Noel Annan
THE ÉLOGE IS NOT MUCH FAVOURED as a literary form in England today: it is hauled out of the cupboard only for use at memorial services, decently to extol the dead man’s virtues. The profile and the interview, the literary forms now much in use, are designed not to praise but to cut people down to size. This was the vogue which delighted Beaverbrook: he called it ‘lopping off the heads of the tall poppies’. The journalist probes for the weak spot, inserts the banderilla, and so goads the wretched bull that he plunges to the doom of self-exposure. Professional interviewers regard this special skill with grave self-satisfaction. They are unanimous in declaring that it does the victim a positive service: he may not appear admirable but he is at least credible.
Intellectuals disparage journalists, but the course they have been following runs alongside the journalists’ trail. Social scientists have depersonalised acres of human experience so that history resembles a ranch on which herds move, driven they know not why by impersonal forces, munching their way across the prairie. Critics, like crabs in a rock pool, scuttle sideways into the recesses of postmodernism and avoid considering how people actually speak and write; or they replace the living artist by an artificial persona composed from his works. No wonder the public buys biographies. Yet how many of the two-volume lives, arid with documentation, fill the throat with dust? Those biographers who are not frightened to paint portraits in the primary colours of virtue and vice seem often to be enslaved by the principle which the harsh-tongued father of the novelist Henry Green characterised years ago as De mortuis nil nisi bunkum; and those who preserve certain reticences prudently let it be known that they did so to avoid damages for libel.
Isaiah Berlin ignores these current fashions. His thought, his theories, always refer to people: the very life he leads pullulates with people. His essays on those who intrigue him are studies in praise. Like the son of Sirach he wants us to praise famous men. But it is not their fame which attracts him, it is their genius. He is not ashamed to worship heroes. He has no wish to pose as God and see with equal eye a hero perish or a sparrow fall. Heroes enhance life, the world expands and becomes less menacing and more hopeful by their very existence. To know a great man is to change one’s notions of what a human being can do or be. To see Shelley plain, to meet as Berlin has done men and women such as Pasternak or Stravinsky, Virginia Woolf or Picasso, Russell or Einstein, he finds exciting. But he does not consider only geniuses. Someone whose prejudices are outrageous and whose behaviour disturbs the bien pensants may exhibit reckless vitality; and that challenges Berlin to find the precise words which best convey his quality and quiddity. Nor need such people be lions or stars. An obscure scholar with an unusual combination of gifts will make him feel the world well won. He likes people to show attractive qualities: austerity is praiseworthy, but so is gaiety. His austere friend John Austin found few pleasures in life equal to that of being able to praise someone unreservedly, and Berlin, no less than Keynes, who was a devastating critic of people, revels in celebrating men and women whom he admires.
But it would be an error to dismiss these studies in praise as conventional tributes. Like all his writing, they are deceptively entertaining and conceal his true originality of mind. Newspapers picture great scientists making a breakthrough which alters the course of physics or biology, or economists are praised for producing a theory which relates both logically and paradoxically all the variables within their branch of knowledge. These are the means, so it is said, by which knowledge is advanced. But Berlin does not enlarge our understanding in this way. To have done so – to have written an abstract treatise on the history of ideas, a subject which has been distorted and misunderstood precisely because it has so often been reduced to abstractions – would have been to contradict the very message he wants us to receive. He has, of course, written on theories of freedom and on historiography; but these critiques are inadequate in themselves to convey what he has added to his own interpretation of life.
That interpretation is pluralism. How the imagination droops at the mention of that dingy word! ‘We live in a pluralist age’ is the castrating cliché of our times. Most people when they use the term mean that society is formed of numbers of minorities who are moved each by their own interests and values. But since the interests of all these groups conflict they have to learn to tolerate each other’s existence. Indeed the institution which needs to exercise the greatest tolerance is the State itself: although it has to express politically the highest common factor of agreement in society it must be especially sensitive in accommodating those whose views are opposed to the consensus. Not only the State. Every controlling body, every institution, management in its various disguises, should respond to minority feelings. But there is a difficulty in sustaining this theory in practice. When government in all its forms is weakened and drained of blood by giving transfusions to enable minorities to flourish, it becomes incapable of resisting determined and ruthless interest-groups or parties. Having benefited by the application of pluralism, they kick over the theory and elbow the government out by taking over its most important functions; they then blandly declare the interests of all other minorities to be subordinate to their own. Must not a government so hesitant about its legitimacy collapse when its power to give orders is challenged?
Isaiah Berlin’s interpretation of pluralism is far more profound. He does not spend time conjecturing how far the State should or should not yield to pressure groups. What fascinates him is not the political consequences of pluralism but its justification. It needs to be justified not only against its enemies but against many of those who preen themselves on being pluralists but would be indignant if they became aware of the implications of what Berlin is saying. For those who pay lip-service to pluralism fail to understand just how disturbing he is. He believes that you cannot always pursue one good end without setting another on one side. You cannot always exercise mercy without cheating justice. Equality and freedom are both good ends but you rarely can have more of one without surrendering some part of the other. This is dispiriting for progressives who like to believe that the particular goal which at present they are pursuing is not incompatible with all the other goals which they like to think they value as much. But Berlin, disbelieving in panaceas or total solutions, is sceptical of many remedies which purport to cure social ills and to reintegrate those said to be alienated from their society. Masterful men and implacable women, planners, moving their fellow citizens about and disposing of the future of their children, determining in the name of efficiency or equality how and where they should live, justifying the brutality of their decisions by declaring how inescapable these decisions are, do not rejoice his heart. Bureaucrats who take pleasure in defining the rules and regulations which govern everyone else’s jobs awaken in him the suspicion that so far from fulfilling what people want they are more interested in manipulating them. But if for him the ideals of the powerful civil servant insult too wantonly the nature of man, he does not display much enthusiasm for the political movements which grew up to oppose the gospel of efficiency. He has reservations about populism or syndicalism. He wonders how much they care for the liberty of minorities.
But these reservations give no comfort to conservatives. Unlike Michael Oakeshott, Berlin is not sceptical of reason in politics or of theories as such. He may have no views about monetarism or deficit budgeting or on other statistical or sociological analyses: but he does not regard such efforts to apply reason to politics as valueless. Such theories, the product of abstract reason and analysis, may, if put into practice, diminish the bruising and dispiriting conflicts between good ends. Life is not one long struggle against impaling oneself on the horns of a dilemma: peaceful trade-offs are possible, nor are they always agonising. Sometimes equality and liberty may be reconciled; sometimes not; but Berlin disagrees with those who deny that tangles of this sort can be combed out. Again, participatory populism is not a form of political organisation likely to make the blood surge through his veins; but if it could be shown that it led to a clear advance towards greater equality he would not reject it. Unlike even moderate conservatives he regards equality as one of the ultimate goals for men, a sacred value, obliged no doubt to yield when other sacred values would have to suffer if they were to collide with it, but to be realised so long as it cannot be shown to be doing irreparable damage. If many people are starving and can be fed if the liberty of the few is curtailed, then the few must lose their liberty. If that gives pain, well, pain must be given. All Berlin asks is that there should be no equivocation and it should be frankly admitted that liberty was curtailed – in a good cause. Nor has he sympathy with the conservative notion that all culture is founded on inequality, nor with a view dear to some intellectuals that art is the supreme value in life, which must be protected and fostered at whatever cost. If the agonising choice had to be made between the destruction of, say, Rome, glistening with the treasures of the ages, and the loss of the independence of a nation and the subjugation of its citizens to a tyranny, Berlin would throw his lot for scorched earth and resistance. Some might guess that in his sympathy for Turgenev he would follow him in loathing the right and fearing the left; and if he were faced with the alternatives which confronted Turgenev in nineteenth-century Russia the guess would be right. Berlin finds reactionary regimes odious, and terrorist revolutionaries insupportable. But within the range of Western democratic politics he follows his fancy.
To want to maximise a particular virtue is common enough: to admit that it is not always possible to do this without fatally diminishing others is not. Unfortunately people, Berlin argues, want to be assured that in fact they can always follow simultaneously all good ends. They therefore listen respectfully to political thinkers who declare that this can be done. Such sages declare that they have discovered a better kind of freedom, positive freedom, which will reconcile the desire for justice, equality, opportunity for self-fulfilment with their wish to be as free and live under as few prohibitions as possible. Positive freedom is the benign name given to the theory which maintains that not merely wise philosophers but the State, indeed governments themselves, can identify what people would really want were they enlightened, if they understood fully what was needed to promote a good, just and satisfying society. For if it is true that this can be identified then surely the State is justified in ignoring what ordinary people say they desire or detest. What people say is the mere rumbling of their lower self, a pathetic underdeveloped persona insufficiently aware of all the possibilities of life, often the slave of evil passions. Who in his senses would want to be a slave to the bottle? Who would not agree that art is vital to anyone who wants to lead a full life? But since all too many people are alcoholics and vast numbers of people care not at all for art, the State is compelled to enforce sobriety and propagate art so long as it is healthy and opens men’s eyes to a better future.
