These make the great crises which break up lives. But the play goes on with all the wild force of life itself. We feel the Idea of jealousv forming itself in the noble nature of Othello, and bringing with it anguish, the bitterer throes of life, those intense and hopeless moments when struggle only makes the coil close tighter round the victim. And after we have felt these, no nature remains quite the same as before. There has entered into us a power of imaginative sympathy which Art alone can inspire and only when it most inwardly reveals Life itself. Of all things, the "Too late" and the "Might have been" are the most sorrowful, and the divine possibility, cruelly realised too late, gives the sharpest edge to Othello's mental agony, when the whole truth of Desdemona's life--an "objectification" of loyalty, love, and purity--is only revealed to him as she lies there dead before him, killed by his own hand. All that it means rushes then like a torrent on his soul; when Othello falls on the bed, by Desdemona's body, the remorse and love that rend him with their talons are beyond even Shakespeare's power of expression. With groans scarcely uttered, Othello gives the only outlet possible to the blinding, scathing storm of passions within him. There is one touch, and only the intuitive artist of humanity and of life could have known it, and given it--only one touch of consolation that could be left him, and it comes to Othello as he is dying! "I kiss'd thee, 'ere I kill'd thee." He fastens on this as a starving man fastens on a crumb of bread. Why is this so true as to be almost intolerable--and yet so beautiful? The characters have art necessities. Schiller said Art has its categorical Imperatives--its _must_, and Shakespeare's characters fulfil them. We feel how inevitable is their fate. They make their own tragedy. The Poet compresses a Life Tragedy into a few pages of manuscript. He, with the great sense and Idea of Human Life in him, has to choose what he will portray, and the greater an artist the more unerring is his selection. Then begins his own absorption in the characters. Conception and expression come to him and come nobly and spontaneously--and so spontaneous is his touch--so completely is he absorbed in, and one with his characters--that it makes our rush of sympathy as spontaneous as his own. We feel the Identification of Shakespeare with Othello--with Iago--with Desdemona He _is_ them _all_. _He_, William Shakespeare, is "the will-less--time-less--subject of knowledge," living in "pure knowing" and absorbed in the creations that represent his varied and his intuitive knowledge of the great Idea of Life. And he excites and suggests in us the same absorption in his creations--that is, if we have the capacity to feel it.