There is perhaps a certain excuse for our failure to rise to Shakespeare’s meaning, and to realise how extraordinary and splendid a thing it was in a gentle Venetian girl to love Othello, and to assail fortune with such a ‘downright violence and storm’ as is expected only in a hero.  It is that when first we hear of her marriage we have not yet seen the Desdemona of the later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive how astonishing this love and boldness must have been in a maiden so quiet and submissive.  And when we watch her in her suffering and death we are so penetrated by the sense of her heavenly sweetness and self-surrender that we almost forget that she had shown herself quite as exceptional in the active assertion of her own soul and will.  She tends to become to us predominantly pathetic, the sweetest and most pathetic of Shakespeare’s women, as innocent as Miranda and as loving as Viola, yet suffering more deeply than Cordelia or Imogen.  And she seems to lack that independence and strength of spirit which Cordelia and Imogen possess, and which in a manner raises them above suffering.  She appears passive and defenceless, and can oppose to wrong nothing but the infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not how to resist or resent.  She thus becomes at once the most beautiful example of this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare’s world.  If her part were acted by an artist equal to Salvini, and with a Salvini for Othello, I doubt if the spectacle of the last two Acts would not be pronounced intolerable.

Of course this later impression of Desdemona is perfectly right, but it must be carried back and united with the earlier before we can see what Shakespeare imagined.  Evidently, we are to understand, innocence, gentleness, sweetness, lovingness were the salient and, in a sense, the principal traits in Desdemona’s character.  She was, as her father supposed her to be,

                         a maiden never bold,
     Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion
     Blushed at herself.

But suddenly there appeared something quite different—­something which could never have appeared, for example, in Ophelia—­a love not only full of romance but showing a strange freedom and energy of spirit, and leading to a most unusual boldness of action; and this action was carried through with a confidence and decision worthy of Juliet or Cordelia.  Desdemona does not shrink before the Senate; and her language to her father, though deeply respectful, is firm enough to stir in us some sympathy with the old man who could not survive his daughter’s loss.  This then, we must understand, was the emergence in Desdemona, as she passed from girlhood to womanhood, of an individuality and strength which, if she had lived, would have been gradually fused with her more obvious qualities and have issued in a thousand actions, sweet and good, but surprising to her conventional or timid neighbours.  And,