People are often convinced by this vision of freedom because they want to believe in a common-sense view of goodness. Surely goodness must be indivisible, surely truth is beauty and beauty truth, surely the different aspects of truth and goodness can always be reconciled. But Berlin declares that sometimes they cannot. Ideology answers the questions ‘How should I behave?’ and ‘How should I live?’ People want to believe that there is one irrefutable answer to these questions. But there is not.
There is not, because life is more than a series of solutions to problems. Berlin’s pluralism has far deeper roots than politics. It is grounded in his understanding of linguistic philosophy and of history. Other philosophers grew weary of John Austin’s devastating ability to dissect a proposition and expose error in their own arguments. ‘You are like a greyhound’, Berlin remembers Ayer saying to Austin, ‘who doesn’t want to run himself, and bites the other greyhounds so that they cannot run either.’1 But Berlin found Austin sympathetic, not so much for the ferocity with which he argued, but because Austin, like the later Wittgenstein, rejected the doctrine that one could assemble a logically perfect language capable of reflecting the structure of reality. Unlike Ayer, who started with the verification principle and rejected an argument if it appeared to conflict with that principle, Austin believed that the only way to analyse knowledge, belief and experience was to study how people actually use words; and he rejected distinctions between empirical and logical truths – between those terms necessary to what Berlin calls ‘all-or-nothing’ philosophies.2
Austin too was a theorist. He invented the theory of the illocutionary use of language (performatory, ascriptive and prescriptive expressions), and he believed in systems and in teamwork for cracking philosophical conundrums, which Berlin did not – much. But Austin did not take problems and force them into a Procrustean bed of a single all-embracing system. Whereas some logical positivists faced with a problem reformulated it in their own terms so that it ceased to be the problem it was, or else rejected it as a pseudo-problem, Austin took every problem as it came. Like Dr Johnson, Austin had a fine scorn for determinism as a doctrine which flew in the face of all experience; and this too Berlin found sympathetic – he does not see human beings as flies struggling vainly in the cobweb of historical causation, incapable of acting as free agents.
But sympathetic as Austin was to him personally and encouraging as his precept was to consider language as an act, something people do in a particular situation, Berlin’s pluralism stands independent from Oxford philosophy; and it is arguable that it is never more palpable and convincing than when he writes about people. Nobody else in our time has invested ideas with such personality; no one has given them corporeal shape and breathed life into them more than Berlin; and he succeeds in doing so because ideas for him are not mere abstractions. They live – how else could they live? – in the minds of men and women, inspiring them, shaping their lives, influencing their actions and changing the course of history. But it is men and women who create these ideas and embody them. Some are scholars enclosed in their hermetic world, despising histrionics, intrigue, ambition – the game of getting on and cashing in. They recoil when confronted with brutal discourtesy, or mere counter-assertion in argument, intended to bludgeon an opponent to the ground, because they find such behaviour intensely distasteful. And yet, wholly admirable as such men are and impressive as their standard of value is, theirs is not the only way of reflecting upon life, nor are their values the one sure guide for mankind. Isaiah Berlin has compared the murmur of Bloomsbury to chamber music: and chamber music certainly resembles that exchange of views, voice answering voice, between intellectuals, like a never-ending series of telephone calls, which so delighted him as a young don in the 1930s. But this is not the only kind of existence to be regarded as admirable or profitable. Chamber music is indeed an austere and demanding musical form: neither Beethoven nor Bach wrote more profound works than the posthumous quartets or the partitas. But symphonies, great choral works and operas demanding a huge orchestra and more than half a dozen soloists also delight and astonish us, and we would think it absurd if some pedant declared that they were all vulgar or grandiose.
