Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

  (iv) Political purpose.--Using the word 'political' in the widest

  possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter

  other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

  Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion

  that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political

  attitude.

  It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another,

  and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.

  By nature--taking your 'nature' to be the state you have attained when

  you are first adult--I am a person in whom the first three motives would

  outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or

  merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my

  political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of

  pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the

  Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the

  sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made

  me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working

  classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the

  nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me

  an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil

  War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.

  I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my

  dilemma:

  A happy vicar I might have been

  Two hundred years ago

  To preach upon eternal doom

  And watch my walnuts grow;

  But born, alas, in an evil time,

  I missed that pleasant haven,

  For the hair has grown on my upper lip

  And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

  And later still the times were good,

  We were so easy to please,

  We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep

  On the bosoms of the trees.

  All ignorant we dared to own

  The joys we now dissemble;

  The greenfinch on the apple bough

  Could make my enemies tremble.

  But girl's bellies and apricots,

  Roach in a shaded stream,

  Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,

  All these are a dream.

  It is forbidden to dream again;

  We maim our joys or hide them:

  Horses are made of chromium steel

  And little fat men shall ride them.

  I am the worm who never turned,

  The eunuch without a harem;

  Between the priest and the commissar

  I walk like Eugene Aram;

  And the commissar is telling my fortune

  While the radio plays,

  But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,

  For Duggie always pays.

  I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,

  And woke to find it true;

  I wasn't born for an age like this;

  Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

  The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and

  thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have

  written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, AGAINST

  totalitarianism and FOR democratic socialism, as I understand it. It

  seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can

  avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or

  another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what

  approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political

  bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing

  one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

  What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make

  political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of

  partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do

  not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art'. I write it

  because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I

  want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I

  could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article,

  if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine

  my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains

  much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not

  able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I

  acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall

  continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the

  earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless

  information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job

  is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially

  public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

  It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and

  it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one

  example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the

  Spanish civil war, HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, is of course a frankly political

  book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard

  for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without

  violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a

  long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the

  Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a

  chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any

  ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a

  lecture about it. 'Why did you put in all that stuff?' he said. 'You've

  turned what might have been a good book into journalism.' What he said

  was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what

  very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men

  were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should

  never have written the book.

  In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of

  language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say

  that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more

  exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style

  of writing, you have always outgrown it. ANIMAL FARM was the first book

  in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse

  political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written

  a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is

  bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some

  clarity what kind of book I want to write.

  Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it

  appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I

  don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain,

  selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a

  mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting s
truggle, like a long

  bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if

  one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor

  understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that

  makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can

  write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's

  own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with

  certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them

  deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it

  is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless

  books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning,

  decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

  LEAR, TOLSTOY AND THE FOOL

  Tolstoy's pamphlets are the least-known part of his work, and his attack

  on Shakespeare [Note, below] is not even an easy document to get hold of,

  at any rate in an English translation. Perhaps, therefore, it will be

  useful if I give a summary of the pamphlet before trying to discuss it.

  [Note: SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA. Written about 1903 as an introduction to

  another pamphlet, SHAKESPEARE AND THE WORKING CLASSES, by Ernest Crosby.

  (Author's footnote)]

  Tolstoy begins by saying that throughout life Shakespeare has aroused in

  him "an irresistible repulsion and tedium". Conscious that the opinion

  of the civilized world is against him, he has made one attempt after

  another on Shakespeare's works, reading and re-reading them in Russian,

  English and German; but "I invariably underwent the same feelings;

  repulsion, weariness and bewilderment". Now, at the age of seventy-five,

  he has once again re-read the entire works of Shakespeare, including the

  historical plays, and I have felt with an even greater force, the same

  feelings--this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm,

  indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius

  which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to

  imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent

  merits--thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding--is

  a great evil, as is every untruth.

  Shakespeare, Tolstoy adds, is not merely no genius, but is not even "an

  average author", and in order to demonstrate this fact he will examine

  KING LEAR, which, as he is able to show by quotations from Hazlitt,

  Brandes and others, has been extravagantly praised and can be taken as an

  example of Shakespeare's best work.

  Tolstoy then makes a sort of exposition of the plot of KING LEAR, finding

  it at every step to be stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible,

  bombastic, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, "wild ravings",

  "mirthless jokes", anachronisms, irrelevancies, obscenities, worn-out

  stage conventions and other faults both moral and aesthetic. LEAR is, in

  any case, a plagiarism of an earlier and much better play, KING LEIR, by

  an unknown author, which Shakespeare stole and then ruined. It is worth

  quoting a specimen paragraph to illustrate the manner in which Tolstoy

  goes to work. Act III, Scene 2 (in which Lear, Kent and the Fool are

  together in the storm) is summarized thus:

  Lear walks about the heath and says word which are meant to express his

  despair: he desires that the winds should blow so hard that they (the

  winds) should crack their cheeks and that the rain should flood

  everything, that lightning should singe his white bead, and the thunder

  flatten the world and destroy all germs "that make ungrateful man"! The

  fool keeps uttering still more senseless words. Enter Kent: Lear says

  that for some reason during this storm all criminals shall be found out

  and convicted. Kent, still unrecognized by Lear, endeavours to persuade

  him to take refuge in a hovel. At this point the fool utters a prophecy

  in no wise related to the situation and they all depart.

  Tolstoy's final verdict on LEAR is that no unhypnotized observer, if such

  an observer existed, could read it to the end with any feeling except

  "aversion and weariness". And exactly the same is true of "all the other

  extolled dramas of Shakespeare, not to mention the senseless dramatized

  tales, PERICLES, TWELFTH NIGHT, THE TEMPEST, CYMBELINE, TROILUS AND

  CRESSIDA."

