He has his
own dislikes. I once asked a friend of mine, long since dead, who
refused to condemn almost anything, whether there were any vices that he
could not find it in his heart to tolerate. He replied at once that
there were two--cruelty, and bilking; which, if the word is not
academic, I may paraphrase as cheating the helpless, swindling a child
out of its pennies, or leaving a house by the back door in order to
avoid paying your cabman his lawful fare. These exclusions from mercy
Shakespeare would accept; and I think he would add a third. His worst
villains are all theorists, who cheat and murder by the book of
arithmetic. They are men of principle, and are ready to expound their
principle and to defend it in argument. They follow it, without remorse
or mitigation, wherever it leads them. It is Iago's logic that makes him
so terrible; his mind is as cold as a snake and as hard as a surgeon's
knife. The Italian Renaissance did produce some such men; the modern
German imitation is a grosser and feebler thing, brutality trying to
emulate the glitter and flourish of refined cruelty.
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