Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/711



CIX

N the seventh story of the third decade of the Hecatommithi of M. Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio, "nobile Ferrarese," first published in 1565, there is an incident so beautifully imagined and so beautifully related that it seems at first inexplicable how Shakespeare, when engaged in transfiguring this story into the tragedy of Othello, can have struck it out of his version. The loss of the magic handkerchief which seals the doom of the hero and his fellow victim is far less plausibly and far less beautifully explained by a mere accident, and a most unlikely accident, than by a device which heightens at once the charm of Desdemona and the atrocity of Iago. It is through her tenderness for his little child that he takes occasion to destroy her.

The ancient or ensign, who is nameless as every other actor in the story except the Moor's wife, is of course, if compared with Iago, a mere shadow cast before it by the advent of that awful figure. But none the less is he the remarkably powerful and original creature of a true and tragic genius. Every man may make for himself, and must allow that he cannot pretend to impose upon any other, his own image of the most wicked man ever created by the will of man or God. But Cinthio's villain is distinctly and vividly set before us: a man "of most beautiful presence, but of the wickedest nature that ever was man in the world." Less abnormal and less inhumanly intellectual than Iago, who loved Desdemona "not out of absolute lust" (perhaps the strangest and subtlest point of all that go to make up his all but inscrutable character), this simpler villain, "no whit heeding the faith given to his wife, nor friendship, nor faith, nor obligation, that he might have to the Moor, fell most ardently in love with Disdemona. And he set all his thought to see if it might become possible for him to enjoy her."

This plain and natural motive would probably have sufficed for any of those great contemporaries who found it easier to excel all other tragic or comic poets since the passing of Sophocles and Aristophanes than to equal or draw near to Shakespeare. For him it was insufficient. Neither envy nor hatred nor jealousy nor resentment, all at work together in festering fusion of conscious and contemplative evil, can quite explain Iago even to himself: yet neither Macbeth nor even Hamlet is by nature more inevitably introspective. But the secret of the abyss of this man's nature lies deeper than did ever plummet sound save Shakespeare's. The bright and restless devil of Goethe's invention, the mournfuler and more majestic devil created by Marlowe, are spirits of less deep damnation than that incarnate in the bluff plain-spoken soldier whose honesty is the one obvious thing about him, the one unmistakable quality which neither man nor woman ever fails to recognize and to trust.

And what is even the loftier Faust, whose one fitting mate was Helen, if compared with the subjects of Iago's fathomless and bottomless malice? This quarry cries on havoc louder than when Hamlet fell. Shakespeare alone could