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 b