I AGO - - -
Follette, Robert M. La
I AGO - - - Oration by Robert M. La Follette ABSTRACT OK ARC; I'M ent 1. Menial analysis of Iago. Has but two of (he throe constituents of mind. Loss of emotional nature hns cost him his moral...
...a beinx who clutches at wickedness with all the greed of a miser...
...Loss of emotional nature hns cost him his moral parts...
...In the whole course of his crime, he betrays never a weakness, never a check of conscience—nothing to mar the elegant symmetry of his fiendishness...
...Upon him he exercises his crafty ingenuity...
...Iago would like to reverse the order of things...
...With what marvellous skill he makes his first attack...
...He is wanting in ethical parts...
...He is a fraction, yet greater than a unit...
...and it is just here that he attains the dignity of a devil...
...Display of his intellectual acutencss—his power of dissimulation, his MANNER and his MEANS...
...Think of it...
...Richard III mounts the throne of England on a score of dead bodies...
...He is often surprised, but is never disconcerted...
...This is the core of his character—abstract, intellectuality united to volition-j.l force, devoid of all morality, divorced from sill feeling...
...The emotions are the native soil of moral life...
...The character is not unnatural...
...He will do nothing except to furnish to himself the "why...
...But farther than this they are profoundly unlike...
...Here is his humanity, his mortal weakness...
...Indeed, it is in those unpremised scenes where the occasion fails to fit his plans, where all the odds are arrayed against him, that he achieves his greatest triumph...
...that they do not construct plans in anticipation...
...Richard would pulverize the universe...
...He does nothing in the,common way...
...Richard III is a monstrosity...
...He desires no moral vindication...
...and through this the "all-powerful and every-watchful Nemesis" hurls her lance, barbed to the shaft with retribution...
...it is fiendishly natural...
...the result of his mental mechanism, not the protest of conscience...
...This compound of wickedness and reason, this incarnation of intellect, this Tartarean basilisk is the logical conclusion in a syllogism whose premises are "Hell and Night...
...Richard is fire, Iago ice...
...His triumph over.all obstacles pins the attention to his intellectual powers...
...He is "instinct with thought...
...Richard III is more humanly terrible...
...Schiller says: "Life is great only as a means of accomplishing the moral law...
...fearful lest the admission has cost him one hellish trait, he quickly adds (hat he stands "accountant for as great a sin...
...but Iago is a magnet with only one pole which ever points toward the infernal...
...And, when he has engaged Othello's car, note the matchless cunning...
...He reads them at a glance, by a flash of instinct...
...and, more than this, the very medium of all their misery is she, "Of spirit so still and gentle, that her motion Blushed at herself...
...He is hardly human, yet he sounds humanity like a philosopher...
...5. Iago, Shakespeare's conception of the "Evil Principle...
...but Iago makes no effort to deceive himself, for he says: "When devils will their blackest sins put on, They do suggest at first with heavenly shows As I do now...
...His reasoning power is abnormally developed...
...These alone are the springs of his action, the source of his power...
...and what Coleridge calls "the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity...
...the philosopher, the moralist—the scoffing demon...
...and is equally careful to tell them...
...Iago a psychological contradiction...
...With pious self-accusation, he says, " Tis my nature's plague to spy into abuses...
...changing like the chameleon, quick to take his cue from the Moor, yet craftily giving direction to the other's thoughts...
...then, as Shakespeare's conception of the "Evil Principle...
...Malignant and artful, hypocritical and heartless, he "seems a saint when most he plays the devil...
...The Thane of Cawdor tops all his murders with his own head...
...Richard loves nothing human...
...HAKESPEARE'S IAGO personifies two constituents of mind—intellect and will...
...Iago hates everything good...
...smothering with one hand all suspicion of hi...
...And it comes like the quick night and consummates the tragedy...
...These are the premises from which, as a conclusion, we deduce Iago—a character without a conscience...
...but he has no feeling, no sympathy, no affection, no fear...
...He "suspects the lusty Moor," and fears "Cassio with his night-cap, too," on occasion...
...By all the principles of dramatic tragedy, Othello is his fit executioner...
...yet he makes the nicest moral distinctions...
...He is an intellectual athlete, and is unceasing in his mental gymnastics...
...this constant combing of his wits for reasons is simply a service performed at the mandate of his craving intellect...
...the boon companion...
...oft my jealousy shapes faults that are not...
...Skeptical of all virtue, to him love is lechery, truth-telling stupid goodness, and lying a daring to be ingenious...
...This is to appease the moral demand, and in its vagueness the poet seeks to avoid a decline in tragic intensity...
