BOOKS AND WRITERS
WHAT was it that distinguished George Orwell from other English writers of his generation ? More than all else, perhaps, it is sophistication of mind that stamps the literature of the present age. If the seventeenth century was an age .of faith, the eighteenth an age of reason, the nineteenth an age of optimism, the twentieth century may fairly be called an age of sophistication. For it is the burden of thowledge acquired with such pains and to so little purpose that afflicts the professionally articulate person in a world in crisis today. No deoubt men and women thought many of our own thoughts during the flippant but apprehensive last century of the decline of Rome. But theirs was a more inchoate, more superstitious view of a society and civilisation in dissolution than is ours ; they lacked the cyclopaedic and exact knowledge that belongs to this late age of the world's experience. And it is, it seems, the oppression of such knowledge that so often corrupts the faith and sterilises the imagination of the writer today. Not the age alone, of course, is responsible. There is also the writer's temperament. A writer writes, after all, as he can or as he must.
The Zeitgeist, in its homelier and less metaphysical aspect, affected Orwell as powerfully as it affected almost any of his contemporaries. His thought was, to a large extent, crisis-ridden ; a re-reading of his earliest books reveals his preoccupation from the beginning with the social and political portents of the wrath to come and demonstrates their remarkable consistency with the vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four. His supreme honesty of mind, however, which is Orwell's most shining virtue, was—as honesty of this sort must always be—as much a matter of character and temperament as of intellect. It went to the roots of his behaviour, lending him the courage again and again, in Burma, in Spain and at home, to live his convictions. With it went also an unmistakable innocence of heart, a genuineness and goodness that are perhaps specially apparent in the fairy-tale world of Animal Farm and that those who knew him could least of all fail to recognise. Through all his phases of intellectual foreboding, in which at times he seemed a little too determined to contemplate the worst, Orwell preserved a saving purity of intention. It was not so much that he had faith where others had only intelligence, but rather that he never lost the common touch from which faith springs. Unlike the run of intellectuals, he was not over-sophisticated. However *destructive his analysis of popular ideals and modes of culture he retained always a sincere and quick-witted sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of ordinary men and women, of average and vulgar natures. Although in the end he seemed to deny it, he hadolways a fellow feeling for the "proles." It is the constancy in him of these two qualities, his honesty and his sympathy, that makes his work all of a piece.
- The interest of his posthumous collection of essays, Shooting an Elephant,* lies largely in this all-of-a-piece character of Orwell's writings. He wrote scarcely anything that is not recognisably his. Tamer and more prosaic than Swift, less demonstrative than Cobbett, not infrequently a good deal clumsier than either, he nevertheless hears a faint resemblance to each while maintaining a plainness and precision of common-sense statement of his own. There is nothing in this volume equal to the best of his critical essays, but his honesty and his passages of acute reasoning are always refreshing. For the rest, the respect and admiration one feels for Orwell's later work are slightly filled out by observing in several of these essays, the earliest of which belongs to the year 1931, the tentative working of his mind on some of the principal themes of Nineteen Eighty- Four. The best of the early pieces is that which gives its title to the volume : Orwell describes how as a young police officer in Burma he shot an innocent-enough elephant that had broken loose in the bazaar merely because the crowd expected him to do so and because he was afraid of looking like a fool. With the sense of his own moral insufficiency goes the no less characteristic thought that at the time "1 did not even know that the British Empire is * Shooting an Elephant, and other Essays. By George Orwell. (Seeker and Warburg. 10s.) dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant, it." An essay on a pamphlet by Tolstoy in illustration of the latter's crassly muddled and almost jealous complaint against Shakespeare, and against King Lear in particular, I found rather dull ; but the analysis of Gulliver's Travels, which is fresh and vigorous, abounds in good things, especially the comparisOn of Swift with Tolstoy, in both of whom, Orwell notes, there is the same disbelief in the possibility of happiness and the same anarchist outlook covering an authoritarian cast of mind. There is a clear hint of Orwell's own imaginative 'dilemma in his close study of the junction of politics and literature in Swift. In Politics and the English Language and The Prevention of Litera- ture he projects the still shadowy outlines of Newspeak and double- think. The nine brief items at the end of the book are taken from the weekly column which as literary editor he contributed to Tribune.
One thing that the book illuminates a little more plainly is Orwell's limitation as an imaginative writer. The times he lived in reinforced his Puritan conscience, giving his Socialism a profoundly moral cast: social salvation before art and before everything else, he often seems to protest. Imagination, in his view, was never disinterested. The truth is that the natural bias of his temperament was all too critical and polemical, all too impulsively rebellious, to enable him to pause and in imagination to accept. Even in arguing the case for Socialism, as he did with brilliant and humane simplicity in The Road to Wigan Pier, he grew impatient not merely with Socialist theory but with its declared ends. That impatience had its sequel when he contemplated the prospect unfolded by the egalitarian planners. In the meantime imagination in him was bounded throughout the 1930s by-barbed wire and slogans. The book of his that is most nearly a novelist's novel—it is the one that has given me personally the pure§t enjoyment—is Coining up for Air, published in the summer of 1939. Fatty Bowling, an insurance salesman, revisits the glimpses of the moon before 1914 and recalls his father's corn and seed merchant's shop and his boyhood passion for fishing with home-made tackle in cowponds and Thames backwaters. I am no fisherman, but nothing has made me understand better what the passion is than this beautifully recaptured moment in the novel. Memory apart, what retrains for Fatty Bowling, as for Orwell, is this: And yet I've enough sense to see that the old life we're used to is being sawn off at the roots. I can feel it happening. I can see the war that's coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loud-speakers telling you what to think. . . . There are millions of others like me. . . . They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet.
It was this vision of things that increasingly took possession of Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four, after the delightful release of Animal Farm, represents a sick man's vision, no doubt. Imperfect in fancy, incomplete in logic, its courage and candour are nevertheless deeply moving. Is there, one asks, an alternative to Ingsoc as' The shape of things to come ? Can the past exist save in records and in memory ? Will the new prototype of the common man learn to love Big Brother ? Perhaps. Big Brother knows.
Objection has Wen taken. to the " melodrama " of Room 101. But why ? For the intellectual progressive, no doubt, it is still true that, in the light-hearted and middle-class phrase of English Real- politik, you can't make a revolution in kid gloves, and that the mishaps and penalties of totalitarian rule are the unavoidable price of progress. For Orwell the truth was rather different. He believed in the reality of "the %vat thing in the world." It was, he was inclined to think, the extinction of the human spirit by terror, which he knew to be a commonplace of totalitarian rule.' He might not have agreed with Acton that the passion Rir equality makes vain the hope of freedom—a statement that may be less true in the actual year 1984 than it appears to. be today—but he had only scorn for the too-willing dupe of egalitarian illusions. R. D. CHARQUES.
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