ss
of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his
snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of
all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him.... The preface
to my "Three Plays for Puritans" contains a section headed "Better than
Shakespeare?" which is, I think, the only utterance of mine on the
subject to be found in a book.... There is at present in the press a new
preface to an old novel of mine called "The Irrational Knot." In that
preface I define the first order in Literature as consisting of those
works in which the author, instead of accepting the current morality and
religion ready-made without any question as to their validity, writes
from an original moral standpoint of his own, thereby making his book an
original contribution to morals, religion, and sociology, as well as to
_belles letters_. I place Shakespeare with Dickens, Scott, Dumas pere,
etc., in the second order, because, tho they are enormously
entertaining, their morality is ready-made; and I point out that the one
play, "Hamlet," in which Shakespeare made an attempt to give as a hero
one who was dissatisfied with the ready-made morality, is the one which
has given the highest impression of his genius, altho Hamlet's revolt is
unskillfully and inconclusively suggested and not worked out with any
philosophic competence.[4]

May I suggest that you should be careful not to imply that Tolstoy's
great Shakespearian heresy has no other support than mine. The preface
of Nicholas Rowe to his edition of Shakespeare, and the various prefaces
of Dr. Johnson contain, on Rowe's part, an apology for him as a writer
with obvious and admitted shortcomings (very ridiculously ascribed by
Rowe to his working by "a mere light of nature"), and, on Johnson's, a
good deal of downright hard-hitting criticism. You should also look up
the history of the Ireland forgeries, unless, as is very probable,
Tolstoy has anticipated you in this. Among nineteenth-century poets
Byron and William Morris saw clearly that Shakespeare was enormously
overrated intellectually. A French book, which has been translated into
English, has appeared within the last ten years, giving Napoleon's
opinions of the drama. His insistence on the superiority of Corneille to
Shakespeare on the ground of Corneille's power of grasping a political
situation, and of seeing men in their relation to the state, is
interesting.

Of course you know about