Tolstoi e o Iluminismo

MEN AND IDEAS

Tolstoy and EnlightenmentBy Isaiah Berlin

"Wl~wo aH~r~s are always said about-1-Tolstoy," wrote the celebrated Russian

critic Mikhailovsky in a forgotten essay pub-.lished in the mid-seventies, "that he is an out-standingly good writer of fiction and a badthinker. This has become an axiom needing nodemonstration." This almost universal verdicthas reigned, virtually unchallenged, for some-thing like a hundred years; and Mikhailovsky’sattempt to question it remained relativelyisolated. Tolstoy dismissed his left-wing ally asa routine liberal hack, and expressed surprisethat anyone should take an interest in him. Thiswas characteristic, but unjust. The essay whichits author called The Right Hand and the Le[tHand of Leo Tolstoy is a brilliant and con-vincing defence of Tolstoy on both intellectualand moral grounds, directed mainly against theliberals and socialists who saw in the novelist’sethical doctrines, and in particular in his glori-fication of the peasants and natural instinct, andhis constant disparagement of scientific culture,a perverse and sophisticated obscurantism whichdiscredited the liberal cause, and played into thehands of priests and reactionaries. Mikhailovskyrejected this view, and in the course of his longand careful attempt to sift the enlightened grainfrom the reactionary chaff in Tolstoy’s opinion,reached the conclusion that there was an un-resolved, and unavowed, conflict in the greatnovelist’s conceptions both of human nature andof the problems facing Russian and Westerncivilisation. Mikhailovsky maintained that, so

This essay is an amended version of theHermon Ould Memorial Lecture, deliveredunder the auspices of the InternationalP.E.N. Club in London on 23rd November,z96o, on the [i#ieth anniversary o] the deathof Tolstoy.

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far from beiug a "bad thinker," Tolstoy was noless acute, clear-eyed, and convincing in hisanalysis of ideas than of instincts or charactersor actions. In his zeal for his paradoxical thesis--paradoxical certainly at the time at which hewrote it--Mikhailovsky sometimes goes too far;but in substance it seems to me to be right; or atany rate, more right than wrong, and my ownremarks are no more than an extended glosson it.

Tolstoy’s opinions are always subjective andcan be (as, for example, in his writings on Shake-speare or Dante or Wagner) wildly perverse.But the questions which in his most didacticessays he tries to answer, are nearly alwayscardinal questions of principle, always first hand,and cut far deeper, in the deliberately simplifiedand naked form in which he usually presentsthem, than those of more balanced and "objec-tive" thinkers. Direct vision always tends tobe disturbing. Tolstoy used this gift to the fullto destroy both his own peace and that of hisreaders. It was this habit of asking exaggeratedlysimple but fundamental questions, to which hedid not himself--at any rate in the ’sixties and’seventies--possess the answers, that gavehim the reputation of being a "nihilist." Yethe certainly had no desire to destroy for the sakeof destruction. He only desired, more than any-thing else in the world, to know the truth. Howannihilating this passion can be, is shown byothers who have chosen to cut below the limitsset by the wisdom of their generation: Machia-velli, Pascal, Rousseau; the author of the Bookof Job. Like them, Tolstoy cannot be fitted intoany of the public movements of his own, or in-deed any other age. The only company to whichTolstoy belongs is the subversive one of ques-tioners to whom no answer has been, or seemslikely to be, given--at least no answer whichthey or those who understand them will beginto accept.

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3O Isaiah Berlin

AS FOR Tolstoy’s positive ideas--and theyvaried less during his long life than has

sometimes been represented--they are not a’: allunique: they have something in common withthe French enlightenment of the eighteenth cen-tury; something with those of the twentiethcentury; little with those of his o,vn times. InRussia he belonged to neither of the great ideo-logical streams which divided educated opinionin that country during his youth. He was nota radical intellectual, with his eyes turned to theWest; nor a Slavophil, that is to say, a believerin a Christian and nationalist monarchy. Hisviews cut across these categories. Like theradicals he had always condemned p.oli’:icalrepression, arbitrary violence, economic ex-ploitation, and all that creates and perpetuatesinequality among men. But the rest of the"westernising" outlook--the heart of the ideo-logy of the intelligentsia--the overwhelmingsense of civic responsibility, the be’fief in naturalscience as the door to all truth, in social andpolitical reform,, in. democracy, material pro-gress, secularism--this celebrated amalgam Tol-stoy rejected, early in life, out of hand. Hebelieved in individual liberty and, indeed, in pro-progress too, but in a queer sense of his own.*He looked with contempt on liberals andsocialists, and with even greater hatred on theright-wing parties of his time. His closestaffinity, as has often been remarked, is withRousseau; he liked and admired Rousseau’sviews more than those of any other modernwriter. Like Rousseau, he rejected the doctrineof original sin, and believed that man was borninnocent, and had been ruined by his own badinstitutions; especially by what passed for educa-tion among civilised men. Like Rousseau again,he put the blame for this process of decadencelargely on the intellectuals--the self-appointed~lites of experts, sophisticated coteries remotefrom common humanity, self-estranged fromnatural life. These men are damned becausethey have all but lost the most precious of allhuman possessions, the capacity with which allmen are born--to see the truth, t’_~e immutable,eternal truth which only charlatans and sophistsrepresent as varying in different circumstancesand times and places--the truth which is visiblefully only to the innocent eye of those whosehearts have not been corrupted--children,peasants, those not blinded by vanity and pride,

* Education is for him "a humar~ activity basedon a desire for equality, and a constant tendencyto advance in knowledge." Equality, that is, be-tween the teacher and the taught; this desire forequality on the part of both is itself for him thespring of progress--progress in the "advance inknowledge" of what men are and what they shoulddo.

the simple, the good. Education, as the Westunderstands it, ruins innocence. That is whychildren resist it bitterly and instinctively: thatis why it has to be rammed down their throats,and, like all coercion and violence, maims thevictim and at times destroys him beyond redress.Men crave for truth by nature; therefore trueeducation must be of such a kind that children,and unsophisticated, ignorant people will absorbit readily and eagerly. But to understand this,and to discover how to apply this knowledge, theeducated must put away their intellectual arro-gance, and make a new beginning. They mustparge their minds of theories, of false, quasi-scientific analogies between the world of menand the world of animals, or of men and inani-mate things. Only then will they be ableto re-establish a personal relationship withthe uneducated--a relationship which onlyhumanity and love can achieve.

In modern times only Rousseau, and perhapsDickens, seem to him to have seen this. Cer-tainly the people’s condition will never be im-p:oved until not only the Czarist bureaucracy,but the "progressists," as Tolstoy called them,the vain and doctrinaire intelligentsia, are".prised off the people’s necks"--the commonpeople’s, and the children’s" too. So long as~anatical theorists bedevil education, little is tobe hoped for. Even the old-fashioned villagep:iest--so Tolstoy maintains in one of his earlytracts--~vas less harmful: he knew little and wasclumsy, idle, and stupid; but he treated hispapils as human beings, not as scientists treatspecimens in a laboratory; he did what he could;he was often corrupt, ill-tempered, unjust, butthese were human--"natural"--vices, and there-fore their effects, unlike those of machine-mademodern instructors, inflicted no permanentinjury.

