86 xxv 11.
87 iv 388–9, xxx 8.
88 ii 57.
89 v 259; cf. i 268. Rouché, op. cit. (p. 361 above, note 3), p. 98 (cf. ibid., p. 52), is understandably surprised by the spectacle of a Christian clergyman complaining that the central theme of Christian religion is perhaps too foreign a topic for a German poem.
90 xxv 11.
91 iv 389.
92 op. cit. (p. 250 above, note 4), vol. 7, p. 460, line 27.
93 xviii 58.
94 i 263; ii 160; iii 30; v 185, 217; viii 392; xiii 364; xiv 38, 84; xxv 10; and passim.
95 xiv 227; xv 321; xviii 248.
96 xviii 160–1.
97 i 366–7.
98 xvii 309.
99 xxix 210.
100 viii 433.
101 xxvii 129.
102 See v 555; cf. v 524.
103 xiii 172; cf. xiii 177.
104 viii 178.
105 xiv 38.
106 xiii 364.
107 This strain is strong in Herder, particularly in his early years: e.g. ‘Philosopher and plebeian, unite in order to be useful!’ (xxxii 51), written in 1765, when Herder was twenty-one. There is also his insistence, already quoted, that political reform must always come ‘from below’ (xxxii 56).
108 xxv 323.
109 v 509.
110 v 502.
111 v 503; cf. ii 118, ii 257, v 536.
112 v 436–40.
113 x 14 (written in 1780–1). This is less than fair to Lowth, who, a good deal earlier than his critic, spoke of biblical verse as words that ‘burst forth in sentences pointed, earnest, rapid, and tremulous’ and declared that ‘we must see all things with their eyes … we must endeavour … to read Hebrew as the Hebrews would have read it’. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753), trans. from the Latin by G. Gregory (London, 1787), Lectures 1 and 5 (vol. 1, pp. 37 and 113).
114 i 258–9.
115 i 264.
116 ibid.
117 ‘Oh accursed word “classical”! It has transformed Cicero for us into a classical school-rhetorician, Horace and Virgil into classical school-poets, Caesar into a pedant, Livy into a phrasemonger. It is the word “classical” that has divided expression from thought, and thought from the event that has generated it.’ This word has become a wall between us and all true education, which would have seen the ancients as living exemplars. ‘This word has buried many a genius beneath a heap of words … crushed him under a millstone of a dead language’ (i 412). When a German poet is described as a second Horace, as a new Lucretius, a historian as a second Livy, that is nothing to be proud of; ‘but it would be a great, rare, enviable glory for us if one could say about such writers: “This is how Horace, Cicero, Lucretius, Livy would have written if they were writing about this topic, at this particular stage of culture, at this particular time, with this particular purpose, for this particular people, with its particular outlook and its own language”’ (i 383).
118 v 502.
119 v 509.
120 ‘Nous sentons, nous; eux, ils observent’: Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, ed. J. Assézat and Maurice Tourneaux (Paris, 1875–7), vol. 8, p. 368.
121 ii 44.
122 i 178.
123 v 526.
124 ibid.
125 Herder does not make clear what he means by the progress – Fortgang – of mankind: relativism is, on the face of it, incompatible with belief in objective progress. But see the discussion beginning at the foot of this page.
126 Rouché, op. cit. (p. 361 above, note 3), esp. pp. 17 ff., deals with this far more faithfully than Herder’s better known German commentators.
127 v 486.
128 v 511.
129 v 512.
130 v 527.
131 v 524.
132 v 527.
133 v 525.
134 v 538.
135 xviii 58.
136 See the remarks on Humanität at xiii 154 ff.
137 viii 210; cf. viii 303.
138 On Receiving the First Aspen Award (London, 1964), pp. 12, 21–2.
139 ‘Die vollständige Wahrheit ist immer nur That,’ he wrote in 1774 (viii 261), long before Fichte or Hegel.
140 This notion is to be found in Hamann.
141 Since originally writing this, I was glad to find it strongly confirmed by H. B. Nisbet, ‘Herder, Goethe, and the Natural “Type”’, Publications of the English Goethe Society NS 37 (1967), 83–119.
142 ‘No Tyrtaeus’, he wrote in 1778, ‘will follow our brothers who have been sold to America as soldiers, no Homer will sing of this sad expedition. When religion, people, country are crushed, when these very notions are grown shadowy, the poet’s lyre can yield only muted, strangled sounds’ (viii 434).
143 Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (op. cit., p. 335 above, note 1), vol. 11, p. 21.
144 Cf. Le philosophe ignorant, section 31: ibid., vol. 26, pp. 78–9.
145 ibid., vol. 11, p. 260.
146 xiii 333–42, esp. 342.
147 xiii 333–4.
148 xviii 248–9.
149 cf. p. 378 above.
