indicated in the first scene. It will be seen that even in the passage
which I quoted earlier, Tolstoy has wilfully misunderstood one phrase and
Slightly changed this meaning of another, making nonsense of a remark
which is reasonable enough in its context. None of these misreadings is
very gross in itself, but their cumulative effect is to exaggerate the
psychological incoherence of the play. Again, Tolstoy is not able to
explain why Shakespeare's plays were still in print, and still on the
stage, two hundred years after his death (BEFORE the "epidemic
suggestion" started, that is); and his whole account of Shakespeare's
rise to fame is guesswork punctuated by outright misstatements. And
again, various of his accusations contradict one another: for example,
Shakespeare is a mere entertainer and "not in earnest", but on the other
hand he is constantly putting his own thoughts into the mouths of his
characters. On the whole it is difficult to feel that Tolstoy's
criticisms are uttered in good faith. In any case it is impossible that
he should fully have believed in his main thesis--believed, that is to
say, that for a century or more the entire civilized world had been taken
in by a huge and palpable lie which he alone was able to see through.
Certainly his dislike of Shakespeare is real enough, but the reasons for
it may be different, or partly different, from what he avows; and therein
lies the interest of his pamphlet.
At this point one is obliged to start guessing. However, there is one
possible clue, or at least there is a question which may point the way to
a clue. It is: why did Tolstoy, with thirty or more plays to choose from,
pick out KING LEAR as his especial target? True, LEAR is so well known
and has been so much praised that it could justly be taken as
representative of Shakespeare's best work; still, for the purpose of a
hostile analysis Tolstoy would probably choose the play he disliked most.
Is it not possible that he bore an especial enmity towards this
particular play because he was aware, consciously or unconsciously, of
the resemblance between Lear's story and his own? But it is better to
approach this clue from the opposite direction--that is, by examining
LEAR itself, and the qualities in it that Tolstoy fails to mention.
One of the first things an English reader would notice in Tolstoy's
pamphlet is that it hardly deals with Shakespeare as a poet. Shakespeare
is treated as a dramatist, and in so far as his popularity is not
spurious, it is held to be due to tricks of stagecraft which give good
opportunities to clever actors. Now, so far as the English-speaking
countries go, this is not true; Several of the plays which are most
valued by lovers of Shakespeare (for instance, TIMON OF ATHENS) are
seldom or never acted, while some of the most actable, such as
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, are the least admired. Those who care most for
Shakespeare value him in the first place for his use of language, the
"verbal music" which even Bernard Shaw, another hostile critic, admits to
be "irresistible". Tolstoy ignores this, and does not seem to realize
that a poem may have a special value for those who speak the language in
which it was written. However, even if one puts oneself in Tolstoy's
place and tries to think of Shakespeare as a foreign poet it is still
clear that there is something that Tolstoy has left out. Poetry, it
seems, is NOT solely a matter of sound and association, and valueless
outside its own language-group: otherwise how is it that some poems,
including poems written in dead languages, succeed in crossing frontiers?
Clearly a lyric like "To-morrow is Saint Valentine's Day" could not be
satisfactorily translated, but in Shakespeare's major work there is
something describable as poetry that can be separated from the words.
Tolstoy is right in saying that LEAR is not a very good play, as a play.
It is too drawn-out and has too many characters and sub-plots. One wicked
daughter would have been quite enough, and Edgar is a superfluous
character: indeed it would probably be a better play if Gloucester and
both his sons were eliminated. Nevertheless, something, a kind of
pattern, or perhaps only an atmosphere, survives the complications and
the LONGUEURS. LEAR can be imagined as a puppet show, a mime, a ballet, a
series of pictures. Part of its poetry, perhaps the most essential part,
is inherent in the story and is dependent neither on any particular set
of words, nor on flesh-and-blood presentation.
Shut your eyes and think of KING LEAR, if possible without calling to
mind any of the dialogue. What do you see? Here at any rate is what I
see; a majestic old man in a long black robe, with flowing white hair and
beard, a figure out of Blake's drawings (but also, curiously enough,
rather like Tolstoy), wandering through a storm and cursing the heavens,
in company with a Fool and a lunatic. Presently the scene shifts and the
old man, still cursing, still understanding nothing, is holding a dead
girl in his arms while the Fool dangles on a gallows somewhere in the
background. This is the bare skeleton of the play, and even here Tolstoy
wants to cut out most of what is essential. He objects to the storm, as
being unnecessary, to the Fool, who in his eyes is simply a tedious
nuisance and an excuse for making bad jokes, and to the death of
Cordelia, which, as he sees it, robs the play of its moral. According to
Tolstoy, the earlier play. KING LEIR, which Shakespeare adapted
terminates more naturally and more in accordance with the moral demands
of the spectator than does Shakespeare's; namely, by the King of the
Gauls conquering the husbands of the elder sisters, and by Cordelia,
instead of being killed, restoring Leir to his former position.
