k down Lear. As surely as Othello is the noblest man of man's
making, Iago is the most perfect evildoer, the most potent demi-devil. It
is of course the merest commonplace to say as much, and would be no less
a waste of speech to add the half comfortable reflection that it is in
any case no shame to fall by such a hand. But this subtlest and
strangest work of Shakespeare's admits and requires some closer than
common scrutiny. Coleridge has admirably described the first great
soliloquy which opens to us the pit of hell within as "the motive-hunting
of a motiveless malignity." But subtle and profound and just as is this
definitive appreciation, there is more in the matter yet than even this.
It is not only that Iago, so to speak, half tries to make himself half
believe that Othello has wronged him, and that the thought of it gnaws
him inly like a poisonous mineral: though this also be true, it is not
half the truth--nor half that half again. Malignant as he is, the very
subtlest and strongest component of his complex nature is not even
malignity. It is the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an
inarticulate poet. In his immortal study on the affair of the diamond
necklace, the most profound and potent humourist of his country in his
century has unwittingly touched on the mainspring of Iago's
character--"the very pulse of the machine." He describes his Circe de la
Mothe-Valois as a practical dramatic poet or playwright at least in lieu
of play-writer: while indicating how and wherefore, with all her
constructive skill and rhythmic art in action, such genius as hers so
differs from the genius of Shakespeare that she undeniably could not have
written a _Hamlet_. Neither could Iago have written an _Othello_. (From
this theorem, by the way, a reasoner or a casuist benighted enough to
prefer articulate poets to inarticulate, Shakespeare to Cromwell, a fair
Vittoria Colonna to a "foul Circe-Megaera," and even such a strategist as
Homer to such a strategist as Frederic-William, would not illogically
draw such conclusions or infer such corollaries as might result in
opinions hardly consonant with the Teutonic-Titanic evangel of the
preacher who supplied him with his thesis.) "But what he can do, that he
will": and if it be better to make a tragedy than to write one, to act a
poem than to sing it, we must allow to Iago a station in the hierarchy of
poets very far in advance of his creator's. None of the great
inartic