150 loc. cit. (p. 353 above, note 1).
151 A doctrine maintained, so it seemed to Herder, by such despotic Paris arbiters of artistic beauty as the disciples of Boileau – the abbés Dubos, Batteux and the like.
152 v 502.
153 But Vico anticipated him: see my Vico and Herder (London, 1976), p. 88, note 1.
154 viii 193.
155 viii 261.
156 ibid. The celebrated description in the introduction to Karl Marx’s German Ideology of what a full human life could be seems to be a direct echo of this doctrine.
157 xiii 195.
158 The form of words is Goethe’s, in Dichtung und Wahrheit, book 12: p. 108, line 25, in op. cit. (p. 258 above, note 3), vol. 28. It is quoted by Roy Pascal on pp. 9–10 and 134 of his The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester, 1953), in which he gives an admirable account, the best in English, of this entire movement.
159 viii 433.
160 ii 160–1.
161 viii 252.
162 It is odd that one of Hamann’s most fruitful observations – that the poetry of Livonian peasants in the country round Riga and Mitau, which he knew well, was connected with the rhythms of their daily work – evidently made no impression on his disciple. Herder is fascinated by the intimate relation of action and speech, e.g. in his theory of why it is that (as he supposed) verbs precede nouns in primitive speech, but ignores the influence of work. This was made good much later under Saint-Simonian and Marxist influence.
163 Like other passionate propagandists, Herder pleaded for that which he himself conspicuously lacked. As sometimes happens, what the prophet saw before him was a great compensatory fantasy. The vision of the unity of the human personality and its integration into the social organism by ‘natural’ means was the polar opposite of Herder’s own character and conduct. He was, by all accounts, a deeply divided, touchy, resentful, bitter, unhappy man in constant need of support and praise, neurotic, pedantic, difficult, suspicious and often insupportable. When he speaks about the ‘simple, deep, irreplaceable feeling of being alive’ (xiii 337) and compares it with the carefully tended, over-arranged world of, say, the critic Sulzer, he is evidently speaking of an experience which he longed for but must often have lacked. It has frequently been remarked that it is tormented and unbalanced personalities – Rousseau, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence – who celebrate with particular passion physical beauty, strength, generosity, spontaneity, above all unbroken unity, harmony and serenity, qualities for which they had an insatiable craving. No man felt less happy in the Prussia of Frederick the Great, or even in the enlightened Weimar of Goethe and Wieland and Schiller, than Herder. Wieland, the most amiable and tolerant of men, found him maddening. Goethe said that he had in him something compulsively vicious – like a vicious horse – a desire to bite and hurt. His ideals seem at times a mirror image of his own frustratio
n.
164 This is the real community which was later (even before Tönnies) contrasted with the artificial Gesellschaft; e.g. Fichte’s Totum as contrasted with his Compositum. But in Herder there are still no explicitly metaphysical overtones: the Kräfte realised in communal life – the dynamic forces which he probably derives from Leibniz – are not discovered, nor do they act, in any a priori or transcendent fashion: but neither are they described as being susceptible to scientific tests; their nature, a puzzle to his commentators, evidently did not seem problematic to Herder.
165 xiv 227.
166 See p. 430 below, note 3.
167 Rouché, op. cit. (p. 361 above, note 3), esp. pp. 9, 48 ff., 62 ff.
168 Meinecke discusses this in Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich and Berlin, 1936), vol. 2, p. 438 – p. 339 in the translation by J. E. Anderson, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook (London, 1972) – and his conclusions are subjected to penetrating criticism by G. A Wells in ‘Herder’s Two Philosophies of History’, Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960), 527–37, at 535–6. Despite Wells’s strictures, Meinecke’s central thesis – that the heart of Herder’s doctrines is a systematic relativism – still seems to me, for the reasons given above, to be valid.
169 It found an unexpected re-incarnation in Mao Tse-tung’s celebrated image of the many flowers.
170 e.g. Rudolf Stadelmann, Der historische Sinn bei Herder (Halle/Saale, 1928); Robert Arnold Fritzsche, ‘Herder und die Humanität’, Der Morgen 3 (1927), 402–10); Hermann Vesterling, Herders Humanitätsprincip (Halle, 1890).
171 See p. 404 above, note 1.
172 See v 169.
173 iv 472.
174 xiv 210.
175 Among modern thinkers, Herder’s relativism most resembles Wyndham Lewis’s protest against what he called ‘the demon of progress in the arts’. In the tract which bears this title (London, 1954) that acute, if perverse, writer denounced, with characteristically vehement and biting eloquence, the notion that valid universal criteria exist in terms of which it is possible to assert or deny that a work of art of one age is or is not superior to one that belongs to an entirely different tradition. What meaning can be attached to, say, the assertion that Phidias is superior or inferior to Michelangelo or Maillol, or that Goethe or Tolstoy represent an improvement on, or decline from, Homer or Aeschylus or Dante or the Book of Job?
