grace before meals and prayers at bedtime: to amuse the children one
tells them Bible stories, and if they ask for a song it is probably
"Glory, glory Hallelujah". Perhaps it is also a sign of spiritual health
in the light literature of this period that death is mentioned freely.
"Baby Phil", the brother of Budge and Toddie, has died shortly before
HELEN'S BABIES opens, and there are various tear-jerking references to
his "tiny coffin". A modern writer attempting a story of this kind would
have kept coffins out of it.
English children are still Americanised by way of the films, but it would
no longer be generally claimed that American books are the best ones for
children. Who, without misgivings, would bring up a child on the coloured
"comics" in which sinister professors manufacture atomic bombs in
underground laboratories while Superman whizzes through the clouds, the
machine-gun bullets bouncing off his chest like peas, and platinum
blondes are raped, or very nearly, by steel robots and fifty-foot
dinosaurs? It is a far cry from Superman to the Bible and the woodpile.
The earlier children's books, or books readable by children, had not only
innocence but a sort of native gaiety, a buoyant, carefree feeling, which
was the product, presumably, of the unheard-of freedom and security which
nineteenth-century America enjoyed. That is the connecting link between
books so seemingly far apart as LITTLE WOMEN and LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
The society described in the one is subdued, bookish and home-loving,
while the other tells of a crazy world of bandits, gold mines, duels,
drunkenness and gambling hells: but in both one can detect an underlying
confidence in the future, a sense of freedom and opportunity.
Nineteenth-century America was a rich, empty country which lay outside
the main stream of world events, and in which the twin nightmares that
beset nearly every modern man, the nightmare of unemployment and the
nightmare of State interference, had hardly come into being. There were
social distinctions, more marked than those of today, and there was
poverty (in LITTLE WOMEN, it will be remembered, the family is at one
time so hard up that one of the girls sells her hair to the barber), but
there was not, as there is now, an all-prevailing sense of helplessness.
There was room for everybody, and if you worked hard you could be certain
of a living--could even be certain of growing rich: this was generally
believed, and for the greater part of the population it was even broadly
true. In other words, the civilisation of nineteenth-century America was
capitalist civilisation at its best. Soon after the civil war the
inevitable deterioration started. But for some decades, at least, life in
America was much better fun than life in Europe--there was more happening,
more colour, more variety, more opportunity--and the books and songs of
that period had a sort of bloom, a childlike quality. Hence, I think, the
popularity of HELEN'S BABIES and other "light" literature, which made it
normal for the English child of thirty or forty years ago to grow up with
a theoretical knowledge of raccoons, woodchucks, chipmunks, gophers,
hickory trees, water-melons and other unfamiliar fragments of the
American scene.
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE COMMON TOAD
Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the
snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own
fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain
buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible
towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something--some kind of
shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the
temperature--has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads
appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to
time--at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and
apparently well, in the middle of the summer.
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look,
like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are
languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes
look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at
another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living
creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured
semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I
think is called a chrysoberyl.
For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on
building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has
swollen to his normal size again, and then he hoes through a phase of
intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he
wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or
even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a
long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes
upon shapeless masses of ten or twenty toads rolling over and over in the
water, one clinging to another without distinction of sex. By degrees,
however, they sort themselves out into couples, with the male duly
sitting on the female's back. You can now distinguish males from females,
because the male is smaller, darker and sits on top, with his arms
tightly clasped round the female's neck. After a day or two the spawn is
laid in long strings which wind themselves in and out of the reeds and
soon become invisible. A few more weeks, and the water is alive with
masses of tiny tadpoles which rapidly grow larger, sprout hind-legs, then
forelegs, then shed their tails: and finally, about the middle of the
summer, the new generation of toads, smaller than one's thumb-nail but
perfect in every particular, crawl out of the water to begin the game
anew.
I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of
spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the
skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets. But I
am aware that many people do not like reptiles or amphibians, and I am
not suggesting that in order to enjoy the spring you have to take an
interest in toads. There are also the crocus, the missel-thrush, the
cuckoo, the blackthorn, etc. The point is that the pleasures of spring
are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid
street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other,
if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green
of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how
Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of
London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I
have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road.
There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds
living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought
that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.
As for spring, not
even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of
England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere,
like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters. The
spring is commonly referred to as "a miracle", and during the past five
or six years this worn-out figure of speech has taken on a new lease of
life. After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the
spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and
harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February
since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to
be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead
at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle
happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in
the square the sooty privets have turned bright green, the leaves are
thickening on the chestnut trees, the daffodils are out, the wallflowers
are budding, the policeman's tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of
blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the
sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the balminess of the
air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their first since last
September.
Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes? To
put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all
groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the
capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living
because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some
other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what
the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is not
doubt that many people think so. I know by experience that a favourable
reference to "Nature" in one of my articles is liable to bring me abusive
letters, and though the key-word in these letters is usually
"sentimental", two ideas seem to be mixed up in them. One is that any
pleasure in the actual process of life encourages a sort of political
quietism. People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it
is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment
of the things we have already. The other idea is that this is the age of
machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its
domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.
This is often backed up by the statement that a love of Nature is a
foible of urbanized people who have no notion what Nature is really like.
Those who really have to deal with the soil, so it is argued, do not love
the soil, and do not take the faintest interest in birds or flowers,
except from a strictly utilitarian point of view. To love the country one
must live in the town, merely taking an occasional week-end ramble at the
warmer times of year.
This last idea is demonstrably false. Medieval literature, for instance,
including the popular ballads, is full of an almost Georgian enthusiasm
for Nature, and the art of agricultural peoples such as the Chinese and
Japanese centre always round trees, birds, flowers, rivers, mountains.
The other idea seems to me to be wrong in a subtler way. Certainly we
ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making
the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual
process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a
man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a
labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine
will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political
problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more
complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first
primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating
an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one's
childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and--to
return to my first instance--toads, one makes a peaceful and decent
future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that
nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a
little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus
energy except in hatred and leader worship.
At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can't stop you
enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I
stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match
in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop
me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can't. So long as you
are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a
holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the
factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are
streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the
sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they
disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
THE PREVENTION OF LITERATURE
About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion
being the tercentenary of Milton's AEROPAGITICA--A pamphlet, it may be
remembered, in defense of freedom of the press. Milton's famous phrase
about the sin of "killing" a book was printed on the leaflets advertising
the meeting which had been circulated beforehand.
There were four speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech
which did deal with the freedom of the press, but only in relation to
India; another said, hesitantly, and in very general terms, that liberty
was a good thing; a third delivered an attack on the laws relating to
obscenity in literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a
defense of the Russian purges. Of the speeches from the body of the hall,
some reverted to the question of obscenity and the laws that deal with
it, others were simply eulogies of Soviet Russia. Moral liberty--the
liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print--seemed to be
generally approved, but political liberty was not mentioned. Out of this
concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly
connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could
point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means
the freedom to criticize and oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted
from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was there
any mention of the various books which have been "killed" in England and
the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a
demonstration in favor of censorship. [Note: It is fair to say that the
P.E.N. club celebrations, which lasted a week or more, did not always
stick at quite the same level. I happened to strike a bad day. But an
examination of the speeches (printed under the title FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION)
shows that almost nobody in our
own day is able to speak out as roundly in
favour of intellectual liberty as Milton could do 300 years ago--and this
in spite of the fact Milton was writing in a period of civil war.
(Author's footnote)]
There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea
of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one
side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and
on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy.
Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself
thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active
persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the
concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of
monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend
money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part
of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the
M.O.I. [Ministry of Information] and the British Council, which help the
writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and
the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting
effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to
turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor
official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what
seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate
he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large body of
opinion which will assure him that he's in the right. In the past, at any
rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the
idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic--political, moral,
religious, or aesthetic--was one who refused to outrage his own
conscience. His outlook was summed up in the words of the Revivalist hymn:
Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known
To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a "Don't" at the
beginning of each line. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the
rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and
characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual
integrity. "Daring to stand alone" is ideologically criminal as well as
practically dangerous. The independence of the writer and the artist is
eaten away by vague economic forces, and at the same time it is
undermined by those who should be its defenders. It is with the second
process that I am concerned here.
Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments
which are not worth bothering about. Anyone who has experience of
lecturing and debating knows them off backwards. Here I am not trying to
deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the
claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in
democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition
that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of
anti-social selfishness. Although other aspects of the question are
usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom of speech and of
the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise,
of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report
contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with
the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer
necessarily suffers. In saying this I may seem to be saying that
straightforward "reportage" is the only branch of literature that
matters: but I will try to show later that at every literary level, and
probably in every one of the arts, the same issue arises in more or less
subtilized forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary to strip away the
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