Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and

  measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books,

  to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a

  certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed

  hypocrisy--their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for

  instance--is bound up with this. Also, in moments of supreme crisis the

  whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of

  instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost

  everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the

  Germans, 'a sleep-walking people', would have been better applied to the

  English. Not that there is anything to be proud of in being called a

  sleep-walker.

  But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well

  marked though not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This

  is one of the first things that one notices when one reaches England from

  abroad, especially if one is coming from southern Europe. Does it not

  contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not really, because it

  is found in people who have no aesthetic feelings whatever. What it does

  link up with, however, is another English characteristic which is so much

  a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to

  hobbies and spare-time occupations, the PRIVATENESS of English life. We

  are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors,

  pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players,

  crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres

  round things which even when they are communal are not official--the

  pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the 'nice cup

  of tea'. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in

  the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty,

  the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home

  of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own

  amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above. The most

  hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of

  course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like all

  other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered,

  labelled, conscripted, 'co-ordinated'. But the pull of their impulses is

  in the other direction, and the kind of regimentation that can be imposed

  on them will be modified in consequence. No party rallies, no Youth

  Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or 'spontaneous'

  demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.

  But in all societies the common people must live to some extent AGAINST

  the existing order. The genuinely popular culture of England is something

  that goes on beneath the surface, unofficially and more or less frowned

  on by the authorities. One thing one notices if one looks directly at the

  common people, especially in the big towns, is that they are not

  puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their

  wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the

  foulest language in the world. They have to satisfy these tastes in the

  face of astonishing, hypocritical laws (licensing laws, lottery acts,

  etc. etc.) which are designed to interfere with everybody but in practice

  allow everything to happen. Also, the common people are without definite

  religious belief, and have been so for centuries. The Anglican Church

  never had a real hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed

  gentry, and the Nonconformist sects only influenced minorities. And yet

  they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling, while almost

  forgetting the name of Christ. The power-worship which is the new

  religion of Europe, and which has infected the English intelligentsia,

  has never touched the common people. They have never caught up with power

  politics. The 'realism' which is preached in Japanese and Italian

  newspapers would horrify them. One can learn a good deal about the spirit

  of England from the comic coloured postcards that you see in the windows

  of cheap stationers' shops. These things are a sort of diary upon which

  the English people have unconsciously recorded themselves. Their

  old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of

  bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral

  attitude to life, are all mirrored there.

  The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked

  characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil.

  It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen

  carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to

  shove people off the pavement. And with this goes something that is

  always written off by European observers as 'decadence' or hypocrisy, the

  English hatred of war and militarism. It is rooted deep in history, and

  it is strong in the lower-middle class as well as the working class.

  Successive wars have shaken it but not destroyed it. Well within living

  memory it was common for 'the redcoats' to be booed at in the streets and

  for the landlords of respectable public houses to refuse to allow

  soldiers on the premises. In peace time, even when there are two million

  unemployed, it is difficult to fill the ranks of the tiny standing army,

  which is officered by the country gentry and a specialized stratum of the

  middle class, and manned by farm labourers and slum proletarians. The

  mass of the people are without military knowledge or tradition, and their

  attitude towards war is invariably defensive. No politician could rise to

  power by promising them conquests or military 'glory', no Hymn of Hate

  has ever made any appeal to them. In the last war the songs which the

  soldiers made up and sang of their own accord were not vengeful but

  humorous and mock-defeatist [Note, below]. The only enemy they ever named

  was the sergeant-major.

  [Note: For example:

  'I don't want to join the bloody Army,

  I don't want to go unto the war;

  I want no more to roam,

  I'd rather stay at home,

  Living on the earnings of a whore.

  But it was not in that spirit that they fought. (Author's footnote.)]

  In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the 'Rule Britannia' stuff,

  is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not

  vocal or even conscious. They do not retain among their historical

  memories the name of a single military victory. English literature, like

  other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that

  the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a

  tale of disasters and retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar

  or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John Moore's army at Corunna, fighting a

  desperate rearguard action before escaping overseas (just like Dunkirk!)

  has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most stirring battle-poem

  in English is about a brigade of cavalry whi
ch charged in the wrong

  direction. And of the last war, the four names which have really engraved

  themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and

  Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the great battles that

  finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the general public.

  The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign observers is

  that it ignores the existence of the British Empire. It looks like sheer

  hypocrisy. After all, the English have absorbed a quarter of the earth

  and held on to it by means of a huge navy. How dare they then turn round

  and say that war is wicked?

  It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire. In

  the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the

  Empire exists. But their dislike of standing armies is a perfectly sound

  instinct. A navy employs comparatively few people, and it is an external

  weapon which cannot affect home politics directly. Military dictatorships

  exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship.

  What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their

  hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash

  of boots. Decades before Hitler was ever heard of, the word 'Prussian'

  had much the same significance in England as 'Nazi' has today. So deep

  does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the officers of the

  British army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off

  duty.

