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Isaiah Berlin
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and intellectual unity with it, owingto the unboundedvitality and constructive genius of the
writing itself. It is one of the mostextraordinary
performances
in the history of literature.
H s E N r.~f Y is alwaysthe same: experts,
T professionals,
men who claim special
authority over other men.Universities and professors are a frequent target for attack. There
are intimations of this already in the section
entitled Youth of his earlier autobiographical
novel. There is something eighteenth-century,
reminiscent both of Voltaire and of Bentham,
about Tolstoys devastating accounts of the dull
and incompetentprofessors and the desperately
bored and obsequiousstudents in Russia in his
time. Thetone is unusual in the nineteenth century: dry, ironical, didactic, mordant,at once
withering and entertaining; the wholebased on
the contrast betweenthe harmonioussimplicity
of nature and the self-destructive complications
created by the malice or stupidity of men--men
from whomthe author feels himself detached,
whomhe affects not to understand, and me, cks
from a distance.
W~are at the earliest beginnings of a theme
whichgrewobsessivein Tolstoyslater life; that
the solution to all our perplexities stares us in
the face--that the answer is about us everywhere, like the light of day, if only we would
not close our eyes or look.everywhere but at
whatis there, staring us in the face, the clear,
simple,irresistible truth.
Like Rousseau and Kant and the believers
in Natural Law, Tolstoy was convinced that
menhave certain basic material and spiritual
needs, in all places, at all times. If these needs
are fulfilled, they lead harmoniouslives, which
is the goal of their nature. Moral,xsthetic, and
other spiritual values are objective and eternal,
and mans inner harmony depends upon his
correct relationship to thc~. Moreover,all his
life, he defended the proposition--which his
ownnovels and sketches do not embody--that
humanbeings arc more harmonious in childhood than under the corrupting influences of
education in later life; and also that simple
people (peasants, cossacks, and so on) have
more "natural" and correct attitude towards
these basic values than civilised men;and that
they are free and independent in a sense in
whichcivilised menarc not. For (he insists on
this over and over again) peasant communities
are in a position to supply their ownmaterial
and spiritual needs out of their ownresources,
provided that they are not robbedor enslaved by
oppressors and exploiters; whereascivilised men
need for their survival the forced labour of
others--serfs, slaves, the exploited masses,called
ironically "dependents," because their ma~ters
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Isaiah Berlin
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Tyutchev, or DonGiovanni, or the Ninth Sym"merge" with the mass of the commonpeople.
Are they too corrupt ever to recover their innophonyare not. If there is an ideal of man,it
cence?Is their case hopeless? Or can it be that
lies not in the future, but in the past. Onceupon
civilised men have acquired (or discovered)
a time there was the Garden of Eden and in it
certain true values of their own,values which
dwelt the uncorrupted humansoul as the Bible
and Rousseauconceived it, and then camethe
barbarians and children may knownothing of,
Fall, corruption, suffering, falsification. It is
but which they, the civilised, cannot lose or
forget, even if, by someimpossible means,they
mere blindness (Tolstoy says over and over
could transform themselvesinto peasants or the
again) to believe, as liberals or socialists~"the
progressives"--believe, that the golden a~e. is
free and happy Cossacks of the Don and the
Terek? This is one of the central and most torstill before us, that history is the story or ~mprovement, that material advance in natural
mentingproblemsin Tolstoys life, to whichhe
goes back again and again, and to which he
science or material skills coincides with real
moral advance.The truth is the reverse of this.
returns conflicting answers.
Tolstoy knowsthat he himself clearly belongs
Tr~r CHILD
IS CLOSER
to the ideal harmonythan
to the minority of barons, bankers, professors.
He knows the symptomsof his condition only
the grownman,and the simple peasant than the
too well. He cannot, for example, deny his
torn, "alienated," morally and spiritually unpassionate love for the music of Mozart or
anchored and self-destructive parasites who
Chopin or the poetry of Tyutchev or Pushkin,
form the civilised ~lite. From this doctrine
the ripest fruits of civilisation. He needs, he
springs Tolstoys notable anti-individualism:
andin particular his diagnosisof the individuals
cannot do without, the printed word and all
the elaborate paraphernalia of the culture in
~vill as the source of misdirectionand perversion
which such lives are lived and such works of
of "natural" humantendencies, and hence the
art are created. But what is the use of Pushkin conviction (derived largely from Schopenhauers
to village boys, whenhis wordsare not intellidoctrine of the will as the source of frustration)
gible to them? Whatreal benefits has the inthat to plan, organise, rely on science, try to
vention of printing brought the peasants? We create rational patterns o~ life in accordance
are told, Tolstoy observes, that books educate
with rational theories, is to swimagainst the
societies ("that is, makethem morecorrupt"),
streamof nature, to close ones eyes to the saving
that it was the written word that has promoted truth within us, to torture facts to fit artificial
the emancipationof the serfs in Russia. Tolstoy
schemas, and torture humanbeings to fit social
denies this: the government would have done
and economic systems against which their
the same without books or pamphlets. Pushkins
natures cry out. From the same source, too,
Boris Godunovpleases only him, Tolstoy: but
comesthe obverse of this: Tolstoys faith in an
to the peasants it meansnothing. The triumphs
intuitively grasped direction of things as not
of civilisation? The telegraph tells him about
merelyinevitable, but objectively--providentially
his sisters health, or about the prospects
--good; and therefore belief in the needto subof KingOtto I of Greece; but what benefits do
mit to it: his quietism.
the.re, asses gain fromit? Yet it is they whopay
This is one aspect of his teaching--the most
and have ahvayspaid for it all; they knowthis
famous, the most central idea of the Tolstoyan
well Whenpeasants kill doctors in the "cholera
movement,and it runs through all his works,
riots" because they regard them as poisoners,
imaginative,critical, didactic, fromTheCossacks
what they do is no doubt wrong, but these
and FamilyHappinessto his last religious tracts.
murdersare no accident: the instinct whichtells
This is the doctrine which the liberals and
the peasants whotheir oppressors are is sound,
Marxists condemned. It is in this moodthat
and the doctors belong to that class. When Tolstoy maintains that to imagine that heroic
WandaLandowskaplayed to the villagers of
personalities determine events is a piece of
Yasnaya Polyana, the great majority of them
colossal megalomaniaand self-deception; his
remained unresponsive. Yet can it be doubted
narrative is designed to showthe insignificance
that it is the simple people wholead the least
of N. apoleonor CzarAlexander,.or of.the aristobroken lives, immeasurably superior to the
crauc and bureaucratic
society ~n Anna
warped and tormented lives of the rich and
Karenina,or of the judges and official persons
educated?
in Resurrection; or again, the emptiness and
The commonpeople, Tolstoy asserts in his
intellectual impotenceof historians and philoearly educational tracts, are self-subsistent not
sophers whotry to explain events by employing
only materially bnt spiritually--folksong, the
concepts like "power" which is attributed to
Iliad, the Bible, spring fromthe people itself,
great men, or "influence" ascribed to writers,
and are therefore intelligible to all meneveryorators, preachers--words,abstractions ~vhich,in
where, as the marvellous poem Silentium by
his view, explain nothing, being themselvesfar
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Isaiah Berlin
more obscure than the facts for which they purport to account. He maintains that we do not
begin to understand, and therefore cannot explain or analyse, what it is to wield authority or
strength, to influence, to dominate. Explanations
that do not explain are, for Tolstoy, a symptom
of the disruptive and self-inflated intellect, the
faculty that destroys innocence and leads to false
ideas and the ruin of humanlife.
THATIS THESTRAIN,inspired by Rousseau and
present in early Romanticism, which inspired
primitivism in art and in life, not in Russia
alone. Tolstoy imagines that he and others can
find the path to the truth about how one should
live by observing simple people, by the study of
the Gospels.
His other strain is the direct opposite of this.
Mikhailovsky says, with justice, that Olenin
cannot, charmed as he is by the Caucasus and
the Cossack idyll, transform himself into a
Lukashka, return to the childlike harmony,
which in his case has long been broken. Levin
knows that if he tried to become a peasant this
could only be a grotesque farce, which the
peasants would be the first to perceive and deride; he and Pierre and Nicolai Rostov know
obscurely that in some sense the) have sumcthing to give that the peasants have not. in the
famous essay entitled What is Hrt? Tolstoy suddenly tells the educated reader tl~at the peasant
needs what your life of ten generations uncrushcd
by hard labour has given you. You had the
leisure to search, to think, to suffer--then give
him that for whose sake you suffered; he is in
need of it... do not bury in the earth the talm~t
given you by history ....
Leisure, then, need not be merely destructive.
Progress can occur: we can learn from what
happened in the past, as those who lived in that
past could not. It is true that we live in an unjust order. But this itself creates direct obligations. Those who are members of the cMlised
61ite, cut o~ as they tragically are from the raass
of the people, have the duty to attempt to recreate broken humanity, to stop exploiting
them, to give them what they most need--edacation, knowledge, material help, a capacity for
living better lives. Levin in Anna Karenina, as
Mikhailovsky remarks, takes up where Nicolai
Rostov in War and Peace left off. They are not
quietists,
and yet what they do is right. The
* Tolstoy is moved to indignaticn by Maupassants celebrated dictum (which he quotes) that the
business of the artist is not to entertain, delight,
move,astonish, cause his reader to dream, reflect,
smile, xveep, or shudder, but ]aire qttelque chose
de beau dens fit torme qtd vous convicndr,, le
miettx daprbs votre temperament.
