'Born Under One Law, to Another Bound'

In his Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014), Michael Oakeshott poses an interesting comparison: “An odd contrast, more or less contemporaries, Tolstoy & Amiel. (I recollect that I came across them both at the same time, when I was about 17½, & both have remained with me.)” 

“Amiel” was Henri Frédéric Amiel (1821-81) a Swiss academic, a lonely, timid figure who found little solace in life. He never married, never had children. The book we know him for, his Journal Intime, was published the year after his death, and Mrs. Humphry Ward’s two-volume English translation appeared in 1885. Amiel distrusted the temptation to indulge in self-pity, unlike Tolstoy, who invented a vast self-mythology to protect and justify himself. And yet, Tolstoy was a genius, perhaps the only novelist (with Proust?) we can rank with Dante and Shakespeare, while Amiel was an interesting, poignant, essentially minor figure in the history of ideas. Oakeshott continues:

 

"Tolstoy (except in regard to whom he would marry; when he dithered) never had any difficulty in deciding. His only difficulty was his aptitude for making half a dozen ‘irrevocable’ & contradictory decisions in as many days.”

 

Tolstoy reminds us of a force of nature, a hurricane; Amiel, a warm afternoon in spring. Tolstoy’s marriage was grand opera, an endless comic drama. “Amiel could never decide anything,” Oakeshott continues. “But he managed to live in indecision, to make it a way of life. (Keats had something about this [‘negative capability’].)” As Keats puts it: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

 

Both writers were fascinated with themselves, though Amiel, not Tolstoy was gifted with self-knowledge. “On the other hand, Tolstoy,” Oakeshott writes, “Tolstoy, by a wonderful intuition, knew an enormous amount about other people; &, Amiel – some people (women) believed that they had never been so profoundly understood, but I doubt if he ever understood anyone but himself.”    

 

Tolstoy and Amiel form an interesting template for all of humanity. Their contradictions, within themselves and between them, stand as a ready tool for understanding the impossibility of understanding ourselves and others. They remain, like us, unresolvable contradictions, humanity in essence. Those looking for consistency in human behavior are doomed to frustration or self-deception. We are walking contradictions. The Elizabethan poet and dramatist Fulke Greville puts it like this in his closet drama Mustapha:

 

“O wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound;

Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?”

 

Greville has been championed by Yvor Winters and Thom Gunn, both mature poets who understood human contradiction. He was born on October 3, 1554, and died on this date, September 30, in 1628 at age seventy-three. He is  perhaps the greatest of under-appreciated English poets.