won't gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live FOR OTHERS,
and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself."
Obviously neither of these conclusions could have been pleasing to
Tolstoy. The first of them expresses the ordinary, belly-to-earth
selfishness from which he was genuinely trying to escape. The other
conflicts with his desire to eat his cake and have it--that is, to
destroy his own egoism and by so doing to gain eternal life. Of course,
LEAR is not a sermon in favour of altruism. It merely points out the
results of practising self-denial for selfish reasons. Shakespeare had a
considerable streak of worldliness in him, and if he had been forced to
take sides in his own play, his sympathies would probably have lain with
the Fool. But at least he could see the whole issue and treat it at the
level of tragedy. Vice is punished, but virtue is not rewarded. The
morality of Shakespeare's later tragedies is not religious in the
ordinary sense, and certainly is not Christian. Only two of them, HAMLET
and OTHELLO, are supposedly occurring inside the Christian era, and even
in those, apart from the antics of the ghost in HAMLET, there is no
indication of a "next world" where everything is to be put right. All of
these tragedies start out with the humanist assumption that life,
although full of sorrow, is worth living, and that Man is a noble
animal--a belief which Tolstoy in his old age did not share.
Tolstoy was not a saint, but he tried very hard to make himself into a
saint, and the standards he applied to literature were other-worldly
ones. It is important to realize that the difference between a saint and
an ordinary human being is a difference of kind and not of degree. That
is, the one is not to be regarded as an imperfect form of the other. The
saint, at any rate Tolstoy's kind of saint, is not trying to work an
improvement in earthly life: he is trying to bring it to an end and put
something different in its place. One obvious expression of this is the
claim that celibacy is "higher" than marriage. If only, Tolstoy says in
effect, we would stop breeding, fighting, struggling and enjoying, if we
could get rid not only of our sins but of everything else that binds us
to the surface of the earth--including love, then the whole painful
process would be over and the Kingdom of Heaven would arrive. But a
normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on
earth to continue. This is not solely because he is "weak", "sinful" and
anxious for a "good time". Most people get a fair amount of fun out of
their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or
the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian
attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is
always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find
eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is
that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life. "Men
must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is
all"--which is an un-Christian sentiment. Often there is a seeming truce
between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their
attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and
the next. And the enormous majority of human beings, if they understood
the issue, would choose this world. They do make that choice when they
continue working, breeding and dying instead of crippling their faculties
in the hope of obtaining a new lease of existence elsewhere.
We do not know a great deal about Shakespeare's religious beliefs, and
from the evidence of his writings it would be difficult to prove that he
had any. But at any rate he was not a saint or a would-be saint: he was a
human being, and in some ways not a very good one. It is clear, for
instance, that he liked to stand well with the rich and powerful, and was
capable of flattering them in the most servile way. He is also noticeably
cautious, not to say cowardly, in his manner of uttering unpopular
opinions. Almost never does he put a subversive or sceptical remark into
the mouth of a character likely to be identified with himself. Throughout
his plays the acute social critics, the people who are not taken in by
accepted fallacies, are buffoons, villains, lunatics or persons who are
shamming insanity or are in a state of violent hysteria. LEAR is a play
in which this tendency is particularly well marked. It contains a great
deal of veiled social criticism--a point Tolstoy misses--but it is all
uttered either by the Fool, by Edgar when he is pretending to be mad, or
makes an intelligent remark. And yet the very fact that Shakespeare had
to use these subterfuges shows how widely his thoughts ranged. He could
not restrain himself from commenting on almost everything, although he
put on a series of masks in order to do so. If one has once read
Shakespeare with attention, it is not easy to go a day without quoting
him, because there are not many subjects of major importance that he does
not discuss or at least mention somewhere or other, in his unsystematic
but illuminating way. Even the irrelevancies that litter every one of his
plays--the puns and riddles, the lists of names, the scraps of
"reportage" like the conversation of the carriers in HENRY IV the bawdy
jokes, the rescued fragments of forgotten ballads--are merely the
products of excessive vitality. Shakespeare was not a philosopher or a
scientist, but he did have curiosity, he loved the surface of the earth
and the process of life--which, it should be repealed, is NOT the same
thing as wanting to have a good time and stay alive as long as possible.
Of course, it is not because of the quality of his thought that
Shakespeare has survived, and he might not even be remembered as a
dramatist if he had not also been a poet. His main hold on us is through
language. How deeply Shakespeare himself was fascinated by the music of
words can probably be inferred from the speeches of Pistol. What Pistol
says is largely meaningless, but if one considers his lines singly they
are magnificent rhetorical verse. Evidently, pieces of resounding
nonsense ("Let floods o'erswell, and fiends for food howl on", etc.) were
constantly appearing in Shakespeare's mind of their own accord, and a
half-lunatic character had to be invented to use them up.
