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
Cressida, &c., Tolstoy only mentions them on account of their “ineptitude.”
The only character of Shakespeare’s whom he finds natural is Falstaff, “precisely because here the tongue of Shakespeare, full of frigid pleasantries and inept puns, is in harmony with the false, vain, debauched character of this repulsive drunkard.”
Tolstoy had not always been of this opinion. He read Shakespeare with pleasure between 1860 and 1870, especially at the time when he contemplated writing a historical play about the figure of Peter the Great. In his notes for 1869 we find that he even takes Hamlet as his model and his guide. Having mentioned his completed works, and comparing War and Peace to the Homeric ideal, he adds:
“Hamlet and my future works; the poetry of the romance-writer in the depicting of character.”
