The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  The best avowed of all Tolstoy’s literary debts is, of course, that to Stendhal. In his celebrated interview in 1901 with Paul Boyer,50 Tolstoy coupled Stendhal and Rousseau as the two writers to whom he owed most, and added that all he had learnt about war he had learnt from Stendhal’s description of the battle of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme, where Fabrice wanders about the battlefield ‘understanding nothing’. He added that this conception – war ‘without panache’ or ‘embellishments’ – of which his brother Nikolay had spoken to him, he later had verified for himself during his own service in the Crimean War. Nothing ever won so much praise from active soldiers as Tolstoy’s vignettes of episodes in the war, his descriptions of how battles appear to those who are actually engaged in them.

  No doubt Tolstoy was right in declaring that he owed much of this dry light to Stendhal. But there is a figure behind Stendhal even drier, even more destructive, from whom Stendhal may well, at least in part, have derived his new method of interpreting social life, a celebrated writer with whose works Tolstoy was certainly acquainted and to whom he owed a deeper debt than is commonly supposed; for the striking resemblance between their views can hardly be put down either to accident, or to the mysterious operations of the Zeitgeist. This figure was the famous Joseph de Maistre; and the full story of his influence on Tolstoy, although it has been noted by students of Tolstoy, and by at least one critic of Maistre,51 still largely remains to be written.

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  On 1 November 1865, in the middle of writing War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote down in his diary ‘I am reading Maistre’,52 and on 7 September 1866 he wrote to the editor Bartenev, who acted as a kind of general assistant to him, asking him to send the ‘Maistre archive’, that is, his letters and notes. There is every reason why Tolstoy should have read this now relatively little-read author. Count Joseph de Maistre was a Savoyard royalist who had first made a name for himself by writing anti-revolutionary tracts during the last years of the eighteenth century. Although normally classified as an orthodox Catholic reactionary writer, a pillar of the Bourbon Restoration and a defender of the pre-revolutionary status quo, in particular of papal authority, he was a great deal more than this. He held grimly unconventional and misanthropic views about the nature of individuals and societies, and wrote with a dry and ironical violence about the incurably savage and wicked nature of man, the inevitability of perpetual slaughter, the divinely instituted character of wars, and the overwhelming part played in human affairs by the passion for self-immolation, which, more than natural sociability or artificial agreements, creates armies and civil societies alike. He emphasised the need for absolute authority, punishment and continual repression if civilisation and order were to survive at all. Both the content and the tone of his writings are closer to Nietzsche, d’Annunzio and the heralds of modern Fascism than to the respectable royalists of his own time, and caused a stir in their own day both among the legitimists and in Napoleonic France. In 1803 Maistre was sent by his master, the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, then living in exile in Rome as a victim of Napoleon and soon forced to move to Sardinia, as his semiofficial representative to the Court of St Petersburg. Maistre, who possessed considerable social charm as well as an acute sense of his environment, made a great impression upon the society of the Russian capital as a polished courtier, a wit and a shrewd political observer. He remained in St Petersburg from 1803 to 1817, and his exquisitely written and often uncannily penetrating and prophetic diplomatic dispatches and letters, as well as his private correspondence and the various scattered notes on Russia and her inhabitants, sent to his government as well as to his friends and consultants among the Russian nobility, form a uniquely valuable source of information about the life and opinions of the ruling circles of the Russian Empire during and immediately after the Napoleonic period.

