THE CHARACTER OF DESDEMONA. FROM ESSAYS ON THE CHARACTERS OF SHAKSPEARE. THERE are critics who cannot bear to see the virtue and delicacy of Shakspeare's Desdemona called in question; who defend her on the ground that Othello is not an Ethiopian, but a Moor; that he is not black, but only tawny; and they protest against the sable mask of Othello upon the stage, and against the pictures of him in which he is always painted black. They say that prejudices have been taken against Desdemona from the slanders of Iago, from the railings of Roderigo, from the disappointed paternal rancour of Brabantio, and from the desponding concessions of Othello himself. I have said, that since I entered upon the third of Shakspeare's seven ages, the first and chief capacity in which I have read and studied him is as a teacher of morals; and that I had scarcely ever seen a player of his parts who regarded him as a moralist at all. I further said, that in my judgment no man could understand him who did study him pre-eminently as a teacher of morals. These critics say they do not incline to put Shakspeare on a level with sop! Sure enough they do not study Shakspeare as a teacher of morals. To them, therefore, Desdemona is a perfect character; and her love for Othello is not unnatural, because he is not a Congo negro but only a sooty Moor, and has royal blood in his veins. My objections to the character of Desdemona arise not from what Iago, or Roderigo, or Brabantio, or Othello says of her; but from what she herself does. She absconds from her father's house, in the dead of night, to marry a blackamoor. She breaks a father's heart, and covers his noble house with shame, to gratify-what? Pure love, like that of Juliet or Miranda? No! unnatural passion; it cannot be named with delicacy. Her admirers now say this is criticism of 1835; that the colour of Othello has nothing to do with the passion of Desdemona. No? Why, if Othello had been white, what need would there have been for her running away with him? She could have made no better match. Her father could have made no reasonable objection to it; and there could have been no tragedy. If the colour of Othello is not as vital to the whole tragedy as the age of Juliet is to her character and destiny, then have I read Shakspeare in vain. The father of Desdemona charges Othello with magic arts in obtaining the affections of his daughter. Why, but because her passion for him is unnatural; and why is it unnatural, but because of his colour? In the very first scene, in the dialogue between Roderigo and Iago, before they rouse Brabantio to inform him of his daughter's elopement, Roderigo contemptuously calls Othello "the thick lips." I cannot in decency quote here-but turn to the book, and see in what language Iago announces to her father his daughter's shameful misconduct. The language of Roderigo is more supportable. He is a Venetian gentleman, himself a rejected suitor of Desdemona; and who has been forbid den by her father access to his house. Roused from his repose at the dead of night by the loud cries of these two men, Brabantio spurns, with indignation and scorn, the insulting and beastly language of Iago; and sharply chides Roderigo, whom he supposes to be hovering about his house in defiance of his prohibitions and in a state of intoxication. He threatens him with punishment. Roderigo replies "Rod. Sir. I will answer any thing. But I beseech you, I thus would play and trifle with your reverence: Struck by this speech as by a clap of thunder, Brabantio calls up his people, remembers a portentous dream, calls for light, goes and searches with his servants, and comes back saying "It is too true an evil: gone she is: And what's to come of my despised time, The father's heart is broken; life is no longer of any value to him; he repeats this sentiment time after time whenever he appears in the scene: and in the last scene of the play, where Desdemona lies dead, her uncle Gratiano says "Poor Desdemona! I am glad thy father's dead, Indeed! indeed! I must look at Shakspeare in this as in all his pictures of human life, in the capacity of a teacher of morals. I must believe that in exhibiting a daughter of a Venetian nobleman of the highest rank eloping in the dead of the night to marry a thick-lipped, wool-headed Moor, opening a train of consequences which lead to her own destruction by her husband's hands, and to that of her father by a broken heart, he did not intend to present her as an example of the perfection of female virtue. I must look first at the action, then at the motive, then at the consequences, before I inquire in what light it is received and represented by the other persons of the drama. The first action of Desdemona discards all female delicacy, all filial duty, all sense of ingenuous shame. So I consider it-and so, it is considered by her own father. Her offence is not a mere elopement from her father's house for a clandestine marriage. I hope it requires no unreasonable rigour of norality to consider even that as suited to raise a prepossession rather unfavourable to the character of a young woman of refined sensibility and elevated education. But an elopement for a clandestine marriage with a blackamoor !