176 e.g. in his Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Dresden, 1764), book 4, chapter 2, section 21, where he speaks of ‘perfection, for which man is not a suitable vessel’; Herder echoes this almost verbatim (v 498).
177 op. cit. (p. 134 above, note 1), vol. 3, p. 589; [Henri de] Boulainvilliers, Histoire de l’ancien gouvernement de la France (The Hague and Amsterdam, 1727), vol. 1, p. 322; Rousseau in the letter to Mirabeau of 26 July 1767. Herder could have come across this in Wegelin’s essay of 1770 on the philosophy of history: see [Jakob von Daniel] Weguelin, ‘Sur la philosophie de l’histoire: premier mémoire’, Nouveaux Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences et belles-lettres, 1770 (Berlin, 1772), 361–414.
178 xiii 16.
179 This is developed at length in God: Some Conversations (xvi 401–580), in which he defends Spinoza against Jacobi’s charges of atheism and pantheism.
180 See the magnificent paean to human freedom and man’s powers of resistance to nature, xiii 142–50.
181 Pace G. A. Wells, who argues strongly for this interpretation: op. cit. (p. 361 above, note 1), pp. 37–42.
182 v 565; cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts [= Sämtliche Werke (op. cit., p. 317 above, note 1), vol. 7] (Stuttgart, 1928), p. 336.
183 e.g. by Günter Jacoby in Herder als Faust: eine Untersuchung (Leipzig, 1911). Goethe himself detested such identifications. For a discussion of this see Robert T. Clark, Jr, Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1955), PP.127 ff.
THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX
An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History
To the memory of Jasper Ridley
A queer combination of the brain of an English
chemist with the soul of an Indian Buddhist.
E. M. de Vogüé1
I
THERE IS A line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’2 Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.
Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation. Thus we have no doubt about the violence of the contrast between Pushkin and Dostoevsky; and Dostoevsky’s celebrated speech about Pushkin has, for all its eloquence and depth of feeling, seldom been considered by any perceptive reader to cast light on the genius of Pushkin, but rather on that of Dostoevsky himself, precisely because it perversely represents Pushkin – an arch-fox, the greatest in the nineteenth century – as being similar to Dostoevsky, who is nothing if not a hedgehog; and thereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into a dedicated prophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was indeed the centre of Dostoevsky’s own universe, but exceedingly remote from the many varied provinces of Pushkin’s protean genius. Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature is spanned by these gigantic figures – at one pole Pushkin, at the other Dostoevsky; and that the characteristics of other Russian writers can, by those who find it useful or enjoyable to ask that kind of question, to some degree be determined in relation to these great opposites. To ask of Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Blok how they stand in relation to Pushkin and to Dostoevsky leads – or, at any rate, has led – to fruitful and illuminating criticism. But when we come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask this of him – ask whether he belongs to the first category or the second, whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of one or of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded of heterogeneous elements – there is no clear or immediate answer. The question does not, somehow, seem wholly appropriate; it seems to breed more darkness than it dispels. Yet it is not lack of information that
makes us pause: Tolstoy has told us more about himself and his views and attitudes than any other Russian, more, almost, than any other European, writer; nor can his art be called obscure in any normal sense: his universe has no dark corners, his stories are luminous with the light of day; he has explained them and himself, and argued about them and the methods by which they are constructed, more articulately and with greater force and sanity and lucidity than any other writer. Is he a fox or a hedgehog? What are we to say? Why is the answer so curiously difficult to find? Does he resemble Shakespeare or Pushkin more than Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike either, and is the question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd? What is the mysterious obstacle with which our enquiry seems faced?
I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to this question, since this would involve nothing less than a critical examination of the art and thought of Tolstoy as a whole. I shall confine myself to suggesting that the difficulty may be, at least in part, due to the fact that Tolstoy was himself not unaware of the problem, and did his best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis I wish to offer is that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog; that his gifts and achievement are one thing, and his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his own achievement, another; and that consequently his ideals have led him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what he and others were doing or should be doing. No one can complain that he has left his readers in any doubt as to what he thought about this topic: his views on this subject permeate all his discursive writings – diaries, recorded obiter dicta, autobiographical essays and stories, social and religious tracts, literary criticism, letters to private and public correspondents. But the conflict between what he was and what he believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history, to which some of his most brilliant and most paradoxical pages are devoted. This essay is an attempt to deal with his historical doctrines, and to consider both his motives for holding the views he holds and some of their probable sources. In short, it is an attempt to take Tolstoy’s attitude to history as seriously as he himself meant his readers to take it, although for a somewhat different reason – for the light it casts on a single man of genius rather than on the fate of all mankind.
The Proper Study of Mankind Page 61