of Iago’s character—­“the very pulse of the machine.”  He describes his Circe de la Mothe-Valois as a practical dramatic poet or playwright at least in lieu of play-writer:  while indicating how and wherefore, with all her constructive skill and rhythmic art in action, such genius as hers so differs from the genius of Shakespeare that she undeniably could not have written a Hamlet.  Neither could Iago have written an Othello. (From this theorem, by the way, a reasoner or a casuist benighted enough to prefer articulate poets to inarticulate, Shakespeare to Cromwell, a fair Vittoria Colonna to a “foul Circe-Megaera,” and even such a strategist as Homer to such a strategist as Frederic-William, would not illogically draw such conclusions or infer such corollaries as might result in opinions hardly consonant with the Teutonic-Titanic evangel of the preacher who supplied him with his thesis.) “But what he can do, that he will”:  and if it be better to make a tragedy than to write one, to act a poem than to sing it, we must allow to Iago a station in the hierarchy of poets very far in advance of his creator’s.  None of the great inarticulate 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.