Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

a Tory imperialist like Bernard Shaw, though HOW one knows it is not

  easy to say. In the case of Yeats, there must be some kind of connection

  between his wayward, even tortured style of writing and his rather

  sinister vision of life. Mr Menon is chiefly concerned with the

  esoteric philosophy underlying Yeats's work, but the quotations which

  are scattered all through his interesting book serve to remind one how

  artificial Yeats's manner of writing was. As a rule, this artificiality

  is accepted as Irishism, or Yeats is even credited with simplicity

  because he uses short words, but in fact one seldom comes on six

  consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an

  affected turn of speech. To take the nearest example:

  Grant me an old man's Frenzy,

  My self must I remake

  Till I am Timon and Lear

  Or that William Blake

  Who beat upon the wall

  Till Truth obeyed his call.

  The unnecessary "that" imports a feeling of affectation, and the same

  tendency is present in all but Yeats's best passages. One is seldom long

  away from a suspicion of "quaintness", something that links up not only

  with the 'nineties, the Ivory Tower and the "calf covers of pissed-on

  green", but also with Rackham's drawings, Liberty art-fabrics and the

  PETER PAN never-never land, of which, after all, "The Happy Townland" is

  merely a more appetising example. This does not matter, because, on the

  whole, Yeats gets away with it, and if his straining after effect is

  often irritating, it can also produce phrases ("the chill, footless

  years", "the mackerel-crowded seas") which suddenly overwhelm one like a

  girl's face seen across a room. He is an exception to the rule that poets

  do not use poetical language:

  How many centuries spent

  The sedentary soul

  In toils of measurement

  Beyond eagle or mole,

  Beyond hearing or seeing,

  Or Archimedes' guess,

  To raise into being

  That loveliness?

  Here he does not flinch from a squashy vulgar word like "loveliness" and

  after all it does not seriously spoil this wonderful passage. But the

  same tendencies, together with a sort of raggedness which is no doubt

  intentional, weaken his epigrams and polemical poems. For instance (I am

  quoting from memory) the epigram against the critics who damned THE

  PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD:

  Once when midnight smote the air

  Eunuchs ran through Hell and met

  On every crowded street to stare

  Upon great Juan riding by;

  Even like these to rail and sweat,

  Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

  The power which Yeats has within himself gives him the analogy ready

  made and produces the tremendous scorn of the last line, but even in

  this short poem there are six or seven unnecessary words. It would

  probably have been deadlier if it had been neater.

  Mr Menon's book is incidentally a short biography of Yeats, but he is

  above all interested in Yeats's philosophical "system", which in his

  opinion supplies the subject-matter of more of Yeats's poems than is

  generally recognised. This system is set forth fragmentarily in various

  places, and at full length in A VISION, a privately printed book which I

  have never read but which Mr Menon quotes from extensively. Yeats gave

  conflicting accounts of its origin, and Mr Menon hints pretty broadly

  that the "documents" on which it was ostensibly founded were imaginary.

  Yeats's philosophical system, says Mr Menon, "was at the back of his

  intellectual life almost from the beginning. His poetry is full of it.

  Without it his later poetry becomes almost completely unintelligible."

  As soon as we begin to read about the so-called system we are in the

  middle of a hocus-pocus of Great Wheels, gyres, cycles of the moon,

  reincarnation, disembodied spirits, astrology and what not. Yeats hedges

  as to the literalness with which he believed in all this, but he certainly

  dabbled in spiritualism and astrology, and in earlier life had made

  experiments in alchemy. Although almost buried under explanations, very

  difficult to understand, about the phases of the moon, the central idea of

  his philosophical system seems to be our old friend, the cyclical

  universe, in which everything happens over and over again. One has not,

  perhaps, the right to laugh at Yeats for his mystical beliefs--for I

  believe it could be shown that SOME degree of belief in magic is almost

  universal--but neither ought one to write such things off as mere

  unimportant eccentricities. It is Mr Menon's perception of this that

  gives his book its deepest interest. "In the first flush of admiration

  and enthusiasm," he says, "most people dismissed the fantastical

  philosophy as the price we have to pay for a great and curious

  intellect. One did not quite realise where he was heading. And those who

  did, like Pound and perhaps Eliot, approved the stand that he finally

  took. The first reaction to this did not come, as one might have

  expected, from the politically-minded young English poets. They were

  puzzled because a less rigid or artificial system than that of A VISION

  might not have produced the great poetry of Yeats's last days." It might

  not, and yet Yeats's philosophy has some very sinister implications, as

  Mr Menon points out.