-That is the measure of my estimation of the character of Desdemona from the beginning; and when I have passed my judgment upon it, and find in the play that from the first moment of her father's knowledge of the act it made him loathe his life, and that it finally broke his heart, I am then in time to inquire, what was the deadly venom which inflicted the immedicable wound :—and what is it, but the colour of Othello? "Now, Roderigo, Where did'st thou see her?-Oh, unhappy girl!With the Moor, say'st thou ?-Who would be a father?" These are the disjointed lamentations of the wretched parent when the first disclosure of his daughter's shame is made known to him. This scene is one of the inimitable pictures of human passion in the hands of Shakspeare, and that half line, "With the Moor say'st thou?" comes from the deepest recesses of the soul. Again, when Brabantio first meets Othello, he breaks out: "O, thou foul thief, where hast thou stow'd my daughter? If she, in chains of magic were not bound, Of such a thing as thou; to fear, not to delight." Several of the English commentators have puzzled themselves with the inquiry why the epithet "curled" is here applied to the wealthy darlings of the nation; and Dr. Johnson thinks it has no reference to the hair; but it evidently has. The curled hair is in antithetic contrast to the sooty bosom, the thick lips, and the woolly head. The contrast of colo is the very hinge upon which Brabantio founds his charge of magic, counteracting the impulse of nature. At the close of the same scene (the second of the first act) Brabantio, hearing that the duke is in council upon public business of the State, determines to carry Othello before him for trial upon the charge of magic. Mine," says he, 66 "Mine's not a middle course; the duke himself Or any of my brothers of the state Cannot but feel the wrong, as 'twere their own: For if such actions may have passage free, Bond slaves and Pagans shall our statesmen be." And Stevens, in his note on this passage, says, "He alludes to the common condition of all blacks who come from their own country, both slaves and pagans; and uses the word in contempt of Othello and his complexion. If this Moor is now suffered to escape with impunity, it will be such an encouragement to his black countrymen, that we may expect to see all the first offices of our state filled up by the Pagans and bond-slaves of Africa." Othello himself in his narrative says that he had been taken by the insolent foe and sold to slavery. He had been a slave. Once more-When Desdemona pleads to the Duke and the council for permission to go with Othello to Cyprus, she says, "That I did love the Moor, to live with him, I saw Othello's visage in his mind; And to his honours and his valiant parts Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate." In commenting upon this passage, William Henley says, "That quality here signifies the Moorish complexion of Othello, and not his military profession, (as Malone had supposed,) is obvious from what immediately follows: I saw Othello's visage in his mind;' and also from what the Duke says to Brabantio— 'If virtue no delighted beauty lack Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.'" The characters of Othello and Iago in this play are evidently intended as contrasted pictures of human nature, each setting off the other. They are national portraits of man-the ITALIAN and the Moon. The Italian is white, crafty and cruel ; a consummate villain; yet, as often happens in the realities of that description whom we occasionally meet in the intercourse of life, so vain of his own artifices that he betrays himself by boasting of them and their success. Accordingly, in the very first scene he reveals to Roderigo the treachery of his own character: "For when my outward action doth demonstrate In compliment extern, 'tis not long after There is a seeming inconsistency in the fact that a double dealer should disclose his own secret, which must necessarily put others upon their guard against him; but the inconsistency is in human nature, and not in the poet. The double dealing Italian is a very intelligent man, a keen and penetrating observer, and full of ingenuity to devise and contrive base expedients. His language is coarse, rude, and obscene: his humour is caustic and bitter. Conscious of no hon est principle in himself, he believes not in the existence of honesty in others. He is jealous and suspicious; quick to note every trifle light as air, and to draw from it inferences of evil as confirmed circumstances. In his dealings with the Moor, while he is even harping upon his honesty, he offers to commit any murder from extreme attachment to his person and interests. In all that Iago says of others, and especially of Desdemona, there is a mixture of truth and falsehood, blended together, in which the truth itself serves to accredit the lie; and such is the ordinary character of malicious slanders. Doctor Johnson speaks of " the soft simplicity," the "innocence," the “artlessness” of Desdemona. Iago speaks of her as a supersubtle Venetian; and when kindling the sparks of jealousy in the soul of Othello, he says, "She did deceive her father, marrying