WITH TttESE IDEAS it is not surprising to findthat Tolstoy was Personally happier among theS:avophil reactionaries. He rejected their ideas;but at least they seemed to him to have somecontact with reality--the land, the peasants,traditional ways of life. At least they believedin the primacy of spiritual values and the£utility of trying to change men by changing themore superficial sides of their life by politicalor constitutional reform. But the Slavophils alsobelieved in the orthodox Church, in the uniquehistorical destiny of the Russian people, thes~nctity of history as a divinely ordained pro-cess, and therefore the justification of manyabsurdities because they were native andancient, and therefore instruments in the divinetactic; they lived by a Christian faith in thegreat mystical body--at once community andchurch--of the generation of the faithful, past,


Tolstoy andpresent, and yet unborn. Intellectually Tolstoyrepudiated this, temperamentally he respondedto it all too strongly. Hc understood well onlythe nobility and the peasants; and the formerbetter than the latter; he shared many of theinstinctive beliefs of his country neighbours;like them he had a natural aversion to all formsof middle-class liberalism: the bourgeoisiescarcely appears in his novels. His attitude toparliamentary democracy, the rights of women,universal suffrage, was not very different fromthat of Cobbett or Carlyle or Proudhon orD. H. Lawrence. He shared deeply the Slavophilsuspicions of all scientific and theoretical gener-alisations as such, and this created a bridgewhich made personal relations with the MoscowSlavophils congenial to him. But his intellectwas not at one with his instinctive convictions.As a thinker he had profound affinities withthe 18th-ccntury philosophes. Like them helooked upon the patriarchal Russian State andChurch which the Slavophils defended, asorganised and hypocritical conspiracies. Like thegreat thinkers of the enlightenment he looked

for values not in history, nor in the sacredmissions of nations or cultures or churches, butin the individual’s own personal experience.Like them, too, he believed in eternal (and notin historically evolving) truths and values, andrejected with both hands the romantic notion ofrace or nation or culture as creative agents, stillmore the Hegelian conception of history as theselbrealisation of self-perfecting reason incar-nated in men or in movements or in institutions(ideas which had deeply influenced the Slavo-phils)--all his life he looked on this as cloudymetaphysical nonsense.

THIS CLEAR, COLD, UNCOMPROMISING realism isquite explicit in the notes and diaries and lettersof his early life. The reminiscences of thosewho knew him as a boy or as a student in theUniversity of Kazan, reinforce this impression.His character was deeply conservative, with astreak of caprice and irrationality; but his mindremained calm, logical, and unswerving; hefollowed the argument easily and fearlessly towhatever extreme it led him--a typically, andsometimes fatally, Russian combination of quali-ties. What did not satisfy his critical sense, herejected. He left the University of Kazan becausehe decided that the professors were incompetentand dealt with trivial issues. Like Helvdtius andhis friends in the mid-eighteenth century, Tol-stoy denounced theology, history, the teachingof dead languages--the entire classical curricu-lum-as an accumulation of data and rules thatno reasonable man could wish to know. Historyparticularly irritated him as a systematic attemptto answer non-existent questions with all the

Enlightenment 31real issues carefully left out. "History is like adeaf man answering questions which nobodyhas asked him," he announced to a startledfellow-student, while they were both locked inthe university detention room for some minoract of insubordination. The first extended state-ment of his full "ideological" position belongsto the ’sixties: the occasion for it was his decisionto compose a treatise on education. All his in-tellectual strength and all his prejudice wentinto this attempt.

I N i86o, Tolstoy, then thirty-two years old,found himself in one of his periodic moral

crises. He had acquired some fame as a writer:Sebastopol, Childhood, Adolescence and Youth,two or three shorter tales, had been praised bythe critics. He was on terms of friendship withsome of the most gifted of an exceptionallytalented generation of writers in his country--Turgenev, Nekrasov, Goncharov, Panaev, Pisem-sky, Fet. His writing struck everyone by itsfreshness, sharpness, marvellous descriptivepower, and the precision and originality of itsimages. His style was at times criticised as awk-ward and even barbarous; but he was unques-tionably the most promising of the youngerprose writers; he had a future; yet his literaryfriends felt reservations about him. He paidvisits to the literary salons, both right- and left-wing (political divisions had always existed andwere becoming sharper in Petersburg andMoscow), but he seemed at ease in none ofthem. He was bold, imaginative, independent.But he was not a man of letters, not funda-mentally concerned with problems of literatureand writing, still less of writers; he had wan-dered in from another, less intellectual, morearistocratic and more primitive world. He wasa well-born dilettante; but that was nothingnew: the poetry of Pushkin and his contem-poraries, unequalled in the history of Russianliterature, had been created by amateurs ofgenius. It was not his origin but his uncon-cealed indifference to the literary life as such--to the habits of problems of professional writers,editors, publicists--that made his friends amongthe men of letters feel uneasy in his presence.This worldly, clever young officer could be ex-ceedingly agreeable; his love for writing wasgenuine and very deep; but at literary gatheringshe was contemptuous, formidable and reserved;he did not dream of opening his heart in amilieu dedicated to intimate, unending self-revelation. He was inscrutable, disdainful, dis-concerting, arrogant, a little frightening. He nolonger, it was true, lived the life of an aristo-cratic officer. The wild nights on which theyoung radicals looked with hatred and contemptas characteristic of the dissipated habits of the


32 Isaiah Berlin

reactionary jeunessc dortCe no longer amusedhim. He had married and settled down, he wasin love with his wife, and becan:e for a time amodel (if occasionally exasperating) husband.But he did not trouble to conceal the fact thathe had far more respect for all forms of reallife--whether of the free Cossacks in theCaucasus, or that of the rich young Guardsofficers in Moscow with their race-horses andballs and gypsies--than for the world of books,reviews, critics, professors, political discussions,and talk about ideals, opinions, and literaryvalues. Moreover, he was opinionated, quarrel-some and at times unexpectedly savage; with theresult that his literary friends treated him withnervous respect, and, in the end, drew awayfrom him; or perhaps he abandoned them. Apartfrom the poet Fet, who was an eccentric anddeeply conservative country squire himself,Tolstoy had no intimates among the writers ofhis own generation. His breach with Turgenev iswell known. He was even remoter from the otherlittdrateurs; he liked Nekrasov better than hispoetry; but then Nekrasov was an editor ofgenius and admired and encouraged Tolstoyfrom his earliest beginnings.

