touches his pride or self-esteem. It would be most unjust to call him
vain, but he has a high opinion of himself and a great contempt for
others. He is quite aware of his superiority to them in certain
respects; and he either disbelieves in or despises the qualities in
which they are superior to him. Whatever disturbs or wounds his sense of
superiority irritates him at once; and in _that_ sense he is highly
competitive. This is why the appointment of Cassio provokes him. This is
why Cassio's scientific attainments provoke him. This is the reason of
his jealousy of Emilia. He does not care for his wife; but the fear of
another man's getting the better of him, and exposing him to pity or
derision as an unfortunate husband, is wormwood to him; and as he is
sure that no woman is virtuous at heart, this fear is ever with him. For
much the same reason he has a spite against goodness in men (for it is
characteristic that he is less blind to its existence in men, the
stronger, than in women, the weaker). He has a spite against it, not
from any love of evil for evil's sake, but partly because it annoys his
intellect as a stupidity; partly (though he hardly knows this) because
it weakens his satisfaction with himself, and disturbs his faith that
egoism is the right and proper thing; partly because, the world being
such a fool, goodness is popular and prospers. But he, a man ten times
as able as Cassio or even Othello, does not greatly prosper. Somehow,
for all the stupidity of these open and generous people, they get on
better than the 'fellow of some soul' And this, though he is not
particularly eager to get on, wounds his pride. Goodness therefore
annoys him. He is always ready to scoff at it, and would like to strike
at it. In ordinary circumstances these feelings of irritation are not
vivid in Iago--_no_ feeling is so--but they are constantly present.
4
Our task of analysis is not finished; but we are now in a position to
consider the rise of Iago's tragedy. Why did he act as we see him acting
in the play? What is the answer to that appeal of Othello's:
Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?
This question Why? is _the_ question about Iago, just as the question
Why did Hamlet delay? is _the_ question about Hamlet. Iago refused to
answer it; but I will venture to say that he _could_ not have answered
it, any more than Hamlet could tell why he delayed. But Shakespeare knew
the answer, and if these characters are great creations and not blunders
we ought to be able to find it too.
Is it possible to elicit it from Iago himself against his will? He makes
various statements to Roderigo, and he has several soliloquies. From
these sources, and especially from the latter, we should learn
something. For with Shakespeare soliloquy generally gives information
regarding the secret springs as well as the outward course of the plot;
and, moreover, it is a curious point of technique with him that the
soliloquies of his villains sometimes read almost like explanations
offered to the audience.[112] Now, Iago repeatedly offers explanations
either to Roderigo or to himself. In the first place, he says more than
once that he 'hates' Othello. He gives two reasons for his hatred.
Othello has made Cassio lieutenant; and he suspects, and has heard it
reported, that Othello has an intrigue with Emilia. Next there is
Cassio. He never says he hates Cassio, but he finds in him three causes
of offence: Cassio has been preferred to him; he suspects _him_ too of
an intrigue with Emilia; and, lastly, Cassio has a daily beauty in his
life which makes Iago ugly. In addition to these annoyances he wants
Cassio's place. As for Roderigo, he calls him a snipe, and who can hate
a snipe? But Roderigo knows too much; and he is becoming a nuisance,
getting angry, and asking for the gold and jewels he handed to Iago to
give to Desdemona. So Iago kills Roderigo. Then for Desdemona: a
fig's-end for her virtue! but he has no ill-will to her. In fact he
'loves' her, though he is good enough to explain, varying the word, that
his 'lust' is mixed with a desire to pay Othello in his own coin. To be
sure she must die, and so must Emilia, and so would Bianca if only the
authorities saw things in their true light; but he did not set out with
any hostile design against these persons.
Is the account which Iago gives of the causes of his action the true
account? The answer of the most popular view will be, 'Yes. Iago was, as
he says, chiefly incited by two things, the desire of advancement, and a
hatred of Othello due principally to the affair of the lieutenancy.
These are perfectly intelligible causes; we have only to add to them
unusual ability and cruelty, and all is explained. Why should Coleridge
and Hazlitt and Swinburne go further afield?' To which last question I
will at once oppose these: If your view is correct, why should Iago be
considered an extraordinary creation; and is it not odd that the people
who reject it are the people who elsewhere show an exceptional
understanding of Shakespeare?
The difficulty about this popular view is, in the first place, that it
attributes to Iago what cannot be found in the Iago of the play. Its
Iago is impelled by _passions_, a passion of ambition and a passion of
hatred; for no ambition or hatred short of passion could drive a man who
is evidently so clear-sighted, and who must hitherto have been so
prudent, into a plot so extremely hazardous. Why, then, in the Iago of
the play do we find no sign of these passions or of anything approaching
to them? Why, if Shakespeare meant that Iago was impelled by them, does
he suppress the signs of them? Surely not from want of ability to
display them. The poet who painted Macbeth and Shylock understood his
business. Who ever doubted Macbeth's ambition or Shylock's hate? And
what resemblance is there between these passions and any feeling that we
can trace in Iago? The resemblance between a volcano in eruption and a
flameless fire of coke; the resemblance between a consuming desire to
hack and hew your enemy's flesh, and the resentful wish, only too
familiar in common life, to inflict pain in return for a slight.
