Of course, it is not difficult to see why Tolstoy so dislikes Shakespeare--mainly because he throws such a glamour over aristocracy, and makes his aristocrats so noble in their sorrows, so radiant, generous, and joyful in their prosperity. Tolstoy is always insisting that aristocrats are not really like that--that they are selfish, stupid, and bored to death; but Shakespeare in glorifying aristocracy is only acting as the people, even in folk-tale and fairy-tale, have always done; they prove by that, it is true, nothing but their own naïve and inexhaustible goodness of heart. The truth is that, in belabouring Shakespeare, Tolstoy is doing the thing that would of all others, had he known its true import, have shocked him most: he is Tolstoy--the aristocrat--cuffing Shakespeare--the peasant's son--for being so like a peasant. {76} Tolstoy has often been blamed for making his uneducated Russian peasants the supreme arbiters of taste, but they would not agree with him about Shakespeare. A friend of mine, a Russian lady, told me she once saw _King Lear_ played in a barn, with the roughest of accessories, before a peasant audience, and, at the conclusion of the drama, there was not a dry eye among the audience. Still Tolstoy's eccentricities need not blind us to those ideas which really are stimulating and valuable. There is his warning against commercialised art--art is not a commercial product, and can never be "ordered" and "paid for" in the same way; there is the warning that schools of art can teach nothing but technique, and that, by an over-elaborate technique, talent itself is often crushed and spoiled; there is the emphatic statement that all great art should be catholic, and that the art which can appeal only to a limited coterie is, almost of necessity, poor art; there is the statement that all art should be as clear as the artist himself can make it, and that "contortions, obscurities, and difficulties" are mostly due to the vain attempt to hide shallowness; and finally, and most important of all, there is the statement that really great art can only be produced by those to whom life is a lovely, a joyous, and a noble thing. {77} CHAPTER VII "THE POWER OF DARKNESS"--"THE KREUTZER SONATA"--"RESURRECTION" Tolstoy has written but few dramas; among these stands pre-eminent the tragedy entitled _The Power of Darkness_. The scene is laid among peasants, and the work is didactic; as is the case with _Resurrection_, its aim is to show the possibility of redemption even for the most fallen. The drama opens with an exceedingly effective situation: Anisya, the second wife of an invalid husband, is in love with the vigorous and powerful young labourer Nikíta, and reproaches him jealously because his father wishes him to marry.