THE SENSE OF TIlE CONTRAST between life andliterature haunted Tolstoy. It made him doubthis own vocation as a writer. Like other youngRussians of birth and fortune, he was conscience-stricken by the appalling condition of thepeasants. Mere reflection or denunci.~tion seemedto him a way of evading action. He must act,he must start with his own estate. Like theeighteenth-century radicals he ~vas convincedthat men were born equal and were made un-equal by the way in which they were broughtup. He established a school for the boys of hisvillage; and, dissatisfied with the educationaltheories then in vogue in Russia, decided to goabroad to study western methods in theory andin practice. He derived a great deal from hisvisits to England, France, Switzerlznd, Belgium,Germany--including the title of his greatestnovel. But his conversations with the mostadvanced western authorities on education andobservation of their methods, had convinced himthat they were at best worthless, at worst harm-ful, to the children upon whom they were prac-tised. He did not stay long in England and paidlittle attention to its "antiquated" schools. InFrance he found that learning was almost en-tirely mechanical--by rote. Prepared questions,lists of dates, for example, were answered com-petently, because they had been learnt by heart.But the same children, when asked for the samefacts from some unexpected angle, often pro-duced absurd replies, which showed that theirknowledge meant nothing to them. The school-

boy who replied that the murderer of Henri IVof France was Julius Ca:sar seemed to himtypical: the boy neither understood nor took aninterest in the facts he had stored up: at most allthat was gained was a mechanical memory.

But the true home of theory was Germany.The pages which Tolstoy devotes to describingteaching and teachers in Germany rival andaz~ticipate the celebrated pages in War andPeace, in which he makes savage fun of admiredexperts in another field--the German strategistsemployed by the Russian army--whom he re-presents as grotesque and pompous dolts.

In Yasnaya Polyana, a journal which he hadhad privately printed in x86~-2, Tolstoy speaksof his educational visits to the West and, byway of example, gives a hair-raising (and exceed-ingly entertaining) account of the latest methodsof teaching the alphabet, used by a specialisttrained in one of the most advanced of theGerman teachers’ seminaries. He describes thepedantic, immensely self-satisfied schoolmaster,as he enters the room and notes with approvalthat the children are seated at their desks,crushed and obedient, in total silence, as pre-scribed by German rules of behaviour. "He castsa look round the class, and knows already whatit is that they ought to understand; he knowsthis, and he knows what the children’s soulsare made of, and much else that the seminaryhas taught him." He is armed with the latestand most progressive pedagogic volume calledDas Fischbuch. It contains pictures of a fish.

"What is this, dear children? .... A fish,"replies the brightest. "No, no. Think. Think l"And he will not rest until some child says thatwhat they see is not a fish, but a book. That isbetter. "And what do books contain?""Letters," says the boldest boy. "No, no," saysthe schoolmaster sadly, "you really must thinkof what you are saying." By this time thechildren are beginning to be hopelessly demoral-ised: they have no notion of what they aremeant to say. They have a confused and per-fectly correct feeling that the schoolmasterwants them to say something unintelligible~that the fish is not a fish that whatever it is hexvants them to say, is something they will neverthink of. Their thoughts begin to stray. Theywonder (this is very Tolstoyan) why the teacheris wearing spectacles, why he is looking throughthem instead of taking them off, and so on.The teacher urges them to concentrate, he harriesand tortures them until he manages to makethem say that what they see is not a fish, but apicture, and then, after more torture, that thepicture represents a fish. If that is what he wants:hem to say, would it not be easier, Tolstoy asks,to make them learn this piece of profoundwisdom by heart, instead of tormenting them


Tolstoy andwith the Fischb~tvh method, which so far fromcausing them to think "creatively," merelystupefies them?

The genuinely intelligent children know thattheir answers are always wrong; they cannot tellwhy; they only know that this is so; while thestupid, who occasionally provide the rightanswers, do not know why they are praised.All that the German pedagogue is doing is tofeed dead human material--or rather livinghuman beings--into a grotesque mechanicalcontraption invented by fanatical fools whothink that this is a way of applying scientificmethod to the education of men. Tolstoy assuresus that his account (of which I have only quoteda short fragment) is not a parody, but ~faithfulreproduction of what he saw and heard in the ad-vanced schools of Germany and in "those schoolsin England that have been fortunate enough toacquire these wonderful modern methods."

DISILLUSIONED AND INDIGNANT, Tolstoy returnedto his Russian estate and began to teach thevillage children himself. He built schools, con-tinued to study, reject and denounce currentdoctrines of education, published periodicals andpamphlets, invented new methods of learninggeography, zoology, physics; composed an entiremanual of arithmetic of his own, inveighedagainst all methods of coercion, especially thosewhich consisted of forcing children against theirwill to memorise facts and dates and figures. Inshort, he behaved like an original, enlightened,energetic, opinionated, somewhat eccentric J8th-century landowner who had become a convertto the doctrines of Rousseau or the abb~ Mably.His accounts of his theories and experiments filltwo stout volumes in the pre-revolutionaryeditions of his collected works. They are stillfascinating, if only because they contain someof the best descriptions of village life andespecially of children, both comical and lyrical,that even he had ever composed. He wrote themin the ’sixties and ’seventies ~vhen he was atthe height of his creative powers. His over-riding didactic purpose is easily forgotten inthe unrivalled insight into the twisting, criss-crossing pattern of the thoughts and feelingsof individual village children, and the marvel-lous concreteness and imagination with whichtheir talk and behaviour, and physical natureround them are described. And side by sidewith this direct vision of human experience,there run the clear, firm dogmas of a fanaticallydoctrinaire eighteenth-century rationalist--doc-trines not fused with the life that he describes,but superimposed upon it, like windows withrigorously symmetrical patterns drawn uponthem, unrelated to the world on which theyopen, and yet achieving a kind of illusory artistic

Enlightenment 3 3and intellectual unity with it, owing to the un-bounded vitality and constructive genius of thewriting itself. It is one of the most extraordinaryperformances in the history of literature.

T H s E N r.~f Y is always the same: experts,professionals, men who claim special

authority over other men. Universities and pro-fessors are a frequent target for attack. Thereare intimations of this already in the sectionentitled Youth of his earlier autobiographicalnovel. There is something eighteenth-century,reminiscent both of Voltaire and of Bentham,about Tolstoy’s devastating accounts of the dulland incompetent professors and the desperatelybored and obsequious students in Russia in histime. The tone is unusual in the nineteenth cen-tury: dry, ironical, didactic, mordant, at oncewithering and entertaining; the whole based onthe contrast between the harmonious simplicityof nature and the self-destructive complicationscreated by the malice or stupidity of men--menfrom whom the author feels himself detached,whom he affects not to understand, and me, cksfrom a distance.

W~ are at the earliest beginnings of a themewhich grew obsessive in Tolstoy’s later life; thatthe solution to all our perplexities stares us inthe face--that the answer is about us every-where, like the light of day, if only we wouldnot close our eyes or look.everywhere but atwhat is there, staring us in the face, the clear,simple, irresistible truth.

