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A DRAMATIC CRITIC
but a tawny barbarian, exuberant with
the quahties conventionally assigned to
the race. His gloating over Desdemona
ill became the lines which displayed the
depth and chastity of the hero's love, and
in the fierce savagery of his jealous rage,
during the last half of the play, the imagi-
native grace and beauty of many passages
were smothered and lost. In the murder
of Desdemona, done with realistic hor-
rors, and in Othello's suicide, effected, not
with indicated dagger, but with a crooked
scimiter and hideous particulars of gasp,
choke, and gurgle, I perceived that both
the letter and the spirit of Shakespeare
were defied and defeated for sensational
purposes.
But thirty years ago criticism of this
sort fell, as now perhaps it falls, upon few
ears that would hear; one of my friends
said that such carping was like girding at
Niagara. Salvini's Othello was undoubt-
edly stupendous and monumental. Leav-
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