Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

riding crop. He had a habit of continuing his lecture while he flogged

  you, and I remember the words 'you dirty little boy' keeping time with

  the blows. The beating did not hurt (perhaps as it was the first time, he

  was not hitting me very hard), and I walked out feeling very much better.

  The fact that the beating had not hurt was a sort of victory and

  partially wiped out the shame of the bed-wetting. I was even incautious

  enough to wear a grin on my face. Some small boys were hanging about in

  the passage outside the door of the ante-room.

  'D'you get the cane?'

  'It didn't hurt,' I said proudly.

  Bingo had heard everything. Instantly her voice came screaming after me:

  'Come here! Come here this instant! What was that you said?'

  'I said it didn't hurt,' I faltered out.

  'How dare you say a thing like that? Do you think that is a proper thing

  to say? Go in and REPORT YOURSELF AGAIN!'

  This time Sim laid on in real earnest. He continued for a length of time

  that frightened and astonished me--about five minutes, it seemed--ending

  up by breaking the riding crop. The bone handle went flying across the

  room.

  'Look what you've made me do!' he said furiously, holding up the broken

  crop.

  I had fallen into a chair, weakly sniveling. I remember that this was the

  only time throughout my boyhood when a beating actually reduced me to

  tears, and curiously enough I was not even now crying because of the

  pain. The second beating had not hurt very much either. Fright and shame

  seemed to have anesthetized me. I was crying partly because I felt that

  this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also

  because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to

  convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked

  up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the

  rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.

  I knew that bed-wetting was (a) wicked and (b) outside my control. The

  second fact I was personally aware of, and the first I did not question.

  It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing that you

  committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to

  avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be

  something that happened to you. I do not want to claim that this idea

  flashed into my mind as a complete novelty at this very moment, under the

  blows of Sim's cane: I must have had glimpses of it even before I left

  home, for my early childhood had not been altogether happy. But at any

  rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a

  world where it was not possible for me to be good. And the double beating

  was a turning-point, for it brought home to me for the first time the

  harshness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more

  terrible, and I was more wicked, than I had imagined. At any rate, as I

  sat on the edge of a chair in Sim's study, with not even the

  self-possession to stand up while he stormed at me, I had a conviction of

  sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt

  before.

  In general, one's memories of any period must necessarily weaken as one

  moves away from it. One is constantly learning new facts, and old ones

  have to drop out to make way for them. At twenty I could have written the

  history of my schooldays with an accuracy which would be quite impossible

  now. But it can also happen that one's memories grow sharper after a long

  lapse of time, because one is looking at the past with fresh eyes and can

  isolate and, as it were, notice facts which previously existed

  undifferentiated among a mass of others. Here are two things which in a

  sense I remembered, but which did not strike me as strange or interesting

  until quite recently. One is that the second beating seemed to me a just

  and reasonable punishment. To get one beating, and then to get another

  and far fiercer one on top of it, for being so unwise as to show that the

  first had not hurt--that was quite natural. The gods are jealous, and

  when you have good fortune you should conceal it. The other is that I

  accepted the broken riding crop as my own crime. I can still recall my

  feeling as I saw the handle lying on the carpet--the feeling of having

  done an ill-bred clumsy thing, and ruined an expensive object. I had

  broken it: so Sim told me, and so I believed. This acceptance of guilt

  lay unnoticed in my memory for twenty or thirty years.

  So much for the episode of the bed-wetting. But there is one more thing

  to be remarked. That is that I did not wet my bed again--at least, I did

  wet it once again, and received another beating, after which the trouble

  stopped. So perhaps this barbarous remedy does work, though at a heavy

  price, I have no doubt.

  All this was thirty years ago and more. The question is: Does a child at

  school go through the same kind of experiences nowadays?

  The only honest answer, I believe, is that we do not with certainty know.

  Of course it is obvious that the present-day attitude towards education

  is enormously more humane and sensible than that of the past. The

  snobbishness that was an integral part of my own education would be

  almost unthinkable today, because the society that nourished it is dead.

  I recall a conversation that must have taken place about a year before I

  left Crossgates. A Russian boy, large and fair-haired, a year older than

  myself, was questioning me.

  'How much a-year has your father got?'

  I told him what I thought it was, adding a few hundreds to make it sound

  better. The Russian boy, neat in his habits, produced a pencil and a

  small notebook and made a calculation.

  'My father has over two hundred times as much money as yours,' he

  announced with a sort of amused contempt.

