The Hedgehog and the Fox

His essay treats ostensibly of Tolstoy’s view of history. But it starts with a penetrating idea on Tolstoy himself. Let us divide writers into hedgehogs and foxes. ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The foxes chase after everything in the world, never aiming at a single point, never acquiring a single vision. The hedgehog is dedicated and dominated, for him everything must revolve round a centre. It is easy to agree that writers fall into the two classes of those for whom the heavens have opened and those for whom they have not. Pushkin, for example, was a fox; Dostoevsky a hedgehog. But what is Tolstoy? Mr Berlin gives a brilliant answer which carries him through most of his essay: Tolstoy was by nature a fox, who believed in being a hedgehog. He had an incomparable gift for creating a picture of real life, building it up from endless details of individuals and events; and when he was off his guard he sometimes implied that if we could know every tiny happening, we would understand the causes of events. But when he pulled himself up and became conscious, he regarded this view as wicked. Somewhere there must be the secret of the universe, which was more than the sum of its parts. This secret always evaded him; and he became the more destructive of the answers given by others, because he had failed to find one for himself.

The experienced reader of War and Peace will find this a convincing explanation. War and Peace is a work of propaganda, as well as the greatest historical novel ever written. It aims to show that men are never in control of events and indeed that the more they seek to control them, the more futile they become. Napoleon is the butt of War and Peace; Kutuzov, waiting for events to decide things for him, its saint. But Tolstoy cheated on the historical record, as Mr Berlin makes clear. He suppressed anything which told in Napoleon’s favour; and he drew a picture of Kutuzov which, as he himself knew, bore no relation to the real man. The Kutuzov of War and Peace is not a historical figure. He is a symbol of the truly wise man who senses the underlying nature of the universe. He is what Tolstoy wanted to be and never succeeded in becoming.

Where did Tolstoy get this doctrine of underlying truth from? This is the second of Mr Berlin’s ideas: he got it from Maistre. Mr Berlin shows that many of the historical details come from Maistre’s correspondence [sc. Soirées]. More than that, Maistre, the reactionary aristocrat, was sceptical of the modern world. He doubted all its values, yet he knew there was no going back. Tolstoy carried this forward into complete ‘negativism’.¹ He tore to pieces all the easy explanations of his contemporaries and hinted that he alone had the answer; yet he neither revealed nor even found it. This is a view of history only in a very abstract sense. The poor workaday historian is out of his depth. History is the record of how people behaved, and we ought to be content with it. At least it is all we have. If you want something more, you must ask the old-style philosopher, now almost extinct in this country. And at this point, Mr Berlin obliges us. The divine afflatus descends upon him. The sentences get longer and longer, the thought soars higher and higher, and what had begun as an essay in literary criticism ends as an utterance of the Delphic Apollo.¹

THE OWL AND THE PUSSY-CAT

John Bowle

With apologies to Mr Isaiah Berlin,

to the hedgehog, and to the fox

For those who will seek them out there are two kinds of animals said to frequent the English countryside.² On the one hand, strange two-legged creatures – round, fluffy, generally silent; predacious yet shy, airborne in a queer noctambulous way, credited by biologists with nocturnal vision, wise, ghostly, mysterious, detached; on the other, four-footed creatures, equally voracious; but sly, not shy; seasonally amorous and then vocal; endowed with queer self-sufficiency and even endearing charm, yet fundamentally and deeply involved in the ephemeral world of phenomena – strugforlifers,³ militant, engaged.