belief in the deep wisdom of the uncorrupted common people, although
Maistre's mordant obiter dicta about the hopeless barbarism, venality
and ignorance of the Russians cannot have been to Tolstoy's taste, if
indeed he ever read them.
Both Maistre and Tolstoy regard the western world as in some
sense 'rotting', as being in rapid decay. This was the doctrine which
the Roman Catholic counter-revolutionaries at the turn of the century
virtually invented, and it formed part of their view of the French
Revolution as a divine punishment visited upon those who strayed
from the Christian faith and in particular that of the Roman Church.
From France this denunciation of secularism was carried by many
devious routes, mainly by second-rate journalists and their academic
readers, to Germany and to Russia (to Russia both directly and via
German versions), where it found a ready soil among those who,
having themselves avoided the revolutionary upheavals, found it
flattering to their amour proprt to believe that they, at any rate, might
64
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
still be on the path to greater power and glory, while the west, destroyed
by the failure of its ancient faith, was fast disintegrating morally and
politically. No doubt Tolstoy derived this element in his outlook at
least as much from Slavophils and other Russian chauvinists as directly
from Maistre, but it is worth noting that this belief is exceptionally
powerful in both these dry and aristocratic observers, and governs
their oddly similar outlooks. Both were au fond unyieldingly pessimistic thinkers, whose ruthless destruction of current illusions frightened off their contemporaries even when they reluctantly conceded the truth of what was said. bespite the fact that Maistre was fanatically ultramontane and a supporter of established institutions,
while Tolstoy, unpolitical in his earlier work, gave no evidence of
radical sentiment, both were obscurely felt to be nihilistic-the humane
values of the nineteenth century fell to pieces under their fingers. Both
sought for some escape from their own inescapable and unanswerable
scepticism in some vast, impregnable truth which would protect them
from the effects of their own natural inclinations and temperament:
Maistre in the Church, Tolstoy in the uncorrupted human heart and
simple brotherly love-a state he could have known but seldom, an ideal
before the vision of which all his descriptive skill deserts him and usually
yields something inartistic, wooden and naive; painfully touching, painfully unconvincing, and conspicuously remote from his own experience.
Yet the analogy must not be overstressed : it is true that both
Maistre and Tolstoy attach the greatest possible importance to war
and conflict, b�t Maistre, like Proudhon after him,1 glorifies war, and
1 Tolstoy visited Proudhon in Brussels in 1 861, the year in which the
latter published a work which was called La Gu�rrt tlla paix, translated into
Russian three years later. On the basis of this fact Eikhenbaum tries to deduce
the influence of Proudhon upon Tolstoy's novel. Proudhon follows Maistre
in regarding the origins of wars as a dark and sacred mystery; and there is
much confused irrationalism, puritanism, love of paradox, and general
Rousseauism in all his work. But these qualities are widespread in radical
French thought, and it is difficult to find anything specifically Proudhonist
in Tolstoy's War and P�au, besides the title. The extent of Proudhon'a
general influence on all kinds of Russian intellectuals during this period was,
of course, very large; it would thus be just as easy, indeed easier, to construct
a case for regarding Dostoevsky- or Maxim Gorky-as a ProudAonisanl as to
look on Tolitoy as one; yet this would be no more than an idle exercise in
critical ingenuity; for the resemblances are vague and general, while the
differences are deeper, more numerous and more specific.
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
declares i t to b e mysterious and divine, while Tolstoy detests it and
regards it as in principle explicable if only we knew enough of the
many minute causes- the celebrated 'differential' of history. Maistre
believed in authority because it was an irrational force, he believed in
the need to submit, in the inevitability of crime and the supreme
importance of inquisitions and punishment. He regarded the executioner as the cornerstone of society, and it was not for nothing that Stendhal called him I 'ami du hourreau and Lamennais said of him
that there were only two realities for him-crime and punishment
'his works are as though written on the scaffold'. Maistre's vision of
the world is one of savage creatures tearing each other limb from
limb, killing for the sake of killing, with violence and blood, which
he sees as the normal condition of all animate life. Tolstoy is far from
such horror, crime, and sadism : 1 and he is not, pace Albert Sorel and
Vogue, in any sense a mystic: he has no fear of questioning anything,
and believes that some simple answer must exist-if only we did not
insist on tormenting ourselves with searching for it in strange and
remote places, when it lies all the time at our feet. Maistre supported
the principle of hierarchy and believed in a self-sacrificing aristocracy,
heroism, obedience, and the most rigid control of the masses by their
social and theological superiors. Accordingly, he advocated that
education in Russia be placed in the hands of the Jesuits; they would
at least inculcate into the barbarous Scythians the Latin language,
which was the sacred tongue of humanity if only because it embodied
the prejudices and superstitions of previous ages-beliefs which had
stood the test of history and experience-alone able to form a wall
strong enough to keep out the terrible acids of atheism, liberalism,
and freedom of thought. Above all he regarded natural science and
secular literature as dangerous commodities in the hands of those
not completely indoctrinated against them, a heady wine which
would dangerously excite, and in the end destroy, any society not
used to it.
Tolstoy all his life fought against open obscurantism and artificial
repression of the desire for knowledge; his harshest words were
directed against those Russian statesmen and publicists in the last
1 Yet Tolstoy, too, says that millions of men kill each other, knowing
that it is physically and morally evil, because it is 'necessary'; because in
doing so, men 'ful.6.lled . . . an elemental, zoological law'. This is pure
Maistre, and very remote from Stendhal or Rousseau.
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T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E F O X
quarter of the nineteenth century- Pobedonostsev and his friends and
minions-who practised precisely these maxims of the great Catholic
reactionary. The author of War and Ptace plainly hated the Jesuits,