"With the exception of the celebrated air for the violin by Bach, the Nocturne in E flat by Chopin, and a dozen pieces, not even entire, chosen from among the works of Haydn, Mozart, Weber, Beethoven, and Chopin,... all the rest may be rejected and treated with contempt, as examples of an art which causes social disunion."
Again:
"I am going to prove that Shakespeare cannot be ranked even as a writer of the fourth order. And as a character-painter he is nowhere."
That the rest of humanity is of a different opinion is no reason for hesitating: on the contrary.
"My opinion," he proudly says, "is entirely different from the established opinion concerning Shakespeare throughout Europe."
Obsessed by his hatred of lies, he scents untruth everywhere; and the more widely an idea is received, the more prickly he becomes in his treatment of it; he refuses it, suspecting in it, as he says with reference to the fame of Shakespeare, "one of those epidemic influences to which men have always been subject. Such were the Crusades in the Middle Ages, the belief in witchcraft, the search for the philosopher's stone, and the passion for tulips. Men see the folly of these influences only when they have won free from them. With the development of the press these epidemics have become particularly notable." And he gives as an example the most recent of these contagious diseases, the Dreyfus Affair, of which he, the enemy of all injustice, the defender of all the oppressed, speaks with disdainful indifference;[10] a striking example of the excesses into which he is drawn by his suspicion of untruth and that instinctive hatred of "moral epidemics" of which he admits himself the victim, and which he is unable to master. It is the reverse side of a virtue, this inconceivable blindness of the seer, the reader of souls, the evoker of passionate forces, which leads him to refer to King Lear as "an inept piece of work," and to the proud Cordelia as a "characterless creature."[11]
Observe that he sees very clearly certain of Shakespeare's actual defects—faults that we have not the sincerity to admit: the artificial quality of the poetic diction, which is uniformly attributed to all his characters; and the rhetoric of passion, of heroism, and even of simplicity. I can perfectly well understand that a Tolstoy, who was the least literary of writers, should have been lacking in sympathy for the art of one who was the most genial of men of letters. But why waste time in speaking of that which he cannot understand? What is the worth of judgments upon a world which is closed to the judge?
Nothing, if we seek in these judgments the passport to these unfamiliar worlds. Inestimably great, if we seek in them the key to Tolstoy's art. We do not ask of a creative genius the impartiality of the critic. When a Wagner or a Tolstoy speaks of Beethoven or of Shakespeare, he is speaking in reality not of Beethoven or of Shakespeare, but of himself; he is revealing his own ideals. They do not even try to put us off the scent. Tolstoy, in criticising Shakespeare, does not attempt to make himself "objective." More: he reproaches Shakespeare for his objective art. The painter of War and Peace, the master of impersonal art, cannot sufficiently deride those German critics who, following the lead of Goethe, "invent Shakespeare," and are responsible for "the theory that art ought to be objective, that is to say, ought to represent human beings without any reference to moral values—which is the negation of the religious object of art."
It is thus from the pinnacle of a creed that Tolstoy pronounces his artistic judgments. We must not look for any personal after-thoughts in his criticisms. We shall find no trace of such a thing; he is as pitiless to his own works as to those of others.[12] What, then, does he really intend? What is the artistic significance of the religious ideal which he proposes?