Passion, in Shakespeare's plays, is perfectly easy to recognise. What
vestige of it, of passion unsatisfied or of passion gratified, is
visible in Iago? None: that is the very horror of him. He has _less_
passion than an ordinary man, and yet he does these frightful things.
The only ground for attributing to him, I do not say a passionate
hatred, but anything deserving the name of hatred at all, is his own
statement, 'I hate Othello'; and we know what his statements are worth.
But the popular view, beside attributing to Iago what he does not show,
ignores what he does show. It selects from his own account of his
motives one or two, and drops the rest; and so it makes everything
natural. But it fails to perceive how unnatural, how strange and
suspicious, his own account is. Certainly he assigns motives enough; the
difficulty is that he assigns so many. A man moved by simple passions
due to simple causes does not stand fingering his feelings,
industriously enumerating their sources, and groping about for new ones.
But this is what Iago does. And this is not all. These motives appear
and disappear in the most extraordinary manner. Resentment at Cassio's
appointment is expressed in the first conversation with Roderigo, and
from that moment is never once mentioned again in the whole play. Hatred
of Othello is expressed in the First Act alone. Desire to get Cassio's
place scarcely appears after the first soliloquy, and when it is
gratified Iago does not refer to it by a single word. The suspicion of
Cassio's intrigue with Emilia emerges suddenly, as an after-thought, not
in the first soliloquy but the second, and then disappears for
ever.[113] Iago's 'love' of Desdemona is alluded to in the second
soliloquy; there is not the faintest trace of it in word or deed either
before or after. The mention of jealousy of Othello is followed by
declarations that Othello is infatuated about Desdemona and is of a
constant nature, and during Othello's sufferings Iago never shows a sign
of the idea that he is now paying his rival in his own coin. In the
second soliloquy he declares that he quite believes Cassio to be in love
with Desdemona; it is obvious that he believes no such thing, for he
never alludes to the idea again, and within a few hours describes Cassio
in soliloquy as an honest fool. His final reason for ill-will to Cassio
never appears till the Fifth Act.
What is the meaning of all this? Unless Shakespeare was out of his mind,
it must have a meaning. And certainly this meaning is not contained in
any of the popular accounts of Iago.
Is it contained then in Coleridge's word 'motive-hunting'? Yes,
'motive-hunting' exactly answers to the impression that Iago's
soliloquies produce. He is pondering his design, and unconsciously
trying to justify it to himself. He speaks of one or two real feelings,
such as resentment against Othello, and he mentions one or two real
causes of these feelings. But these are not enough for him. Along with
them, or alone, there come into his head, only to leave it again, ideas
and suspicions, the creations of his own baseness or uneasiness, some
old, some new, caressed for a moment to feed his purpose and give it a
reasonable look, but never really believed in, and never the main forces
which are determining his action. In fact, I would venture to describe
Iago in these soliloquies as a man setting out on a project which
strongly attracts his desire, but at the same time conscious of a
resistance to the desire, and unconsciously trying to argue the
resistance away by assigning reasons for the project. He is the
counterpart of Hamlet, who tries to find reasons for his delay in
pursuing a design which excites his aversion. And most of Iago's reasons
for action are no more the real ones than Hamlet's reasons for delay
were the real ones. Each is moved by forces which he does not
understand; and it is probably no accident that these two studies of
states psychologically so similar were produced at about the same
period.
What then were the real moving forces of Iago's action? Are we to fall
back on the idea of a 'motiveless malignity;'[114] that is to say, a
disinterested love of evil, or a delight in the pain of others as simple
and direct as the delight in one's own pleasure? Surely not. I will not
insist that this thing or these things are inconceivable, mere phrases,
not ideas; for, even so, it would remain possible that Shakespeare had
tried to represent an inconceivability. But there is not the slightest
reason to suppose that he did so. Iago's action is intelligible; and
indeed the popular view contains enough truth to refute this desperate
theory. It greatly exaggerates his desire for advancement, and the
ill-will caused by his disappointment, and it ignores other forces more
important than these; but it is right in insisting on the presence of
this desire and this ill-will, and their presence is enough to destroy
Iago's claims to be more than a demi-devil. For love of the evil that
advances my interest and hurts a person I dislike, is a very different
thing from love of evil simply as evil; and pleasure in the pain of a
person disliked or regarded as a competitor is quite distinct from
pleasure in the pain of others simply as others. The first is
intelligible, and we find it in Iago. The second, even if it were
intelligible, we do not find in Iago.
