Talking of books

Leo in the ascendant

Benny Green

The reprinting of Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £1.30) suggests that people are still buying it, and perhaps even reading it, which is a reassuring thought, because it is as stimulating and as consummately argued a critical investigation as anyone could wish for. Its purpose 15 to scrutinise the motivations, conscious or Otherwise, which led Tolstoy to clutter that rattling adventure yarn, War and Peace, with dissertations on freemasonry, ,historical de

terminism and the rest of the excrescences which obscure the story line. The tone of the investigation is cool, respectful, but as dedicated to the Pursuit of truth as Tolstoy himself. The nearest approach I can recall,

apart_ from Berlin's Fathers and Children, his account of Turgenev's anguished Liberalism, is Dickens, the Two Scrooges, by

Edmund Wilson, a critical detective not unlike Berlin in manner, quietly resolute, undistracted by the noise outside, steadily grinding the lens of thought to the point where it reflects the facts. And just as Wilson follows Dickens from Mr Wardle's mistletoe to the contemplation of that muckheap of irrespon

sible capitalism which threatens to envelop the world in Our Mutual Friend, so Berlin

defines Tolstoy's path from the libertinism of the officers' mess to the eventual embracing of a mysticism without solace.

What Tolstoy was searching for in War and Peace, and what his failure to locate drove him to melancholic madness, was a discernible pattern in the universe, for the more he tested Life, the more it seemed to be a

steamroller flattening our feeble pretensions to Free Will. In a sense his whole life was a quest for this pattern; had he found it, it might have saved him from the messianic frenzy of his last years, when he presented the terrible spectacle of an old man shaking his fist at God for having the effrontery not to be there.

Inevitably then, the theme of The Hedgehog and the Fox is paradox; the paradox of Tols

toy's violent need for Faith denied by the matching violence of his refusal to dupe himself into thinking he had found it; the paradox of the Great Man concept of history illus trated by an impotent Napoleon; the paradox that there are after all great men, so long as they are Russian, like Kutuzov. Our final impression is of Tolstoy's heroic intellect standing guard over his moral integrity, refusing to permit any easy surrender to the blandishments of religious quietism; so that the war and peace of Tolstoy's title are really about the struggle between his head and his heart, that deadly battle fought out on so many different nineteenth-century fronts, and whose most grimly comic variant is Darwin, whose scientific pursuits were so divorced from his spiritual needs that he could devote his life to what Samuel Butler called the "banishing of Mind from the Universe" an.c1 still attend church on Sunday, unaware till Thomas Huxley explained it all to him, that he had killed his own deity stone dead. There are curious parallels between Tolstoy's text and the words of others who independently trod the identical path, sometimes before he did. For instance, which of these two attempts to lampoon history textbooks predates the other?

Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man. He had such-and-such mistresses, and such-andsuch ministers . . .

William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders ...

As it happens, Carroll's Alice predates War and Peace by three years; on the other hand, Tosltoy's touching faith in the peasantry as the instrument of Russian salvation long anticipates Orwell's odd emotional commitment to the British working classes; but how odd that both Tolstoy the feudal overlord and Orwell the Old Etonian forgot that the meek, once they have inherited the earth, sometimes lose their meekness. As for the faintly Panglossian hints in War and Peace of spiritual salvation lying beyond the powers of intellect, that is a discovery triumphantly received every other generation. Pascal's "The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing" (1660), and Mark Twain's "You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, which the intellect scorns" (1882)

would both do as an epigraph for Natasha Rostov.

Tolstoy's was the dilemma of a man who, having proved that God does not exist, sees that there is therefore nothing else for it but to throw himself on His Everlasting Mercy; or even worse, of the man who devotes his life to the accumulation of facts proving that the accumulation of facts is a foolhardy business. No wonder that in the end Berlin defines his hero as a man 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.

One last paradox, thoughtfully supplied by Berlin himself. The long quotes in French from Joseph de Maistre, and that line of Greek from Archilochus on the very first page of this masterly essay, would no doubt have made Tolstoy, the sworn enemy of hollow pedagoguery, shake with demonic laughter. But perhaps I think this only because I have no French or Greek myself.