The Hedgehog and the Fox

Yet what he believed in was the opposite. He advocated a single embracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not many levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level – in War and Peace, to the standard of the good man, the single, spontaneous, open soul: as later to that of the peasants, or of a simple Christian ethic divorced from any complex theology or metaphysic; some simple, quasi-utilitarian criterion, whereby everything is interrelated directly, and all the items can be assessed in terms of one another by some simple measuring-rod. Tolstoy’s genius lies in a capacity for marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the presence of the object itself, and not of a mere description of it, employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality of a particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences – the ‘oscillations’ of feeling – in favour of what is common to them all. But then this same writer pleads for, indeed preaches with great fury, particularly in his last, religious phase, the exact opposite: the necessity of expelling everything that does not submit to some very general, very simple standard: say, what peasants like or dislike, or what the Gospels declare to be good.

This violent contradiction between the data of experience, from which he could not liberate himself, and which, of course, all his life he knew alone to be real, and his deeply metaphysical belief in the existence of a system to which they must belong, whether they appear to do so or not, this conflict between instinctive judgement and theoretical conviction – between his gifts and his opinions – mirrors the unresolved conflict between the reality of the moral life, with its sense of responsibility, joys, sorrows, sense of guilt and sense of achievement – all of which is nevertheless illusion – and the laws which govern everything, although we cannot know more than a negligible portion of them – so that all scientists and historians who say that they do know them and are guided by them are lying and deceiving – but which nevertheless alone are real. Beside Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoevsky, whose abnormality is so often contrasted with Tolstoy’s ‘sanity’, are well-integrated personalities, with a coherent outlook and a single vision. Yet out of this violent conflict grew War and Peace: its marvellous solidity should not blind us to the deep cleavage which yawns open whenever Tolstoy remembers, or rather reminds himself – fails to forget – what he is doing, and why.

IV

Theories are seldom born in the void. The question of the roots of Tolstoy’s vision of history is therefore a reasonable one. Everything that Tolstoy writes on history has the stamp of his own original personality, a first-hand quality denied to most writers on abstract topics. On these subjects he wrote as an amateur, not as a professional; but let it be remembered that he belonged to the world of great affairs: he was a member of the ruling class of his country and his time, and knew and understood it completely; he lived in an environment exceptionally crowded with theories and ideas, he examined a great deal of material for War and Peace (though, as several Russian scholars have shown,¹ not as much as is sometimes supposed), he travelled a great deal, and met many notable public figures in Germany and France.