Wow this is great, thank you! As someone with a reasonably positive opinion of all three here (Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Orwell), I must say Orwell's clarity is remarkable.
> It is a mistake to write Tolstoy off as a moralist attacking an artist. […] 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. […] 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.
His perception of King Lear's true moral, of Tolstoy (or Gandhi) as “saint”, and of “creeds […] which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power” — in all of this Orwell hits the nail on the head IMO.
Dorian Lynskey's Orwell biography The Ministry of Truth spends a chunk of its time on interactions between Huxley, Wells and Orwell. I found much of that fascinating, picturing these esteemed authors critiquing each others works(sometimes over supper).
Full recommendation for the book, even if only for the Zamyatin chapter collapsing everyone from Rand to George Lucas in to twenty pages or so.
