Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

can learn from what happened in the past, as those who lived in that

past could not. It is true that we live in an unjust order. But this

itself creates direct obligations. Those who are members of the

civilised elite, cut off as they tragically are from the mass of the people,

have the duty to attempt to re-create broken humanity, to stop

exploiting them, to give them what they most need-education, knowledge, material help, a capacity for living better lives. Levin in A""a Karmi,a, as Mikhailovsky remarks, takes up where Nikolay Rostov

in War anti Ptact left off. They are not quietists, and yet what they

do is right. The emancipation of the peasants, in Tolstoy's view,

although it did not go far enough, was nevertheless an act of willgood-will-on the part of the government, and now it is necessary to teach peasants to read and write and grasp the rules of arithmetic,

something which they cannot do for themselves; to equip them for

the use of freedom. I cannot merge myself with the mass of peasants;

but I can at least use the fruit of the unjustly obtained leisure of

myself and my ancestors-my education, knowledge, skills- for the

benefit of those whose labour made it �ible.

This is the talent I may not bury. I must work to promote a just

society in accordance with those objective standards which all men,

except the hopelessly corrupt, see and accept, whether they live by

them or not. The simple see them more clearly, the sophisticated

more dimly, but all men can see them if they try; indeed to be able

to see them is part of what it is to be a man. When injustice is perpetrated, I have an obligation to speak out and act against it; nor may artists any more than others sit with folded hands. What makes good

252

TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTENMENT

writers good is ability to see truth-social and individual, material and

spiritual-and so present it that it cannot be escaped. Tolstoy holds

that Maupassant, for example, is doing precisely this, despite himself

and his aesthetic fallacies. He may, because he is a corrupt human

being, take the side of the bad against the good, write about a worthless

Paris seducer with greater sympathy than he feels for his victims. But

provided that he tells the truth at a level that is sufficiendy profoundand men of talent cannot avoid doing this-he will face the reader with fundamental moral questions, whether he means to do this or not,

questions which the reader can neither escape nor answer without

rigorous and painful self-examination.

This, for Tolstoy, opens the path to regeneration, and is the proper

function of art. Vocation-talent-is obedience to an inner need: to

fulfil it is the artist's purpose and his duty. Nothing is more false than

the view of Pie artist as a purveyQr, or a craftsman whose sole function

it is to create a beautiful thing, as Flaubert, or Renan, or Maupassantl

maintain. There is only one human goal, and it is equally binding 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 have a right to be free and also equal, are all eternal

and absolute truths. Therefore we must persuade men to read the Iliad

and not pornographic French novels, and to work for an equal society,

not a theocratic or political hierarchy. Coercion is evil; men have

always known this to be true; therefore they must work for a society

in which there will be no wars, no prisons, no executions, in any

circumstances, for any reason; for a society in which individual

freedom exists to the maximum degree. By his own route Tolstoy

arrived at a programme of Christian anarchism which had much in

common with that of the Russian populists, with whom, but for their

doctrinaire socialism, and their beliefin science and faith in the methods

of terrorism, Tolstoy's attitude had much in common. For what he

now appeared to be advocating was a programme of action, not of

quietism; this programme underlay the educational reform that he

1 Tolstoy is moved to indignation by Maupa.ssant's celebrated dictum

(which he quotes) that the business of the artist is not to entertain, delight,

move, utonish, cause his reader to dream, reflect, smile, weep, or shudder,

but (ft�irt J rjulf•t t:Aost tie 6tt�• tlt�fll '" jof'fllt 9•i rJfJMI t:Oflrlitfltlr" It fllin3t t1' .pns rJOirt ltfllplrt�flltfll.

..

253

R U SSIAN T H INKERS

attempted to carry out. He strove to discover, collect, expound eternal

truths, awaken the spontaneous interest, the imagination, love,

curiosity of children or simple folk; above all to liberate their 'natural'

moral, emotional and intellectual forces, which he did not doubt, as

Rousseau did not doubt, would achieve harmony within men and

between them, provided that we eliminate everything that might maim,

cramp and kill them.

This programme-that of making possible the free self-development

of all human faculties-rests on one vast assumption: that there exists

at least one path of development on which these faculties will neither

conflict with each other, nor develop disproportionately-a sure path

to complete harmony in which everything fits and is at peace; with

the corollary that knowledge of man's nature gained from observation

or introspection or moral intuition, or from the study of the lives and

writings of the best and wisest men of all ages, can show us this path.

