curtain falls on the corpses of the two lovers, the spectator is in a state of breathless expectation. You might hear the flight of a gnat across the room, and those are ill-judged spirits whose zeal compels them to interrupt by their applause the anxiety which is momentarily increasing.
In that first word all has been said, all has been determined. Farewell forever to Desdemona! Farewell to Othello! Desdemona only appears henceforth as the innocent bird struggling feebly in the grasp of a vulture, but of a vulture who is himself furiously struggling under the grasp of another vulture, and who avenges himself by his treatment of his unhappy victim for the frightful tortures which he is suffering in his own person.
The spectator looks upon this picture, not with that restless curiosity which passes alternately from fear to hope, but, if we may say so—and we do it fully sensible that there are important differences—with something of that inexpressible anguish which absorbs us when, in a court of justice, we are watching the vain efforts of a criminal who is being hurried along to a fatal and inevitable condemnation.
Othello has never thought, has never had occasion to think, how strange, how incomprehensible is the sentiment which he has inspired in Desdemona; now for the first time he thinks of it:
"Haply, for I am black,
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have; or, for I am declined
Into the vale of years."
One irregular taste, Iago suggests to him, indicates other irregularities. Beyond a doubt she is lost—"she's gone."
This first suspicion, to use Schlegel's energetic language, is "a drop of poison in his veins, and sets his whole blood in the wildest ferment." The savage is again uppermost. The civilized portion of his nature, which has never met him in this region, which has only subdued him on the field of battle, is powerless to hold him in check. The struggle goes on for some moments; for some moments does Othello, the warrior, the statesman, the lord of others and of himself, attempt to treat his own love as a sportive flame, his jealousy as a folly.
"Exchange me for a goat,
When I shall turn the business of my soul
To such exsufflicate and blown surmises.
* * * * *
No, Iago;
I'll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove;
And, on the proof, there is no more but this—
Away at once with love and jealousy.
* * * * *
Look here, Iago;
All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven.
'Tis gone!"