Books: Byron instead of Vietnam

A new volume of lectures gives us Isaiah Berlin in his own words.

The Roots of Romanticism

by Isaiah Berlin ed Henry Hardy Chatto pounds 20

When he died in 1997, at the ripe age of 88 but still seemingly in possession of his extraordinary intellectual capacities, Sir Isaiah Berlin swiftly became the subject of an intelligent, sympathetic biography by Michael Ignatieff and a scorching piece of invective from Christopher Hitchens. Nothing now written on the subject can be taken seriously unless it faces the Hitchens challenge. Not all Hitchens's assaults need to be taken so seriously; he sometimes misses his target. But this time, for sure, the argument and the verdict cannot be dodged.

The new volume of Berlin lectures is not some rehash of previous published work. As the devoted editor Dr Henry Hardy explains, it is the first authentic, properly edited edition of possibly the most prestigious lectures Berlin ever delivered - the A W Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in March and April 1965. As Hardy notes, Berlin himself had doubts about some aspects of what he had said, but not about the general theme. He had hoped to expand his original series of lectures - a "tour de force of the extempore lecturer's art", according to Hardy - into a more deliberate and comprehensive study. Maybe he had second thoughts himself about the conclusions he had tentatively reached. Anyhow, here is Isaiah Berlin at the height of his glory, speaking for himself. Even without the Ignatieff-Hitchens interruptions, it would all be well worth hearing.

The 1960s could have been, and should have been, the moment when the great liberal philosopher gave his view on the conduct of American politics or the American century, as it is sometimes called. The 1960s were also the period when some great American scholars of one breed or another had embarked on their studies of the romantic Byron which critically contributed to the revival of his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic in the past half-century. Leslie Marchand published his great three-volume life in 1957; Truman Guy Steffan his The Making of a Masterpiece: the facsimile Don Juan in the same year. Jerome McGann published his first epoch-making Byron study, Fiery Dust, in 1968. All these developments might have been expected to influence the romantic atmosphere.

The Byron who had launched his Don Juan with the cry "I will not give way to all the cant of Christendom", did not figure quite so honourably in the Isaiah Berlin calculations. He was given a special prominence as one of the creators of the whole Romantic movement, but denied the individual mastery of his later achievement. Berlin seemed to concentrate all his interest on the Byron of his early romances, Lara, The Corsair and Manfred, with no place left, in practice or theory, for the Byron of Beppo or Don Juan or Sardanapalus. Indeed, Sardanapalus makes his entry in Berlin's transposition as some recreated Lara and not as the king of peace, the creator of real revolution. Berlin's errors of such a nature are rare indeed; maybe it was a theoretical weakness: he was too eager to deny how the most fervent romantics could turn realist, and make their words most like things.

Berlin was often seen or hailed by his admirers as the most consistent and persistent liberal voice of the century. His cultural and historical interests crossed every frontier; he could speak heaven knows how many languages; he had heroes of his own whom he could make especially endearing to his readers - Alexander Herzen, or Moses Hess - and yet he could pick an English mentor as the one who taught him most truly. He wrote one of his best ever essays on John Stuart Mill, and concluded thus: "One of the symptoms of Mill's kind of three-dimensional, rounded, authentic quality is that we feel sure that we can tell where he would have stood on the issues of our own day. Can anyone doubt what position he would have taken on the Dreyfus case, on Munich, or Suez or Budapest, or Apartheid or Colonialism or the Wolfenden report?" Or Vietnam, we must painfully add.

Berlin's piece on Mill was published first in 1959; it underlines for sure how well Berlin did understand the liberal tradition and how well he must have known that it was the duty of philosophers to practise what they preach.

Which brings us, alas, to the Christopher Hitchens horror story, which, I fear, cannot be escaped or dismissed. His report on the matter is not of some casual remarks or lapses by Berlin. It is rather a report, based on the evidence of Berlin's own correspondence, of what was his attitude about the political and military leaders who were conducting the war in Vietnam. According to Hitchens, nothing about his real attitude on this matter appeared in Ignatieff's biography, although Hitchens had taken special efforts to remind him. Instead, Berlin is quoted as describing himself as a "last feeble echo of J S Mill to be treated gently as a harmless, respectable old relic" - an especially awkward reference in the light of Berlin's own understanding of how bravely Mill had spoken out in defence of unpopular causes and how Berlin appreciated the tradition. It does appear instead that Berlin himself was so wedded to the American cause that he would forgive any infamy.