  He died in 1821, the author of several theologico-political essays, but the definitive editions of his works, in particular of the celebrated Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, which in the form of Platonic dialogue dealt with the nature and sanctions of human government and other political and philosophical problems, as well as his Correspondance diplomatique and his letters, were published in full only in the 1850s and early 1860s by his son Rodolphe and by others. Maistre’s open hatred of Austria, his anti-Bonapartism, as well as the rising importance of the Piedmontese kingdom before and after the Crimean War, naturally increased interest in his personality and his thought at this date. Books on him began to appear and excited a good deal of discussion in Russian literary and historical circles. Tolstoy possessed the Soirées, as well as Maistre’s diplomatic correspondence and letters, and copies of them were to be found in the library at Yasnaya Polyana. It is in any case quite clear that Tolstoy used them extensively in War and Peace.53 Thus the celebrated description of Paulucci’s intervention in the debate of the Russian General Staff at Drissa is reproduced almost verbatim from a letter by Maistre. Similarly Prince Vasily’s conversation at Mme Scherer’s reception with the ‘homme de beaucoup de mérite’54 about Kutuzov is obviously based on a letter by Maistre, in which all the French phrases with which this conversation is sprinkled are to be found. There is, moreover, a marginal note in one of Tolstoy’s early drafts, ‘At Anna Pavlovna’s J. Maistre’, which refers to the raconteur who tells the beautiful Hélène and an admiring circle of listeners the idiotic anecdote about the meeting of Napoleon with the duc d’Enghien at supper with the celebrated actress Mlle Georges.’55 Again, old Prince Bolkonsky’s habit of shifting his bed from one room to another is probably taken from a story which Maistre tells about the similar habit of Count Stroganov. Finally, the name of Maistre occurs in the novel itself,56 as being among those who agree that it would be embarrassing and senseless to capture the more eminent princes and marshals of Napoleon’s army, since this would merely create diplomatic difficulties. Zhikharev, whose memoirs Tolstoy is known to have used, met Maistre in 1807, and described him in glowing colours;’57 something of the atmosphere to be found in these memoirs enters into Tolstoy’s description of the eminent émigrés in Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s drawing-room, with which War and Peace opens, and his other references to fashionable Petersburg society at this date. These echoes and parallels have been collated carefully by Tolstoyan scholars, and leave no doubt about the extent of Tolstoy’s borrowing.

  Among these parallels there are similarities of a more important kind. Maistre explains that the victory of the legendary Horatius over the Curiatii – like all victories in general – was due to the intangible factor of morale, and Tolstoy similarly speaks of the supreme importance of this unknown quantity in determining the outcome of battles – the impalpable ‘spirit’ of troops and their commanders. This emphasis on the imponderable and the incalculable is part and parcel of Maistre’s general irrationalism. More clearly and boldly than anyone before him, Maistre declared that the human intellect was but a feeble instrument when pitted against the power of natural forces; that rational explanations of human conduct seldom explained anything. He maintained that only the irrational, precisely because it defied explanation and could therefore not be undermined by the critical activities of reason, was able to persist and be strong. And he gave as examples such irrational institutions as hereditary monarchy and marriage, which survived from age to age, while such rational institutions as elective monarchy, or ‘free’ personal relationships, swiftly and for no obvious ‘reason’ collapsed wherever they were introduced. Maistre conceived of life as a savage battle at all levels, between plants and animals no less than individuals and nations, a battle from which no gain was expected, but which originated in some primal, mysterious, sanguinary, self-immolatory craving implanted by God. This instinct was far more powerful than the feeble efforts of rational men who tried to achieve peace and happiness (which was, in any case, not the deepest desire of the human heart – only of its caricature, the liberal intellect) by planning the life of society without reckoning with the violent forces which sooner or later would i
nevitably cause their puny structures to collapse like so many houses of cards.

  Maistre regarded the battlefield as typical of life in all its aspects, and derided the generals who thought that they were in fact controlling the movements of their troops and directing the course of the battle. He declared that no one in the actual heat of battle can begin to tell what is going on:

  On parle beaucoup de batailles dans le monde sans savoir ce que c’est; on est surtout assez sujet à les considérer comme des points, tandis qu’elles couvrent deux ou trois lieues de pays: on vous dit gravement: Comment ne savez-vous pas ce qui s’est passé dans ce combat puisque vous y étiez? tandis que c’est précisément le contraire qu’on pourrait dire assez souvent. Celui qui est à la droite sait-il ce qui se passe à la gauche? sait-il seulement ce qui se passe à deux pas de lui? Je me représente aisément une de ces scénes épouvantables: sur un vaste terrain couvert de tous les apprêts du carnage, et qui semble s’ébranler sous les pas des hommes et des chevaux; au milieu du feu et des tourbillons de fumée; étourdi, transporté par le retentissement des armes à feu et des instruments militaires, par des voix qui commandent, qui hurlent ou qui s’éteignent; environné de morts, de mourants, de cadavres mutilés; possédé tour à tour par la crainte, par l’espérance, par la rage, par cinq ou six ivrcsses différentes, que devient I’homme? que voit-il? que sait-il au bout de quelques heures? que peut-il sur lui et sur les autres? Parmi cette foule de guerriers qui ont combattu tout le jour, il n’y en a souvent pas un seul, et pas même le général, qui sache où est le vainqueur. Il ne tiendrait qu’à moi de vous citer des batailles modernes, des batailles fameuses dont la mémoire ne périra jamais, des batailles qui ont changé la face des affaires en Europe, et qui n’ont été perdues que parce que tel ou tel homme a cru qu’elles l’étaient; de maniére qu’en supposant toutes les circonstances égales, ct pas une goutte de sang de plus versée de part et d’autre, un autre général aurait fait chanter le Te Deum chez lui, et forcé I’histoire de dire tout le contraire de ce qu’elle dira.58

  And later:

  N’avons-nous pas fini même par voir perdre des batailles gagnées?… Je crois en général que les batailles ne se gagnent ni ne se perdent point physiquement.59

  And again, in a similar strain:

  De même une armée de 40,000 hommes est inférieure physiquement à une autre armée de 60,000: mais si la première a plus de courage, d’expérience et de discipline, elle pourra battre la seconde; car elle a plus d’action avec moins de masse, et c’est ce que nous voyons à chaque page de l’histoire.60

  And finally:

  C’est l’opinion qui perd les batailles, et c’est 1’opinion qui les gagne.61

  Victory is a moral or psychological, not a physical, issue:

  qu’est ce qu’une bataille perdue?… C’est une bataille qu’on croit avoir perdue. Rien n’est plus vrai. Un homme qui se bat avec un autre est vaincu lorsqu’il est tué ou terrassé, et que l’autre est debout; il n’en est pas ainsi de deux armées: l’une ne peut être tuée, tandis que l’autre reste en pied. Les forces se balancent ainsi que les morts, et depuis surtout que l’invention de la poudre a mis plus d’égalité dans les moyens de destruction, une bataille ne se perd plus matériellement; c’est-à-dire parce qu’il y a plus de morts d’un côté que de l’autre: aussi Frédéric II, qui s’y entendait un peu, disait: Vaincre, c’est avancer. Mais quel est celui qui avance? c’est celui dont la conscience et la contenance font reculer l’autre.62

  There is and can be no military science, for ‘C’est l’imagination qui perd les batailles’,63 and ‘peu de batailles sont perdues physiquement – vous tirez, je tire … le véritable vainqueur, comme le véritable vaincu, c’est celui qui croit 1’être’.64

  This is the lesson which Tolstoy says he derives from Stendhal, but the words of Prince Andrey about Austerlitz – ‘We lost because very early on we told ourselves we had lost’65 – as well as the attribution of Russian victory over Napoleon to the strength of the Russian desire to survive, echo Maistre and not Stendhal.

  This close parallelism between Maistre’s and Tolstoy’s views about the chaos and uncontrollability of battles and wars, with its larger implications for human life generally, together with the contempt of both for the naïve explanations provided by academic historians to account for human violence and lust for war, was noted by the eminent French historian Albert Sorel, in a little-known lecture to the École des Sciences Politiques delivered on 7 April 1888.66 He drew a parallel between Maistre and Tolstoy, and observed that although Maistre was a theocrat, while Tolstoy was a ‘nihilist’, yet both regarded the first causes of events as mysterious, involving the reduction of human wills to nullity. ‘The distance’, wrote Sorel, ‘from the theocrat to the mystic, and from the mystic to the nihilist, is smaller than that from the butterfly to the larva, from the larva to the chrysalis, from the chrysalis to the butterfly.’67 Tolstoy resembles Maistre in being, above all, curious about first causes, in asking such questions as Maistre’s ‘Expliquez pourquoi ce qu’il y a de plus honorable dans le monde, au jugement de tout le genre humain sans exception, est le droit de verser innocemment le sang innocent?’,68 in rejecting all rationalist or naturalistic answers, in stressing impalpable psychological and ‘spiritual’ – and sometimes ‘zoological’ – factors as determining events, and in stressing these at the expense of statistical analyses of military strength, very much like Maistre in his dispatches to his government at Cagliari. Indeed, Tolstoy’s accounts of mass movements – in battle, and in the flight of the Russians from Moscow or of the French from Russia – might almost be designed to give concrete illustrations of Maistre’s theory of the unplanned and unplannable character of all great events. But the parallel runs deeper. The Savoyard Count and the Russian are both reacting, and reacting violently, against liberal optimism concerning human goodness, human reason, and the value or inevitability of material progress: both furiously denounce the notion that mankind can be made eternally happy and virtuous by rational and scientific means.