...He is a criminal climax: endow him with a single supernatural quality and he stands among the devils of fiction supreme...
...but too well he knows the human mind to gorge it with suspicion...
...It has been said that "deep rogues take all their villainy a priori...
...From the time he lays down the postulate that "I am not what I am" till he attains his infernal majority, he is the same refined, pitiless, sarcastic devil...
...We offer Iago...
...part, yet more than the whole...
...Iago has no conscience...
...He plans, but it is because he likes the mental exercise...
...But upon Othello he plays with more subtlety, and infinitely greater zest...
...His contempt for all good is supreme...
...His questioning, his "reasons...
...Iago is more perfect as a devil, Richard more perfect as a villain...
...Whatever is most mean, whatever is most hard, whatever is vilely atrocious and dangerously difficult, he seizes with greedy glee...
...but carefully adds, "it were not for your quiet or your good to let you know my thoughts...
...and the "double knavery," the "How...
...To condense into one moment the whole of a life, to put a fiat on existence, to engulf a soul in the awful immensity of its own acts—this is sublime...
...Iago's carefully perfected schemes would seem to rebuke this philosophy were it not that they appear, rather, meat for his mind, than directions for his diabolisms...
...Iago few...
...His death satisfies the equation of right...
...He is a paradox...
...Significant fact...
...and...
...lago has none, hence is his superior in pure hellish consistency...
...3. He is a being without conscience, but his acute mind redeems him to us as a subject...
...Iago more subjective...
...and nothing is sublimer than a criminal yielding his life because of the morality he has violated...
...whets him keen...
...and forgets remorse...
...coming in the thin sulntance of a dream, yet so terrible that the remorseful "drops hang on his trembling flesh...
...He is emphatically a being of reasons...
...His methods have the merit of orig«iality...
...perfidy, and kindling with the other the consuming fires of the Moor's jealousy...
...The one, the ethical satisfaction at the inevitable recoil of the broken moral law...
...while over all, in sullen silence, gloats this imp of darkness...
...Strange, unspeakable uriion of opposites...
...This we offer as the ethical and aesthetical reason for the indefiniteness thrown about Iago's fate by the dramatist...
...the goblin whose s-mile is a stab and whose laugh is an infernal sneer...
...Somber mingling of a smile and a sneer...
...He does not care to justify himself, except as an intellectual satisfaction...
...Richard III is more objective...
...Iago and Desdemona...
...Somewhere, Thomas Carlyle has said, "There are depths in man that go to the length of the lowest Hell, as there are heights that reach highest Hea,ven...
...But to have conceived and brought forth a being so super-physical, so positively devilish, so intensely infernal, that his death would be pathos—this is genius...
...hence, the vagueness of his fate, which can be explained, in no other way...
...in fact, he commits crime merely for crime's sake, and there is no sin that he will r.ot claim as his own...
...He had pushed his creation to the verge of the finite, punishment was demanded, none could be devised which would requite him...
...In point of Satanieal finish Iago is Richard—and more...
...Wth the single exception of Iago, Shakespeare has availed himself of this principle...
...Richard and Iago possess some qualities in common: both have mighty intellects...
...That Desdemona, whose childlike nature is a divine fusion of innocence and chastity, should be played off against a moral outlaw, a being whose livery is "heavenly shows" and whose logic is the "divinity of hell," is a juxtaposition appalling, fascinating...
...He wastes no words on Roderigo other than to make the "fool his purse...
...but Iago is just beyond the reach of death and we can fancy him disappearing in the darkness of which he is a part...
...Iago more devilishly perfect...
...Weird harmony of discords...
...The "constant, loving, noble nature"'of the Moor ctvariges quickly under the "almost superhuman art" of Iago...
...the supple sophist, the nimble logician...
...There are two fitnesses in a villain's death— the moral fitness and the tragic fitness...
...And how perfect the creation...
...That virtue should be turned into pitch," that "out of goodness" shou!d be made "the net to enmesh them all," that innocence should become the instrument of the infernal, is a "moral antithesis" that preludes the oncoming of chaos...
...he is "like himself alone," and he stalks along his bloody course, a solitary creation...
...Lady Macbeth bleaches in death the "damned spot" from her unclean hand...
...Richard III seals with his own blood, on Bosworth field, the sublime in his career...
...O the poet whose genius could compound these elements without an explosion...
...His is the cold passion of intellect, whose icy touch chills the warm life in nil it reaches...
...Tis Diana in the talons cf a Harpy...
