There remains, thirdly, the idea that Iago is a man of supreme intellect who is at the same time supremely wicked.  That he is supremely wicked nobody will doubt; and I have claimed for him nothing that will interfere with his right to that title.  But to say that his intellectual power is supreme is to make a great mistake.  Within certain limits he has indeed extraordinary penetration, quickness, inventiveness, adaptiveness; but the limits are defined with the hardest of lines, and they are narrow limits.  It would scarcely be unjust to call him simply astonishingly clever, or simply a consummate master of intrigue.  But compare him with one who may perhaps be roughly called a bad man of supreme intellectual power, Napoleon, and you see how small and negative Iago’s mind is, incapable of Napoleon’s military achievements, and much more incapable of his political constructions.  Or, to keep within the Shakespearean world, compare him with Hamlet, and you perceive how miserably close is his intellectual horizon; that such a thing as a thought beyond the reaches of his soul has never come near him; that he is prosaic through and through, deaf and blind to all but a tiny fragment of the meaning of things.  Is it not quite absurd, then, to call him a man of supreme intellect?

And observe, lastly, that his failure in perception is closely connected with his badness.  He was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the power of love; and he was destroyed by it because he could not understand it; and he could not understand it because it was not in him.  Iago never meant his plot to be so dangerous to himself.  He knew that jealousy is painful, but the jealousy of a love like Othello’s he could not imagine, and he found himself involved in murders which were no part of his original design.  That difficulty he surmounted, and his changed plot still seemed to prosper.  Roderigo and Cassio and Desdemona once dead, all will be well.  Nay, when he fails to kill Cassio, all may still be well.  He will avow that he told Othello of the adultery, and persist that he told the truth, and Cassio will deny it in vain.  And then, in a moment, his plot is shattered by a blow from a quarter where he never dreamt of danger.  He knows his wife, he thinks.  She is not over-scrupulous, she will do anything to please him, and she has learnt obedience.  But one thing in her he does not know—­that she loves her mistress and would face a hundred deaths sooner than see her fair fame darkened.  There is genuine astonishment in his outburst ’What!  Are you mad?’ as it dawns upon him that she means to speak the truth about the handkerchief.  But he might well have applied to himself the words she flings at Othello,

                          O gull!  O dolt! 
     As ignorant as dirt!

The foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the marvellous structure of his plot a piece of crass stupidity.

To the thinking mind the divorce of unusual intellect from goodness is a thing to startle; and Shakespeare clearly felt it so.  The combination of unusual intellect with extreme evil is more than startling, it is frightful.  It is rare, but it exists; and Shakespeare represented it in Iago.  But the alliance of evil like Iago’s with supreme intellect is an impossible fiction; and Shakespeare’s fictions were truth.