ulate may more justly claim place and precedence. With all his
poetic gift, he has no poetic weakness. Almost any creator but his would
have given him some grain of spite or some spark of lust after Desdemona.
To Shakespeare's Iago she is no more than is a rhyme to another and
articulate poet. {179} His stanza must at any rate and at all costs be
polished: to borrow the metaphor used by Mr. Carlyle in apologetic
illustration of a royal hero's peculiar system of levying recruits for
his colossal brigade. He has within him a sense or conscience of power
incomparable: and this power shall not be left, in Hamlet's phrase, "to
fust in him unused." A genuine and thorough capacity for human lust or
hate would diminish and degrade the supremacy of his evil. He is almost
as far above or beyond vice as he is beneath or beyond virtue. And this
it is that makes him impregnable and invulnerable. When once he has said
it, we know as well as he that thenceforth he never will speak word. We
could smile almost as we can see him to have smiled at Gratiano's most
ignorant and empty threat, being well assured that torments will in no
wise ope his lips: that as surely and as truthfully as ever did the
tortured philosopher before him, he might have told his tormentors that
they did but bruise the coating, batter the crust, or break the shell of
Iago. Could we imagine a far other lost spirit than Farinata degli
Uberti's endowed with Farinata's might of will, and transferred from the
sepulchres of fire to the dykes of Malebolge, we might conceive something
of Iago's attitude in hell--of his unalterable and indomitable posture
for all eternity. As though it were possible and necessary that in some
one point the extremities of all conceivable good and of all imaginable
evil should meet and mix together in a new "marriage of heaven and hell,"
the action in passion of the most devilish among all the human damned
could hardly be other than that of the most godlike among all divine
saviours--the figure of Iago than a reflection by hell-fire of the figure
of Prometheus.

Between Iago and Othello the position of Desdemona is precisely that
defined with such quaint sublimity of fancy in the old English
byword--"between the devil and the deep sea." Deep and pure and strong
and adorable always and terrible and pitiless on occasion as the sea is
the great soul of the glorious hero to whom she has given herself; and
what likeness of man's enemy