In my late teens I picked up copies, on a recommendation from an older student I had met, who was attending the, for me, impossibly exotic McGill University, of Orwell’s essays: Inside the Whale, and Decline of the English Murder. I still have these paperbacks - at the time I had never read writing like that before.
Today in class we get to read one of the essays, and it is a special pleasure to bring writing to students that I remember from when I was their age. Last week we read excerpts from Tolstoy’s What is Art? and his essay on Shakespeare, and this week we look at responses from Roger Fry, and from Orwell. Here Orwell writes about Lear, and Tolstoy’s claim that, as one of the hundred thousand ways in which the play is an utter failure, the Fool is superfluous:
In Tolstoy's impatience with the Fool one gets a glimpse of his deeper quarrel with Shakespeare. He objects, 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.
Clearly his education at Eton was time and money well spent in developing his talents to the full.