Iago did
not clearly understand what was moving his desire; though he tried to
give himself reasons for his action, even those that had some reality
made but a small part of the motive force; one may almost say they were
no more than the turning of the handle which admits the driving power
into the machine. Only once does he appear to see something of the
truth. It is when he uses the phrase '_to plume up my will_ in double
knavery.'
To 'plume up the will,' to heighten the sense of power or
superiority--this seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of
cruelty which evidently do not spring chiefly from ill-will, and which
therefore puzzle and sometimes horrify us most. It is often this that
makes a man bully the wife or children of whom he is fond. The boy who
torments another boy, as we say, 'for no reason,' or who without any
hatred for frogs tortures a frog, is pleased with his victim's pain, not
from any disinterested love of evil or pleasure in pain, but mainly
because this pain is the unmistakable proof of his own power over his
victim. So it is with Iago. His thwarted sense of superiority wants
satisfaction. What fuller satisfaction could it find than the
consciousness that he is the master of the General who has undervalued
him and of the rival who has been preferred to him; that these worthy
people, who are so successful and popular and stupid, are mere puppets
in his hands, but living puppets, who at the motion of his finger must
contort themselves in agony, while all the time they believe that he is
their one true friend and comforter? It must have been an ecstasy of
bliss to him.
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