Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

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

  nature he was imperious as well as egotistical. Well after he was grown

  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...

  ....and we'll wear out,

  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