remains obscure: in fact, we know as much and as little of him as we know of the chief agent in any criminal affair which was reported yesterday. Stated in Police Court terms: he is a subaltern, who tries to lie with his General's wife; failing in his intent, he gets jealous of an airy rival; poisons his General's ear; has the satisfaction of bruising the lady of his desire to death as a positive confirmed whore too!- in the eye of him he'd fain have cuckolded; experiences a wolfish joy in the death of that once potential horned beast; and, in the end, is himself sent down to the Pit on quite other grounds than poor Desdemona's broken breast-bone and spine, and with never so much as a memory or a thought of the cuckold that was not to be, whom he had escorted to the bounds of Space and Time with every circumstance of miserableness and hate. That is pretty much as he half-exists in the "Hecatommithi": for the simple reason that Cinthio, having made him play his part, with supreme success, in the affairs of Desdemona and the Moor, as a good enough Renaissance Italian, a Cesare Borgia on the smallest scale, was content to ask no more of him, but to let him end even as, in an enlightened Italy, such small change of Machiavelli's ideal Prince might end, and very often did. In "Othello" all this is changed: Iago quits the Police-Court (so to say) for the purlieus of Humanity, and, instead of depending for immortality on the word of a mere reporter, is taken up, and shaken, and squeezed, and made to know something of himself, and to make that much of himself he knows, and a great deal besides, intelligible to others,

by the greatest manieur d'hommes that ever lived. The result is such an exemplary presentation of active, motiveless, and militant wickedness as Balzac, say-the Balzac of Philippe Bridau and Cousin Betty—has not so much as approached.

IV

Is it quite made out? I am reluctant to determine. I think it is; but I have to admit that, if it be, the achievement is accomplished largely by means of soliloquy: an expedient in dramatic art abominable to the play-going mind. Yet was it a common device with Shakespeare, to whom its practice saved much trouble: nay, made things possible which in its absence could not have been essayed. Accepting it for the compromise it is, you may say, I think, that, thanks to its use, Iago is entirely credible. Despite the majestic assurance and completeness of his presentment as a chief actor in the play, we should not know him as we do if we were denied the privilege of sitting with him in the privy chamber of his thought, and taking our fill, and more, of those terrible mental practices by which he seeks, in the dry light of an excellent and daring intelligence, to reconcile his action with his conscience, his processes with his results, and, half in earnest, half in jest, as it were to excuse himself before his soul. He is a piece of pure intellect: he has gaiety, wit, invention, a kind of lethal humour; he is versed in "politic authors,” and, besides, he is deeply read in the books of Character

and Life, so that he "knows all qualities of human dealing with a most learned spirit"; he discovers in himself a fine observer, a shrewd and gluttonous critic; first and last he is high in resolve, cruel of heart, swift and resolute of hand; in speech he is liberal to the point of intemperance, with an odd trick of obscenity, whether suggested or phrased, which he has practised till it has mastered him, and in which the World, if it were but wise, would find proof indubitable of the inherent baseness of his mind. Said a fine critic to me long years ago, in the great Salvini times: "You may meet Iago on any Yorkshire race-course"; and, the inevitable mutations duly made, I take the remark to be intrinsically just. Palmer of Rugely, the poisoning creature, was of Iago's type and strain; and the Ring breeds many such potential beasts of prey. These are the men who kill, and are half surprised and half angered to find, as they generally do, that Killing is called Murder, is an offence before the Law, and must be expiated on the Gallows. These wretches play with Evil much as a young man plays with Life; and are just as sorry for themselves when they come to the unchanging end.

For the rest, Iago, like his kind at large, is wholly the creature of the Event he quickens and stage-manages. He gulls Roderigo, he gulls Cassio, he gulls Othello into killing Desdemona, and essaying to compass his Lieutenant's murder. But, though he never so much as suspect it, the mortal issue he has made imminent masters him ever, and, being determined, leaves him the most wretched slave this side Eternity. He starts by "guying"

an aged and respectable Senator on a most delicate and peculiar point of honour, in terms so rank that Shakespeare himself, good as he was at filth (and none better ever lived), has not improved on them; he ends as the murderer whole or parcel-gilt of Othello, Desdemona, Roderigo, and Emilia, with a bad wound in his body, the assurance of being done to death by torture (not that he would care much for that), and the knowledge that, thanks to him, the Cassio he so wretchedly loathed and scorned is Governor of Cyprus. For all his vocabulary and for all his brains, his contempt for elementary human law is ever too strong for him. He makes the best of circumstances that he can; he wins his points; he is always alert, maleficent, superior to his opportunity; and in the long run he is found to be merely the peer the Hogarthian Thomas Idle.

of

V

But, to make a play, it is not enough to present Intelligence at odds with Morals. For, as was long since pointed out to me by my dear friend Fleeming Jenkin, the staple of Drama is Emotion. "You must have Incident," he argued, in his fine, logical way, "or your Emotion will not be Strong; you must have Character, or it will not be Interesting; you must have Style, or your presentation of it, whatever it be, will not be Literature." But, if you lacked all these (the contention was) you might stagger through, and grip your audience, and

achieve your end, if only you had Emotion. Dumas père, though Jenkin knew it not, had said the same thing years before. There was an essential difference, he remarked, between himself and Hugo, "le Penseur' (so the loyal old Artist called the greatest Liar in all Drama), and the difference consisted in this: Hugo could do nothing in the play-writing way without what one may call the fripperies of drama - Horns of Hernani, Tombs of Charlemagne, "Soupers à Ferrare," Choruses of Monks, Coffins, Thunder and Lightning, Ruined Castles, and the like; whereas all he wanted was "four trestles, four boards, two actors, and a passion." "Tis the briefest, the most comprehensive, the most luminous statement of the essentials of drama that ever, I believe, was made; and it fits the "Othello" of Shakespeare as it fits the Æschylean "Oresteia,” like a glove.

Scene by scene and act by act, the "Moor of Venice" moves with an irresistible stride to an inevitable end; 't is a lasting and affecting proof, if any proof were needed, that the "well-made play" did not begin with “Antony" and "la Tour de Nesle"; it shows that the Sardou formula and the Ibsen formula are mere matters of to-day, and that here at least is a point at which the Sophocles of the "Edipus" might take hands with Shakespeare, and own that, his own masterpiece, all radiant and serene as it appears, is no greater nor more splendid an achievement in design, in construction, in effect, than this. This is another way of saying that, Iago apart, the interest of "Othello" is entirely and unalterably emotional. You might play it in a barn, and it would still fulfil it