[1] Orwell analyzes Tolstoy's criticism of Shakespeare's work in general and his attack on King Lear in particular.
Artistic theories such as Tolstoy's are quite worthless, because they not only start out with arbitrary assumptions, but depend on vague terms ('sincere', 'important' and so forth) which can be interpreted in any way one chooses.
Some of them are worth pointing out, not because they invalidate his main charge but because they are, so to speak, evidence of malice.After a detailed, itemized analysis aimed to show that a great number of Tolstoy's arguments are false, dishonest and malicious, Orwell identifies Tolstoy's chief quarrel with Shakespeare as "the quarrel between the religious and the humanist attitude towards life."
The exuberance with life that characterizes Shakespeare, his interest in everything, the poetic brilliance – the very qualities for which people tend to admire Shakespeare – are precisely the qualities that make him unendurable to Tolstoy, who preached austerity and whose "main aim, in his later years, was to narrow the range of human consciousness.
Orwell then proceeds to examine Tolstoy himself and notes that the special hatred Tolstoy reserved for King Lear could well be due to the curious similarity of his own story to Lear's, and to the fact that he suffered disappointments of the same nature after renouncing his estate, his aristocratic title and his copyrights.