Orwell's Collected Essays - Being Read 2009.10.10

I have been dipping into Orwell's Collected Essays and there is some great stuff. I was delighted to discover he commented on Shakespeare via his criticism of Tolstoy's splenetic diatribe that denounced Shakespeare as, in Orwell's paraphrase of Tolstoy's polemic:

a writer entirely without merit, one of the worst and most contemptible writers the world has ever seen (154).

Isn't that amazing!

Orwell introduced his examination of Tolstoy's polemic with a general comment on the nature of criticism:

... Criticism becomes more and more openly partisan, and even the pretence of detachment becomes very difficult. But one cannot infer from that that there is no such thing as an aesthetic judgment, that every work of art is simply and solely a political pamphlet and can be judged only as such. If we reason like that we lead our minds into a blind alley in which certain large and obvious facts become inexplicable. And in illustration of this I want to examine one of the greatest pieces of moral, non-aesthetic criticism — anti-aesthetic criticism, one might say — that have been written: Tolstoy's essay on Shakespeare (153).

And I love how Orwell summarizes Tolstoy — it was far more readable than Tolstoy's writing:

Tolstoy's main contention is that Shakespeare is a trivial, shallow writer, with no coherent philosophy, no thoughts or ideas worth bothering about, no interest in social or religious problems, no grasp of character or probability, and, in so far as he could be said to have a definable attitude at all, with a cynical, immoral, worldly outlook on life. He accuses him of patching his plays together without caring twopence for credibility, of dealing in fantastic fables and impossible situations, of making his characters talk in an artificial flowery language completely unlike that of real life. He also accuses him of thrusting anything and everything into his plays — soliloquies, scraps of ballads, discussions, vulgar jokes and so forth — without stopping to think whether they had anything to do with the plot, and also of taking for granted the immoral power politics and unjust social distinctions of the times he lived in. Briefly, he accuses him [of] being a hasty, slovenly writer, a man of doubtful morals, and above all, of not being a thinker' (154).

I wrote my own essay that comments on Orwell's comment on Tolstoy's comment on Shakespeare! (I have criticized the existence of literary critics, and now I am become one — life is funny!) I've called it Tolstoy, Orwell and the Tao of Shakespeare.