quality of a feeling-the degree of its 'oscillation', the ebb and flow,
the minute movements (which Turgenev mocked as a mere trick on
his part) -the inner and outer texture and 'feel' of a look, a thought,
a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire
period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations.
The celebrated life-likeness of every object and every person in his
world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every
ingredient of it in its fullest individual essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were; never as a mere datum, however vivid, within some stream of consciousness, with blurred edges, an outline, a shadow, an
impressionistic representation : nor yet calling for, and dependent on,
some process of reasoning in the mind of the reader; but always as a
solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space-an event fully present to the senses
or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and
firmly articulated.
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
Peact, to the standard of the good man, the single, spontaneous, open
souclass="underline" 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 o.f the object itself, and not of a mere description of it,
5 1
RU SSIAN T H IN K E R S
employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality o f 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 j udgment 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, Gogo! 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 himselffails to forget-what he is doing, and why.
I V
Theories are seldom born i n the void. And the question of the roots
of Tolstoy's vision of history is therefore a reasonable one. Everything
that Tolstoy writes on history has a 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 W or and Peace (though, as several Russian scholars
52
THE H E D G E HOG AND THE FOX
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.
That he read widely, and was influenced by what he read, cannot
be doubted. It is a commonplace that he owed a great deal to Rousseau,
and probably derived from him, as much as from Diderot and the
French Enlightenment, his analytic, anti-historical ways of approaching social problems, in particular the tendency to treat them in terms of timeless, logical, moral, and metaphysical categories, and not look
for their essence, as the German historical school advocated, in terms
of growth, and of response to a changing historical environment. He
remained an admirer of Rousseau, and late in life still recommended
Emile as the best book ever written on education.2 Rousseau must have
strengthened, if he did not actually originate, his growing tendency to
idealise the soil and its cultivatCJrs-the simple peasant, who for Tolstoy
is a repository of almost as rich a stock of'natural' virtues as Rousseau's
noble savage. Rousseau, too, must have reinforced the coarse-grained,
rough peasant in Tolstoy with his strongly moralistic, puritanical
strain, his suspicion of, and antipathy to, the rich, the powerful, the
happy as such, his streak of genuine vandalism, and occasional bursts
of blind, very Russian rage against western sophistication and refinement, and that adulation of 'virtue' and simple tastes, of the 'healthy'
moral life, the militant, anti-liberal barbarism, which is one of
Rousseau's specific contributions to the stock of Jacobin ideas. And
perhaps Rousseau influenced him also in setting so high a value upon
family life, and in his doctrine of superiority of the heart over the head,
of moral over intellectual or aesthetic virtues. This has been noted
before, and it is true and illuminating, but it does not account for
Tolstoy's theory of history, of which little trace can be found in the
profoundly unhistorical Rousseau. Indeed in so far as Rousseau seeks
to derive the right of some men to authority over others from a theory
of the transference of power in accordance with the Social Contract,
Tolstoy contemptuously refutes him.
We get somewhat nearer to the truth if we consider the influence
1 For example, both Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum in the works cited above
(p. 26, note 3, and p. 4-B, note 1 ).
1 'On n'a pas rendu justice l Rousseau . . . J'ai lu tout Rousseau, oui,