  That was in 1915. What happened to that money a couple of years later, I

  wonder? And still more I wonder, do conversations of that kind happen at

  preparatory schools now?

  Clearly there has been a vast change of outlook, a general growth of

  'enlightenment,' even among ordinary, unthinking middle-class people.

  Religious belief, for instance, has largely vanished, dragging other

  kinds of nonsense after it. I imagine that very few people nowadays would

  tell a child that if it masturbates it will end in the lunatic asylum.

  Beating, too, has become discredited, and has even been abandoned at many

  schools. Nor is the underfeeding of children looked on as a normal,

  almost meritorious act. No one now would openly set out to give his

  pupils as little food as they could do with, or tell them that it is

  healthy to get up from a meal as hungry as you sat down. The whole status

  of children has improved, partly because they have grown relatively less

  numerous. And the diffusion of even a little psychological knowledge has

  made it harder for parents and schoolteachers to indulge their

  aberrations in the name of discipline. Here is a case, not known to me

  personally, but known to someone I can vouch for, and happening wi
thin my

  own lifetime. A small girl, daughter of a clergyman, continued wetting

  her bed at an age when she should have grown out of it. In order to

  punish her for this dreadful deed, her father took her to a large garden

  party and there introduced her to the whole company as a little girl who

  wetted her bed: and to underline her wickedness he had previously painted

  her face black. I do not suggest that Bingo and Sim would actually have

  done a thing like this, but I doubt whether it would have much surprised

  them. After all, things do change. And yet--!

  The question is not whether boys are still buckled into Eton collars on

  Sunday, or told that babies are dug up under gooseberry bushes. That kind

  of thing is at an end, admittedly. The real question is whether it is

  still normal for a school child to live for years amid irrational terrors

  and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one is up against the very great

  difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks. A child which

  appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it

  cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien under-water world

  which we can only penetrate by memory or divination. Our chief clue is

  the fact that we were once children ourselves, and many people appear to

  forget the atmosphere of their own childhood almost entirely. Think for

  instance of the unnecessary torments that people will inflict by sending

  a child back to school with clothes of the wrong pattern, and refusing to

  see that this matters! Over things of this kind a child will sometimes

  utter a protest, but a great deal of the time its attitude is one of

  simple concealment. Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to

  be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. Even the affection

  that one feels for a child, the desire to protect and cherish it, is a

  cause of misunderstanding. One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply

  than one can love another adult, but is rash to assume that the child

  feels any love in return. Looking back on my own childhood, after the

  infant years were over, I do not believe that I ever felt love for any

  mature person, except my mother, and even her I did not trust, in the

  sense that shyness made me conceal most of my real feelings from her.

  Love, the spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love, was something I could

  only feel for people who were young. Towards people who were old--and

  remember that 'old' to a child means over thirty, or even over

  twenty-five--I could feel reverence, respect, admiration or compunction,

  but I seemed cut off from them by a veil of fear and shyness mixed up

  with physical distaste. People are too ready to forget the child's

  physical shrinking from the adult. The enormous size of grownups, their

  ungainly, rigid bodies, their coarse wrinkled skins, their great relaxed

  eyelids, their yellow teeth, and the whiffs of musty clothes and beer and

  sweat and tobacco that disengage from them at every movement! Part of the

  reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child

  is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen

  from below. Besides, being fresh and unmarked itself, the child has

  impossibly high standards in the matter of skin and teeth and complexion.

  But the greatest barrier of all is the child's misconception about age. A

  child can hardly envisage life beyond thirty, and in judging people's

  ages it will make fantastic mistakes. It will think that a person of

  twenty-five is forty, that a person of forty is sixty-five, and so on.

  Thus, when I fell in love with Elsie I took her to be grown up. I met her

  again, when I was thirteen and she, I think, must have been twenty-three;

  she now seemed to me a middle-aged woman, somewhat past her best. And the

  child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some

  mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the

  age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of

  no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see,

  having anything to live for. Only child life is real life. The

  schoolmaster who imagines he is loved and trusted by his boys is in fact

  mimicked and laughed at behind his back. An adult who does not seem

  dangerous nearly always seems ridiculous.

  I base these generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood

  outlook. Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we

  have of discovering how a child's mind works. Only by resurrecting our

  own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child's

  vision of the world. Consider this, for example. How would Crossgates

  appear to me now, if I could go back, at my present age, and see it as it

  was in 1915? What should I think of Bingo and Sim, those terrible,

  all-powerful monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow,

  ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any

  thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse. I would be no

  more frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormouse.