Like Rousseau and Kant and the believersin Natural Law, Tolstoy was convinced thatmen have certain basic material and spiritualneeds, in all places, at all times. If these needsare fulfilled, they lead harmonious lives, whichis the goal of their nature. Moral, xsthetic, andother spiritual values are objective and eternal,and man’s inner harmony depends upon hiscorrect relationship to thc~. Moreover, all hislife, he defended the proposition--which hisown novels and sketches do not embody--thathuman beings arc more harmonious in child-hood than under the corrupting influences ofeducation in later life; and also that simplepeople (peasants, cossacks, and so on) have more "natural" and correct attitude towardsthese basic values than civilised men; and thatthey are free and independent in a sense inwhich civilised men arc not. For (he insists onthis over and over again) peasant communitiesare in a position to supply their own materialand spiritual needs out of their own resources,provided that they are not robbed or enslaved byoppressors and exploiters; whereas civilised menneed for their survival the forced labour ofothers--serfs, slaves, the exploited masses, calledironically "dependents," because their ma~ters


34 Isaiah Berlin

depend o_l them. The masters ar~: parasitic uponoth-ers: they are degraded not m-erely by thefact that to enslave and exploit o~hers is a ~:enialof such objective values as justice, equality,human dignity, love--values which men craveto realise because they cannot help this, becausethey are men--but for the further, and to himeven more important, reason, that to live onrobbed or borrowed goods, and so fail to beself-subsistent, falsifies "natural" feelings andperceptions, corrodes men morally, and makesthem both wicked and miserable. The humanideal is a society of free and equal men, wholive and think by the light of what is true andright, and so are not in conflict with each otheror themselves. This is a form--a very simpleone--of the classical doctrine of natural law,whether in its theological or secular, liberal-anarchist form. To it Tolstoy adhered all hislife; as much in his "secular" period, as afterhis "conversion." His early stories express thisvividly. The Cossacks Lukashka or UncleYeroshka are morally superior, as well ashappier and ~esthetically more harmoniousbeings than Olenin in The Cossacks; Oleninknows this; indeed that is the hear: of the situa-tion. Pierre in War and Peace and Levin inAnna Karenina have a sense of this in simplepeasants and soldiers; so does Nekhlyudov inThe Morning o[ a Landowner. This convictionfills Tolstoy’s mind to a greater and greaterdegree~ until it overshadows all other issues inhis later works Resurrection and The Deatho[ Ivan Ilyich are not intelligible without it.

T o ~.s r o r’ s critical thought constantly re-volves round this central notion--the con-

trast between nature and artifice, truth and in-vention. When, for instance, in the ’nineties helaid down conditions of excellence in art (in thecourse of an introduction to a Russian transla-tion of Maupassant’s stories), he demanded ofall ,vriters, in the first place the possession ofsufficient talent; in the second that the subjectitself must be morally important; and finallythat they must truly love (what was worthyof love) and hate (what was worthy of ~ate)in what they describe--"commit" themselves~retain the direct moral vision of childhood,and not maim their natures by practisingself-imposed, self-lacerating and always illusoryimpartiality and detachment--or, still worse,deliberate perversion of "natural" values. Talentis not given equally to all men; but everyonecan, if he tries, discover eternal, unchangingattributes---what is good and what is bad, whatis important and what is trivial. Onl~y false~"made-up"--theories delude men anu writersabout this, and so distort their lives and creativeactivity. Tolstoy applies his criterion literally,

almost mechanically. Thus Nekrasov, according*o him, treated subjects of profound importance,and possessed superb skill as a writer; but his;,ttitude towards his suffering peasants andcrushed idealists remained chilly and unreal.l)ostoevsky’s subjects lack nothing in serious-hess, and his concern is profound and genuine;but the first condition is unfulfilled: he is diffuseand repetitive; he does not know how to tell thetruth clearly and then to stop. Turgenev, on theother hand, is judged to be both an excellentwriter and to stand in a real, morally adequate,relationship to his subjects; but he fails on thesecond count: the subjects are too circumscribedand trivial--and for this no degree of integrityor skill can compensate. Content determinesform, never form content; and if the content istoo small or trivial, nothing will save the workof the artist. To hold the opposite of this--tobelieve in the primacy of form--is to sacrificetruth; to end by producing works that are con-trived. There is no harsher word in Tolstoy’sentire critical vocabulary than "made-up," in-dicating that the writer did not truly experienceor imagine, but merely "composed"--"made-up"that which he is purporting to describe.

So, too, Tolstoy maintained that Maupassant,whose gifts he admired greatly, betrayed hisgenius precisely owing to false and vulgartheories of this kind; yet he remained, none theless, a good writer to the degree to which, likeBalaam, although he might have meant tocurse virtue, he could not help discerning whatwas good; and this perception attracted his loveto it, and forced him against his own will to-wards the truth. Talent is vision, vision revealsthe truth, truth is eternal and objective. To seethe truth about nature or about conduct, to see itdirectly and vividly as only a man of genius(or a simple humafibeing or a child) can see it,and then to deny or tamper with the vision incold blood, no matter for the sake of what, ismonstrous, unnatural; a symptom of a deeplydiseased character.

T R tr X ~ is discoverable: to follow it is to begood, inwardly sound, harmonious. Yet it

is clear that our society is not harmonious orcomposed of internally harmonious individuals.The interests of the educated minority~whatTolstoy calls the professors, the barons, and thebankers--are opposed to those of the majority--the peasants, the poor; each side is indifferent to,or mocks, the values of the other. Even thosewho, like Olenin, Pierre, Nekhlyudov, Levin,realise the spuriousness of the values of the pro-fessors, barons, and bankers, and the moraldecay in which their false education has involvedthem, even those who are truly contrite, cannot,despite Slavophil pretensions, go native and


Tolstoy and Enlightenment"merge" with the mass of the common people.Are they too corrupt ever to recover their inno-cence? Is their case hopeless? Or can it be thatcivilised men have acquired (or discovered)certain true values of their own, values whichbarbarians and children may know nothing of,but which they, the civilised, cannot lose orforget, even if, by some impossible means, theycould transform themselves into peasants or thefree and happy Cossacks of the Don and theTerek? This is one of the central and most tor-menting problems in Tolstoy’s life, to which hegoes back again and again, and to which hereturns conflicting answers.

Tolstoy knows that he himself clearly belongsto the minority of barons, bankers, professors.He knows the symptoms of his condition onlytoo well. He cannot, for example, deny hispassionate love for the music of Mozart orChopin or the poetry of Tyutchev or Pushkin,the ripest fruits of civilisation. He needs, hecannot do without, the printed word and allthe elaborate paraphernalia of the culture inwhich such lives are lived and such works ofart are created. But what is the use of Pushkinto village boys, when his words are not intelli-gible to them? What real benefits has the in-vention of printing brought the peasants? Weare told, Tolstoy observes, that books educatesocieties ("that is, make them more corrupt"),that it was the written word that has promotedthe emancipation of the serfs in Russia. Tolstoydenies this: the government would have donethe same without books or pamphlets. Pushkin’sBoris Godunov pleases only him, Tolstoy: butto the peasants it means nothing. The triumphsof civilisation? The telegraph tells him abouthis sister’s health, or about the prospectsof King Otto I of Greece; but what benefits dothe.re, asses gain from it? Yet it is they who payand have ahvays paid for it all; they know thiswell When peasants kill doctors in the "cholerariots" because they regard them as poisoners,what they do is no doubt wrong, but thesemurders are no accident: the instinct which tellsthe peasants who their oppressors are is sound,and the doctors belong to that class. WhenWanda Landowska played to the villagers ofYasnaya Polyana, the great majority of themremained unresponsive. Yet can it be doubtedthat it is the simple people who lead the leastbroken lives, immeasurably superior to thewarped and tormented lives of the rich andeducated?