Still, desire of advancement and resentment about the lieutenancy,
though factors and indispensable factors in the cause of Iago's action,
are neither the principal nor the most characteristic factors. To find
these, let us return to our half-completed analysis of the character.
Let us remember especially the keen sense of superiority, the contempt
of others, the sensitiveness to everything which wounds these feelings,
the spite against goodness in men as a thing not only stupid but, both
in its nature and by its success, contrary to Iago's nature and
irritating to his pride. Let us remember in addition the annoyance of
having always to play a part, the consciousness of exceptional but
unused ingenuity and address, the enjoyment of action, and the absence
of fear. And let us ask what would be the greatest pleasure of such a
man, and what the situation which might tempt him to abandon his
habitual prudence and pursue this pleasure. Hazlitt and Mr. Swinburne do
not put this question, but the answer I proceed to give to it is in
principle theirs.[115]
The most delightful thing to such a man would be something that gave an
extreme satisfaction to his sense of power and superiority; and if it
involved, secondly, the triumphant exertion of his abilities, and,
thirdly, the excitement of danger, his delight would be consummated. And
the moment most dangerous to such a man would be one when his sense of
superiority had met with an affront, so that its habitual craving was
reinforced by resentment, while at the same time he saw an opportunity
of satisfying it by subjecting to his will the very persons who had
affronted it. Now, this is the temptation that comes to Iago. Othello's
eminence, Othello's goodness, and his own dependence on Othello, must
have been a perpetual annoyance to him. At _any_ time he would have
enjoyed befooling and tormenting Othello. Under ordinary circumstances
he was restrained, chiefly by self-interest, in some slight degree
perhaps by the faint pulsations of conscience or humanity. But
disappointment at the loss of the lieutenancy supplied the touch of
lively resentment that was required to overcome these obstacles; and the
prospect of satisfying the sense of power by mastering Othello through
an intricate and hazardous intrigue now became irresistible. Iago did
not clearly understand what was moving his desire; though he tried to
give himself reasons for his action, even those that had some reality
made but a small part of the motive force; one may almost say they were
no more than the turning of the handle which admits the driving power
into the machine. Only once does he appear to see something of the
truth. It is when he uses the phrase '_to plume up my will_ in double
knavery.'
To 'plume up the will,' to heighten the sense of power or
superiority--this seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of
cruelty which evidently do not spring chiefly from ill-will, and which
therefore puzzle and sometimes horrify us most. It is often this that
makes a man bully the wife or children of whom he is fond. The boy who
torments another boy, as we say, 'for no reason,' or who without any
hatred for frogs tortures a frog, is pleased with his victim's pain, not
from any disinterested love of evil or pleasure in pain, but mainly
because this pain is the unmistakable proof of his own power over his
victim. So it is with Iago. His thwarted sense of superiority wants
satisfaction. What fuller satisfaction could it find than the
consciousness that he is the master of the General who has undervalued
him and of the rival who has been preferred to him; that these worthy
people, who are so successful and popular and stupid, are mere puppets
in his hands, but living puppets, who at the motion of his finger must
contort themselves in agony, while all the time they believe that he is
their one true friend and comforter? It must have been an ecstasy of
bliss to him. And this, granted a most abnormal deadness of human
feeling, is, however horrible, perfectly intelligible. There is no
mystery in the psychology of Iago; the mystery lies in a further
question, which the drama has not to answer, the question why such a
being should exist.
Iago's longing to satisfy the sense of power is, I think, the strongest
of the forces that drive him on. But there are two others to be noticed.
One is the pleasure in an action very difficult and perilous and,
therefore, intensely exciting. This action sets all his powers on the
strain. He feels the delight of one who executes successfully a feat
thoroughly congenial to his special aptitude, and only just within his
compass; and, as he is fearless by nature, the fact that a single slip
will cost him his life only increases his pleasure. His exhilaration
breaks out in the ghastly words with which he greets the sunrise after
the night of the drunken tumult which has led to Cassio's disgrace: 'By
the mass, 'tis morning. Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.'
Here, however, the joy in exciting action is quickened by other
feelings. It appears more simply elsewhere in such a way as to suggest
that nothing but such actions gave him happiness, and that his happiness
was greater if the action was destructive as well as exciting. We find
it, for instance, in his gleeful cry to Roderigo, who proposes to shout
to Brabantio in order to wake him and tell him of his daughter's flight:
Do, with like timorous[116] accent and dire yell
As when, by night and negligence, the fire
Is spied in populous cities.
All through that scene; again, in the scene where Cassio is attacked and
Roderigo murdered; everywhere where Iago is in physical action, we catch
this sound of almost feverish enjoyment. His blood, usually so cold and
slow, is racing through his veins.
