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PARTISAN REVIEW
has become a very touchstone of our aging "modernity." For if Pound's
translations can give us little sense of CavaIcanti or Li Po or the Proven–
c;als-they can give us a very good sense, indeed, of that Comedian of
Culture who is Pound, the quick-change artist in his famous repertory
of Chinese Gentleman, Troubadour, and scholastic expounder of Love.
And this, for better or for worse, is a key image of our own age, of the
contemporary mind haunted by half-understood tags of a score of cul–
tures, trying to translate into verse what was once passion and belief.
Our Muse is the poet without a Muse, whom quite properly we acquit of
treason (what remains to betray?) and consign to Saint Elizabeth's.
Leslie A. Fiedler
TOLSTOY AND HISTORY
THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX. By Isaiah Berlin. Simon and Schuster.
$2.50.
Thanks to Turgenev, Flaubert was among the very first in
Europe to read
War and Peace.
He read it with "shouts of joy and ad–
miration," but (as Isaiah Berlin reminds us) also with horror:
all
se
repete! Et il philosophise!"
he told Turgenev in the same letter in which
he raved about the force of Tolstoy's rendering of reality.
An artist who "philosophized." What a scandal that was for Flau–
bert, the ascetic of "pure" art. By "philosophizing," Tolstoy not only
violated the canons of naturalistic art; he also, and above all, violated
the "morality" of the artist as Flaubert understood and practiced it. It
did not even occur to Flaubert that, in a historical novel, considerations
on history could be at least as relevant as, in a "pure" novel like
L'Edu–
cation S entimentale,
the rather dull description (based, as we now know,
on the perusal of the stagecoach schedules of the time and scientific
treatises about the rocks and trees of the Fontainebleau forest) of the
trip of Frederic and the Marechale going back to Paris just in time to
be caught in the turmoil of the June uprising.
Flaubert's exclamation could well serve as an epigraph to most that
has been written since then on Tolstoy: the artist is great, but his ideas
are either confused, or fal se, or repellent, if not all of these together.
From "pure" aesthetes to the bolsheviks, this has been the prevailing atti–
tude toward Tolstoy.
In his concise and learned essay, which is by far the best analysis
of Tolstoy's intellectual personality ever attempted, Isaiah Berlin has
no trouble showing that such a judgment simply overlooks the facts:
the first one of all being the seriousness of Tolstoy's interest in the prob-
