/'lpinglt-the absurdities committed by his opponents. They are acute
observers of the varieties of experience: every attempt to represent
these falsely, or to offer ddusive explanations of them, they detect
immediately and deride savagely. Yet they both know that the full
truth-the ultimate basis of the correlation of all the ingredients of
the universe with one another�the context in which alone anything
that they, or anyone else, can say can ever be true or false, trivial or
important-that resides in a synoptic vision which, because they do
not possess it, they cannot express. What is it that Pierre has learnt, of
which Princess Marie's marriage is an acceptance, that Prince Andrey
all his life pursued with such agony? Like Augustine, Tolstoy can
only say what it is not; His genius is devastatingly destructive. He can
only,attempt to point towards his goal by exposing the false signposts
to it; to isolate the truth by annihilating that which it is not-namely
all that can be said in the clear, analytical language that corresponds
to the all too clear, but necessarily limited, vision of the foxes. Like
Moses, he must halt at the borders of the Promised Land; without it
his journey is meaningless; but he cannot enter it; yet he knows that
it exists, and can tell us, as no one else has ever told us, all that it is
not-above all, ni.t anything that art, or science or civilisation or
rational criticism, can achieve. And so too Joseph de Maistre. He is
the Voltaire of reaction. Every new doctrine since the ages of faith is
tom to shreds with ferocious skill and malice. The pretenders are
exposed and struck down one by one; the armoury of weapons against
liberal and humanitarian doctrines is the most effective ever assembled.
But the throne remains vacant, the positive doctrine is too uncon-
77
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
vincing. Maistre sighs for the Dark Ages, but no sooner are plans
for the undoing of the French Revolution-a return to the status 'luo
antt'-suggested by his fellow emigres, than he denounces them as
childish nonsense-an attempt to behave as if what has occurred and
changed us all irretrievably had never been. To try to reverse the
Revolution, he wrote, was as if one had been invited to drain the
Lake of Geneva by bottling its waters in a wine cellar.
There is no kinship between him and those who really did believe
in the possibility of some kind of return-nco-medievalists from
Wackenroder and Gorres and Cobbett to G. K. Chesterton and
Slavophils and Distributists and pre-Raphaelites and other nostalgic
romantics; for he believed, as Tolstoy also did, in the exact opposite :
in the 'inexorable' power of the present moment : in our inability to do
away with the sum of conditions which cumulatively determine our
basic categories, an order which we can never fully describe or, otherwise than by some immediate awareness of it, come to know.
The quarrel between these rival types of knowledge-that which
results from methodical inquiry, and the more impalpable kind that
consists in the 'sense of reality', in 'wisdom' -is very old. And the
claims of both have generally been recognised to have some validity:
the bitterest clashes have been concerned with the precise line which
marks the frontier between their territories. Those who made large
claims for non-scientific knowledge have been accused by their
adversaries of irrationalism and obscurantism, of the deliberate rejection, in favour of the emotions or blind prejudice, of reliable public standards of ascertainable truth; and have, in their turn, charged their
opponents, the ambitious champions of science, with making absurd
claims, promising the impossible, issuing false prospectuses undertaking to explain history or the arts or the states of the individual soul (and to change them too) when quite plainly they do not begin to
understand what they are; when the results of their labours, even
when they are not nugatory, tend to take unpredicted, often catastrophic directions-and all' this because they will not, being vain and headstrong, admit that too many factors in too many situations are
always unknown, and not discoverable by the methods of natural
science. Better, surely, not to pretend to calculate the incalculable,
not to pretend that there is an Archimedean point outside the world
whence everything is measurable and alterable; better to use in each
context the methods that seem to fit it best, that give the (pragmatically)
best results; to resist the temptations of Procrustes; above all to dis-
78
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
tinguish what is isolable, classifiable and capable of objective study
and sometimes of precise measurement and manipulation, from the
most permanent, ubiquitous, inescapable, intimately present features
of our world, which, if anything, are over-familiar, so that their
'inexorable' pressure, being too much with us, is scarcely felt, hardly
noticed, and cannot conceivably be observed in perspective, be an
object of study. This is the distinction that permeates the thought of
Pascal and Blake, Rousseau and Schelling, Goethe and Coleridge,
Chateaubriand and Carlyle; of all those who speak of the, reasons of
the heart, or of men's moral or spiritual nature, of sublimity and
depth, of the 'profounder' insight of poets and prophets, of special
kinds of understanding, of inwardly comprehending, or being at one
with, the world. To these latter thinkers both Tolstoy and Maistre
belong. Tolstoy blames everything on our ignorance of empirical
causes, and. Maistre on the abandonment of Thomist logic or the
theology of the Catholic Church. But these avowed professions are
belied by the tone and content of what in fact the two great critics
say. Both stress, over and over again, the contrast between the 'inner'
and the 'outer', the 'surface' which alone is lighted by the rays of
science and of reason, and the 'depths'-'the real life lived by men'.
For Maistre, as later for Barres, true knowledge- wisdom-lies in an
understanding of, and communion with, Ia terre et les morts (what
has this to do with Thomist logic?)- the great unalterable movement
created by the links between the dead and the living and the yet
unborn and the land on which they live; and it is this, perhaps, or
something akin to it, that, in their respective fashions, Burke and
Taine, and their many imitators, have attempted to convey. As for
Tolstoy, to him such mystical conservatism was peculiarly detestable,
since it seemed to him to evade the central question by merely restating
it, concealed in a cloud of pompous rhetoric, as the answer. Yet he,
too, in the end, presents us with the vision, dimly discerned by K utuzov
and by Pierre, of Russia in her vastness, and what she could and what
she could not do or suffer, and how and when-all of which Napoleon
and his advisers (who knew a great deal but not of what was relevant