Free Ideas and the Novel by Mary McCarthy

the spread of Napoleonic daydreams to the youth of succeeding generations, but he sensed that the glorification of Napoleon was pernicious, whoever was affected by it. One of his main efforts in War and Peace is to cut the Idea on horseback down to size. This had nothing to do, I believe, with Russian patriotism—he was hard on the Russian generals too, with the exception of Kutuzov—and if he was more fiercely contemptuous of Napoleon than of, say, Prince Bagration, it was because the man in Napoleon, the parcel of common humanity, had been superseded by an enthroned Idea. The virtue Tolstoy sees in Kutuzov is that, far from claiming to embody in his stout, sleepy person an abstract notion of military genius, he has no particular ideas of strategy in warfare but proceeds by instinct, by a kind of animal cunning, like the fox’s. Tolstoy’s dislike of the French Emperor, for him inseparable from the tiresome, ridiculous “legend” that he sat for like a portrait, knows no bounds. It even makes him deride the cold Napoleon had on the day of Borodino as being even minimally responsible for the French setback there—a thought that ordinarily would have appealed to him since a cold is a little joke of Nature that can be played on a man of destiny as well as on anybody else. He will not allow Napoleon’s cold—inflated to scale by professional historians—to have had any weight at all in the affair.
    Tolstoy is not interested in the mighty social forces that may or may not have swept Napoleon and his have-nots to power on a tidal wave of discontent with the status quo ante. He is too pessimistic and, I should say, too acute an observer to expect great changes for humanity in the replacement of one form of power by another. The rapid ennoblement of have-nots into haves by the gift of offices, riches, and titles was only an acceleration of a common social process—the reward system had long been practiced by monarchies. In other words, the revolutionary content of the Napoleonic idea-on-the-march left him cold; he did not believe in its reality. What one finds in Le rouge et le noir and Les illusions perdues appears to bear him out. Despite the presence of a few lofty spirits—one being an ancient curé—notions of glory and sacrifice, when they are found at all, seem inextricable in most cases from notions of self-advancement, and this cannot be wholly the dampening effect of the Restoration of the Bourbons on young and ardent temperaments.
    If Tolstoy took the trouble to polemicize against Napoleon more than forty years after his death, it was not because of any practical harm to be expected from that quarter but because an Idea of him persisted that was injurious to the very act of thought as exemplified in the writing of history. The good reason one might have for such a preoccupation can be clearly seen in the concluding sentences of the article “Napoleon” in the 1911 Britannica: “...the great warrior, who died of cancer on the 5th of May, 1821, was thereafter enshrouded in mists of legend through which his form loomed as that of a Prometheus condemned to a lingering agony for his devotion to the cause of humanity.” Military prowess had fused with philanthropy. Tolstoy did not look on war as a benefaction and, as a Christian, he could never have sympathized with the picture of a latter-day Prometheus. It is a messianic concept, and there could be only one Messiah; later claimants were necessarily false, a series of vulgar impostors.
    He did not care for saviors in whatever shape they presented themselves. As is indicated in Anna Karenina, it is enough if a man is able to save his own soul by living for it, which is the same as living for God—the rest will take care of itself. This is the Tolstoyan message, which went through various stages but did not really change. It follows that any hypostasization, of a mental concept such as Hegel’s world-soul, or of an aggregate such as the nation, would be to him