Why then should we not recognise that the world of affairs has its own validity and is governed by its own rules? Why should we not admit that statesmen cannot be scholars or scholars statesmen, just as long ago the Church divided mankind into the laity, the secular clergy and ‘religious’? ‘Life’, writes Berlin, ‘may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others.’1 Bloomsbury had a right to their own scale of values: but they were in error when they assumed that all sensible and intelligent individuals should conform to it. It is all very well to believe that you have discovered the truth about ethics, history, painting and personal relations; but to declare that anyone in the vast world who does not accept these conclusions is either a fool or a knave is grotesque. Statesmen must, therefore, display very different qualities and live by ideals far removed from those of the scholars who later interpret them. Pluralism means the acceptance of a multitude of ideals appropriate in different circumstances and for men of different callings. Indeed there are different kinds of statesmen and it would be foolish to judge that one type inspired by one set of ideas is necessarily worse than another type acting under the influence of a different set of ideas. At one point, in describing Roosevelt, Berlin contrasts two types of statesmen, the first consisting of men of single principle and fanatical vision, ignoring men and events and bending them to their powerful will, the second consisting of men who possess delicate antennae which enable them to sense how events are moving and how their fellow citizens feel, to divine where the means lie for effecting what they desire; ‘the distinction I am drawing’, writes Berlin, ‘is not a moral one, not one of value but one of type’.1 In each category some are noble or attractive, some dubious or deplorable. On the one hand there stand Garibaldi, Trotsky, Parnell, de Gaulle, Woodrow Wilson and Hitler; on the other Bismarck, Lincoln, Lloyd George, Masaryk, Gladstone and Roosevelt.
Immediately we begin to see that many of the moral judgements commonly made about politics are simply untrue. It is not true that good men alone bring dignity and prosperity to their people. But neither is it true, as so-called realists like to argue, that desirable ends in politics are nearly always achieved by employing undesirable means. Honourable and conscientious men have all too often failed ignominiously to govern well, while ruffians and fanatics have imposed law and order upon chaotic conditions and replaced enfeebled popular governments by vigorous despotic regimes. But it is also true that tyrants such as Hitler have died seeing the empire they created crumbling before their eyes, while indomitable leaders such as Ben-Gurion, pursuing justice and independence, lead their compatriots out of the wilderness and die lapped by the waves of their gratitude. Berlin is no Mosca or Michels, the kind of political realist who relishes telling his readers that, if the State is to defy its enemies, society to be stable and the masses happy, the ticket you buy for such a performance will cost you dear in lost liberties, the deaths of innocent creatures and the execution of opponents of the regime. Too high a price and Berlin, like Ivan Karamazov, would return his ticket.2 He is not a party man. He joins no camp and excludes as few visionaries as possible. Both Tolstoy and Marx he considers mistaken but far fuller of truth than of error, and worthy of the deepest respect. Belinsky, a fierce believer in one ideology after another, dedicated to propagating the truth as he saw it, intolerant of anyone whom he considered to be wilfully living a life of error, is most unlike Weizmann, the politician whom Berlin so admires; but the human race would be impoverished without men such as Belinsky. That is why he chooses the éloge as his paradigm. It is a way of expressing the variety of life, or reminding us how in someone who at first sight seems antipathetic or perverse good qualities abound: how the person in question lives by standards entirely appropriate to his calling. For unless society acknowledges that men both do and should live according to different ideals, the men and women within it will not be free.
Like all thinkers of importance Isaiah Berlin writes in a style which is entirely his and his alone and without which he could not express his meaning. In recent years it has become even more personal as he records what he has to say on tape and amends the transcript to produce the final draft. Such a method would be ruinous for most writers; but Berlin’s mind is of such distinction that he thinks and speaks, whether in a room among friends or on the rostrum delivering a lecture, in long periods, clause upon clause, the predicate lengthening out into a profusion of participles, a manner which in the hands of other men would have become a cumbersome imitation of Cicero. He is not a Henry Moore shaping a great mass of stone which relates human beings to the elemental forces of nature. Rather he resembles a Seurat, a pointillist who peppers his canvas with a fusillade of adjectives, epithets, phrases, analogies, elucidations and explanations so that at last a particular idea, a principle of action, a vision of life emerges before our eyes in all its complexity; and no sooner have we comprehended it than he begins using the same methods to create a conflicting or, it may be, a complementary vision of life, so that by contrast we may understand the first conception better. He will always use two words where one will not do. He has no fear that his reader will get lost in the labyrinth of his sentences, because they have the rhythm and the spring of the spoken word. He defends what he calls Churchill’s Johnsonian prose. The self-conscious revival of the style of a bygone age, such as the Gothic Revival, need not be fake; it can be genuine. And Churchill’s prose is a projection of himself and his vision of history, highly coloured, vivid, big, bright, unsubtle, addressed to the world at large, not a vehicle for introspection or the private life, but suffused with deep sentiment for his own country and its place in the hierarchy of nations. Berlin’s style reflects his own sense of values no less faithfully.
For, of course, he is a man with a sharp sense of right and wrong. No one should suppose that a pluralist is a relativist. He is as much entitled to his vision of life as the Catholic or the Marxist. Berlin reminds us that a vision should not be expected to be as precise as an equation.
