ee 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