They might have successfully set it up—but I, the Judge, would have successfully put it down. Honestly, I don't think Othello mad; and for this reason, that the thought never before came into my head. An incident that appears to me most wonderful in dramatic invention is—the Swooning. Look at the precise words preceding his falling down. To me it has no other effect or sense, than that of the blood being driven up into the head, and oppressing with physical pressure that bodily organ—the brain. The soul strikes the body like a hammer, and knocks it down.
TALBOYS.
Ay, how his words waver—"That's not so good now"—from a man believing, or on the point of believing. There is to me a physical faintness in these words, and in the play upon the words "lie with her," &c., intellect reeling to fall.
NORTH.
Good. But I believe body and soul of Othello—or the relation between body and soul—to be physiologically right and sound. The swooning goes soon off—the accident of an hour—the mind is else in full vigour, sound, and misled. You must recollect that a mind of supereminent physical (may one say so?) and moral power—a mind that would have been strong and calm through the Russian Campaign of Napoleon—is not in a day stricken into a state which requires the medical skill and attention of Dr Willis. Othello had an immensely strong physical constitution undoubtedly—had he not, the adventures related would long ago have extinguished him. This is one meaning of that sudden and strange narrative which children are taught by rote, and which men may not have quite fathomed; but a strong body and strong soul conjoined, do not lightly admit of disjunction. Madness, properly so called, is a disjunction, in some way or kind, of the natural union between soul and body. A few days disrupt the ties in the aged Lear. You may think that in Othello—I suppose Ætat. 40 or 45—the ties would bear some wrenching of the rack, ere snapping. I think that they held firm.
TALBOYS.
True, sir, insanity would even detract from the moral majesty and splendour of Othello.
NORTH.
It would. The time comes back to me when I did not care for the Play or the Man. The Play now seems to me wonderful, more even than Hamlet or Lear—and the Man, in poetical invention, a match for Achilles or Satan.