A Collection of Essays

by George Orwell

  What are these three poems, Burnt Norton and the rest, "about"? It is not so easy to say what they are about, but what they appear on the surface to be about is certain localities in England and America with which Mr Eliot has ancestral connexions. Mixed up with this is a rather gloomy musing upon the nature and purpose of life, with the rather indefinite conclusion I have mentioned above. Life has a "meaning", but it is not a meaning one feels inclined to grow lyrical about; there is faith, but not much hope, and certainly no enthusiasm. Now the subject-matter of Mr Eliot's early poems was very different from this. They were not hopeful, but neither were they depressed or depressing. If one wants to deal in antitheses, one might say that the later poems express a melancholy faith and the earlier ones a glowing despair. They were based on the dilemma of modern man, who despairs of life and does not want to be dead, and on top of this they expressed the horror of an over-civilized intellectual confronted with the ugliness and spiritual emptiness of the machine age. Instead of "not too far from the yew-tree" the keynote was "weeping, weeping multitudes", or perhaps "the broken fingernails of dirty hands". Naturally these poems were denounced as "decadent" when they first appeared, the attacks only being called off when it was perceived that Eliot's political and social tendencies were reactionary. There was, however, a sense in which the charge of "decadence" could be justified. Clearly these poems were an end-product, the last gasp of a cultural tradition, poems which spoke only for the cultivated third-generation rentier, for people able to feel and criticize but no longer able to act. E. M. Forster praised "Prufrock" on its first appearance because "it sang of people who were ineffectual and weak" and because it was "innocent of public spirit" (this was during the other war, when public spirit was a good deal more rampant than it is now). The qualities by which any society which is to last longer than a generation actually has to be sustained -- industry, courage, patriotism, frugality, philoprogenitiveness -- obviously could not find any place in Eliot's early poems. There was only room for rentier values, the values of people too civilized to work, fight or even reproduce themselves. But that was the price that had to be paid, at any rate at that time, for writing a poem worth reading. The mood of lassitude, irony, disbelief, disgust, and not the sort of beefy enthusiasm demanded by the Squires and Herberts, was what sensitive people actually felt. It is fashionable to say that in verse only the words count and the "meaning" is irrelevant, but in fact every poem contains a prose meaning, and when the poem is any good it is a meaning which the poet urgently wishes to express. All art is to some extent propaganda. "Prufrock" is an expression of futility, but it is also a poem of wonderful vitality and power, culminating in a sort of rocket-burst in the closing stanzas:

  I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

  Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

  When the wind blows the water white and black.

  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

  By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown,

  Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

  There is nothing like that in the later poems, although the rentier despair on which these lines are founded has been consciously dropped.

  But the trouble is that conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on "despairing of life" into a ripe old age. One cannot go on and on being "decadent", since decadence means falling and one can only be said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon. Sooner or later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude towards life and society. It would be putting it too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the Communist Party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines. There are other deaths besides physical death, and there are other sects and creeds besides the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, but it remains true that after a certain age one must either stop writing or dedicate oneself to some purpose not wholly aesthetic. Such a dedication necessarily means a break with the past:

  every attempt

  Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

  Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

  For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

  One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

  Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

  With shabby equipment always deteriorating

  In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

  Undisciplined squads of emotion.

  Eliot's escape from individualism was into the Church, the Anglican Church as it happened. One ought not to assume that the gloomy Petainism to which he now appears to have given himself over was the unavoidable result of his conversion. The Anglo-Catholic movement does not impose any political "line" on its followers, and a reactionary or austro-Fascist tendency had always been apparent in his work, especially his prose writings. In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process; but it is far from easy, and in practice books by orthodox believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree. The reason is that the Christian churches still demand assent to doctrines which no one seriously believes in. The most obvious case is the immortality of the soul. The various "proofs" of personal immortality which can be advanced by Christian apologists are psychologically of no importance; what matters, psychologically, is that hardly anyone nowadays feels himself to be immortal. The next world may be in some sense "believed in" but it has not anywhere near the same actuality in people's minds as it had a few centuries ago. Compare for instance the gloomy mumblings of these three poems with "Jerusalem my happy home"; the comparison is not altogether pointless. In the second case you have a man to whom the next world is as real as this one. It is true that his vision of it is incredibly vulgar -- a choir practice in a jeweller's shop -- but he believes in what he is saying and his belief gives vitality to his words. In the other case you have a man who does not really feel his faith, but merely assents to it for complex reasons. It does not in itself give him any fresh literary impulse. At a certain stage he feels the need for a "purpose", and he wants a "purpose" which is reactionary and not progressive; the immediately available refuge is the Church, which demands intellectual absurdities of its members, so his work becomes a continuous nibbling round those absurdities, an attempt to make them acceptable to himself. The Church has not now any living imagery, any new vocabulary to offer:

  The rest

  Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

  Perhaps what we need is prayer, observance, etc. but you do not make a line of poetry by stringing those words together. Mr Eliot speaks also of

  the intolerable wrestle

  With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

  I do not know, but I should imagine that the struggle with meanings would have loomed smaller, and the poetry would have seemed to matter more, if he could have found his way to some creed which did not start off by forcing one to believe the incredible.

  There is no saying whether Mr Eliot's development could have been much other than it has been. All writers who are any good develop throughout life, and the general direction of their development is determined. It is absurd to attack Eliot, as some leftwing critics have done, for being a "reactionary" and to imagine that he might have used his gifts in the cause of democracy and Socialism. Obviously a scepticism about democracy and a disbelief in "progress" are an integral part of him; without them he could not have written a line of his works. But it is arguable that he would have done better to go much further in the direction implied in his famous "Anglo-Catholic and Royalist" declaration. He could not have developed into a Socialist, but he might have developed into the last apologist of aristocracy.

  Neither feudalism nor indeed Fascism is necessarily deadly to poets thou
gh both are to prose writers. The thing that is really deadly to both is Conservatism of the halfhearted modern kind.

  It is at least imaginable that if Eliot had followed wholeheartedly the anti-democratic, anti-perfectionist strain in himself he might have struck a new vein comparable to his earlier one. But the negative Petainism, which turns its eyes to the past, accepts defeat, writes off earthly happiness as impossible, mumbles about prayer and repentance and thinks it a spritual advance to see life as "a pattern of living worms in the guts of the women of Canterbury" -- that, surely, is the least hopeful road a poet could take.

  Poetry London, October-November 1942; reprinted in Little Reviews Anthology, edited by Denys Val Baker, 1943.

  37. An Unpublished Letter12 to the Editor of The Times

  l0a Mortimer Crescent

  NW6

  12 October 1942

  12. Text taken from a carbon copy.

  Sir,

  May I be allowed to offer one or two reflections on the British Government's decision to retaliate against German prisoners,13 which seems so far to have aroused extraordinarily little protest?

  13. In August the British and Canadians had made a short raid on Dieppe. The Germans alleged that during the raids the British had tied the hands of German prisoners and that, in reprisal, they were putting a number of British prisoners of war in chains. Whereupon the British Government declared their intention of putting equal numbers of German prisoners in chains.

  By chaining up German prisoners in response to similar action by the Germans, we descend, at any rate in the eyes of the ordinary observer, to the level of our enemies. It is unquestionable when one thinks of the history of the past ten years that there is a deep moral difference between democracy and Fascism, but if we go on the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth we simply cause that difference to be forgotten. Moreover, in the matter of ruthlessness we are unlikely to compete successfully with our enemies. As the Italian radio has just proclaimed, the Fascist principle is two eyes for an eye and a whole set of teeth for one tooth. At some point or another public opinion in England will flinch from the implications of this statement, and it is not very difficult to foresee what will happen. As a result of our action the Germans will chain up more British prisoners, we shall have to follow suit by chaining up more Axis prisoners, and so it will continue till logically all the prisoners on either side will be in chains. In practice, of course, we shall become disgusted with the process first, and we shall announce that the chaining up will now cease, leaving, almost certainly, more British than Axis prisoners in fetters. We shall thus have acted both barbarously and weakly, damaging our own good name without succeeding in terrorizing the enemy.

  It seems to me that the civilized answer to the German action would be something like this: "You proclaim that you are putting thousands of British prisoners in chains because some half-dozen Germans or thereabouts were temporarily tied up during the Dieppe raid. This is disgusting hypocrisy, in the first place because of your own record during the past ten years, in the second place because troops who have taken prisoners have to secure them somehow until they can get them to a place of safety, and to tie men's hands in such circumstances is totally different from chaining up a helpless prisoner who is already in an internment camp. At this moment, we cannot stop you maltreating our prisoners, though we shall probably remember it at the peace settlement, but don't fear that we shall retaliate in kind. You are Nazis, we are civilized men. This latest act of yours simply demonstrates the difference."

  At this moment this may not seem a very satisfying reply, but I suggest that to anyone who looks back in three months' time, it will seem better than what we are doing at present and it is the duty of those who can keep their heads to protest before the inherently silly process of retaliation against the helpless is carried any further.

