Page:The Moor of Venice.djvu/22

11 is prompted solely by the resistance of Desdemona's virtue to his licentious arts, and is directed against her alone. She is his victim. But in the Tragedy, the motives of Iago's hatred of Othello and Cassio are of a different nature, and his vengeance sweeping, universal, black, and terrible: he uses every one in turn as a tool to effect his purpose, and all are in turn his victims; his is a pure lust of villainy and revenge, for which, it is true, the motives appear at first inadequate,—perhaps unnatural, as some critics have remarked; but a little consideration surely removes this objection. Had there been sufficient cause, however atrocious, for Iago to have been actuated by personal revenge, his guilt would have been simply the excess of wicked and unbridled passion; but by affixing to his conduct less natural motives, its malignity is rendered in proportion fiendlike, passionless, and instinct with guilt in its most unmixed form of "motiveless malignity." At the same time, Iago's revenge is not so entirely "inadequate and vague" as it has been represented. In the opening scene of the Play we see one chief cause of his hatred both of the Moor and Cassio; but he afterwards avows other motives, of jealousy, expressed in the strongest and plainest language, "the thought whereof," he says—