opinions, reached the conclusion that there was an unresolved, and
unavowed, conflict in the great novelist's conceptions both of human
nature and of the problems facing Russian and western civilisation.
Mikhailovsky maintained that, so far from being a 'bad thinker',
Tolstoy was no less acute, clear-eyed and convincing in his analysis of
ideas than of instincts or characters or actions. In his zeal for his
paradoxical thesis-paradoxical certainly at the time at which he wrote
it- Mikhailovsky sometimes goes too far; but in substance it seems to
me to be right; or at any rate, more right than wrong, and my own
remarks are no more than an extended gloss on it.
Tolstoy's opinions are always subjective and can be (as, for example,
in his writings on Shakespeare or Dante or Wagner) wildly perverse.
But the questions which in his most didactic essays he tries to answer
are nearly always cardinal questions of principle, always first-hand,
238
TOLSTOY AND EN L I G HTEN M ENT
and cut far deeper, in the deliberately simplified and naked form in
which he usually presents them, than those of more balanced and
'objective' thinkers. Direct vision always tends to be disturbing.
Tolstoy used this gift to the full to destroy both his own peace and
that of his readers. It was this habit of asking exaggeratedly simple
but fundamental questions, to which he did not himself-at any rate in
the 1 86os and- 7os-possess the answers; that gave him the reputation
of being a 'nihilist'. Yet he certainly had no desire to destroy for the
sake of destruction. He only desired, more than anything else in the
world, to know the truth. How annihilating this passion can be is
shown by others who have chosen to cut below the limits set by the
wisdom of their generation: Machiavelli, Pascal, Rousseau; the author
of the Book of Job. Like them, Tolstoy cannot be fitted into any of
the public movements of his own, or indeed any other age. The only
company to which Tolstoy belongs is the subversive one of questioners
to whom no answer has been, or seems likely to be, given-at least no
answer which they or those who understand them will begin to accept.
As for Tolstoy's positive ideas-and they varied less during his long
life than has sometimes been represented-they are not at all unique:
they have something in common with the French Enlightenment of
the eighteenth century; something with those of the twentieth century;
little with those of his own times. In Russia he belonged to neither
of the great ideological streams which divided educated opinion in that
country during his youth. He was not a radical intellectual, with his
eyes turned to the west; nor a Slavophil, that is to say, a believer in a
Christian and nationalist monarchy. His views cut across these
categories. Like the radicals he had always condemned political
repression, arbitrary violence, economic exploitation, and all that
creates and perpetuates inequality among men. But the rest of the
'W esternising' outlook- the heart of the ideology of the intelligentsiathe overwhelming sense of civic responsibility, the belief in natural science as the door to all truth, in social and political reform, in
democracy, material progress, secularism-this celebrated amalgam
Tolstoy rejected, early in life, out of hand. He believed in individual
liberty and, indeed, in progress too, but in a queer sense of his own.1
1 Education for him is 'an activit)l based on the human need for equality
and the immutable law of the advance of education', which he interprets as
the constant equalisation of knowledge, knowledge which is always growing
because I know what the child does not know; moreover, each generation
..
'-39
R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
He looked with contempt on liberals and socialists, and with even
greater hatred on the right-wing parties of his time. His closest affinity,
as has often been remarked, is with Rousseau ; he liked and admired
Rousseau's views more than those of any other modern writer. Like
Rousseau, he rejected the doctrine of original sin, and believed that
man was born innocent, and had been ruined by his own bad institutions; especially by what passed for education among civilised men.
Like Rousseau again, he put the blame for this process of decadence
largely on the intellectuals-the self-appointed elites of experts, sophisticated coteries remote from common humanity, self-estranged from natural life. These men are damned because they have all but lost the
most precious of all human possessions, the capacity with which all
men are born-to see the truth, the immutable, eternal truth which
only charlatans and sophists represent as varying in different circumstances and times and places- the truth which is visible fully only to the innocent eye of those whose hearts have not been corrupted children, peasants, those not blinded by vanity and pride. the simple, the good. Education, as the west understands it, ruins innocence. That
is why children resist it bitterly and instinctively: that is why it has to
be rammed down their throats, and, like all coercion and violence,
maims the victim and at times destroys him beyond redress. Men crave
for truth by nature; therefore true education must be of such a kind
that children and unsophisticated, ignorant people will absorb it readily
and eagerly. But to understand this, and to discover how to apply this
knowledge, the educated must put away their intellectual arrogance,
and make a new beginning. They must purge their minds of theories,
of false, quasi-scientific analogies between the world of men and the
world of animals, or of men and inanimate things. Only then will they
be able to re-establish a personal relationship with the uneducated-a
relationship which only humanity and love can achieve.
In modern times only Rousseau, and perhaps Dickens, seem to him
to have seen this. Certainly the people's condition will never be
improved until not only the tsarist bureaucracy, but the 'progressists',
as Tolstoy called them, the vain and doctrinaire intelligentsia, are
knows what the previous generations have thought, whereas they do not
know what future generations would think. The equality is between the
teacher and the taught; this desire for equality on the part of both is itself
for him the spring of progress- progress in the sense of'advance in knowledge'
of what men are and what they should do.
240
TOLSTOY AND E N L I G H TENM ENT
'prised off the people's necks' -the common people's, and the children's
too. So long as fanatical theorists bedevil education, little is to be hoped
for. Even the old-fashioned village priest-so Tolstoy maintains in
one of his early tracts-was less harmful : he knew little and was clumsy,
idle, and stupid; but he treated his pupils as human beings, not as
scientists treat specimens in a laboratory; he did what he could; he
was often corrupt, ill-tempered, unjust, but these were human
'natural' -vices, and therefore their effects, unlike those of machinemade modern instructors, inflicted no permanent injury.
With these ideas it is not surprising to find that Tolstoy was personally happier among the Slavophil reactionaries. He rejected their ideas; but at least they seemed to him to have some contact with