you: And when she seemed to shake and fear your looks, She loved them most." "And so she did," answers Othello. This charge, then, was true; and Iago replies: "Why, go to, then ; She that so young could give out such a seeming To seal her father's eyes up, close as oak.He thought 'twas witchcraft." It was not witchcraft; but surely as little was it simplicity, innocence, artlessness. The effect of this suggestion upon Othello is terrible only because he knows it is true. Brabantio, on parting from him, had just given him the same warning, to which he had not then paid the slightest heed. But soon his suspicions are roused-he tries to repel them; they are fermenting in his brain: he appears vehemently moved and yet unwilling to acknowledge it. Iago, with fiend-like sagacity, seizes upon the paroxysm of emotion, and then comes the following dialogue :— "Iago. "My lord, I see you are moved. Othello. No, not much moved: I do not think but Desdemona's honest. Ingo. Long live she so! and long live you to think so! Of her own clime, complexion, and degree; The deadly venom of these imputations, working up to phrensy the suspicions of the Moor, consist not in their falsehood but in their truth. I have said the character of Desdemona was deficient in delicacy. Besides the instances to which I referred in proof of this charge, observe what she says in pleading for the restoration of Cassio to his office, from which he had been cashiered by Othello for beastly drunkenness and a consequent night-brawl, in which he had stabbed Montano-the predecessor of Othello as Governor of Cypress and nearly killed him: yet in urging Othello to restore Cassio to his office and to favour, Desdemona says— "in faith, he's penitent; And yet his trespass, in our common reason, Now, to palliate the two crimes of Cassio-his drunken fit and his stabbing of Montano-the reader knows that he has been inveigled to the commission of them by the accursed artifices of Iago; but Desdemona knows nothing of this; she has no excuse for Cassio-nothing to plead for him but his penitence. And is this the character for a woman of delicate sentiment to give of such a complicated and heinous offence as that of which Cassio had been guilty, even when pleading for his pardon? No! it is not for female delicacy to extenuate the crimes of drunkenness and bloodshed, even when performing the appropriate office of raising the soul-subduing voice of mercy. Afterwards in the same speech, she says— I will not inquire how far this avowal that she had been in the frequent habit of speaking dispraisingly of Othello at the very time when she was so deeply enamoured with his honours and his valiant parts, was consistent with sincerity. Young ladies must be allowed a little concealment and a little disguise, even for passions which they have no need to be ashamed. It is the rosy pudencythe irresistible charm of the sex; but the exercise of it in satirical censure upon the very object of their most ardent affections is certainly no indication of innocence, simplicity, or artlessness. I still retain, then, the opinion First. That the passion of Desdemona for Othello is unnatural, solely and exclusively because of his colour. Second. That her elopement to him, and secret marriage with him, indicate a personal character not only very deficient in delicacy, but totally regardless of filial duty, of female modesty, and of ingenuous shame. Third. That her deficiency in delicacy is discernible in her conduct and discourse throughout the play. I perceive and acknowledge, indeed, the admirable address with which the part has been contrived to inspire and to warm the breast of the spectator with a deep interest in her fate; and I am well aware that my own comparative insensibility to it is not in unison with the general impression which it produces upon the stage. I shrink from the thought of slandering even a creature of the imagination. When the spectator or reader follows, on the stage or in the closet, the infernal thread of duplicity and of execrable devices with which Iago entangles his victims, it is the purpose of the dramatist to merge all the faults and vices of the sufferers in the overwhelming flood of their calamities, and in the unmingled detestation of the inhuman devil, their betrayer and destroyer. And in all this, I see not only the skill of the artist, but the power of the moral operator, the purifier of the spectator's heart by the agency of terror and pity. The characters of Othello and Desdemona, like all the characters of men and women in real life, are of "mingled yarn," with qualities of good and bad-of virtue and vices in proportion differently composed. Iago, with a high order of intellect, is, in moral principle, the very spirit of evil. I have said the moral of the tragedy is, that the intermarriage of black and white blood is a violation of the law of nature. That is the lesson to be learned from the play. To exhibit all the natural consequences of their act, the poet is compelled to make the marriage secret. It must commence by an elopement, and by an outrage upon the decorum of social intercourse. He must therefore assume, for the performance of this act, persons of moral character sufficiently frail and imperfect to be capable of performing it, but in other respects endowed with pleasing and estimable qualities. Thus, the Moor is represented as of free, and open and generous nature; as a Christian; as a distinguished military commander in the service of the Republic of Venice; as having rendered important service to the state, and as being in the enjoyment of a splendid reputation as a warrior. The other party to the marriage is a maiden, fair, gentle, and accomplished; born and educated in the proudest rank of Venetian nobility. decay. Under the despotism of the Cæsars, the end of eloquence was perverted from persuasion to panegyric, and all her faculties were soon palsied by the touch of corruption, or enervated by the impotence of servitude. Then succeeded the midnight of the monkish ages, when with the other liberal arts she slumbered in the profound darkness of the cloister. At the revival of letters in modern Europe, eloquence, together with her sister muses, awoke, and shook the poppies from her brow. But their torpors still tingled in her veins. In the interval her voice was gone; her favourite languages were extinct; her organs were no longer attuned to harmony, and her hearers could no longer understand her speech. The discordant jargon of feudal anarchy had banished the musical dialects, in which she had always delighted. The theatres of her former triumphs were either deserted, or they were filled with the babblers of sophistry and chicane. She shrunk intuitively from the forum, for the last object she remembered to have seen there was the head of her darling Cicero, planted upon the rostrum. She ascended the tri Othello, setting aside his colour, has every quality to fascinate and charm the female heart. Desdemona, apart from the grossness of her fault in being accessible to such a passion of such an object, is amiable and lovely; among the most attractive of her sex and condition. The faults of their characters are never brought into action excepting as they illustrate the moral principle of the whole story. Othello is not jealous by nature. On the contrary, with a strong natural understanding, and all the vigilance essential to an experienced commander, he is of a disposition so unsuspicious and confiding, that he believes in the exceeding honesty of Iago long after he has ample cause to suspect and distrust him. Desdemona, supersubtle as she is in the management of her amour with Othello; deeply as she dissembles to deceive her father; and, forward as she is in inviting the courtship of the Moor; discovers neither artifice nor duplicity from the moment that she is Othello's wife. Her innocence, in all her relations with him, is pure and spotless; her kindness for Cassio is mere untainted benevolence; and, though unguarded in her personal deportment toward him, it is far from the slightest soil of culpa-bunals of justice; there she found her child, Perble impropriety. Guiltless of all conscious reproach in this part of her conduct, she never uses any of the artifices to which she had resorted to accomplish her marriage with Othello. Always feeling that she has given him no cause of suspicion, her endurance of his cruel treatment and brutal abuse of her through all the stages of violence, till he murders her in bed, is always marked with the most affecting sweetness of temper, the most perfect artlessness, and the most endearing resignation. The defects of her character have here no room for development, and the poet carefully keeps them out of sight. Hence it is that the general reader and spectator, with Dr. Johnson, give her unqualified credit for soft simplicity, artlessness, and innocence-forgetful of the qualities of a different and opposite character, stamped upon the transactions by which she effected her marriage with the Moor. The marriage, however, is the source of all her calamities; it is the primitive cause of all the tragic incidents of the play, and of its terrible catastrophe. That the moral lesson to be learned from it is of no practical utility in England, where there are no valiant Moors to steal the affections of fair and high-born dames, may be true; the lesson, however, is not the less, couched under the form of an adinirable drama; nor needs it any laborious effort of the imagination to extend the moral precept resulting from the story to a salutary admonition against all ill-assorted, clandestine, and unnatural marriages. ANCIENT AND MODERN ELOQUENCE. FROM LECTURES ON RHETORIC AND ORATORY. WITH the dissolution of Roman liberty, and the decline of Roman taste, the reputation and the excellency of the oratorical art fell alike into suasion, manacled and pinioned by the letter of the law; there she beheld an image of herself, stammering in barbarous Latin, and staggering under the lumber of a thousand volumes. Her heart fainted within her. She lost all confidence in herself. Together with her irresistible powers, she lost proportionably the consideration of the world, until, instead of comprising the whole system of public education, she found herself excluded from the circle of science, and declared an outlaw from the realms of learning. She was not however doomed to eternal silence. With the progress of freedom and of liberal science, in various parts of modern Europe, she obtained access to mingle in the deliberations of their parliaments. With labour and difficulty she learned their languages, and lent her aid in giving them form and polish. But she has never recovered the graces of her former beauty, nor the energies of her ancient vigour. THE FATHERS OF NEW ENGLAND. FROM AN ORATION AT PLYMOUTH. WORLDLY Fame has been parsimonious of her favour to the memory of those generous champions. Their numbers were small; their stations in life obscure; the object of their enterprise unostentatious; the theatre of their exploits remote: how could they possibly be favourites of worldly Fame?