But Iago, finally, is not simply a man of action; he is an artist. His
action is a plot, the intricate plot of a drama, and in the conception
and execution of it he experiences the tension and the joy of artistic
creation. 'He is,' says Hazlitt, 'an amateur of tragedy in real life;
and, instead of employing his invention on imaginary characters or
long-forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more dangerous course
of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his
newest friends and connections, and rehearses it in downright earnest,
with steady nerves and unabated resolution.' Mr. Swinburne lays even
greater stress on this aspect of Iago's character, and even declares
that 'the very subtlest and strongest component of his complex nature'
is 'the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an inarticulate poet.'
And those to whom this idea is unfamiliar, and who may suspect it at
first sight of being fanciful, will find, if they examine the play in
the light of Mr. Swinburne's exposition, that it rests on a true and
deep perception, will stand scrutiny, and might easily be illustrated.
They may observe, to take only one point, the curious analogy between
the early stages of dramatic composition and those soliloquies in which
Iago broods over his plot, drawing at first only an outline, puzzled how
to fix more than the main idea, and gradually seeing it develop and
clarify as he works upon it or lets it work. Here at any rate
Shakespeare put a good deal of himself into Iago. But the tragedian in
real life was not the equal of the tragic poet. His psychology, as we
shall see, was at fault at a critical point, as Shakespeare's never was.
And so his catastrophe came out wrong, and his piece was ruined.
Such, then, seem to be the chief ingredients of the force which,
liberated by his resentment at Cassio's promotion, drives Iago from
inactivity into action, and sustains him through it. And, to pass to a
new point, this force completely possesses him; it is his fate. It is
like the passion with which a tragic hero wholly identifies himself, and
which bears him on to his doom. It is true that, once embarked on his
course, Iago _could_ not turn back, even if this passion did abate; and
it is also true that he is compelled, by his success in convincing
Othello, to advance to conclusions of which at the outset he did not
dream. He is thus caught in his own web, and could not liberate himself
if he would. But, in fact, he never shows a trace of wishing to do so,
not a trace of hesitation, of looking back, or of fear, any more than of
remorse; there is no ebb in the tide. As the crisis approaches there
passes through his mind a fleeting doubt whether the deaths of Cassio
and Roderigo are indispensable; but that uncertainty, which does not
concern the main issue, is dismissed, and he goes forward with
undiminished zest. Not even in his sleep--as in Richard's before his
final battle--does any rebellion of outraged conscience or pity, or any
foreboding of despair, force itself into clear consciousness. His
fate--which is himself--has completely mastered him: so that, in the
later scenes, where the improbability of the entire success of a design
built on so many different falsehoods forces itself on the reader, Iago
appears for moments not as a consummate schemer, but as a man absolutely
infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.
5
Iago stands supreme among Shakespeare's evil characters because the
greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone to his making,
and because he illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts
concerning evil which seem to have impressed Shakespeare most. The first
of these is the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom
fellow-feeling of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute egoism
becomes possible to them, and with it those hard vices--such as
ingratitude and cruelty--which to Shakespeare were far the worst. The
second is that such evil is compatible, and even appears to ally itself
easily, with exceptional powers of will and intellect. In the latter
respect Iago is nearly or quite the equal of Richard, in egoism he is
the superior, and his inferiority in passion and massive force only
makes him more repulsive. How is it then that we can bear to contemplate
him; nay, that, if we really imagine him, we feel admiration and some
kind of sympathy? Henry the Fifth tells us:
There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out;
but here, it may be said, we are shown a thing absolutely evil,
and--what is more dreadful still--this absolute evil is united with
supreme intellectual power. Why is the representation tolerable, and why
do we not accuse its author either of untruth or of a desperate
pessimism?
To these questions it might at once be replied: Iago does not stand
alone; he is a factor in a whole; and we perceive him there and not in
isolation, acted upon as well as acting, destroyed as well as
destroying.[117] But, although this is true and important, I pass it by
and, continuing to regard him by himself, I would make three remarks in
answer to the questions.
In the first place, Iago is not merely negative or evil--far from it.
Those very forces that moved him and made his fate--sense of power,
delight in performing a difficult and dangerous action, delight in the
exercise of artistic skill--are not at all evil things. We sympathise
with one or other of them almost every day of our lives. And,
accordingly, though in Iago they are combined with something detestable
and so contribute to evil, our perception of them is accompanied with
sympathy. In the same way, Iago's insight, dexterity, quickness,
address, and the like, are in themselves admirable things; the perfect
man would possess them. And certainly he would possess also Iago's
courage and self-control, and, like Iago, would stand above the impulses
of mere feeling, lord of his inner world. All this goes to evil ends in
Iago, but in itself it has a great worth; and, although in reading, of
course, we do not sift it out and regard it separately, it inevitably
affects us and mingles admiration with our hatred or horror.