Nor do we complain of ‘escapism’ or perversion of the facts [he writes] until the categories adopted are thought to do too much violence to the ‘facts’. To interpret, to relate, to classify, to symbolise are those natural and unavoidable human activities which we loosely and conveniently describe as thinking. We complain, if we do, only when the result is too widely at variance with the common outlook of our own society and age and tradition.1
That is, not the conventional wisdom or even the accepted beliefs of a culture, but the very concepts and categories in which we can hardly help thinking, being who we are and when and where we exist. What, then, is Isaiah Berlin’s own vision of life and what are the virtues he particularly esteems?
His heart has always been given to the life of the mind and to Oxford. Oxford has sustained him as a scholar and he has tried to repay the debt by helping to found a graduate college and assuming other duties he would not otherwise have willingly performed. He has deliberately chosen to praise men very different in temperament from himself, austere or withdrawn figures, not perhaps noted for their ebullient humour, scholars who thought a day lost if fourteen hours had not been spent in the Bodleian, college men whose minds sucked up like a sponge details in the accounts such as the singular low rate of interest earned by the reserve building fund. He practised pluralism in life: he genuinely admired those who were, like himself, indisputably intellectuals but more severe and dry. Yet even among such he cannot help making us aware that it is useless to expect them all to exhibit the same good qualities. Hubert Henderson and Richard Pares were good college men, but would it not be ludicrous to blame the shy Plamenatz for detesting committees and the noise of repartee in the common room after a feast? And would it not be equally ludicrous to condemn those who liked noise, such as Maurice Bowra, who preferred vehemence to reticence, pleasure to austerity, exuberance to melancholy, intellectual gaiety and the deflating of the establishment, the self-important and the pompous, to pietas and gravitas? High spirits are also part of what a university should prize. Professors such as Felix Frankfurter, effervescent, dispelling the prim self-consciousness that is the bane of academic communities, preferring the company of his younger colleagues to the right-thinking conventional men who consider themselves to be the arbiters of academic life – they too are essential to a great university.
Nowhere does Isaiah Berlin better reveal his commitment to Oxford and the life of the mind than in his incomparable essay on John Austin, worthy to rank with Keynes’s memories of his early beliefs, in which he describes Austin pursuing truth without regard for friend or foe or for the consequences, and with a single-mindedness which Berlin found later only when he got to know Keynes’s mentor G. E. Moore. There will be some who will regard his description of what was actually discussed in that seminar as final proof that British philosophy loses itself in a wilderness of pedantry. They will be wrong. Philosophers of every age, Plato’s disciples, the schoolmen, Cartesians, Hegelians, have always worked on minute points, or upon sharply defined problems such as perception and epistemology. Berlin is not complacent. Looking back, he thinks those young dons such as himself who took part in Austin’s seminar were too self-centred to publish much. They were gratified enough if one of their points won acceptance from the rest of the group. But, as he says, those who have never believed that they and their colleagues were discovering for the first time new truths which would have profound consequences for their subject, ‘those who have never been under the spell of this kind of illusion, even for a short while, have not known true intellectual happiness’.1
Scholars are often bores – even the greatest among them. One day when Berlin was a young man a scholar called on him who was regarded by some people as a genius and by others as a champion among bores. This was Namier and, as Berlin says, ‘He was, in fact, both.’2 Not that Berlin was bored. Not even when Namier explained to him slowly and at length, not once but several times, that he was wasting his life because Marx was someone unworthy to occupy his attention and because ideas were merely the product of men’s subconscious drives for power, glory, wealth and pleasure, was he cast down. When Namier explained that the reason why England was a great power, at once humane and civilised, was precisely that the English recognised how unimportant ideas were and kept intellectuals firmly in their place, he became even more interested and over the years treasured with amusement examples of Namier’s more terrifying insults. For this mounting interest there were two reasons. Unlike other scholars who when told that their subject is worthless write off their persecutor as a maniac, Berlin asked himself why it was that Namier thought as he did and what sort of a man he was. Namier seemed to him to be both the most anti-metaphysical of rationalists, at one with the analyses of Mach and Freud or later of the Vienna circle, yet at the same time a Jew and, like Disraeli, a nationalist and a romantic. What was more he was an East European Jew. What was best he was a Zionist.
