He has a profound contempt for the human race, and, in the human race, he has a profound contempt for women; he shrugs his shoulders at the bare suggestion of the possibility of female honor. His own wife, especially, is an insupportable burden to him. His only aim in the world is fortune—his enjoyments are palpable and material—and yet we are required to see, in the mere suspicion of an old intrigue between his wife and Othello, a force powerfully acting upon and moving his soul!
He is presented as the most artful villain that ever existed, and yet all his projects are so ill-contrived, so clumsy, so destitute of foresight, that not one of them succeeds—neither was it possible that they could be successful.
He is presented as an impostor of fearful penetration, capable of impenetrable dissimulation; and yet the traps that he sets are so palpable that, although he has to do with an idiot, in comparison with whom any pig-headed imbecile would be a marvel of perspicacity, every one possessed of the smallest relic of sense would not allow himself to be decoyed by them for the space of two minutes.
This, forsooth, is his scheme! Desdemona has espoused Othello; she has chosen him, as he is, out of a thousand others more worthy of her; she has left all for him; to all appearance she loves him; Iago himself does not doubt it; hardly have they received the nuptial benediction before they are separated; Othello sets out with Cassio—observe, with Cassio; Desdemona also departs for Cyprus; by accident the two parties, who had left Venice at different times, arrive in Cyprus the same day, within half an hour of one another. To the knowledge and in the sight of all, Othello included, Cassio, the companion of his voyage, has not been able to speak to Desdemona more than ten minutes on the public road. And yet on the afternoon of this same day, in the midst of the first transports of a union which has been for so long a time retarded, Iago takes upon himself to persuade the amorous Othello that Desdemona, the gentle Desdemona, has betrayed him, before even she has belonged to him—that she has delivered up her heart and her person—to whom?—to Cassio, who has been able neither to see her nor to converse with her. And Iago speaks of his passion as a thing already ancient, and yet—and yet as a thing posterior to her marriage with Othello; for he represents Cassio as exclaiming,
"Cursed fate, that gave thee to the Moor!"
and Iago speaks of Cassio's intrigue with innumerable details and interminable explanations.
Which is the greatest simpleton, the man who conceives such a project, or the man who allows himself to be entrapped by it?
Will it be said that he succeeded? He succeeded according to the representation of the author; but what will common sense say of the matter?
The author is himself successful: but why? Because, such is the intensity and vivacity of his original conception, that the most revolting improbabilities, the most inconceivable absurdities, pass by unperceived; because no one is so ungracious, no one has time to notice the stratagems of the drama. It is, however, another thing to offer these absurdities to be admired as merits.