“How sad it were for Arthur, should he live, To sit once more within his lonely hall, And miss the wonted number of my knights, And miss to hear high talk of noble deeds As in the golden days before thy sin. For which of us, who might be left, could speak Of the pure heart, nor seem to glance at thee? And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk Thy shadow still would glide from room to room, And I should evermore be vext with thee In hanging robe or vacant ornament, Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair, For think not, tho’ thou wouldst not love thy lord, Thy lord has wholly lost his love for thee. I am not made of so slight elements. Yet must I leave thee, woman, to thy shame. I hold that man the worst of public foes Who either for his own or children’s sake, To save his blood from scandal, lets the wife Whom he knows false, abide and rule the house: For being thro’ his cowardice allow’d Her station, taken everywhere for pure, She like a new disease, unknown to men, Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd, Makes wicked lightnings of her eyes, and saps The fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulse With devil’s leaps, and poisons half the young. Worst of the worst were that man he that reigns! Better the King’s waste hearth and aching heart Than thou reseated in thy place of light, The mockery of my people, and their bane.” This is a long instance to set out but it will serve, not only for the immediate purpose of discussion, but as a text for more general consideration of a prevalent attitude in Victorian poetry of which Tennyson was the chief exemplar. When every allowance has been made for dramatic detachment, we cannot but suppose that the passage quoted embodies a belief to which Tennyson himself would have subscribed, and it is difficult to get away from the feeling that there is something radically unsound in it. Every spectator of _Othello_ must have felt the impulse to leap on to the stage and cry upon Othello to come to his senses and realise that even if he cannot see that he is being fooled by a villain he should at least sit down and have the matter out with Desdemona. By his end Othello becomes a noble and heroic figure, but, even allowing that he discovers in the action what seem to him to be sufficient grounds for the cruellest of his suspicions, we can never feel in the body itself of the play that his jealousy is anything but contemptible. Had Shakespeare’s method been different, and had he concealed the truth from us as he does from Othello, or had our opinion inclined towards Desdemona’s guilt until the final revelation, we could still not but have felt that she was tolerable company at least compared with her termagant and demoniac husband. But Shakespeare saw that Othello was an immensely attractive figure as an expression of life, without for a moment insisting that he was an admirable figure on