  The first great wave of optimistic rationalism which followed the Wars of Religion broke against the violence of the great French Revolution and the political despotism and social and economic misery which ensued: in Russia a similar development was shattered by the long succession of repressive measures taken by Nicholas I to counteract firstly the effect of the Decembrist revolt, and, nearly a quarter of a century later, the influence of the European revolutions of 1848–9; and to this must be added the material and moral effect, a decade later, of the Crimean débâcle. In both cases the emergence of naked force killed a great deal of tender-minded idealism, and resulted in various types of realism and toughness – among others, materialistic socialism, authoritarian neo-feudalism, blood-and-iron nationalism and other bitterly anti-liberal movements. In the case of both Maistre and Tolstoy, for all their unbridgeably deep psychological, social, cultural and religious differences, the disillusionment took the form of an acute scepticism about scientific method as such, distrust of all liberalism, positivism, rationalism, and of all the forms of high-minded secularism then influential in Western Europe; and led to a deliberate emphasis on the ‘unpleasant’ aspects of human history, from which sentimental romantics, humanist historians and optimistic social theorists seemed so resolutely to be averting their gaze.

  Both Maistre and Tolstoy spoke of political reformers (in one interesting instance, of the same individual representative of them, the Russian statesman Speransky) in the same tone of bitterly contemptuous irony. Maistre was suspected of having had an actual hand in Speransky’s fall and exile; Tolstoy, through the eyes of Prince Andrey, describes the pale face of Alexander’s one-time favourite, his soft hands, his fussy and self-important manner, the artificiality and emptiness of his movements – as somehow indicative of the unreality of his person and of his liberal activities – in a manner which Maistre could only have applauded. Both speak of intellectuals with scorn and hostility. Maistre rega
rds them not merely as grotesque casualties of the historical process – hideous cautions created by Providence to scare mankind into a return to the ancient Roman faith – but as beings dangerous to society, a pestilential sect of questioners and corrupters of youth against whose corrosive activity all prudent rulers must take measures. Tolstoy treats them with contempt rather than hatred, and represents them as poor, misguided, feeble-witted creatures with delusions of grandeur. Maistre sees them as a brood of social and political locusts, as a canker at the heart of Christian civilisation, which is of all things the most sacred and will be preserved only by the heroic efforts of the Pope and his Church. Tolstoy looks on them as clever fools, spinners of empty subtleties, blind and deaf to the realities which simpler hearts can grasp, and from time to time he lets fly at them with the brutal violence of a grim, anarchical old peasant, avenging himself, after years of silence, on the silly, chattering, town-bred monkeys, so knowing, and full of words to explain everything, and superior, and impotent and empty. Both dismiss any interpretation of history which does not place at the heart of it the problem of the nature of power, and both speak with disdain about rationalistic attempts to explain it. Maistre amuses himself at the expense of the Encyclopaedists – their clever superficialities, their neat but empty categories – very much in the manner adopted by Tolstoy towards their descendants a century later, the scientific sociologists and historians. Both profess belief in the deep wisdom of the uncorrupted common people, although Maistre’s mordant obiter dicta about the hopeless barbarism, venality and ignorance of the Russians cannot have been to Tolstoy’s taste, if indeed he ever read them.