Undervaluation of one's own qualities, however, and enthusiasm for the complementary ones, is a familiar psychological fact. The poet Tolstoï wishes to be a cut-and-dried philosopher. He repudiates his poetry, and likewise speaks coldly--indeed, even with hostility--of the spirits akin to him, of Goethe and Shakespeare. There is only one opinion among lovers of art, and that is that Tolstoï, in the natural spontaneity of his characters and incidents, is to be compared with these two alone, and in the abundance of his psychological traits with Shakespeare only. Yet at present Tolstoï is engaged in writing a book, soon to appear, against Shakespeare and the study of Shakespeare. In our conversation he came back to the indefensible over-estimation of this artist.
"If people were capable of approaching Shakespeare impartially they would lose their unreasonable reverence for this writer. He is crude, immoral, a toady to the great, an arrogant despiser of the small, a slanderer of the common people. He lacks good taste in his jests, is unjust in his sympathies, ignoble, intoxicated with the acquaintance with which a few aristocrats honored him. Even his art is over-estimated, for in every case the best comes from his predecessors or his sources. But people are quite blind. They are under the spell of the consensus of opinion handed down for centuries. It is truly incredible what ideas can be awakened in the human mind by consecutive treatments of one and the same theme."
I believe that one will not go astray in finding in the above-mentioned book against Shakespeare a prosecution at the same time of Tolstoï's campaign against the æsthetic-artistic view of life in general. His purpose is to overthrow one of the chief idols of the æsthetic cult. As far as the arguments on the moral side are concerned, he will certainly have a following. The son of a tavern-keeper, himself an actor, Shakespeare was certainly not the ideal of a gentleman. Tolstoï will, however, have difficulty in abolishing wonder at the artistic power of this most sumptuous of all geniuses.
Tolstoï dealt with the influence of general opinion again in another connection. He was speaking of the mischief that the newspapers do in the world, but chose, in my opinion, a very inappropriate example of this.