Tolstoy aad
a7
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Isaiah Bertin
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might infect him with our own diseased outlooks? But is it really possible for such neutral
communicationsto occur between men? Is not
every humancommunicationa conscious or unconscious impression of one temperament,attitude to life, scale of values, uponanother? Are
men ever so thoroughly insulated from each
other, that the careful avoidance of more than
the minimumdegree of social intercourse will
leave themunsullied, absolutely free to see truth
and falsehood, goodand evil, beauty and ugliness, with their own,and only their owneyes?
Is this not an absurd conceptionof individuals
as creatures whocan be kept pure fromall social
influence--absurd in the world even of Tolstoys
middle years--even, that is, without the new
knowledge of human beings that we have
acquired to-day, as the result of the labours of
psychologists,sociologists, philosophers?Welive
in a degeneratesociety: only the pure can rescue
us. But whowill educate the educators? Whois
so pure as to knowhow, let alone be able, to
heal our world or anyonein it?
E V WE E N these poles--ou one side facts,
B nature, what there as; on the other duty,
justice, what there should be; on one side innocence, on the other education; between the
claims of spontaneityand those of obligation, of
the injustice of coercing others, and of the injustice of leaving them to go their ownway,
Tolstoy waveredand struggled all his life. And
not onlyhe, but all those populists and ,socialists
and idealistic students whoin Russia went to
the people," and could not decide whether they
went to teach or to learn, whetherthe "goodof
the people"for whichthey ,were ready,,to sacrifice their lives, was what the people in fact
desired, or something that only the reformers
knew to be good for them, what the "people"
should desire--would desire if only they were
as educated and wise as their champions--but,
in fact, in their benightedstate, often spurned
and violently resisted. Thesecontradictions, and
his unswerving recognition of his failure to
reconcile or modifythem, are, in a sense, what
gives its special meaningboth to Tolstoys life
and to the morally agonised, didactic pages of
his art. He furiously rejected the compromises
and alibis of his liberal contemporariesas mere
feebleness and evasion. Yet he believed that a
final solution to the problemsof howto apply
the principles of Christ must exist, eventhough
neither he nor anyone else had wholly discoveredit. Herejected the very possibility that
some of the tendencies and goals of which he
speaks might be literally both real and incompatible. Historicism versus moralresponsibility;
quietism versus the duty to resist evil; teleology
or a causal order against the play of chanceand
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Isaiah Berlin
Davison
Peripheral Vision
TheOrigin of Species
POETRY
Saint-John Perse
By Anthony Hartley
r c T i ra o Saint-JohnPerse to receive
i rathes E/.Nobel
Prize for Literature the committee
have chosen to honour the work of the most
senior of European poets. Since the death of
Boris Pasternakit is hard to think of any other
major poet whosecharacteristic published work
stretches from ~9o9(Images ?t Crusoe) to the
present day (Chronique),and this in itself is not
without significance in any estimate of his
achievement. Saint-John Perse is often (and
rightly) described as an epic writer--a rare
phenomenon
these days, but rather less rare at
a time when both Paul Claudel and Charles
P~guycould lay claim to the sametitle. Beginning to write during the period when French
poetry was dominated by a pre-i9~ 4 moodof
confidentvitalism, it was inevitable that SaintJohn Perse should be affected by the sameforces
that were influencing his fellows.
Before the first World War came to turn
everything upside down, the dominant note
struck by the French imagination was one of an
impassioned acceptance of the phenomenal
world, which can be found in works otherwise
as different as Gides Les NourrituresTerrestres
or P6guys Eve and possibly also in the Impressionist and Post-impressionist schools of
painting. "I can involve myself with everything
around me in silent ecstasy and accept everything that exists--with the word: Behold...,"
wrote Henri Alain-Fournier to Jacques Rivi~re,
and Gide summedup for his own generation
when he confessed "You will never knowthe
efforts we have had to make to become interested in life; but, nowthat it interests us, it
will be like everythingelse--passionately." That
was the mood. Its effect upon poetry was to
change the poets conception of his ownwork.
Gone were the absent bouquets and the blank
white pages of Mallarm&From being a transformation ofthe visible world, poetry cameto
be viewedas a re-creation or celebration of it~
In the greatest poets of the time--Val~ry and
Claudel--this attitude is quite specific. For
Claudel his own task as poet was to be "the
assembler of the land of God," while Val~ry
4l