-That common crier, whose existence is only known by the assemblage of multitudes: that pander of wealth and greatness, so eager to haunt the palaces of fortune, and so fastidious to the houseless dignity of virtue: that parasite of pride, ever scornful to meekness, and ever obsequious to insolent power: that heedless trumpeter, whose ears are deaf to modest merit, and whose eyes are blind to bloodless, distant excellence. CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. [Born 1771. Died 1810.] CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN was the first American who chose literature as a profession, and the first to leave enduring monuments of genius in the fields of the imagination. His family were of the Society of Friends. He was born in Philadelphia on the seventeenth of January, 1771. In his youth he was diminutive and feeble, modest and studious. At ten years of age, when some one petulantly called him boy, he exclaimed, "What does he mean? does he not know that it is neither age nor size, but sense, that makes the man? I could ask him a hundred questions of which he could not answer one." He studied the humanities with Robert Proud, the historian of Pennsylvania. He was a favourite with his teacher, by whose advice, when close application impaired his health, he went into the country, and in solitary walks received impressions of some of those grand scenes which are described in his works, and habits of abstraction for which he was subsequently distinguished. He quitted school before he was sixteen, and soon after entered upon the study of the law. He joined a society of students, one of whom was the late Dr. Milnor, and in arguments at its meetings exhibited an ability that was deemed the earnest of future triumphs. But the profession became to him every day less attractive, and was finally abandoned. His family remonstrated, but in vain. His dislike to the scenes presented in the courts, and to the tautologies, circuities, artifices, and falsehoods of the law, were invincible. He regarded it as a "tissue of shreds and remnants of a barbarous antiquity, patched by the stupidity of modern workmen into new deformity," and would have nothing to do with it. He was now without any definite aims. He became a prey to melancholy. He sought relief in change of scene, and made excursions through Pennsylvania and the neighbouring states; but his diary and correspondence show that he found no relief. To one of his friends "Ormond," chapter ii. he wrote, "Forget that any latent anguish or corroding sorrow is concealed under that aspect of indifference which has become habitual." He saw an obstacle to the schemes of despair in the sorrow they would occasion to the few who loved him, and for their sakes determined to bear every thing with a heroic calmness. In 1793 he went to New York. He was warmly attached to Dr. Elihu H. Smith of that city, who had been a student in the Medical College at Philadelphia; and with him and William Johnson, afterward an eminent lawyer, he entered into a domestic partnership, and took a house. His associates introduced him to a literary society called the Friendly Club, among whose members were Dr. Samuel L. Mitchell, Anthony Bleecker, William Dunlap, James Kent, since known as the great chancellor, and others who were afterward distinguished. It was like a new and invigorating atmosphere. The French revolution was then at its heat, and was shaking the institutions of Christendom. Theorists in all countries were busy with schemes for the melioration of the condition of mankind. Brown was affected with the general contagion. He had already been an occasional writer for the periodicals, and had projected epics and romances. He now became a political philosopher, and wrote about Utopias. Near the close of 1797 he published his first work, Alcuin, a Dialogue on the Rights of Women. It is not without ingenuity. In the last few years many women in this country and in Europe, vexed that they cannot unsex themselves, have written in the same way. The book was unsuccessful, and the author directed his attention into another department of letters. I do not know at what time it was written, but it is proper to mention here an unfinished novel, entitled Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist, because it contains the early history of one of his most striking characters, the real hero of Wieland, and must be read before that work can be properly appreciated. It |