From the time that he was a boy at St Paul’s Isaiah Berlin was a Zionist. This loyalty inspired some of his finest writing. Some Zionists despise and hate Jews who assimilate successfully to the culture of the country in which they live: but not Berlin. He has no quarrel with the children or grandchildren of those whom Namier called ‘trembling Israelites’,1 men and women of Jewish descent who have long ceased to tremble, and live happily among their neighbours, accepted for what they are, who are free from envy, anxiety and apprehension and who do not observe Jewish rituals or festivals and indeed may be hostile to religion as such. He may, it is true, regard as faintly odious the contortions of those Jews who attract attention to their origins by their efforts to suppress them, who wince at hearing the name of Zion mentioned and would prefer to be strolling in the Long Room at Lord’s wearing the tie of the Marylebone Cricket Club. Similarly, although he does not seek out their company, he would not decline to talk to those Foreign Office officials whose whole training has been devoted to fostering sound pro-Arab policies and distrust of Israel. He knows well that some of those whom he fascinates harbour in their secret heart mild anti-Semitic views, upper-class people who almost forget he is a Jew because, devoid of anxiety or resentment about the matter, he is as secure in his Jewishness as they are in their cocoon. Indeed he has a keen eye for those snubs, insults, pin-pricks and acts of exclusion to which even now Jews are subjected in ordinary life. Others, smooth as Jacob’s hands, may make light of such things or ignore them; but for him such humiliations convince him of the necessity of the State of Israel. He did not become a Zionist because the Jews should inhabit their natural land promised them by Jehovah. He became a Zionist because he wanted there to be somewhere on earth where Jews are not always in a minority, fearful that, if they did not behave well and ape an alien culture, the Gentiles would despise them – or even murder or expel them. You feel that he speaks for himself when, writing about Weizmann, he notes how ‘Martyrs, failures, casualties, victims of circumstance or of their own absurdities – the stock subjects of the mocking, sceptical Jewish sense of humour – filled him with distress and disgust.’1 The mordant, sophisticated jokes of central European Jews (‘I have bad luck: every time I buy a dwarf it grows’) – jokes full of avant-garde sophistication, cynicism, and vulgarity masking a desperate political fanaticism – are not for him. Again, when he speaks of Weizmann’s love of England, the respect which as an East European Jew he had for its humane democracy, its civil liberty, legal equality, toleration, moderation, dislike of extremes and lack of cruelty, even its taste for the odd and the eccentric, Berlin is saying something about his own love for the country in which his parents settled.
For a few years during the war Berlin worked on the staff of the British Embassy in Washington, and he has measured all the imponderables, the might-have-beens, the swing of the pendulum of fate which led to the collapse of his hopes and those of Weizmann that Britain might have been the willing midwife at the birth of Israel. He never excuses his own misapprehensions but nor does he admit error when in fact despite events he was at the time right.
Some may have wondered whether he suffered from divided loyalties. Such doubts used long ago to be entertained about Catholics and there were plenty of worldly-wise establishmentarians such as Harold Nicolson who considered that it was unwise to employ Jews in the Foreign Office because they were ‘not one of us’ and could hardly be expected to recognise that British oil interests in Arab States were paramount. Dual allegiance can create tensions and strain loyalty; it is untrue to deny that the problem exists. But it did not exist for Berlin. He had no doubt that he was a servant in Washington of the British Government, of his own country, a country which had not conscripted him or compelled him to hold views and pursue policies deeply repugnant to him. He was under no constraint. As a civilian he was free, even in wartime, to resign. And being free he had no right to disobey or cavil. He took for granted the supremacy of total loyalty to England, which at one time had stood alone against Hitler. The clarity and purity of his moral perception relieved him of those fearful upheavals and soul-searchings which lesser men suffered over such issues as the atom bomb. Occasionally, of course, in discussing the Middle East with his colleagues in the embassy, most of whom were anti-Zionist, he found himself in disagreement and hence in some discomfort. Again, it was painful for him when some fanatical Zionists considered him tainted by his British allegiance. But discomfort or pain are different from moral contortion and strain. For had he suffered in that way then indeed the contention held by the Nicolsons of this world that no one can loyally serve two ideals would gain credence and provide tinder for xenophobia in general and anti-Semitism in particular. Nor does he stop at dual loyalties. As a pluralist he sees no contradiction in observing quadruple or quintuple loyalties.