...who has sworn eternal vengeance on virtue everywhere...
...What he lacks in emotion he has gained in intellectual acutencss, but the result is deformity...
...Brave, he has the audacity to defy destiny, the impudent confidence to enter the lists against the Unknown...
...He not only knows more than he feels, he knows everything, feels nothing...
...The full course of tragedy, the mighty sweep of its changing scenes, must yield an apt sequence, a sublime completeness, else it fails in its aim...
...2. Originality of his methods of meanness, as shown in hi* relations to the other characters of the tragedy...
...Monster, he stands apart from men...
...From the feelings are grown great ethical truths, one by one, forming at last the grand body of the moral law...
...But Iago is emotionally a cipher, and his poverty of sentiment and wealth of intellect render him doubly dangerous...
...he comes and goes, and comes and goes again, with his ingenious innuendoes...
...Thoroughly passionless, coldly intellectual, he is forced into the self-confession that be is no libertine...
...We find the answer in his great intellect...
...Pursued by croaking phantoms, scourged by the invisible lash of violated conscience, he flings himself into the conflict and, with a royal flourish in perfect keeping with his character, closes the tragedy...
...who would turn cosmos into chaos...
...both dissimulators, both actors...
...The strength of the Moor's affection is made a fatal weakness...
...This redeems him to us as'a subject, and yields another explanation for what has been termed his "little traee of cons'c-iehee...
...Why do we tolerate him...
...That dignity would have been sacrificed in his death...
...But it is a quality he feels not, knows not...
...Iago egotistical, cold, cynical, sly...
...his greatest crime is his greatest pleasure...
...The polished, affable attendant...
...He does not assail Desdemona's virtue with a well-conned story, but is seemingly surprised into an exclamation, appearing-to utter his suspicions by the merest accident...
...Now we see his character in all its artful cunning, all its devilish cruelty...
...Mark the "steep inequality" between him and Richard III: the Duke of Gloster, born with teeth, a twisted body, and a majestic mind, cuts his way through those of his own flesh, to a throne...
...the other, the grandeur of a finale...
...What he lacks in feeling he has gained in knowing—he knows everything, feels nothing...
...It is consistent with a devil—not with the villain of a tragedy...
...Like the genuine devil, he destroys the entire household —not through some unguarded vice, but through its very virtues...
...O this "unequal contest between the powers of grossness and purity...
...and, with every dose of poison, gives just a little antidote...
...The conscfence of Richard wakes from its swoon...
...In his deep schemes, we nearly forget the villain...
...He sets all goodness by the ears...
...And this is Iago...
...Richard 111 murders many and sweats with horror...
...both are wily, cunning, crafty...
...But, hidden away somewhere in his black soul is a germ of conscience disgoised as superstitious fear—a germ of conscience which starts forth when that towering will is off guard...
...cursing Cassio with his protestations of love, and damning Desdemona while joining in a benediction to her honesty...
...Here we have the key to his character—he is possessed of an inflexible will, of an intellect, pungent, subtle, super-sensual...
...Why .is it, then, that this character does not disgust us...
...It is not that he requires these reasons as a "whetstone for his revenge," it is not that his "resolution is too much for his conscience," but rather that he revels in reasons, that his hungry mind will have its food...
...not that he dreads to destroy either without some motive, but because his mental constitution demands a reason for 'all things...
...His self-questioning, his subtle sophisms, his cataclysm of reason's, are riot the weak protest of a moral part, but the logical outcome of a sleepless intellect...
...Now flashes forth the invisible lightning of his malignant mind, and to all virtue within its reach...
...Richard's conscience finally asserts itself...
...Iago wins the throne of Hell in three strides...
...Schlegel defines wickedness as "nothing but selfishness designedly unconscientious...
...This is a moral defiance sublimely hideous, but hardly reconcilable in a being with even a "little trace of conscience...
...Were there a single golden thread of moral sense to knit him to the good in humanity, it w-ould shine forth when Desdemona—whose only offense against him is that she is pure—sinks under his cursed cunning...
...We are only promised that his "punishment shall torment him much and hold him long...
...and his own hypocrisy gladdens and intoxicates him...
...Richard is arrogant, passionate, powerful, violent...
...The other characters of the tragedy of Othello —a tragedy which Macauley pronounced Shakespeare's greatest—are but puppets, moving at the will of this master...
...4. Contrasted with Richard 111...
...This is nothing short of Stygian skill...
...we follow his intricate windings with such intense interest...
...laeo's manner of practicing on Othello is only matched by the means he employs...
Vol. 19 • October 1927 • No. 10
