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In November Stallworthy sent Berlin a long list of queries about the final text of the Introduction, but it was February 1968 before Berlin replied. In his letter (reproduced on page 2 below) he wrote:
I see that gradually but inexorably I am becoming if not your most intolerable (though I may be that too) certainly your most time- consuming author. At the risk of inflicting a blow upon you which may seriously endanger your health - such health and optimism as you may have regained during your recent holiday -1 propose to inflict yet another hideous blow upon you [...] It has been represented to me by kind friends (for once genuinely kind) that the book might be improved by the inclusion in it of yet another essay on the same subject, namely my Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society a few years ago, the title of which was 'From Hope and Fear Set Free'. This would make a fifth essay in the book and the title could be altered from 'Four Essays on Liberty' either to 'Five Essays on Liberty' or simply 'Essays on Liberty', since five essays perhaps begin to deserve that title. The piece in question is not the worst that I have written, and I should like it included.
He enclosed the necessary small changes to the first paragraph of the Introduction, and added in a covering manuscript note: 'I do indeed grovel before you: I cannot operate any differently from the way that I do: but why should you (or the printer) suffer? Determinism & the helplessness of man must be true after all.' Stallworthy's reply on the fifth essay was this:
Tempted as we are by the thought of a fifth essay, I'm very much afraid that it is now too late to include this. We have advertised 'Four Essays' in numerous catalogues, have made a block for the cover, have
(toposite) A page from the proofs of Four Essays on Liberty, see pp. 161-2 below. Berlin's long correction, which was not incorporated into the finished book in this form, reads as follows: 'Some thinkers seem to feel no intellectual discomfort in interpreting such concepts as responsibility, culpability, etc. in conformity with strict determinism. I must own that while the notion of uncaused choice, which is nevertheless not something out of the blue, is one of which I know of no adequate analysis, its opposite, a choice fully attributable to antecedent causes mental or physical, and yet regarded as entailing responsibility and therefore subject to moral praise or blame, seems to me even less intelligible. This difference, which has so deeply divided opinion, is the crux of the matter: a puzzle which has exercised some thinkers for more than two thousand years: while others either fail to see it, or have regarded it as a mere confusion. The present state of controversy seems to me much the same as in the days of the Greeks who first began it.'
worked out a published price on the basis of the present length, and - not last and not least - have set up as headline on every other page 'Four Essays on Liberty'.
Berlin replied:
I am naturally disappointed that you should consider it too late to include 'From Hope and Fear Set Free'. I am afraid that no further collection of essays on philosophical topics by myself will ever materialise [. ..] But this essay belongs as of right to the original collection which you are about to publish and, if not included there, can never be reprinted at all. This may seem to you (and, on reflection, to myself) not to be an appreciable loss to anyone; nevertheless, I should like to make a final plea, and beg you to consider whether perhaps it could not be substituted at the last moment for 'Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century', to which it is vastly superior. The changes required will, after all, not be very grave. It will mean the loss of one appendix[3] and one, by now, ancient piece - that really could reappear, if it were thought worthy, in some other collection. I do not underestimate the trouble to which I am putting you, but, for once, my desire to improve the volume - as this substitution undoubtedly would do - is much stronger than even my easily disturbed guilt about all this tiresome chopping and changing for which I have been responsible. Would you give the matter another thought? Could you attempt to soften the (by now) savage breast of your New York colleagues? I do beg you to consider this once again.
Far from softening a savage New York breast, this hardened an Oxford heart. Deciding that the time had come for straight speaking, Stallworthy asked Berlin to come and see him. He now takes up the story in his own words:
Berlin countered with an invitation to lunch in All Souls. 'Thank you, but no,' I replied. There had to be a show-down and I wanted the territorial advantage of my own corral. Berlin, recognising the strategy, proposed other meeting-places, pleaded pressure of work, but I said No: there would be no further progress on the book until we had met - at the Press - to discuss the situation. He prevaricated for some weeks, but finally agreed.
I waited for him that morning wearing my darkest suit, my darkest frown.
'Sir Isaiah . . .'
He interrupted my frontal attack with a raised hand and a rapid
' This now appears as note r to p. 69 below.
diversionary manoeuvre: 'They tell me you're translating Blok. ' Greatest poet of the Revolution. Did you know his wife? No? I met her. Must tell you about her.' And he did - brilliantly.
'Sir Isaiah . . .'
Again the raised hand - and now the diversionary manoeuvre cunningly changed course: 'I know I've been tiresome, but I've been so busy, so distracted by this new College for homeless lecturers.' Thirty-four years later, as a Fellow of that College, I am amused to remember the old magician's revolutionary peroration: 'I will take them from the highways and byways. They will be the sweepings of the streets, but they will inherit the earth!'