Nothing is easier to such a poet than to create perfect villains.
Throughout he is handling the unruly passions which make their
character, and he never hits upon the moral law which restrains them;
but at the same time, and by the same faculty, he changes the inanimate
masks, which the conventions of the stage mould on an identical pattern,
into living and illusory figures. How shall a demon be made to look as
real as a man? Iago is a soldier of fortune who has roved the world from
Syria to England, who, nursed in the lowest ranks, having had close
acquaintance with the horrors of the wars of the sixteenth century, had
drawn thence the maxims of a Turk and the philosophy of a butcher;
principles he has none left. "O my reputation, my reputation!" cries the
dishonored Cassio. "As I am an honest man," says Iago, "I thought you
had received some bodily wound; there is more sense in that than in
reputation."[677] As for woman's virtue, he looks upon it like a man who
has kept company with slave-dealers. He estimates Desdemona's love as he
would estimate a mare's: that sort of thing lasts so long--then... And
then he airs an experimental theory with precise details and nasty
expressions like a stud doctor. "It cannot be that Desdemona should long
continue her love to the Moor, nor he his to her.... These Moors are
changeable in their wills;... the food that to him now is as luscious as
locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must
change for youth: when she is sated with his body, she will find the
error of her choice."[678] Desdemona, on the shore, trying! to forget
her cares, begs him to sing the praises of her sex. For every portrait
he finds the most insulting insinuations. She insists, and bids him take
the case of a deserving woman. "Indeed," he replies, "she was a wight,
if ever such wight were,... to suckle fools and chronicle small
beer."[679] He also says, when Desdemona asks him what he would write in
praise of her: "O gentle lady do not put me to't, for I am nothing, if
not critical."[680] This is the key to his character. He despises man;
to him Desdemona is a little wanton wench, Cassio an elegant
word-shaper, Othello a mad bull, Roderigo an ass to be basted, thumped,
made to go. He diverts himself by setting these passions at issue; he
laughs at it as at a play. When Othello, swooning, shakes in his
convulsions, he rejoices at this capital result: "Work on, my medicine,
work! Thus credulous fools are caught."[681] You would take him for one
of the poisoners of the time, studying the effect of a new potion on a
dying dog. He only speaks in sarcasms; he has them ready for everyone,
even for those whom he does not know. When he wakes Brabantio to inform
him of the elopement of his daughter, he tells him the matter in coarse
terms, sharpening the sting of the bitter pleasantry, like a
conscientious executioner, rubbing his hands when he hears the culprit
groan under the knife. "Thou art a villain!" cries Brabantio. "You
are--a senator!" answers Iago. But the feature which really completes
him, and makes him take rank with Mephistopheles, is the atrocious truth
and the cogent reasoning by which he likens his crime to virtue.[682]
Cassio, under his advice, goes to see Desdemona, to obtain her
intercession for him; this visit is to be the ruin of Desdemona and
Cassio. Iago, left alone, hums for an instant quietly, then cries:
"And what's he then that says I play the villain?
When this advice is free I give and honest,
Probal to thinking and indeed the course
To win the Moor again."[683]
To all these features must be added a diabolical energy,[684] an
inexhaustible inventiveness in images, caricatures, obscenity, the
manners of a guard-room, the brutal bearing and tastes of a trooper,
habits of dissimulation, coolness, hatred, and patience, contracted amid
the perils and devices of a military life, and the continuous miseries
of long degradation and frustrated hope; you will understand how
Shakespeare could transform abstract treachery into a concrete form, and
how Iago's atrocious vengeance is only the natural consequence of his
character, life, and training.