The common people, Tolstoy asserts in hisearly educational tracts, are self-subsistent notonly materially bnt spiritually--folksong, theIliad, the Bible, spring from the people itself,and are therefore intelligible to all men every-where, as the marvellous poem Silentium by

35Tyutchev, or Don Giovanni, or the Ninth Sym-phony are not. If there is an ideal of man, itlies not in the future, but in the past. Once upona time there was the Garden of Eden and in itdwelt the uncorrupted human soul as the Bibleand Rousseau conceived it, and then came theFall, corruption, suffering, falsification. It ismere blindness (Tolstoy says over and overagain) to believe, as liberals or socialists~"theprogressives"--believe, that the golden a~e. isstill before us, that history is the story or ~m-provement, that material advance in naturalscience or material skills coincides with realmoral advance. The truth is the reverse of this.

Tr~r CHILD IS CLOSER to the ideal harmony thanthe grown man, and the simple peasant than thetorn, "alienated," morally and spiritually un-anchored and self-destructive parasites whoform the civilised ~lite. From this doctrinesprings Tolstoy’s notable anti-individualism:and in particular his diagnosis of the individual’s~vill as the source of misdirection and perversionof "natural" human tendencies, and hence theconviction (derived largely from Schopenhauer’sdoctrine of the will as the source of frustration)that to plan, organise, rely on science, try tocreate rational patterns o~ life in accordancewith rational theories, is to swim against thestream of nature, to close one’s eyes to the savingtruth within us, to torture facts to fit artificialschemas, and torture human beings to fit socialand economic systems against which theirnatures cry out. From the same source, too,comes the obverse of this: Tolstoy’s faith in anintuitively grasped direction of things as notmerely inevitable, but objectively--providentially--good; and therefore belief in the need to sub-mit to it: his quietism.

This is one aspect of his teaching--the mostfamous, the most central idea of the Tolstoyanmovement, and it runs through all his works,imaginative, critical, didactic, from The Cossacksand Family Happiness to his last religious tracts.This is the doctrine which the liberals andMarxists condemned. It is in this mood thatTolstoy maintains that to imagine that heroicpersonalities determine events is a piece ofcolossal megalomania and self-deception; hisnarrative is designed to show the insignificanceof N. apoleon or Czar Alexander,. or of.the aristo-crauc and bureaucratic society ~n AnnaKarenina, or of the judges and official personsin Resurrection; or again, the emptiness andintellectual impotence of historians and philo-sophers who try to explain events by employingconcepts like "power" which is attributed togreat men, or "influence" ascribed to writers,orators, preachers--words, abstractions ~vhich, inhis view, explain nothing, being themselves far


36 Isaiah Berlinmore obscure than the facts for which they pur-port to account. He maintains that we do notbegin to understand, and therefore cannot ex-plain or analyse, what it is to wield authority orstrength, to influence, to dominate. Explanationsthat do not explain are, for Tolstoy, a symptomof the disruptive and self-inflated intellect, thefaculty that destroys innocence and leads to falseideas and the ruin of human life.

THAT IS THE STRAIN, inspired by Rousseau andpresent in early Romanticism, which inspiredprimitivism in art and in life, not in Russiaalone. Tolstoy imagines that he and others canfind the path to the truth about how one shouldlive by observing simple people, by the study ofthe Gospels.

His other strain is the direct opposite of this.Mikhailovsky says, with justice, that Olenincannot, charmed as he is by the Caucasus andthe Cossack idyll, transform himself into aLukashka, return to the childlike harmony,which in his case has long been broken. Levinknows that if he tried to become a peasant thiscould only be a grotesque farce, which thepeasants would be the first to perceive and de-ride; he and Pierre and Nicolai Rostov knowobscurely that in some sense the) have sumc-thing to give that the peasants have not. in thefamous essay entitled What is Hrt? Tolstoy sud-denly tells the educated reader tl~at the peasant

needs what your life of ten generations uncrushcdby hard labour has given you. You had theleisure to search, to think, to suffer--then givehim that for whose sake you suffered; he is inneed of it... do not bury in the earth the talm~tgiven you by history ....

Leisure, then, need not be merely destructive.Progress can occur: we can learn from whathappened in the past, as those who lived in thatpast could not. It is true that we live in an un-just order. But this itself creates direct obliga-tions. Those who are members of the cMlised61ite, cut o~ as they tragically are from the raassof the people, have the duty to attempt to re-create broken humanity, to stop exploitingthem, to give them what they most need--edaca-tion, knowledge, material help, a capacity forliving better lives. Levin in Anna Karenina, asMikhailovsky remarks, takes up where NicolaiRostov in War and Peace left off. They are notquietists, and yet what they do is right. The

* Tolstoy is moved to indignaticn by Maupas-sant’s celebrated dictum (which he quotes) that thebusiness of the artist is not to entertain, delight,move, astonish, cause his reader to dream, reflect,smile, xveep, or shudder, but ]aire qttelque chosede beau dens fit torme qtd vous convicndr,, lemiettx d’aprbs votre temperament.

emancipation of the peasants, in Tolstoy’s view,although it did not go far enough, was neverthe-less an act of will--good-will--on the part ofthe government, and now it is necessary to teachpeasants to read and write and grasp the ruleso~ arithmetic, something which they cannot dofor themselves; to equip them for the use offreedom. I cannot merge myself with the mass ofl, asants; but I can at least use the fruit of theunjustly obtained leisure of myself and myancestors--my education, knowledge, skills--forthe benefit of those whose labour made it pos-sible. This is the talent I may not bury. I mustwork to promote a just society in accordancewith those objective standards which all men,except the hopelessly corrupt, see and accept,whether they live by them or not. The simplesee them more clearly, the sophisticated moredimly, but all men can see them if they try;indeed to be able to see them is part of what iti.~ to be a man. When injustice is perpetuated,1 have an obligation to speak out and act againstit; nor may artists any more than others sit withfolded hands. What makes good writers good isability to see truth~social and individual,material and spiritual--and so present it that itcannot be escaped. Tolstoy holds that Mau-passant, for example, is doing precisely this,despitc himself and his ~esthetic fallacies. Hemay, because he is a corrupt human being, takethc side of the bad against the good, write abouta worthlcss Paris seducer with greater sympathythan he feels for his victims. But provided thathe tclls the truth at a level that is sufficientlyprofound--and men of talent cannot avoid doingthis--he will face the reader with fundamentalmoral questions, whether he means to do this ornot, questions which the reader can neitherescape nor answer without rigorous and painfulself-examination. This, for Tolstoy, opens thepath to regeneration, and is the proper functiono_" art. Vocation--talent~is obedience to aninner need: to fulfil it is the artist’s purpose andhis duty. Nothing is more false than the view ofthe artist as a purveyor, or a craftsman whosesole function it is to create a beautiful thing, asFlaubert, or Renan, or Maupassant* maintain.There is only one human goal, and it is equallybinding on all men, landowners, doctors, barons,professors, bankers, peasants: to tell the truth,and be guided by it in action, that is, to do good,and persuade others to do so. That God exists,or that the Iliad is beautiful, or that men havea right to be free and also equal, are all eternaland absolute truths. Therefore we must persuademen to read the Iliad and not pornographicFrench novels, and to work for an equal society,not a theocratic or political hierarchy. Coercionis evil; men have always known this to be true;therefore they must work for a society in which


