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”. 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 defense. 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, organizing 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 by 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, Balzak, 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 a 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 the 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 lead-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 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 inquiry 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. |
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