  Moreover, in those days they seemed to me fantastically old,

  whereas--though of this I am not certain--I imagine they must have been

  somewhat younger than I am now. And how would Johnny Hall appear, with

  his blacksmith's arms and his red, jeering face? Merely a scruffy little

  boy, barely distinguishable from hundreds of other scruffy little boys.

  The two sets of facts can lie side by side in my mind, because these

  happen to be my own memories. But it would be very difficult for me to

  see with the eyes of any other child, except by an effort of the

  imagination which might lead me completely astray. The child and the

  adult live in different worlds. If that is so, we cannot be certain that

  school, at any rate boarding school, is not still for many children as

  dreadful an experience as it used to be. Take away God, Latin, the cane,

  class distinctions and sexual taboos, and the fear, the hatred, the

  snobbery and the misunderstanding might still all be there. It will have

  been seen that my own main trouble was an utter lack of any sense of

  proportion or probability. This led me to accept outrages and believe

  absurdities, and to suffer torments over things which were in fact of no

  importance. It is not enough to say that I was 'silly' and 'ought to

  have known better.' Look back into your own childhood and think of the

  nonsense you used to believe and the trivialities which could make you

  suffer. Of course my own case had its individual variations, but

  essentially it was that of countless other boys. The weakness of the

  child is that it starts with a blank sheet. It neither understands nor

  questions the society in which it lives, and because of its credulity

  other people can work upon it, infecting it with the sense of

  inferiority and the dread of offending against mysterious, terrible

  laws. It may be that everything that happened to me at Crossgates could

  happen in the most 'enlightened' school, though perhaps in subtler

  forms. Of one thing, however, I do feel fairly sur
e, and that is that

  boarding schools are worse than day schools. A child has a better chance

  with the sanctuary of its home near at hand. And I think the

  characteristic faults of the English upper and middle classes may be

  partly due to the practice, general until recently, of sending children

  away from home as young as nine, eight or even seven.

  I have never been back to Crossgates. In a way it is only within the last

  decade that I have really thought over my schooldays, vividly though

  their memory has haunted me. Nowadays, I believe, it would make very

  little impression on me to see the place again, if it still exists. And

  if I went inside and smelled again the inky, dusty smell of the big

  schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the

  swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only

  feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How

  small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in

  myself!

  WRITERS AND LEVIATHAN (1948)

  The position of the writer in an age of State control is a subject that

  has already been fairly largely discussed, although most of the evidence

  that might be relevant is not yet available. In this place I do not want

  to express an opinion either for or against State patronage of the arts,

  but merely to point out that WHAT KIND of State rules over us must

  depend partly on the prevailing intellectual atmosphere: meaning, in

  this context, partly on the attitude of writers and artists themselves,

  and on their willingness or otherwise to keep the spirit of liberalism

  alive. If we find ourselves in ten years' time cringing before somebody

  like Zhdanov, it will probably be because that is what we have deserved.

  Obviously there are strong tendencies towards totalitarianism at work

  within the English literary intelligentsia already. But here I am not

  concerned with any organised and conscious movement such as Communism,

  but merely with the effect, on people of goodwill, of political thinking

  and the need to take sides politically.

  This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber

  truncheons, atomic bombs, etc are what we daily think about, and

  therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not

  name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship,

  your thoughts will be about sinking ships. But not only is our

  subject-matter narrowed, but our whole attitude towards literature is

  coloured by loyalties which we at least intermittently realise to be

  non-literary. I often have the feeling that even at the best of times

  literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted

  standards whatever--any EXTERNAL reference which can give meaning to the

  statement that such and such a book is "good" or "bad"--every literary

  judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an

  instinctive preference. One's real reaction to a book, when one has a

  reaction at all, is usually "I like this book" or "I don't like it", and

  what follows is a rationalisation. But "I like this book" is not, I

  think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is "This book

  is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it". Of course,

  when one praises a book for political reasons one may be emotionally

  sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but also

  it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie. Anyone used

  to reviewing books for political periodicals is well aware of this. In

  general, if you are writing for a paper that you are in agreement with,

  you sin by commission, and if for a paper of the opposite stamp, by

  omission. At any rate, innumerable controversial books-books for or

  against Soviet Russia, for or against Zionism, for or against the