Tolstoy aadthere will be no wars, no prisons, no executions,in any circumstances, for any reason, for asociety in which individual freedom exists to themaximum degree. By his own route Tolstoyarrived at a programme of Christian anarchismwhich had much in common with that of theRussian Populists, with whom, but for theirdoctrinaire socialism, and their belief in scienceand faith in the methods of terrorism, Tolstoy’sattitude had much in common. For what henow appeared to be advocating was a pro-gramme of action, not of quietism; this pro-gramme underlay the educational reform thatTolstoy attempted to carry out. He strove todiscover, collect, expound eternal truths, awakenthe spontaneous interest, the imagination, love,curiosity of children or simple folk; above allliberate their "natural" moral, emotional, andintellecmal forces, which, he did not doubt, asRousseau did not doubt, would achieve harmonywithin men and between them, provided thatwe eliminate everything that might maim,cramp, and kill them.

T ~/1 s i, R O G/~ ~. U M ~--that of making pos-sible the free self-development of all human

faculties--rests on one vast assumption: thatthere exists at least one path of development onwhich these faculties will neither conflict witheach other, nor develop disproportionately--asure path to complete harmor/y ifi which every-thing fits and is at peace; with the corollary thatknowledge of man’s nature gained from observa-tion or introspection or moral intuition, or fromthe study of the lives and writings of the bestand wisest men of all ages, can show us this path.This is not the place for considering how far thedoctrine is compatible with ancient religiousteachings or modern psychology. The point Iwish to stress is that it is, above all, a pro-gramme of action, a declaration of war againstcurrent social values, against the tyranny ofstates, societies, churches, against brutality,justice, stupidity, hypocrisy, weakness, above all,against vanity and moral blindness. A man whohas fought a good fight in this war will therebyexpiate the sin of having been a hedonist andan exploiter, and the son and beneficiary ofrobbers and oppressors.

This is what Tolstoy believed, preached, andpractised. His "conversion" altered his view ofwhat was good and what was evil. It did notweaken his faith in the need for action. Hisbelief in the principles themselves neverwavered. The enemy entered by another door:Tolstoy’s sense of reality was too inexorable tokeep out tormenting doubts about how theseprinciples--no matter how true themselves--should be applied. Even though 1 believe somethings to be beautiful or good, and others to be

a7ugly and evil, what right have I to bring upothers in the light of my convictions, when Iknow that I cannot help liking Chopin andMaupassant, while these far better men--peasants or children--do not? Have I, whostand at the end of a long period of elaboration~of generations of civilised, unnatural living~have I the right to touch their souls?

To seek to influence someone, however darkthe proce.ss, is to engage in a morally suspectenterprise. This is obvious in the case of thecrude manipulation of one man by another. Butin principle, it holds equally o£ education. Alleducators seek to shape the minds and lives ofthe educated towards a given goal, or toresemble a given model. But if we--the sophisti-cated members of a deeply corrupt society--are.ourselves unhappy, inharmonious, gone astray,what can we be doing but trying to changechildren born healthy into our own sick sem-blance, to make cripples of them like ourselves?We are what we have become, we cannot helpour love of Pushkin’s verse, of Chopin’s music;we discover that children and peasants findthem unintelligible or tedious. What do we do?We persist, we "educate" them until they tooappear to enjoy these works or, at least, see whywe enjoy them. What have we done? We findthe works of Mozart and Chopin beautiful onlybecause Mozart and Chopin were themselveschildren of our decadent culture, and thereforetheir words speak to our diseased minds; butwhat right have we to infect others, to makethem as corrupt as ourselves? We can see theblemishes of other systems. We see all too clearlyhow the human personality is destroyed byProtestant insistence on obedience, by Catholicstress on emulation, by the appeal to self-interestand the importance of social position or rankon which the Russian education, according toTolstoy, is based. Is it, then, either monstrousarrogance or a not perverse inconsistency tobehave as if our own favoured systems of educa-tion-something recommended by Pestalozzi, orthe Lancaster method, systems which merelyreflect their inventors’ civilised, and consequentlyperverted personalities--are necessarily superior,or less destructive, than what we c6ndemn soreadily and justly in the superficial French orthe stupid and pompous Germans? ¯

H ow ~s T~s to be avoided. To, stoy re-peats the lessons of Rousseau’s Emile.

Nature: only nature will save us. We must seekto understand what is "natural," spontaneous,uncorrupt, sound, in harmony with itself andother objects in the world, and clear paths fordevelopment on these lines; not seek to alter, toforce into a mould. We must listen to the dic-tates of our stifled original nature, not look on


38 Isaiah Bertin

it as mere .raw stuff upon which to impose ourunique personalities and poweri~u’- wills. Todefy, to be Promethean, to create goals andbuild worlds in rivalry with what our moralsense knows to be eternal truths, g~ven once andfor all to all men, truths in virtue of which theyare men and not beasts--that is the monstroussin of pride, committed by all reformers, allrevolutionaries, all men judged great and effec-tive. And r.o less by government officials, or bycountry squires who, from liberal convictions orsimply caprice or boredom, interfere with thelives of the peasants.* Do not teach; learn: thatis the sense of Tolstoy’s essay, written nearly ahundred years ago, "Should we teach peasants’children how to ~vrite, or should the)’ teach us?",and of all the accounts published in the ’sixtiesand ’seventies, written with his customary fresh-ness, attention to detail, and unapproachablepower of direct perception, in which he givesexamples o~ stories written by the children inhis village, and speaks of the awe which he feltwhile in the presence of the act of pure creation,in which, he assures us, he played no part him-self. These stories would only be spoilt by his"corrections;" they seem to him far more pro-found than any of the works of Goethe; heexplains how deeply ashamed they make him ofhis own superficiality, vanity, stupidity, narrow-uess, lack of moral and xsthetic sense. If onecan help children and peasants, it is only bymaking it easier for them to advance freelyalong their own instinctive path. To direct is tospoil. Men are good and need only freedom torealise their goodness.

