and particularly detested their success in converting Russian ladies of
fashion during Alexander's reign-the final events in the life of Pierre's
worthless wife, Helene, might almost have been founded upon
Maistre's activities as a missionary to the aristocracy of St Petersburg:
indeed, there is every reason to think that the Jesuits were expelled
from Russia, and Maistre himself was virtually recalled, when his
interference was deemed too overt and too successful by the Emperor
himself.
Nothing, therefore, would have shocked and irritated Tolstoy so
much as to be told that he had a great deal in common with this
apostle of darkness, this defender of ignorance and serfdom. N evertheless, of all writers on social questions, Maistre's tone most nearly resembles that of Tolstoy. Both preserve the same sardonic, almost
cynical, disbelief in the improvement of society by rational means, by
the enactment of good laws or the propagation of scientific knowledge.
Both speak with the same angry irony of every fashionable explanation,
every social nostrum, particularly of the ordering and planning of
society in accordance with some man-made formula. In Maistre
openly, and in Tolstoy less obviously, there is a deeply sceptical attitude
towards all experts and all techniques, all high-minded professions of
secular faith and efforts at social improvement by well-meaning but,
alas, idealistic persons; there is the same distaste for anyone who deals
in ideas, who believes in abstract principles: and both are deeply
affected by Voltaire's temper, and bitterly reject his views. Both
ultimately appeal to some elemental source concealed in the souls of
men, Maistre even while denouncing Rousseau as a false prophet,
Tolstoy with his more ambiguous attitude towards him. Both above
all reject the concept of individual political liberty: of civil rights
guaranteed by some impersonal system of justice. Maistre, because he
regarded any desire for personal freedom-whether political or economic or social or cultural or religious-as wilful indiscipline and stupid insubordination, and supported tradition in its most darkly i!"rational
and repressive forms, because it alone provided the energy which gave
life, continuity, and safe anchorage to social institutions; Tolstoy
rejected political reform because he believed that ultimate regeneration
could come only from within, and that the inner life was only lived
truly in the untouched depths of the mass of the people.
67
R U SS IAN T H I N K E R S
V I
But there is a larger and more important parallel between Tolstoy's
interpretation of history and the ideas of Maistre, and it raises issues
of fundamental principle concerning knowledge of the past. One of
the most striking elements common to the thought of these dissimilar,
and indeed antagonistic, pmuurs, is their preoccupation with the
'inexorable' character-the 'march'-of events. Both Tolstoy and
Maistre think of what occurs as a thick, opaque, inextricably complex
web of events, objects, characteristics, connected and divided by
literally innumerable unidentifiable links-and gaps and sudden discontinuities too, visible and invisible. It is a view of reality which makes all clear, logical and scientific constructions- the well defined,
symmetrical patterns of human reason-seem smooth, thin, empty,
'abstract' and totally ineffective as means either of description or of
analysis of anything that lives, or has ever lived. Maistre attributes
this to the incurable impotence of human powers of observation and
of reasoning, at least when they function without the aid of the superhuman sources of knowledge-faith, revelation, tradition, above all the mystical vision of the great saints and doctors of the Church, their
unanalysable, special sense of reality to which natural science, free
criticism and the secular spirit are fatal. The wisest of the Greeks,
many among the great Romans, and after them the dominant ecclesiastics and statesmen of the Middle Ages, Maistre tells us, possessed this insight; from it flowed their power, their dignity and their success.
The natural enemies of this spirit are cleverness and specialisation :
hence the contempt so rightly shown for, in the Roman world, experts
and technicians-the Gratculus uuritns-the remote but unmistakable
ancestors of the sharp, wizened figures of the modern Alexandrian
Age-the terriblf' Eighteenth Century-all the lcrivasurit tt avocasstrit
- the miserable crew of scribblers and attorneys, with the predatory,
sordid, grinning figure of Voltaire at their head, destructive and selfdestructive, because blind and deaf to the true Word of God. Only the Church t:nderstands the 'inner' rhythms, the 'deeper' currents of
the world, the silent march of things; non in commotiont Dominus; not
in noisy democratic !llanifestos nor in the rattle of constitutional
formulas, nor in revolutionary violence, but in the eternal natural
order, governed by 'natural' law. Only those who understand it know
what can and what cannot be achieved, what should and what should
not be attempted. They and they alone hold the key to secular success
68
THE H ED G E H O G AND T H E FOX
as well as to spiritual salvation. Omniscience belongs only to God. But
only by immersing ourselves in His Word- His theological or metaphysical principles, embodied at their lowest in instincts and ancient superstitions which are but primitive ways, tested by time, of divining
and obeying His laws-whereas reasoning is an effort to substitute
one's own arbitrary rules-dare we hope for wisdom. Practical wisdom
is to a large degree knowledge of the inevitable: of what, given our
world order, could not but happen; and conversely, of how things
cannot be, or could not have been, done; of why some schemes must,
cannot help but, end in failure, although for this no demonstrative or
scientific reason can be given. The rare capacity for seeing this we
righdy call a 'sense of reality'-it is a sense of what fits with what, of
what cannot exist with what; and it goes by many names: insight,
wisdom, practical genius, a sense of the past, an understanding of life
and of human character.
Tolstoy's view is not very different; save that he gives as the reason
for the folly of our exaggerated claims to understand or determine
events not foolish or blasphemous efforts to do without special, i.e.
supernatural knowledge, but our ignorance of too many among the
vast number of interrelations-the minute determining causes of
events; if we began to know the causal network in its infinite variety,
we should cease to praise and blame, boast and regret, or look on
human beings as heroes or villains, but should submit with due
humility to unavoidable necessity. Yet to say no more than this is to
give a travesty of his beliefs. It is indeed Tolstoy's explicit doctrine in
War and Ptoct that all truth is in science-in the knowledge of material
causes-and that we consequently render ourselves ridiculous by
arriving at conclusions on too little evidence, comparing in this