  One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is

  the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual

  dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life.

  The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the

  world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an

  affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and

  intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its

  ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is 'Yes, I am

  UGLY, and you daren't laugh at me', like the bully who makes faces at his

  victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven

  knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce

  some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would

  laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in

  countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army. The

  Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed

  definitely under German control, and, as one would expect, they do it

  less well than the Germans. The Vichy government, if it survives, is

  bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground discipline into what is left

  of the French army. In the British army the drill is rigid and

  complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth century, but without

  definite swagger; the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a

  society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must

  never be taken out of the scabbard.

  And yet the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with

  barbarities and anachronisms. Our criminal law is as out-of-date as the

  muskets in the Tower. Over against the Nazi Storm Trooper you have got to

  set that typically English figure, the hanging judge, some gouty old

  bully with his mind rooted in the nineteenth century, handing out savage

  sentences. In England people are still hanged by the neck and flogged

  with the cat o' nine tails. Both of these punishments are obscene as well

  as cruel, but there has never been any genuinely popular outcry against

  them. People accept them (and Dartmoor, and Borstal) almost as they

  accept the weather. They are part of 'the law', which is assumed to be

  unalterable.

  Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for

  constitutionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something

  above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and

  stupid, of course, but at any rate INCORRUPTIBLE.

  It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that

  there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one

  accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the

  law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when

  it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything

  wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the

  atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling

  as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred

  Macartney's WALLS HAVE MOUTHS or Jim Phelan's JAIL JOURNEY, in the solemn

  idiocies that take place at the trials of conscientious objectors, in

  letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that

  this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'. Everyone believes in

  his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be

  impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such

  thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the

  intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

  An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a

  face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is 'just the

  same as' or 'just as bad as' totalitarianism never take account of this

  fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same

  as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective

  truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very

  powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life

  is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where

  are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in

  the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a

  certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but

  open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest

  of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the

  public mind, it cannot become COMPLETELY corrupt. You do not arrive at

  the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to

  vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even

  hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man

  in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will

  ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate

  interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances

  take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a

  symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and

  privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by

  which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

  iii.

  I have spoken all the while of 'the nation', 'England', 'Britain', as

  though forty-five million souls could somehow be treated as a unit. But

  is not England notorious
ly two nations, the rich and the poor? Dare one

  pretend that there is anything in common between people with �100,000 a

  year and people with �1 a week? And even Welsh and Scottish readers are

  likely to have been offended because I have used the word 'England'

  oftener than 'Britain', as though the whole population dwelt in London

  and the Home Counties and neither north nor west possessed a culture of

  its own.

  One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point

  first. It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel

  themselves to be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for

  instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see

  the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands

  by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the

  British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion.

  Even the differences between north and south England loom large in our

  own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the moment that any two

  Britons are confronted by a European. It is very rare to meet a

  foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English

  and Scots or even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the Breton and the

  Auvergnat seem very different beings, and the accent of Marseilles is a

  stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of 'France' and 'the French',

  recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization, which in fact it

  is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the outsider even the cockney

  and the Yorkshireman have a strong family resemblance.

  And even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat when one

  regards the nation from the outside. There is no question about the

  inequality of wealth in England. It is grosser than in any European

  country, and you have only to look down the nearest street to see it.

  Economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three or four. But

  at the same time the vast majority of the people FEEL themselves to be a

  single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more than they

  resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred,

  and always stronger than any kind of internationalism. Except for a brief

  moment in 1920 (the 'Hands off Russia' movement) the British working

  class have never thought or acted internationally. For two and a half

  years they watched their comrades in Spain slowly strangled, and never

  aided them by even a single strike [Note, below]. But when their own

  country (the country of Lord Nuffield and Mr Montagu Norman) was in

  danger, their attitude was very different. At the moment when it seemed

  likely that England might be invaded, Anthony Eden appealed over the radio

  for Local Defence Volunteers. He got a quarter of a million men in the

  first twenty-four hours, and another million in the subsequent month. One

  has only to compare these figures with, for instance, the number of

  conscientious objectors to see how vast is the strength of traditional

  loyalties compared with new ones.

  [Note: It is true that they aided them to a certain extent with money.

  Still, the sums raised for the various aid-Spain funds would not equal

  five per cent of the turnover of the football pools during the same

  period. (Author's footnote.)]

  In England patriotism takes different forms in different classes, but it

  runs like a connecting thread through nearly all of them. Only the

  Europeanized intelligentsia are really immune to it. As a positive

  emotion it is stronger in the middle class than in the upper class--the

  cheap public schools, for instance, are more given to patriotic

  demonstrations than the expensive ones--but the number of definitely

  treacherous rich men, the Laval-Quisling type, is probably very small. In

  the working class patriotism is profound, but it is unconscious. The

  working man's heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack. But the