This is not the place for considering how far the doctrine is compatible

with ancient religious teachings or modern psychology. The point I

wish to stress is that it is, above all, a programme of action, a declaration of war against current social values, against the tyranny of states, societies, churches, against brutality, injustice, stupidity, hypocrisy,

weakness, above all against vanity and moral blindness. A man who

has fought a good fight in this war will thereby expiate the sin of

having been a hedonist and an exploiter, and the son and beneficiary

of robbers and oppressors.

This is what Tolstoy believed, preached, and practised. His 'conversion' altered his view of what was good and what was evil. It did not weaken his faith in the need for action. His belief in the principles

themselves never wavered. The enemy entered by another door:

Tolstoy's sense of reality was too inexorable to keep out tormenting

doubts about how these principles-no matter how true themselvesshould be applied. Even though I believe some things to be beautiful or good, and others to be ugly and evil, what right have I to bring up

others in the light of my convictions, when I know that I cannot help

liking Chopin and Maupassant, while these far better men-peasants

or children-do not? Have I, who stand at the end of a long period of

elaboration-of generations of civilised, unnatural living-have I the

right to touch thnr souls?

To seek to influence someone is to engage in a morally suspect

enterprise. This is obvious in the case of the crude manipulation of

one man by another. But in principle it holds equally of education. All

254

TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTENMENT

educators seek to shape the minds and lives of the educated towards a

given goal, or to resemble a given model. But if we-the sophisticated

members of a deeply corrupt society-are ourselves unhappy, inharmonious, gone astray, what can we be doing but trying to change children born healthy into our own sick semblance, to make cripples

of them like ourselves? We are what we have become, we cannot help

our love of Pushkin's verse, of Chopin's music; we discover that

children and peasants find them unintelligible or tedious. What do we

do? We persist, we 'educate' them until they too appear to enjoy these

works or, at least, see why we enjoy them. What have we done? We

find the works of Mozart and Chopin beautiful only because Mozart

and Chopin were themselves children of our decadent culture, and

therefore their words speak to our diseased minds; but what right have

we to infect others, to make them as corrupt as ourselves? We can

see the blemishes of other systems. We see all too clearly how the

human personality is destroyed by Protestant insistence on obedience,

by Catholic stress on emulation, by the appeal to self-interest and the

importance of social position or .rank on which Russian education,

according to Tolstoy, is based. Is it not, then, either monstrous

arrogance or a perverse inconsistency to behave as if our own favoured

systems of education-something recommended by Pestalozzi, or the

Lancaster method, systems which merely reRect their inventors'

civilised, and consequently perverted, personalities-are necessarily

superior, or less destructive, than what we condemn so readily

and justly in the superficial French or the stupid and pompous

Germans?

How is this to be avoided? Tolstoy repeats the lessons of Rousseau's

Emile. Nature: only natur� will save us. We must seek to understand

what is 'natural', spontaneous, uncorrupt, sound, in harmony with

itself and other objects in the world, and clear paths for development

on these lines; not seek to alter, to force into a mould. We must

listen to the dictates of our stiRed original nature, not look on it as

mere raw stuff upon which to impose our unique personalities and

powerful wills. To defy, to be Promethean, to create goals and build

worlds in rivalry with what our moral sense knows to be eternal

truths, given once and for all to all men, truths in virtue of which

they are men and not beasts-that is the monstrous sin of pride, committed by all reformers, all revolutionaries, all men judged great and effective. And no less by government officials, or by country squires

who, from liberal convictions or simply caprice or boredom, interfere

•'

255

R U S S I AN T H INKERS

with the lives of the peasants.1 Do not teach; learn: that is the sense

of Tolstoy's essay, written nearly a hundred years ago, 'Who should

learn to write from whom: should peasants' children learn from us,

or should we learn from peasants' children?', and of all the accounts

published in the 1 86os and 7os, written with his customary freshness,

attention to detail, and unapproachable power of direct perception, in

which he gives examples of stories written by the children in his

village, and speaks of the awe which he felt while in the presence of

the act of pure creation, in which, he _assures us, he played no part

himself. These stories would only be spoilt by his 'corrections'; they

see� to him far more profound than any of the works of Goethe; he

explains how deeply ashamed they make him of his own superficiality,

vanity, stupidity, narrowness, lack of moral and aesthetic sense. If one

can help children and peasants, it is only by making it easier for them

to advance freely along their own instinctive path. To direct is to