Iago and Edmund are poetical as
parts of a whole; and when in speech they approach the upper region of
thought, it is because the details allotted to them have to be highly
wrought for the sake of the general plot and effect, and further,
because humanity and truth speak at times through strange organs.
Besides, the ideal may be used to show more glaringly the hideousness
of evil, and thence Iago and Edmund, as ideal villains, through the
very darkness in which only poetic art could have enveloped them, help
us by indirection to see and value the lights that surround the noble
and the good.
In healthy function all the feelings are pure and moral, those whose
action is most earthly and animal and selfish uniting themselves at
their highest with the spiritual, for performance whose compass
reaches beyond an individual, momentary good. A burglar or a murderer
may exhibit courage; but here, a manly quality backing baseness and
brutality for selfish, short-sighted ends, there is an introverted and
bounded action, no expansive upward tendency, and thence no poetry.
But courage, when it is the servant of principle for large, unselfish
ends, becomes poetical, exhibiting the moral beautiful, as in the
fable of Curtius and the fact (or fable) of Winkelried.
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