"We speak," writes Tolstoy in the ’seventies,"of bringing a man up to be a scoundrel, ahypocrite, a good man: of the Spartans as bring-ing up brave men, of French education asproducing one-sided and self-satisfied personsand so on." But this is speaking of---and using--human beings as so mu,,c.h raw mate,rial thatwe model, this is what bringing up’ to belike this or like that means. We are evidentlyready to alter the direction spontaneously fol-lowed by the souls and wills of others, to denytheir independence--in favour of ~vhat? Of ourown corrupt, false, or at best, uncertain values?"Education," Tolstoy says elsewhere, "is theaction of one person on another with a view tocausing the other to acquire certain moral

* Mikhailovsky maintains that in Polikuskka, oneof Tolstoy’s best stories, composed during theperiod of the educational tracts, he represents thetragic death of the hero as ultimately due to thewilful interference with the lives o~ her peasantson the part: of the well meaning, bnt vain andfoolish, landowner. His argnment is highly con-vincing.

habits;" but this involves always some degree ofmoral tyranny. And in a wild moment of panic,he adds, "Is not the ultimate motive of theeducator envy--envy of the purity of the child;desire to make the child more like himself, thatis, more corrupt?" What has the entire historyof education been? All philosophers of educa-tion, from Plato to Kant, professed to want onething: to free education from the chains of theevil past--from its ignorance and its errors--"to find out what men truly need, and adjustthe new schools to that." They struck off oneyoke only to put another in its place. Certain~cbolastic philosophers insisted on Greek because*hat ~vas the language of Aristotle, who knewthe truth. But, Tolstoy continues, Luther deniedthe authority of the Church Fathers and in-sisted on inculcating the original Hebrew,because he l~new that that was the language in~vhich God had revealed eternal truths tomen. Bacon looked to empirical knowledgeo~ nature, and his theories contradicted those ofAristotle. Rousseau proclaimed his faith in life,life as he conceived it, and not in theories. Butabout one thing they were all agreed: that onemust liberate the young from the blind despot-ism of the old; and each immediately substitutedhis own fanatical, enslaving dogma in its place.If I am sure that I kno~v the truth and that allel:.e is error, does that alone entide me to super-in:end the education of another? Is such cer-tainty enough? Whether or not it disagreeswith the certainties of others? By what right doI put a wall round the pupil, exclude all ex-ternal influences, and try to mould him as Iplease, into my own or somebody else’s image?The answer to this question Tolstoy passionatelysays to the "progressives" must be "yes" or "no"..."if it is ’yes,’ then the church schools andthe Jews’ schools have as much right to existas our universities." He declares that he sees nomoral difference, at least in principle, betweenthe compulsory Latin of the traditional estab-lishments and the compulsory materialism xvithwhich the radical professors indoctrinate theircaptive audiences. There might indeed be some-thiug to be said for the things that the liberalsdelight in denouncing: education at home, forexample. But it is surely natural that parentsshould wish their children to resemble them.Again there is a case for a religious upbringing,for it is natural that believers should ~vant tosave all other human beings from what they, atany rate, are certain must be eternal damnation.Similarly the government is entitled to trainmen, for society caunot survive without somesort of government, and governments cannotexist ~vithout some qualified specialists to servethem. But what is the basis of "liberal educa-tiou" in schools and nniversitics, staffed by men


Tolstoy and Enlightenment~vho do not eveu claim to be sure that what theyteach is true? Empiricism? The lessons of his-tory? The only lesson that history teaches us isthat all previous educational systems haveproved to be despotisms founded on falsehoods,and later roundly condemned. Why should thetwenty-first century not look back on us in thenineteenth with the same scorn and amusementas that ~vith which we now look on mediaevalschools and universities? If the history of educa-tion is the history merely of tyranny and error,what right have we to carry on this abominablefarce? And if we are told that it has always beenso, that it is nothing new, that we cannot help it,and must do our best--is this not like sayingthat murders have always taken place, so thatwe might as well go on murdering, even thoughwe have now discovered what it is that makesmen murder? In these circumstances, we shouldbe villains if we did not say at least so much asthis: that since, unlike the Pope or Luther ormodern positivists, we do not ourselves claim tobase our education (or other forms of interfer-ence with human beings) on the knowledge ofabsolute truth, we must at least stop torturingothers in the name of what wc do not know.All we can know for certain is what men actu-ally want. Let us at least have the courage ofour admitted ignorance, of our doubts and un-certainties. At least we can try to discover whatothers, children or adults, require, by taking offthe spectacles of tradition, prejudice, dogma, andmaking it possible for ourselves to know men asthey truly are, by listening to them carefully andsympathetically, and understanding them andtheir lives and their needs, one by one individu-ally. Let us at least try to provide them with~vhat they ask for, and leave them as free aspossible. Give them Bildung (for which he pro-duces a Russian equivalent, and points out withpride that there is none in French or English)---that is to say, seek to influence them by preceptand by the example of our own lives; but notapply "education" to them, which is essentiallya method of coercion, and destroys what is mostnatural and sacred in man--the capacity forknowing and acting for himself in accordancewith what he thinks to be true and good--thepower and the right of self-direction.

BUT HE CANNOT LET THE MATTER rest there, asmany a liberal has tried to do. For the questionimmediately arises: how are we to contrive toleave the schoolboy and the student free? Bybeing morally neutral? By imparting onlyfactual knowledge, not ethical, or aesthetic, orsocial or religious doctrine? By placing the"facts" before the pupil, and letting him formhis own conclusions, without seeking to in-fluence him in any direction, for fear that we

39might infect him with our own diseased out-looks? But is it really possible for such neutralcommunications to occur between men? Is notevery human communication a conscious or un-conscious impression of one temperament, atti-tude to life, scale of values, upon another? Aremen ever so thoroughly insulated from eachother, that the careful avoidance of more thanthe minimum degree of social intercourse willleave them unsullied, absolutely free to see truthand falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugli-ness, with their own, and only their own eyes?Is this not an absurd conception of individualsas creatures who can be kept pure from all socialinfluence--absurd in the world even of Tolstoy’smiddle years--even, that is, without the newknowledge of human beings that we haveacquired to-day, as the result of the labours ofpsychologists, sociologists, philosophers? We livein a degenerate society: only the pure can rescueus. But who will educate the educators? Who isso pure as to know how, let alone be able, toheal our world or anyone in it?

