Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

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