pplied to himself the words she
flings at Othello,

O gull! O dolt!
As ignorant as dirt!

The foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the
marvellous structure of his plot a piece of crass stupidity.

To the thinking mind the divorce of unusual intellect from goodness is a
thing to startle; and Shakespeare clearly felt it so. The combination of
unusual intellect with extreme evil is more than startling, it is
frightful. It is rare, but it exists; and Shakespeare represented it in
Iago. But the alliance of evil like Iago's with _supreme_ intellect is
an impossible fiction; and Shakespeare's fictions were truth.

6

The characters of Cassio and Emilia hardly require analysis, and I will
touch on them only from a single point of view. In their combination of
excellences and defects they are good examples of that truth to nature
which in dramatic art is the one unfailing source of moral instruction.

Cassio is a handsome, light-hearted, good-natured young fellow, who
takes life gaily, and is evidently very attractive and popular. Othello,
who calls him by his Christian name, is fond of him; Desdemona likes him
much; Emilia at once interests herself on his behalf. He has warm
generous feelings, an enthusiastic admiration for the General, and a
chivalrous adoration for his peerless wife. But he is too easy-going. He
finds it hard to say No; and accordingly, although he is aware that he
has a very weak head, and that the occasion is one on which he is bound
to run no risk, he gets drunk--not disgustingly so, but ludicrously
so.[120] And, besides, he amuses himself without any scruple by
frequenting the company of a woman of more than doubtful reputation, who
has fallen in love with his good looks. Moralising critics point out
that he pays for the first offence by losing his post, and for the
second by nearly losing his life. They are quite entitled to do so,
though the careful reader will not forget Iago's part in these
transactions. But they ought also to point out that Cassio's looseness
does not in the least disturb our confidence in him in his relations
with Desdemona and Othello. He is loose, and we are sorry for it; but we
never doubt that there was 'a daily beauty in his life,' or that his
rapturous admiration of Desdemona was as wholly beautiful a thing as it
appears, or that Othello was perfectly safe when in his courtship he
employed Cassio to 'go betwee