E V W E E N these poles--ou one side facts,B nature, what there as; on the other duty,

justice, what there should be; on one side inno-cence, on the other education; between theclaims of spontaneity and those of obligation, ofthe injustice of coercing others, and of the in-justice of leaving them to go their own way,Tolstoy wavered and struggled all his life. Andnot only he, but all those populists and ,socialistsand idealistic students who in Russia ’went tothe people," and could not decide whether theywent to teach or to learn, whether the "good ofthe people" for which they ,were ready,,to sacri-fice their lives, was what ’the people in factdesired, or something that only the reformersknew to be good for them, what the "people"should desire--would desire if only they wereas educated and wise as their champions--but,in fact, in their benighted state, often spurnedand violently resisted. These contradictions, andhis unswerving recognition of his failure toreconcile or modify them, are, in a sense, whatgives its special meaning both to Tolstoy’s lifeand to the morally agonised, didactic pages ofhis art. He furiously rejected the compromisesand alibis of his liberal contemporaries as merefeebleness and evasion. Yet he believed that afinal solution to the problems of how to applythe principles of Christ must exist, even thoughneither he nor anyone else had wholly dis-covered it. He rejected the very possibility thatsome of the tendencies and goals of which hespeaks might be literally both real and incom-patible. Historicism versus moral responsibility;quietism versus the duty to resist evil; teleologyor a causal order against the play of chance and


40 Isaiahirrational force; spiritual harmony, simplicity,the mass of the people on the one hand, and theirresistible attraction of the culture of minoritiesand its a~ on the other; the corruption of thecivilised portion of society on one side, and itsdirect duty to raise the masses of the people toits own level on the other; the dynamism andfalsifying influence of passionate, simple, one-sided faith, as against the clear-sighted sense ofthe complex facts and inevitable weakness inaction which flows from enlightened scepticism--all these strains are given full play in thethought of Tolstoy. His adhesion to themappears as a series of inconsistencies in hissystem because it may be that the conflicts existin fact and lead to collisions in real life.* Tolstoyis incapab!e of suppressing, or falsifying, or

* Some Marxist critics, notably Lak~cs, repre-sent these contradictions as the expression in artof the crisis in Russian feudalism and in particularin the condition of the peasants whose predicamentTolstoy is held to reflect. This seems to me an over-optimistic view: the destruction of Tolstoy’s worldshould have made his dilemmas obsolete. Thereader can judge for himself whether this is so.

Berlin

explaining away by reference to dialectical orother "deeper" levels of thought, any truthwhen it presents itself to him, no matter whatthis entails, where it leads, how much it destroysof what he most passionately longs to believe.Everyone knows that Tolstoy placed truth high-est of all the virtues. Others have said this too,and have celebrated her no less memorably. ButTolstoy is among the few who have truly earnedthat rare right: for he sacrificed all he had uponher altar--happiness, friendship, love, peace,moral and intellectual certainty, and, in the end,his life. And all she gave him in return wasdoubt, insecurity, self-contempt and insolublecontradictions.

In this sense, although he would have re-pudiated this violently, he is a martyr and a hero--perhaps the most richly gifted of all--in thetradition of European enlightenment. Thisseems a paradox; but, then, his entire life bearswitness to the proposition to the denial of whichhis last years were dedicated: that the truth isseldom wholly simple or clear, or as obvious asit may sometimes seem to the eye of the commonobserver.

Two Poems by Peter Davison

Peripheral Vision

The corner of the eyeIs where my visions lie.A startle, or a slantFrom squirrel~ bird, or plantTurns hard and fast if seenBy eyes asquint and keen.

Rather the shape and styleThat only just beguileThe tail-end of my sightThan organizing lightTo tidy up the viewAnd clear it out of true.

The Origin of Species

The elements of flesh and flowerFlourish in twig, in hand, in web.Dwarfed by nature’s flow and ebb,I work to whittle down her power.

Someone has tagged the shapes of lifeTo form a handle for the eye.Grateful, my tongue savours the lieOf unicorn and hippogriff.

The elements of flesh and flowerKindle new fire in cell and cell.Shut out that nakedness. A shellOf names will give me room to cower.


POETRY

Saint-John PerseBy Anthony Hartley

i ra s E/. r c T i ra o Saint-John Perse to receivethe Nobel Prize for Literature the committee

have chosen to honour the work of the mostsenior of European poets. Since the death ofBoris Pasternak it is hard to think of any othermajor poet whose characteristic published workstretches from ~9o9 (Images ?t Crusoe’) to thepresent day (Chronique), and this in itself is notwithout significance in any estimate of hisachievement. Saint-John Perse is often (andrightly) described as an epic writer--a rarephenomenon these days, but rather less rare ata time when both Paul Claudel and CharlesP~guy could lay claim to the same title. Begin-ning to write during the period when Frenchpoetry was dominated by a pre-i9~4 mood ofconfident vitalism, it was inevitable that Saint-John Perse should be affected by the same forcesthat were influencing his fellows.

Before the first World War came to turneverything upside down, the dominant notestruck by the French imagination was one of animpassioned acceptance of the phenomenalworld, which can be found in works otherwiseas different as Gide’s Les Nourritures Terrestresor P6guy’s Eve and possibly also in the Im-pressionist and Post-impressionist schools ofpainting. "I can involve myself with everythingaround me in silent ecstasy and accept every-thing that exists--with the word: ’Behold’...,"wrote Henri Alain-Fournier to Jacques Rivi~re,and Gide summed up for his own generationwhen he confessed "You will never know theefforts we have had to make to become in-terested in life; but, now that it interests us, itwill be like everything else--passionately." Thatwas the mood. Its effect upon poetry was tochange the poet’s conception of his own work.Gone were the absent bouquets and the blankwhite pages of Mallarm& From being a trans-formation of’the visible world, poetry came tobe viewed as a re-creation or celebration of it~

In the greatest poets of the time--Val~ry andClaudel--this attitude is quite specific. ForClaudel his own task as poet was to be "theassembler of the land of God," while Val~ry

4l

saw in the poetic act the supreme symbol of thephenomenal world, of a return to the turbulentsprings of existence as opposed to the serenecontemplation of the mind by itself, which healone valued. However different the values ofthese two poets may have been, the part assignedby them to poetry is the same: an elemental re-enactment of the universe and its contents.

T xs, therefore, not surprising to find thatI Saint-John Perse’s first book of poems (pub-lished in ~9x~ under the name Saint-L~ger L~ger)should be called Eloges. The poems containedin this volume recall the poet’s childhood in theWest Indian island of Guadeloupe, and theirtheme is the celebration of the phenomenalworld by a child, whose eye, like that of thepoet, is peculiarly adapted to take possession ofthe objects around him. The child can bringthings into a bright, stereoscopic focus whichthey have long since lost for the grown man.In these poems the beasts, flowers, and land-scapes of the island appear dressed in wonder,able to excite sudden bursts of joy. Oxen andmules thrown overboard to swim ashore areseen as "ces dieux coulds en or et ]rottds derdsine," and they are greeted by the sea in amanner befitting their divinity: "L’eau lesvante! jaillit!" A girl walking along the roadbecomes "Sur la chaussde de cornaline, une fillev~tue comme un roi de Lydie." A bird passingoverhead is "sauvage comme Cambyse et douxcomme ~tssudrus. And this profusion of imagesserves to impart a sense of freshness to a morn-ing world as well as to convey the mythopoeicquality of a child’s mind.

Yet the identification with the child’s experi-ence is only illusory. There is nostalgia as wellas wonder in these poems:

Sinon l’en]ance qu’y avait-il alors qu’il n’y aplus?

Plainesl pentesl II yavait plus d’ordrel Et tout n’dtait que rbgnes etconfins de lueurs. Et l’ombre et la lumi~re alorsdtaient phts prbs d’etre une m~me chose .... Jeparle d’une estime .... etux lisiOres le ]ruit

pouvait choir


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