  Having dealt with Lear Tolstoy draws up a more general indictment against

  Shakespeare. He finds that Shakespeare has a certain technical skill

  which is partly traceable to his having been an actor, but otherwise no

  merits whatever. He has no power of delineating character or of making

  words, and actions spring naturally out of situations, Us language is

  uniformly exaggerated and ridiculous, he constantly thrusts his own

  random thoughts into the mouth of any character who happens to be handy,

  he displays a "complete absence of aesthetic feeling", and his words

  "have nothing whatever in common with art and poetry".

  "Shakespeare might have been whatever you like," Tolstoy concludes, "but

  he was not an artist." Moreover, his opinions are not original or

  interesting, and his tendency is "of the lowest and most immoral".

  Curiously enough, Tolstoy does not base this last judgement on

  Shakespeare's own utterances, but on the statements of two critics,

  Gervinus and Brandes. According to Gervinus (or at any, rate Tolstoy's

  reading of Gervinus) "Shakespeare taught...THAT ONE MAY BE TOO GOOD",

  while according to Brandes: "Shakespeare's fundamental principle...is

  that THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS." Tolstoy adds on his own account that

  Shakespeare was a jingo patriot of the worst type, but apart from this he

  considers that Gervinus and Brandes have given a true and adequate

  description of Shakespeare's view of life.

  Tolstoy then recapitulates in a few paragraphs the theory of art which he

  had expressed at greater length elsewhere. Put still more shortly, it

  amounts to a demand for dignity of subject matter, sincerity, and good

  craftsmanships. A great work of art must deal with some subject which is

  "important to the life of mankind", it must express something which the

  author genuinely feels, and it must use such technical methods as will

  produce the desired effect. As Shakespeare is debased in outlook,

  slipshod in execution and incapable of being sincere even for a moment,

  he obviously stands condemned.

  But here there arises a difficult question. If Shakespeare is all that

  Tolstoy has shown him to be, how did he ever come to be so generally

  admired? Evidently the answer can only lie in a sort of mass hypnosis, or

  "epidemic suggestion". The whole civilized world has somehow been deluded

  into thinking Shakespeare a good writer, and even the plainest

  demonstration to the contrary makes no impression, because one is not

  dealing with a reasoned opinion but with something akin to religious

  faith. Throughout history, says Tolstoy, there has been an endless series

  of these "epidemic suggestions"--for example, the Crusades, the search

  for the Philosopher's Stone, the craze for tulip growing which once swept
r />   over Holland, and so on and so forth. As a contemporary instance he

  cites, rather significantly, the Dreyfus case, over which the whole world

  grew violently excited for no sufficient reason. There are also sudden

  short-lived crazes for new political and philosophical theories, or for

  this or that writer, artist or scientist--for example, Darwin who (in

  1903) is "beginning to be forgotten". And in some cases a quite worthless

  popular idol may remain in favour for centuries, for "it also happens

  that such crazes, having arisen in consequence of special reasons

  accidentally favouring their establishment correspond in such a degree to

  the views of life spread in society, and especially in literary circles,

  that they are maintained for a long time". Shakespeare's plays have

  continued to be admired over a long period because "they corresponded to

  the irreligious and unmoral frame of mind of the upper classes of his

  time and ours".

  As to the manner in which Shakespeare's fame STARTED, Tolstoy explains it

  as having been "got up" by German professors towards the end of the

  eighteenth century. His reputation "originated in Germany, and thence was

  transferred to England". The Germans chose to elevate Shakespeare

  because, at a time when there was no German drama worth speaking about

  and French classical literature was beginning to seem frigid and

  artificial, they were captivated by Shakespeare's "clever development of

  scenes" and also found in him a good expression of their own attitude

  towards life. Goethe pronounced Shakespeare a great poet, whereupon all

  the other critics flocked after him like a troop of parrots, and the

  general infatuation has lasted ever since. The result has been a further

  debasement of the drama--Tolstoy is careful to include his own plays

  when condemning the contemporary stage--and a further corruption of the

  prevailing moral outlook. It follows that "the false glorification of

  Shakespeare" is an important evil which Tolstoy feels it his duty to

  combat.

  This, then, is the substance of Tolstoy's pamphlet. One's first feeling

  is that in describing Shakespeare as a bad writer he is saying something

  demonstrably untrue. But this is not the case. In reality there is no

  kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or

  any other writer, is "good". Nor is there any way of definitely proving

  that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is "bad". Ultimately there is no

  test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to

  majority opinion. Artistic theories such as Tolstoy's are quite

  worthless, because they not only start out with arbitrary assumptions,

  but depend on vague terms ("sincere", "important" and so forth) which can

  be interpreted in any way one chooses. Properly speaking one cannot

  ANSWER Tolstoy's attack. The interesting question is: why did he make it?

  But it should be noticed in passing that he uses many weak or dishonest

  arguments. Some of these are worth pointing out, not because they

  invalidate his main charge but because they are, so to speak, evidence of

  malice.

  To begin with, his examination of KING LEAR is not "impartial", as he

  twice claims. On the contrary, it is a prolonged exercise in

  misrepresentation. It is obvious that when you are summarizing KING LEAR

  for the benefit of someone who has not read it, you are not really being

  impartial if you introduce an important speech (Lear's speech when

  Cordelia is dead in his arms) in this manner: "Again begin Lear's awful

  ravings, at which one feels ashamed, as at unsuccessful jokes." And in a

  long series of instances Tolstoy slightly alters or colours the passages

  he is criticizing, always in such a way as to make the plot appear a

  little more complicated and improbable, or the language a little more

  exaggerated. For example, we are told that Lear "has no necessity or

  motive for his abdication", although his reason for abdicating (that he

  is old and wishes to retire from the cares of state) has been clearly