It is only, I think, in this most tragic of tragedies that the sovereign lord and incarnate god of pity and terror can be said to have struck with all his strength a chord of which the resonance could excite such angry agony and heartbreak of wrath as that of the brother kings when they smote their staffs against the ground in fierce imperious anguish of agonised and rebellious compassion, at the oracular cry of Calchas for the innocent blood of Iphigenia.  The doom even of Desdemona seems as much less morally intolerable as it is more logically inevitable than the doom of Cordelia.  But doubtless the fatalism of Othello is as much darker and harder than that of any third among the plays of Shakespeare, as it is less dark and hard than the fatalism of King Lear.  For upon the head of the very noblest man whom even omnipotence or Shakespeare could ever call to life he has laid a burden in one sense yet heavier than the burden of Lear, insomuch as the sufferer can with somewhat less confidence of universal appeal proclaim himself a man more sinned against than sinning.

And yet, if ever man after Lear might lift up his voice in that protest, it would assuredly be none other than Othello.  He is in all the prosperous days of his labour and his triumph so utterly and wholly nobler than the self-centred and wayward king, that the capture of his soul and body in the unimaginable snare of Iago seems a yet blinder and more unrighteous blow

   Struck by the envious wrath of man or God

than ever fell on the old white head of that child-changed father.  But at least he is destroyed by the stroke of a mightier hand than theirs who struck down Lear.  As surely as Othello is the noblest man of man’s making, Iago is the most perfect evildoer, the most potent demi-devil.  It is of course the merest commonplace to say as much, and would be no less a waste of speech to add the half comfortable reflection that it is in any case no shame to fall by such a hand.  But this subtlest and strangest work of Shakespeare’s admits and requires some closer than common scrutiny.  Coleridge has admirably described the first great soliloquy which opens to us the pit of hell within as “the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity.”  But subtle and profound and just as is this definitive appreciation, there is more in the matter yet than even this.  It is not only that Iago, so to speak, half tries to make himself half believe that Othello has wronged him, and that the thought of it gnaws him inly like a poisonous mineral:  though this also be true, it is not half the truth—­nor half that half again.  Malignant as he is, the very subtlest and strongest component of his complex nature is not even malignity.  It is the instinct of what Mr. Carlyle would call an inarticulate poet.  In his immortal study on the affair of the diamond necklace, the most profound and potent humourist of his country in his century has unwittingly touched on the mainspring