Nevertheless it was perhaps the experiences of those years which determined him, except for a short sojourn in Moscow, never to work again for any government. Nor was he dazzled by the powerful, and if they sought him out he did not necessarily respond. After the war Beaverbrook, who had heard of Berlin’s renowned weekly telegram to the Foreign Office, a commentary on the Washington political scene, summoned him and used all his repertoire of blandishments to inveigle Berlin to write for his papers. Beaverbrook was incredulous when his overtures were not immediately accepted. ‘Why, Arnold Bennett wrote for me until the last breath he drew’ – why should not Mr Berlin accept? There could be luxurious living which he, Beaverbrook, knew well how to arrange. There could be – and it was an offer, he declared, which was not made to many – there could be a discreet flat where Berlin could entertain – a lady; indeed ladies, if need be, could even materialise. The offer was not taken up. Shortly after, Berlin was denounced by one of Beaverbrook’s minions in a leading article. Berlin enormously enjoyed the episode.
‘The Jews are a peculiar and difficult people in many ways,’ he has written, ‘not least because their history has contradicted most of the best-known and most admired theories of historical causation.’1 In the history of the Jews and in the creation of the State of Israel Berlin finds his most telling argument against those who maintain that history is the study of classes and social movements, impersonal forces such as demography and climatic changes, of technological development and terms of trade. In Braudel’s great work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, the Spanish King makes his appearance only well on into the second volume, and for the most part, along with other princes and geniuses of that time, does not cut much of a figure. That is not how Berlin sees history. The foundation of the State of Israel was inherently improbable. That it came about was principally due, in Berlin’s view, to a great statesman, Chaim Weizmann. No explanation of how it came about which eliminated Weizmann would hold water. And so little is history inevitable or determined that Weizmann’s own reasonable assumptions and policies for bringing about the birth of the State were blown away by incalculable and fortuitous events.
The foundation of the State of Israel is not the only example in our times of the actions of individuals confounding determinism in history. The resistance by the British in 1940, or Hitler’s invasion of Russia a year later, are as telling. If Weizmann was a great man because by his intervention in history he made the improbable happen, so were Churchill and Roosevelt. But the question immediately bursts in the sky like a shower of fireworks: how are we to regard great men? Berlin would vehemently deny that great men are beyond moral scrutiny, as Hegel declared they were. In praise of Weizmann he declares: ‘[He] committed none of those enormities for which men of action, and later their biographers, claim justification, on the ground of what is called raison d’état […]. Weizmann, despite his reputation as a master of realpolitik, forged no telegrams, massacred no minorities, executed and incarcerated no political opponents.’1 Politicians should not sacrifice, even when trapped in a crisis, the accepted standards of private morality to the alleged claims of the State or some interest group. Yet at the same time, while you may, if you choose, ask questions about a great man which would be perfectly appropriate if you were considering the life of one of your friends – whether he was kind, sensitive, good company – you should recognise that these are not the most important questions. It is more appropriate to ask what this statesman achieved, what was his vision of life and how it affected his policies. Just as Matthew Arnold declared that any translation of Homer should recognise that Homer was noble and sublime and wrote in the grand manner, so Berlin suggests that Roosevelt’s critics should recognise that it was due to his personality that America was regarded on his death as the natural champion of democracy and of humane social policies. It was Roosevelt who gave Americans a status both inside and outside their country which they had never had before; and in achieving this he never sacrificed any fundamental political principle to retain power nor whipped up wicked passions to crush his enemies. And similarly Churchill was recognised all over the world as the man who had saved his country and prevented Europe from falling under an evil power. Both men had, and will always have, their critics, and part of what these critics say will be true. But their criticisms pale beside the qualities, the style and the achievements which these men displayed; and they displayed them because they were animated each by a vision of life – Churchill ruling his days and controlling his passions by his sense of the past and of his place in history, Roosevelt understanding the future and shaping his policies so as to give Americans the maximum scope to deal with its problems. Devoted though he is to the virtues of the private life, Berlin has a just estimate of public virtue.
Few of us have the imagination or the integrity to see life as a whole, but you do not have to be a statesman or an artist to have a vision of life. There are people in every class in society who do so and Berlin records how in 1946, when staying at the embassy in Paris, he met such a person. This was Auberon Herbert, who having held him not in conversation but in monologue long after everyone else had retired, when Berlin was hoping for a few hours’ sleep before departing at five the next morning, followed him to his bedroom and stayed talking. Berlin says he did not find this strange; he could hardly have done so, since in those days he was capable of doing exactly that himself if, as was always so, plenty was still left to say. Berlin came to realise then and in the subsequent years of friendship that Herbert did not merely hold strong, quixotic, eccentric and sometimes deplorable views, but that he lived under the spell of a code, in part that of the landed aristocracy, but made all the more piquant by a singular fastidiousness and generosity of spirit. It was a limited vision; it was a prejudiced vision; but it was not an ignoble vision. As Berlin puts it, Herbert disliked philistines, cowards and hypocrites more than he disliked liars, barbarians or cunning adventurers. Bizarre as some of the ends were which he pursued without regard to whether the means existed to attain them, Herbert’s contempt for utilitarian principles was admirable precisely because his religion checked his natural lack of moderation.