  Translated into political terms, Yeats's tendency is Fascist. Throughout

  most of his life, and long before Fascism was ever heard of, he had had

  the outlook of those who reach Fascism by the aristocratic route. He is

  a great hater of democracy, of the modern world, science, machinery, the

  concept of progress--above all, of the idea of human equality. Much of

  the imagery of his work is feudal, and it is clear that he was not

  altogether free from ordinary snobbishness. Later these tendencies took

  clearer shape and led him to "the exultant acceptance of authoritarianism

  as the only solution. Even violence and tyranny are not necessarily

  evil because the people, knowing not evil and good, would become

  perfectly acquiescent to tyranny...Everything must come from

  the top. Nothing can come from the masses." Not much interested in

  politics, and no doubt disgusted by his brief incursions into public

  life, Yeats nevertheless makes political pronouncements. He is too big a

  man to share the illusions of Liberalism, and as early as 1920 he

  foretells in a justly famous passage ("The Second Coming") the kind of

  world that we have actually moved into. But he appears to welcome the

  coming age, which is to be "hierarchical, masculine, harsh, surgical",

  and is influenced both by Ezra Pound and by various Italian Fascist

  writers. He describes the new civilisation which he hopes and believes

  will arrive: "an aristocratic civilisation in its most completed form,

  every detail of life hierarchical, every great man's door crowded at

  dawn by petitioners, great wealth everywhere in a few men's hands, all

  dependent upon a few, up to the Emperor himself, who is a God dependent

  on a greater God, and everywhere, in Court, in the family, an inequality
/>
  made law." The innocence of this statement is as interesting as its

  snobbishness. To begin with, in a single phrase, "great wealth in a few

  men's hands", Yeats lays bare the central reality of Fascism, which the

  whole of its propaganda is designed to cover up. The merely political

  Fascist claims always to be fighting for justice: Yeats, the poet, sees

  at a glance that Fascism means injustice, and acclaims it for that very

  reason. But at the same time he fails to see that the new authoritarian

  civilisation, if it arrives, will not be aristocratic, or what he means

  by aristocratic. It will not be ruled by noblemen with Van Dyck faces,

  but by anonymous millionaires, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and murdering

  gangsters. Others who have made the same mistake have afterwards changed

  their views and one ought not to assume that Yeats, if he had lived

  longer, would necessarily have followed his friend Pound, even in

  sympathy. But the tendency of the passage I have quoted above is

  obvious, and its complete throwing overboard of whatever good the past

  two thousand years have achieved is a disquieting symptom.

  How do Yeat's political ideas link up with his leaning towards

  occultism? It is not clear at first glance why hatred of democracy and a

  tendency to believe in crystal-gazing should go together. Mr Menon only

  discusses this rather shortly, but it is possible to make two guesses.

  To begin with, the theory that civilisation moves in recurring cycles is

  one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. If it is

  true that "all this", or something like it, "has happened before", then

  science and the modern world are debunked at one stroke and progress

  becomes for ever impossible. It does not much matter if the lower orders

  are getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be returning

  to an age of tyranny. Yeats is by no means alone in this outlook. If the

  universe is moving round on a wheel, the future must be foreseeable,

  perhaps even in some detail. It is merely a question of discovering the

  laws of its motion, as the early astronomers discovered the solar year.

  Believe that, and it becomes difficult not to believe in astrology or

  some similar system. A year before the war, examining a copy of

  GRINGOIRE, the French Fascist weekly, much read by army officers, I

  found in it no less than thirty-eight advertisements of clairvoyants.

  Secondly, the very concept of occultism carries with it the idea that

  knowledge must be a secret thing, limited to a small circle of

  initiates. But the same idea is integral to Fascism. Those who dread the

  prospect of universal suffrage, popular education, freedom of thought,

  emancipation of women, will start off with a predilection towards secret

  cults. There is another link between Fascism and magic in the profound

  hostility of both to the Christian ethical code.

  No doubt Yeats wavered in his beliefs and held at different times many

  different opinions, some enlightened, some not. Mr Menon repeats for him

  Eliot's claim that he had the longest period of development of any poet

  who has ever lived. But there is one thing that seems constant, at least

  in all of his work that I can remember, and that is his hatred of modern

  western civilisation and desire to return to the Bronze Age, or perhaps

  to the Middle Ages. Like all such thinkers, he tends to write in praise

  of ignorance. The Fool in his remarkable play, THE HOUR-GLASS, is a

  Chestertonian figure, "God's fool", the "natural born innocent", who is

  always wiser than the wise man. The philosopher in the play dies on the

  knowledge that all his lifetime of thought has been wasted (I am quoting

  from memory again):

  The stream of the world has changed its course,

  And with the stream my thoughts have run

  Into some cloudly, thunderous spring

  That is its mountain-source;

  Ay, to a frenzy of the mind,

  That all that we have done's undone

  Our speculation but as the wind.

  Beautiful words, but by implication profoundly obscurantist and

  reactionary; for if it is really true that a village idiot, as such, is

  wiser than a philosopher, then it would be better if the alphabet had

  never been invented. Of course, all praise of the past is partly

  sentimental, because we do not live in the past. The poor do not praise

  poverty. Before you can despise the machine, the machine must set you free

  from brute labour. But that is not to say that Yeats's yearning for a more

  primitive and more hierarchical age was not sincere. How much of all

  this is traceable to mere snobbishness, product of Yeats's own position

  as an impoverished offshoot of the aristocracy, is a different question.

  And the connection between his obscurantist opinions and his tendency

  towards "quaintness" of language remains to be worked out; Mr Menon

  hardly touches upon it.