In other words the tragedy ought to have been a comedy, or perhaps a
melodrama. It is doubtful whether the sense of tragedy is compatible with
belief in God: at any rate, it is not compatible with disbelief in human
dignity and with the kind of "moral demand" which feels cheated when
virtue fails to triumph. A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue
does NOT triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the
forces which destroy him. It is perhaps more significant that Tolstoy
sees no justification for the presence of the Fool. The Fool is integral
to the play. He acts not only as a sort of chorus, making the central
situation clearer by commenting on it more intelligently than the other
characters, but as a foil to Lear's frenzies. His jokes, riddles and
scraps of rhyme, and his endless digs at Lear's high-minded folly,
ranging from mere derision to a sort of melancholy poetry ("All thy other
titles thou hast given away, that thou wast born with"), are like a
trickle of sanity running through the play, a reminder that somewhere or
other in spite of the injustices, cruelties, intrigues, deceptions and
misunderstandings that are being enacted here, life is going on much as
usual. In Tolstoy's impatience with the Fool one gets a glimpse of his
deeper quarrel with Shakespeare. He o
bjects, with some justification, to
the raggedness of Shakespeare's plays, the irrelevancies, the incredible
plots, the exaggerated language: but what at bottom he probably most
dislikes is a sort of exuberance, a tendency to take--not so much a
pleasure as simply an interest in the actual process of life. It is a
mistake to write Tolstoy off as a moralist attacking an artist. He never
said that art, as such, is wicked or meaningless, nor did he even say
that technical virtuosity is unimportant. But his main aim, in his later
years, was to narrow the range of human consciousness. One's interests,
one's points of attachment to the physical world and the day-to-day
struggle, must be as few and not as many as possible. Literature must
consist of parables, stripped of detail and almost independent of
language. The parables--this is where Tolstoy differs from the average
vulgar puritan--must themselves be works of art, but pleasure and
curiosity must be excluded from them. Science, also, must be divorced
from curiosity. The business of science, he says, is not to discover what
happens but to teach men how they ought to live. So also with history and
politics. Many problems (for example, the Dreyfus case) are simply not
worth solving, and he is willing to leave them as loose ends. Indeed his
whole theory of "crazes" or "epidemic suggestions", in which he lumps
together such things as the Crusades and the Dutch passion of tulip
growing, shows a willingness to regard many human activities as mere
ant-like rushings to and fro, inexplicable and uninteresting. Clearly he
could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like
Shakespeare. His reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being
pestered by a noisy child. "Why do you keep jumping up and down like
that? Why can't you sit still like I do?" In a way the old man is in the
right, but the trouble is that the child, has a feeling in its limbs
which the old man has lost. And if the old man knows of the existence of
this feeling, the effect is merely to increase his irritation: he would
make children senile, if he could. Tolstoy does not know, perhaps, just
WHAT he misses in Shakespeare, but he is aware that he misses something,
and he is determined that others shall be deprived of it as well. By
up he would still occasionally strike his servant in moments of anger,
and somewhat later, according to his English biographer, Derrick Leon, he
felt "a frequent desire upon the slenderest provocation to slap the faces
of those with whom he disagreed". One docs not necessarily get rid of
that kind of temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed
it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one's
native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler
forms. Tolstoy was capable of abjuring physical violence and of seeing
what this implies, but he was not capable of tolerance or humility, and
even if one knew nothing of his other writings, one could deduce his
tendency towards spiritual bullying from this single pamphlet.
However, Tolstoy is not simply trying to rob others of a pleasure he does
not share. He is doing that, but his quarrel with Shakespeare goes
further. It is the quarrel between the religious and the humanist
attitudes towards life. Here one comes back to the central theme of KING
LEAR, which Tolstoy does not mention, although he sets forth the plot in
some detail.
Lear is one of the minority of Shakespeare's plays that are unmistakably
ABOUT something. As Tolstoy justly complains, much rubbish has been
written about Shakespeare as a philosopher, as a psychologist, as a
"great moral teacher", and what-not. Shakespeare was not a systematic
thinker, his most serious thoughts are uttered irrelevantly or
indirectly, and we do not know to what extent he wrote with a "purpose"
or even how much of the work attributed to him was actually written by
him. In the sonnets he never even refers to the plays as part of his
achievement, though he does make what seems to be a half-ashamed allusion
to his career as an actor. It is perfectly possible that he looked on at
least half of his plays as mere pot-boilers and hardly bothered about
purpose or probability so long as he could patch up something, usually
from stolen material, which would more or less hang together on the
stage. However, that is not the whole story. To begin with, as Tolstoy
himself points out, Shakespeare has a habit of thrusting uncalled-for
general reflections into the mouths of his characters. This is a serious
fault in a dramatist, but it does not fit in with Tolstoy's picture of
Shakespeare as a vulgar hack who has no opinions of his own and merely
wishes to produce the greatest effect with the least trouble. And more
than this, about a dozen of his plays, written for the most part later
than 1600, do unquestionably have a meaning and even a moral. They
revolve round a central subject which in some cases can be reduced to a
single word. For example, MACBETH is about ambition, Othello is about
jealousy, and TIMON OF ATHENS is about money. The subject of LEAR is
renunciation, and it is only by being wilfully blind that one can fail to
understand what Shakespeare is saying.