  Yours truly,

  [George Orwell]

  38. B.B.C. Internal Memorandum

  From: Eric Blair, Indian Section

  Subject: Weekly News Commentary

  To: Eastern Service Director

  Confidential

  15 October 1942

  With reference to the suggestion that I should write and broadcast the weekly news review [to India] in English over my own name, i.e. George Orwell. The four speakers who are at present doing this in rotation have contracts up to 7 November, after which I will gladly take this on. But there are one or two points which it would be better to define clearly beforehand.

  If I broadcast as George Orwell I am as it were selling my literary reputation, which so far as India is concerned probably arises chiefly from books of anti-imperialist tendency, some of which have been banned in India. If I gave broadcasts which appeared to endorse unreservedly the policy of the British Government I should quite soon be written off as "one more renegade" and should probably miss my potential public, at any rate among the student population. I am not thinking about my personal reputation, but clearly we should defeat our own object in these broadcasts if I could not preserve my position as an independent and more or less "agin the government" commentator. I would therefore like to be sure in advance that I can have reasonable freedom of speech. I think this weekly commentary is only likely to be of value if I can make it from an anti-Fascist rather than imperialist standpoint and avoid mention of subjects on which I could not conscientiously agree with current Government policy.

  I do not think this is likely to cause trouble, as the chief difficulty is over Indian internal politics, which we rarely mention in our weekly news commentaries. These commentaries have always followed what is by implication a "left" line, and in fact have contained very little that I would not sign with my own name. But I can imagine situations arising in which I should have to say that I could not in honesty do the commentary for that week, and I should like the position to be defined in advance.14

  14. The B.B.C. authorities were agreeable to Orwell's proposal. He had joined the Eastern Service (Indian Section) of the B.B.C. in the summer of 1941.

  39. Letter15 to T.S.Eliot

  15. Text taken from a carbon copy.

  Dear Eliot,

  I wonder if you would like to take part in a programme on Tuesday November 3rd. We have a magazine number once a month which is called "Voice" and pretends to be a magazine in broadcast form. Where it is possible we try to get poets to read their own work. We usually arrange each number round a central theme and we think next time of having an American number. You are I think the only American poet at present in England, though there may perhaps be others, in which case I should be glad to hear about them. In any case we would like it very much if you would take part and read something of your own, either one or two poems taking anything up to five minutes in all. The other people who will probably be taking part are Herbert Read, William Empson, myself and Mulk Raj Anand,16 though we will try to dig up some American writers if we can. Please do this if the date is at all possible for you. It will only mean giving up the morning of that particular day.

  Yours sincerely,.

  [Geo. Orwell]

  Talks Producer Indian Section

  16. Mulk Raj Anand (1905- ), Indian novelist and critic who broadcast for the Indian Section of the B.B.C. during the war. He was appointed Chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1966.

  40. Review

  The British Way in Warfare by B. H. Liddell Hart

  This collection of revised and reprinted essays written from about 1932 onwards, is largely a history of the development of the British army in the years between the two wars. Its opening chapters, however, contain a survey of Britain's "traditional grand strategy" which is the most interesting and provocative part of the book and the most important at this moment. The battle for mechanization has been won, at any rate on paper, but the controversy over the Second Front is still raging, and Captain Liddell Hart's theories are extremely relevant to it.

  What is the "traditional strategy" which we have abandoned and which C
aptain Liddell Hart implies that we should return to? Briefly, the strategy of indirect attack and limited aims. It was practised with great success in Britain's predatory wars of the eighteenth century and only dropped in the decade before 1914, when Britain entered into an all-in alliance with France. Its technique is essentially commercial. You attack your enemy chiefly by means of blockade, privateering, and sea-borne "commando" raids. You avoid raising a mass army and leave the land fighting as far as possible to continental allies whom you keep going by means of subsidies. While your allies are doing your fighting for you you capture your enemy's overseas trade and occupy his outlying colonies. At the first suitable moment you make peace, either retaining the territories you have captured or using them as bargaining counters. This was, in fact, Britain's characteristic strategy for something like two hundred years, and the term perfide Albion was thoroughly justified except in so far as the behaviour of other States was morally similar. The wars of the eighteenth century were waged in a spirit so mercenary that the normal process is reversed, and they seem more "ideological" to posterity than they did to the people who fought in them. But in any case the "limited aims" strategy is not likely to be successful unless you are willing to betray your allies whenever it pays to do so.