Tolstoy's native tongue was not English, and one cannot blame him for
being unmoved by Shakespeare's verse, nor even, perhaps, for refusing to
believe that Shakespeare's skill with words was something out of the
ordinary. But he would also have rejected the whole notion of valuing
poetry for its texture--valuing it, that is to say, as a kind of music.
If it could somehow have been proved to him that his whole explanation of
Shakespeare's rise to fame is mistaken, that inside the English-speaking
world, at any rate, Shakespeare's popularity is genuine, that his mere
skill in placing one syllable beside another has
given acute pleasure to
generation after generation of English-speaking people--all this would
not have been counted as a merit to Shakespeare, but rather the contrary.
It would simply have been one more proof of the irreligious, earthbound
nature of Shakespeare and his admirers. Tolstoy would have said that
poetry is to be judged by its meaning, and that seductive sounds merely
cause false meanings to go unnoticed. At every level it is the same
issue--this world against the next: and certainly the music of words is
something that belongs to this world.
A sort of doubt has always hung around the character of Tolstoy, as round
the character of Gandhi. He was not a vulgar hypocrite, as some people
declared him to be, and he would probably have imposed even greater
sacrifices on himself than he did, if he had not been interfered with at
every step by the people surrounding him, especially his wife. But on the
other hand it is dangerous to take such men as Tolstoy at their
disciples' valuation. There is always the possibility--the probability,
indeed--that they have done no more than exchange one form of egoism for
another. Tolstoy renounced wealth, fame and privilege; he abjured
violence in all its forms and was ready to suffer for doing so; but it is
not easy to believe that he abjured the principle of coercion, or at
least the DESIRE to coerce others. There are families in which the father
will say to his child, "You'll get a thick car if you do that again",
while the mother, her eyes brimming over with tears, will take the child
in her arms and murmur lovingly, "Now, darling, IS it kind to Mummy to do
that?" And who would maintain that the second method is less tyrannous
than the first? The distinction that really matters is not between
violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite
for power. There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of
armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more
intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who
believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances.
will go to prison", but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and
dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like
pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete
renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you
have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary
dirtiness of politics--a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to
draw any material advantage--surely that proves that you are in the
right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone
else should be bullied into thinking likewise.
If we are to believe what he says in his pamphlet, Tolstoy has never been
able to see any merit in Shakespeare, and was always astonished to find
that his fellow-writers, Turgenev, Fet and others thought differently. We
may be sure that in his unregenerate days Tolstoy's conclusion would have
been: "You like Shakespeare--I don't. Let's leave it at that." Later,
when his perception that it takes all sorts to make a world had deserted
him, he came to think of Shakespeare's writings as something dangerous to
himself. The more pleasure people took in Shakespeare, the less they
would listen to Tolstoy. Therefore nobody must be ALLOWED to enjoy
Shakespeare, just as nobody must be allowed to drink alcohol or smoke
tobacco. True, Tolstoy would not prevent them by force. He is not
demanding that the police shall impound every copy of Shakespeare's
works. But he will do dirt on Shakespeare, if he can. He will try to get
inside the mind of every lover of Shakespeare and kill his enjoyment by
every trick he can think of, including--as I have shown in my summary of
his pamphlet--arguments which are self-contradictory or even doubtfully
honest.
But finally the most striking thing is how little difference it all
makes. As I said earlier, one cannot ANSWER Tolstoy's pamphlet, at least
on its main counts. There is no argument by which one can defend a poem.
It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible. And if this test
is valid, I think the verdict in Shakespeare's case must be "not guilty".
Like every other writer, Shakespeare will be forgotten sooner or later,
but it is unlikely that a heavier indictment will ever be brought against
him. Tolstoy was perhaps the most admired literary man of his age, and he
was certainly not its least able pamphleteer. He turned all his powers of
denunciation against Shakespeare, like all the guns of a battleship
roaring simultaneously. And with what result? Forty years later
Shakespeare is still there completely unaffected, and of the attempt to
demolish him nothing remains except the yellowing pages of a pamphlet
which hardly anyone has read, and which would be forgotten altogether if
Tolstoy had not also been the author of WAR AND PEACE and ANNA KARENINA.
SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS (1947)
Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but after a week or
two, just when I seemed to be settling into routine of school life) I
began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion
to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier.
Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for
granted. It is a normal reaction in children who have been removed from
their homes to a strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on
as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which
the proper cure was a beating. For my part I did not need to be told it
was a crime. Night after night I prayed, with a fervor never previously
attained in my prayers, 'Please God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please
God, do not let me wet my bed!' but it made remarkably little difference.
Some nights the thing happened, others not. There was no volition about
it, no consciousness. You did not properly speaking do the deed: you were
merely woke up in the morning and found that the sheets were wringing
wet.
After the second or third offense I was warned that I should be beaten
next time, but I received the warning in a curiously roundabout way. One
afternoon, as we were filing out from tea, Mrs. Simpson, the headmaster's
wife, was sitting at the head of one of the tables, chatting with a lady
of whom I know nothing, except that she was on an afternoon's visit to
the school. She was an intimidating, masculine-looking person wearing a
riding habit, or something that I took to be a riding habit. I was just
leaving the room when Mrs. Simpson called me back, as though to introduce
me to the visitor.
Mrs. Simpson was nicknamed Bingo, and I shall call her by that name for I
seldom think of her by any other. (Officially, however, she was addressed
as Mum, probably a corruption of the 'Ma'am' used by public school boys
to their housemasters' wives.) She was a stocky square-built woman with
hard red chee
ks, a flat top to her head, prominent brows and deepset,
suspicious eyes. Although a great deal of the time she was full of false
heartiness, jollying one along with mannish slang ('Buck up, old chap!'
and so forth), and even using one's Christian name, her eyes never lost
their anxious, accusing look. It was very difficult to look her in the
face without feeling guilty, even at moments when one was not guilty of
anything in particular.
'Here is a little boy,' said Bingo, indicating me to the strange lady,
'who wets his bed every night. Do you know what I am going to do if you
wet your bed again?' she added, turning to me. 'I am going to get the
Sixth Form to beat you.'
The strange lady put on an air of being inexpressibly shocked, and
exclaimed 'I-should-think-so!' And here occurred one of those wild,
almost lunatic misunderstandings which are part of the daily experience
of childhood. The Sixth Form was a group of older boys who were selected
as having 'character' and were empowered to beat smaller boys. I had not
yet learned of their existence, and I misheard the phrase 'the Sixth
Form' as 'Mrs. Form.' I took it as referring to the strange lady--I
thought, that is, that her name was Mrs. Form. It was an improbable name,
but a child has no judgment in such matters. I imagined, therefore, that
it was she who was to be deputed to beat me. It did not strike me as
strange that this job should be turned over to a casual visitor in no way
connected with the school. I merely assumed that 'Mrs. Form' was a stern
disciplinarian who enjoyed beating people (somehow her appearance seemed
to bear this out) and I had an immediate terrifying vision of her
arriving for the occasion in full riding kit and armed with a hunting
whip. To this day I can feel myself almost swooning with shame as I
stood, a very small, round-faced boy in short corduroy knickers, before
the two women. I could not speak. I felt that I should die if 'Mrs. Form'
were to beat me. But my dominant feeling was not fear or even resentment:
it was simply shame because one more person, and that a woman, had been
told of my disgusting offense.
A little later, I forget how, I learned that it was not after all 'Mrs.
Form' who would do the beating. I cannot remember whether it was that
very night that I wetted my bed again, but at any rate I did wet it again
quite soon. Oh, the despair, the feeling of cruel injustice, after all my
prayers and resolutions, at once again waking between the clammy sheets!
There was no chance of hiding what I had done. The grim statuesque
matron, Daphne by name, arrived in the dormitory specially to inspect my
bed. She pulled back the clothes, then drew herself up, and the dreaded
words seemed to come rolling out of her like a peal of thunder:
'REPORT YOURSELF to the headmaster after breakfast!'
I do not know how many times I heard that phrase during my early years at
Crossgates. It was only very rarely that it did not mean a beating. The
words always had a portentous sound in my ears, like muffled drums or the
words of the death sentence.
When I arrived to report myself, Bingo was doing something or other at
the long shiny table in the ante-room to the study. Her uneasy eyes
searched me as I went past. In the study Mr. Simpson, nicknamed Sim, was
waiting. Sim was a round-shouldered curiously oafish-looking man, not
large but shambling in gait, with a chubby face which was like that of an
overgrown baby, and which was capable of good humor. He knew, of course,
why I had been sent to him, and had already taken a bone-handled riding
crop out of the cupboard, but it was part of the punishment of reporting
yourself that you had to proclaim your offense with your own lips. When I
had said my say, he read me a short but pompous lecture, then seized me
by the scruff of the neck, twisted me over and began beating me with the