  This is a very short book, and I would greatly like to see Mr Menon go

  ahead and write another book on Yeats, starting where this one leaves

  off. "If the greatest poet of our times is exultantly ringing in an era

  of Fascism, it seems a somewhat disturbing symptom," he says on the last

  page, and leaves it at that. It is a disturbing symptom, because it is

  not an isolated one. By and large the best writers of our time have been

  reactionary in tendency, and though Fascism does not offer any real

  return to the past, those who yearn for the past will accept Fascism

  sooner than its probable alternatives. But there are other lines of

  approach, as we have seen during the past two or three years. The

  relationship between Fascism and the literary intelligentsia badly needs

  investigating, and Yeats might well be the starting-point. He is best

  studied by someone like Mr Menon, who can approach a poet primarily as a

  poet, but who also knows that a writer's political and religious beliefs

  are not excrescences to be laughed away, but something that will leave

  their mark even on the smallest detail of his work.

  ARTHUR KOESTLER (1944)

  One striking fact about English literature during the present century is

  the extent to which it has been dominated by foreigners--for example,

  Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats, Pound and Eliot. Still, if you

  chose to make this a matter of national prestige and examine our

  achievement in the various branches of literature, you would find that

  England made a fairly good showing until you came to what may be roughly

  described as political writing, or pamphleteering. I mean by this the

  special class of literature that has arisen out of the European

  political struggle since the rise of Fascism. Under this heading novels,

  autobiographies, books of "reportage", sociological treatises and plain

  pamphlets can all be lumped together, all of them having a common origin

  and to a great extent the same emotional atmosphere.

  Some out of the outstanding figures in this school of writers are

  Silone, Malraux, Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koestler himself.

  Some of these are imaginative writers, some not, but they are all alike

  in that they are trying to
write contemporary history, but UNOFFICIAL

  history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied about in

  the newspapers. Also they are all alike in being continental Europeans.

  It may be an exaggeration, but it cannot be a very great one, to say

  that whenever a book dealing with totalitarianism appears in this

  country, and still seems worth reading six months after publication, it

  is a book translated from some foreign language. English writers, over

  the past dozen years, have poured forth an enormous spate of political

  literature, but they have produced almost nothing of aesthetic value,

  and very little of historical value either. The Left Book Club, for

  instance, has been running ever since 1936. How many of its chosen

  volumes can you even remember the names of? Nazi Germany, Soviet

  Russia, Spain, Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia--all that these and

  kindred subjects have produced, in England, are slick books of

  reportage, dishonest pamphlets in which propaganda is swallowed whole

  and then spewed up again, half digested, and a very few reliable guide

  books and text-books. There has been nothing resembling, for instance,

  FONTAMARA or DARKNESS AT NOON, because there is almost no English writer

  to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside. In

  Europe, during the past decade and more, things have been happening to

  middle-class people which in England do not even happen to the working

  class. Most of the European writers I mentioned above, and scores of

  others like them, have been obliged to break the law in order to engage

  in politics at all; some of them have thrown bombs and fought in street

  battles, many have been in prison or the concentration camp, or fled

  across frontiers with false names and forged passports. One cannot

  imagine, say, Professor Laski indulging in activities of that kind.

  England is lacking, therefore, in what one might call concentration-camp

  literature. The special world created by secret-police forces,

  censorship of opinion, torture and frame-up trials is, of course, known

  about and to some extent disapproved of, but it has made very little

  emotional impact. One result of this is that there exists in England

  almost no literature of disillusionment about the Soviet Union. There is

  the attitude of ignorant disapproval, and there is the attitude of

  uncritical admiration, but very little in between. Opinion on the Moscow

  sabotage trials, for instance, was divided, but divided chiefly on the

  question of whether the accused were guilty. Few people were able to see

  that, whether justified or not, the trials were an unspeakable horror.

  And English disapproval of the Nazi outrages has also been an unreal

  thing, turned on and off like a tap according to political expediency.

  To understand such things one has to be able to imagine oneself as the

  victim, and for an Englishman to write Darkness at Noon would be as

  unlikely an accident as for a slave-trader to write UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.

  Koestler's published work really centres about the Moscow trials. His

  main theme is the decadence of revolutions owing to the corrupting

  effects of power, but the special nature of the Stalin dictatorship has

  driven him back into a position not far removed from pessimistic

  Conservatism. I do not know how many books he has written in all. He is

  a Hungarian whose earlier books were written in German, and five books

  have been published in England: SPANISH TESTAMENT, THE GLADIATORS,

  DARKNESS AT NOON, SCUM. OF THE EARTH, and ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE. The

  subject-matter of all of them is similar, and none of them ever escapes

  for more than a few pages from the atmosphere of nightmare. Of the five

  books, the action of three takes place entirely or almost entirely in

  prison.

  In the opening months of the Spanish civil war Koestler was the NEWS

  CHRONICLE'S correspondent in Spain, and early in 1937 he was taken

  prisoner when the Fascists captured Malaga. He was nearly shot out of

  hand, then spent some months imprisoned in a fortress, listening every