It is more difficult for an intellectual to see the point of eccentricity in another intellectual – eccentricity not in his habits but in his rational and dispassionate analysis of phenomena. That Berlin was charmed by Aldous Huxley, a man of singular sweetness of nature, humility and range of mind, is not surprising. What is unusual is the way Berlin rejects the assumption common among intellectuals that Huxley wasted his maturity investigating paranormal psychology. On the contrary: perhaps no one since Spinoza has believed as unswervingly as Huxley that knowledge liberates; and Berlin praises Huxley for extending the panorama of knowledge to include occult as well as open knowledge. He believes that Huxley had an insight into what may prove to be the field in which the greatest advances will be made in the next century: in the relation of body to mind and of myth and ritual to empirical investigation.
No one should suppose that these éloges emerge from a vapid disposition. Dear people exist who have never been heard to say a harsh word about anyone: for the good reason that they have taught themselves to live in a world of their own imagining where none hear, see or speak evil. Berlin is not one of them. He is not blind to human failings and is quick to spot the feet of clay of those he likes or esteems as well as of those whom he thinks of little account. As Jack Gallagher at Cambridge used to say, each of us has awful friends; and we are all somebody’s awful friend. But if Isaiah Berlin cannot help regarding some awful people with sympathy and affection, even if they embarrass him, there are others who seem to him not merely awful but unattractive because they are insensitive or inhuman. He distinguishes between the awful and the bad. It is bad to be the kind of careerist who begins life as an oily opportunist only too willing to betray his friends in a crisis and ends it by gratuitously harming others in order to feed his unappeasable appetite for power and position. Others are worse than bad: downright evil or sinister or both. The sinister and evil are quite different from certain able and successful men and women whom he would rather not meet but, if he did, would make the best of it. They are different again from certain types of celebrities or snobs or complacent bien pensants or proud and corrupt European aristocrats who lie on the other side of his frontier of tolerance. The sinister and evil give him the horrors and, if faced by them, he melts from the room like a displeased ghost vanishing.
Unlike some who have such a sharp eye he is not interested – none less so – in doing others down. He may be censorious but, unlike many moralists, censoriousness is not a state of mind in which he finds pleasure. In the act of observing a crook or a charlatan, a dullard or a devious fellow, he enjoys discovering redeeming features. Redemption not condemnation, merits not failings, stimulate him to write; and when he writes he chooses those he wants to praise and particularises only their good qualities. He hardly ever attributes defects: defects he generalises. For instance, if he saw fit to praise a man for the style, even the abandon, with which he dressed, he would contrast him with those who are natty or trendy – and leave his reader to guess who they were. Like Hamlet he stands amazed at what a piece of work is a man; unlike Hamlet he delights in man.
Human beings delight him because he possesses a special gift which some of those who make sapient judgements upon people singularly lack. That is an irrepressible sense of humour. Its special qualities are spontaneity, playfulness, delight in absurdity. It is not entirely English: it owes something to his Russian origins. It is like the humour which bubbles up like a spring in Dostoevsky and is at the heart of Chekhov. Not for nothing did he regard the composer Nicolas Nabokov, whose sense of comedy was highly developed, with special affection: he loves jokes and lightheartedness even when they spring from the facetious schoolboy humour with which Churchill used to discomfit his enemies, entertain his friends and hearten his countrymen.
These tributes, then, are not sketches thrown on one side, the refuse of the artist’s studio. They are as much part of Isaiah Berlin’s oeuvre as are his essays on liberty and on the intellectuals of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. No one can understand ideas unless he sees them as the expression of the passions, desires, longings and frustrations of human beings; and the word ‘life’ itself has no meaning unless it calls to mind men and women – past, present and to come.
1 168.
2 172.
1 5–6.
1 450.
2 Karamazov says: ‘too high a price has been placed on harmony. We cannot afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket of admission.’ The Brothers Karamazov, book 5, chapter 4: trans. David Magarshack (Harmondsworth, 1958), i 287.
1 6.
1 176.
2 131.
1 [Renamed ‘trembling amateur gentiles’ by IB.]
1 94.
1 Zionist Politics in Wartime Washington: A Fragment of Personal Reminiscence (Jerusalem, 1972), 67; reprinted in Flourishing (xxii/2), 692–3.
1 80.