Lear renounces his throne but expects everyone to continue treating him
as a king. He does not see that if he surrenders power, other people will
take advantage of his weakness: also that those who flatter him the most
grossly, i.e. Regan and Goneril, are exactly the ones who will turn
against him. The moment he finds that he can no longer make people obey
him as he did before, he falls into a rage which Tolstoy describes as
"strange and unnatural", but which in fact is perfectly in character. In
his madness and despair, he passes through two moods which again are
natural enough in his circumstances, though in one of them it is probable
that he is being used partly as a mouthpiece for Shakespeare's own
opinions. One is the mood of disgust in which Lear repents, as it were,
for having been a king, and grasps for the first time the rottenness of
formal justice and vulgar morality. The other is a mood of impotent fury
in which he wreaks imaginary revenges upon those who have wronged him.
"To have a thousand with red burning spits come hissing in upon 'em!",
and:
It were a delicate stratagem to shoe
A troop of horse with felt; I'll put't in proof;
And when I have stol'n upon these sons-in-law,
Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!
Only at the end does he realize, as a sane man, that power, revenge and
victory are not worth while:
No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison...
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.
But by the time he makes this discovery it is too late, for his death and
Cordelia's are already decided on. That is the story, and, allowing for
some clumsiness in the telling, it is a
very good story.
But is it not also curiously similar to the history of Tolstoy himself?
There is a general resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because
the most impressive event in Tolstoy's life, as in Lear's, was a huge and
gratuitous act of renunciation. In his old age, he renounced his estate,
his title and his copyrights, and made an attempt--a sincere attempt,
though it was not successful--to escape from his privileged position and
live the life of a peasant. But the deeper resemblance lies in the fact
that Tolstoy, like Lear, acted on mistaken motives and failed to get the
results he had hoped for. According to Tolstoy, the aim of every human
being is happiness, and happiness can only be attained by doing the will
of God. But doing the will of God means casting off all earthly pleasures
and ambitions, and living only for others. Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy
renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him
happier. But if there is one thing certain about his later years, it is
that he was NOT happy. On the contrary he was driven almost to the edge
of madness by the behaviour of the people about him, who persecuted him
precisely BECAUSE of his renunciation. Like Lear, Tolstoy was not humble
and not a good judge of character. He was inclined at moments to revert
to the attitudes of an aristocrat, in spite of his peasant's blouse, and
he even had two children whom he had believed in and who ultimately
turned against him--though, of course, in a less sensational manner than
Regan and Goneril. His exaggerated revulsion from sexuality was also
distinctly similar to Lear's. Tolstoy's remark that marriage is "slavery,
satiety, repulsion" and means putting up with the proximity of "ugliness,
dirtiness, smell, sores", is matched by Lear's well-known outburst:
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends;
There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit,
Burning, scalding, stench, consumption, etc., etc.
And though Tolstoy could not foresee it when he wrote his essay on
Shakespeare, even the ending of his life--the sudden unplanned flight
across country, accompanied only by a faithful daughter, the death in a
cottage in a strange village--seems to have in it a sort of phantom
reminiscence of LEAR.
Of course, one cannot assume that Tolstoy was aware of this resemblance,
or would have admitted it if it had been pointed out to him. But his
attitude towards the play must have been influenced by its theme.
Renouncing power, giving away your lands, was a subject on which he had
reason to feel deeply; Probably, therefore, he would be more angered and
disturbed by the moral that Shakespeare draws than he would be in the
case of some other play--MACBETH, for example--which did not touch so
closely on his own life. But what exactly is the moral of LEAR? Evidently
there are two morals, one explicit, the other implied in the story.
Shakespeare starts by assuming that to make yourself powerless is to
invite an attack. This does not mean that EVERYONE will turn against you
(Kent and the Fool stand by Lear from first to last), but in all
probability SOMEONE will. If you throw away your weapons, some less
scrupulous person will pick them up. If you turn the other cheek, you
will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This docs not
always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if
it does happen. The second blow is, so to speak, part of the act of
turning the other cheek. First of all, therefore, there is the vulgar,
common-sense moral drawn by the Fool: "Don't relinquish power, don't give
away your lands." But there is also another moral. Shakespeare never
utters it in so many words, and it does not very much matter whether he
was fully aware of it. It is contained in the story, which, after all, he
made up, or altered to suit his purposes. It is: "Give away your lands if
you want to, but don't expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you