to the issue) did not perceive; and so (although their knowledge of
history and science and minute causes was perhaps greater than
Kutuzov's or Pierre's) were led duly to their doom. Maistre's paeans
to the superior science of the great Christian soldiers of the past and
Tolstoy's lamentations about our scientific ignorance should not
mislead anyone as to the nature of what they are in fact defending:
79
R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
awareness of the 'deep currents', the raisons de ctZur, which they did
not indeed themselves know by direct experience; but beside which,
they were convinced, the devices of science were but a snare and a
delusion.
Despite their deep dissimilarity and indeed violent opposition to
one another, Tolstoy's sceptical realism and Maistre's dogmatic
authoritarianism are blood brothers. For both spring from an agonised
belief in a single, serene vision, in which all problems are resolved, all
doubts stilled, peace and understanding finally achieved. Deprived of
this vision, they devoted all their formidable resollrces from their
very different, and indeed often incompatible, positions, to the elimination of all possible adversaries and critics of it. The faiths for whose mere abstract possibility they fought were not, indeed, identical. It is
the predicament in which they found themselves and that caused them
to dedicate their strength to the lifelong task of destruction, it is their
common enemies and the strong likeness between their temperaments
that make them odd but unmistakable allies in a war which they were
both conscious of fighting until their dying day.
V I I I
Opposed as Tolstoy and Maistre were-one the apostle of the gospel
that all men are brothers, the other the cold defender of the claims
of violence, blind sacrifice, and eternal suffering-they were united
by inability to escape from the same tragic paradox: they were both
by nature sharp-eyed foxes, inescapably aware of sheer, de facto
differences which divide and forces which disrupt the human world,
observers utterly incapable of being deceived by the many subtle
devices, the unifying systems and faiths and sciences, by which the
superficial or the desperate sought to conceal the chaos from themselves and from one another. Both looked for a harmonious universe, but everywhere found war and disorder, which no attempt to cheat,
however heavily disguised, could even begin to hide; and so, in a
condition of final despair, offered to throw away the terrible weapons
of criticism, with which both, but particularly Tolstoy, were overgenerously endowed, in favour of the single great vision, something too indivisibly simple and remote from nonnal intellectual proces5es
to be assailable by the instruments of reason, and therefore, perhaps,
offering a path to peace and salvation. Maistre began as a moderate
liberal and ended by pulverising the new nineteenth-century world
from the solitary citadel of his own variety of ultramontane Catholicism.
8o
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
Tolstoy began with a view of human life and history which contradicted all his knowledge, all his gifts, all his inclinations, and which, in consequence, he could scarcely be said to have embraced in the sense
of practising it, either as a writer or as a man. From this, in his old
age, he passed into a form of life in which he tried to resolve the
glaring contradiction between what he believed about men and events,
and what he thought he believed, or ought to believe, by behaving, in
the end, as if factual questions of this kind were not the fundamental
issues at all, only the trivial preoccupations of an idle, ill-conducted
life, while the real questions were quite different. But it was of no
use: the Muse cannot be cheated. Tolstoy was the least superficial
of men : he could not swim with the tide without being drawn
irresistibly beneath the surface to investigate the darker depths below;
and he could not avoid seeing what he saw and doubting even that;
he could close his eyes but not forget that he was doing so; his
appalling, destructive, sense of what was false frustrated this final
effort at self-deception as it ciid all the earlier ones; and he died in
agony, oppressed by the burden of his intellectual infallibility and
his sense of perpetual moral error, the greatest of those who can
neither reconcile, nor leave unreconciled, the conflict of what there
is with what there ought to be. Tolstoy's sense of reality was until
the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which
he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect
shivered the world, and he dedicated all of his vast strength of mind
and will to the lifelong denial of this fact. At once insanely proud
and filled with self-hatred, omniscient and doubting everything, cold
and violently passionate, contemptuous and self-abasing, tormented
and detached, surrounded by an adoring family, by devoted followers,
by the admiration of the entire civilised world, and yet almost wholly
isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old
man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.
Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty
'Human life is a great social duty,' (said Louis Blanc]:
'man must constantly sacrifice himself for society.'
'Why?' I asked suddenly.
'How do you mean "Why?"- but surely the whole
purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?'
'But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices
and nobody enjoys himself.'
'You are playing with words.'
'The muddle-headedness of a barbarian,' I replied,
laughing. Alexander Herzen, 'My Past and Thoughts'1
Since the age of thirteen . . . I have served one idea,
marched under one banner-war against all imposed
authority-against every kind of deprivation of freedom,
in the name of the absolute independence of the individual.
I should like to go on with my little guerilla war-like a
real Cossack-11:sj tigtflt F1111s1-as the Germans say.
Aleunder Herzen, letter to Mazzini1
OF all the Russian revolutionary writers of the nineteenth century,
Herzen and Bakunin remain the most arresting. They were divided
by many differences both of doctrine and of temperament, but they
were at one in placing the ideal of individual liberty at the centre of
their thought and action. Both dedicated their lives to rebellion against
every form of oppression, social and political, public and private, open
and concealed; but the very multiplicity of their gifts has tended to
obscure the relative value of their ideas on this crucial topic.
Bakunin was a gifted journalist, whereas Herzen was a writer of
1 So6r1111it so(Aiuflii 11 1rid1J111i lomdA (Co/JtmJ Wri1i11gs ;, TAirty
l'olumtr) (Moacow, 1 954-65; inde:r:es 1966), val. XI, p. 48. All subsequent
references to Herzen's works are to this edition, by volume and page, thus: