Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

bias, would identify with an agricultural worker as he would never have

  done with a town worker. Most boys had in their minds a vision of an

  idealized ploughman, gipsy, poacher, or gamekeeper, always pictured as a

  wild, free, roving blade, living a life of rabbit-snaring, cockfighting,

  horses, beer, and women. Masefield's 'Everlasting Mercy', another

  valuable period-piece, immensely popular with boys round about the war

  years, gives you this vision in a very crude form. But Housman's Maurices

  and Terences could be taken seriously where Masefield's Saul Kane could

  not; on this side of him, Housman was Masefield with a dash of

  Theocritus. Moreover all his themes are adolescent--murder, suicide,

  unhappy love, early death. They deal with the simple, intelligible

  disasters that give you the feeling of being up against the 'bedrock

  facts' of life:

  The sun burns on the half-mown hill,

  By now the blood has dried;

  And Maurice among the hay lies still

  And my knife is in his side.

  And again:

  They hand us now in Shrewsbury jail

  And whistles blow forlorn,

  And trains all night groan on the rail

  To men who die at morn.

  It is all more or less in the same tune. Everything comes unstuck. 'Ned

  lies long in the churchyard and Tom lies long in jail'. And notice also

  the exquisite self-pity--the 'nobody loves me' feeling:

  The diamond drops adorning

  The low mound on the lea,

  These arc the tears of morning,

  That weeps, but not for thee.

  Hard cheese, old chap! Such poems might have been written expressly for

  adolescents. And the unvarying sexual pessimism (the girl always dies or

  marries somebody else) seemed like wisdom to boys who were herded

  together in public schools and were half-inclined to think of women as

  something unattainable. Whether Housman ever had the same appeal for

  girls I doubt. In his poems the woman's point of view is not considered,

  she is merely the nymph, the siren, the treacherous half-human creature

  who leads you a little distance and then gives you the slip.

  But Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were

  young in 1920 if it had not been for another strain in him, and that was

  his blasphemous, antinomian, 'cynical' strain. The fight that always

  occurs between the generations was exceptionally bitter at the end of the

  Great War; this was partly due to the war itself, and partly it was an

  indirect result of the Russian Revolution, but an intellectual struggle

  was in any case due at about that date. Owing probably to the ease and

  security of life in England, which even the war hardly disturbed, many

  people whose ideas were formed in the eighties or earlier had carried

  them quite unmodified into the nineteen-twenties. Meanwhile, so far as

  the younger generation was concerned, the official beliefs were

  dissolving like sand-castles. The slump in religious belief, for

  instance, was spectacular. For several years the old-young antagonism

  took on a quality of real hatred. What was left of the war generation had

  crept out of the massacre to find their elders still bellowing the

  slogans of 1914, and a slightly younger generation of boys were writhing

  under dirty-minded celibate schoolmasters. It was to these that Housman

  appealed, with his implied sexual revolt and his personal grievance

  against God. He was patriotic, it was true, but in a harmless

  old-fashioned way, to the tune of red coats and 'God save the Queen'

  rather than steel helmets and 'Hang the Kaiser'. And he was satisfyingly

  anti-Christian--he stood for a kind of bitter, defiant paganism, the

  conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly

  fitted the prevailing mood of the young; and all in charming fragile

  verse that was composed almost entirely of words of one syllable.

  It will be seen that I have discussed Housman as though he were merely a

  propagandist, an utterer of maxims and quotable 'bits'. Obviously he was

  more than that. There is no need to under-rate him now because he was

  over-rated a few years ago. Although one gets into trouble nowadays for

  saying so, there are a number of his poems ('Into my heart an air that

  kills', for instance, and 'Is my team ploughing?') that are not likely to

  remain long out of favour. But at bottom it is always a writer's

  tendency, his 'purpose', his 'message', that makes him liked or disliked.

  The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit

  in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs. And no book is

  ever truly neutral. Some or other tendency is always discernible, in

  verse as much as in prose, even if it does no more than determine the

  form and the choice of imagery. But poets who attain wide popularity, Uke

  Housman, are as a rule definitely gnomic writers.

  After the war, after Housman and the Nature poets, there appears a group

  of writers of completely different tendency--Joyce, Eliot, Pound,

  Lawrence, Wyndham, Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey. So far as the

  middle and late twenties go, these are 'the movement', as surely as the

  Auden-Spender group have been 'the movement' during the past few years.

  It is true that not all of the gifted writers of the period can be fitted

  into the pattern. E. M. Forster, for instance, though he wrote his best

  book in 1923 or thereabouts, was essentially, pre-war, and Yeats does not

  seem in either of his phases to belong to the twenties. Others who were

  still living, Moore, Conrad, Bennett, Wells, Norman Douglas, had shot

  their bolt before the war ever happened. On the other hand, a writer who

  should be added to the group, though in the narrowly literary sense he

  hardly 'belongs', is Somerset Maugham. Of course the dates do not fit

  exactly; most of these writers had already published books before the

  war, but they can be classified as post-war in the same sense that the

  younger men now writing are post-slump. Equally, of course, you could

  read through most of the literary papers of the time without grasping

  that these people are 'the movement'. Even more then than at most times

  the big shots of literary journalism were busy pretending that the

  age-before-last had not come to an end. Squire ruled the LONDON MERCURY

  Gibbs and Walpole were the gods of the lending libraries, there was a

  cult of cheeriness and manliness, beer and cricket, briar pipes and

  monogamy, and it was at all times possible to earn a few guineas by

  writing an article denouncing 'high-brows'. But all the same it was the

  despised highbrows who had captured the young. The wind was blowing from

  Europe, and long before 1930 it had blown the beer-and-cricket school

  naked, except for their knighthoods.

  But the first thing one would notice about the group of writers I have

  named above is that they do not look like a group. Moreover several of

  them would strongly object to being coupled with several of the others.

  Lawrence and Eliot were in reality antipathetic, Huxley worshipped

  Lawrence but was repelled by Joyce, most of the others would have looked

&n
bsp; down on Huxley, Strachey, and Maugham, and Lewis attacked everyone in

  turn; indeed, his reputation as a writer rests largely on these attacks.

  And yet there is a certain temperamental similarity, evident enough now,

  though it would not have been so a dozen years ago. What it amounts to is

  PESSIMISM OF OUTLOOK. But it is necessary to make clear what is meant by

  pessimism.

  If the keynote of the Georgian poets was 'beauty of Nature', the keynote

  of the post-war writers would be 'tragic sense of life'. The spirit

  behind Housman's poems for instance, is not tragic, merely querulous; it

  is hedonism disappointed. The same is true of Hardy, though one ought to

  make an exception of THE DYNASTS. But the Joyce-Eliot group come later in

  time, puritanism is not their main adversary, they are able from the

  start to 'see through' most of the things that their predecessors had

  fought for. All of them are temperamentally hostile to the notion of

  'progress'; it is felt that progress not only doesn't happen, but OUGHT

  not to happen. Given this general similarity, there are, of course,

  differences of approach between the writers I have named as well as

  different degrees of talent. Eliot's pessimism is partly the Christian

  pessimism, which implies a certain indifference to human misery, partly a

  lament over the decadence of Western civilization ('We are the hollow

  men, we are the stuffed men', etc., etc.), a sort of twilight-of-the-gods

  feeling, which finally leads him, in Sweeney Agonistes for instance, to

  achieve the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it

  is. With Strachey it is merely a polite eighteenth-century scepticism

  mixed up with a taste for debunking. With Maugham it is a kind of stoical

  resignation, the stiff upper lip of the pukka sahib somewhere east of

  Suez, carrying on with his job without believing in it, like an Antonine

  Emperor. Lawrence at first sight does not seem to be a pessimistic

  writer, because, like Dickens, he is a 'change-of-heart' man and

  constantly insisting that life here and now would be all right if only

  you looked at it a little differently. But what he is demanding is a

  movement away from our mechanized civilization, which is not going to

  happen. Therefore his exasperation with the present turns once more into

  idealization of the past, this time a safely mythical past, the Bronze

  Age. When Lawrence prefers the Etruscans (his Etruscans) to ourselves it

  is difficult not to agree with him, and yet, after all, it is a species

  of defeatism, because that is not the direction in which the world is

  moving. The kind of life that he is always pointing to, a life centring

  round the simple mysteries--sex, earth, fire, water, blood--is merely a

  lost cause. All he has been able to produce, therefore, is a wish that

  things would happen in a way in which they are manifestly not going to

  happen. 'A wave of generosity or a wave of death', he says, but it is

  obvious that there are no waves of generosity this side of the horizon.

  So he flees to Mexico, and then dies at forty-five, a few years before

  the wave of death gets going. It will be seen that once again I am

  speaking of these people as though they were not artists, as though they

  were merely propagandists putting a 'message' across. And once again it

  is obvious that all of them are more than that. It would be absurd, for

  instance, to look on ULYSSES as MERELY a show-up of the horror of modern

  life, the 'dirty DAILY MAIL era', as Pound put it. Joyce actually is more

  of a 'pure artist' than most writers. But ULYSSES could not have been

  written by someone who was merely dabbling with word-patterns; it is the

  product of a special vision of life, the vision of a Catholic who has

  lost his faith. What Joyce is saying is 'Here is life without God. Just

  look at it!' and his technical innovations, important though they are,

  are primarily to serve this purpose.

  But what is noticeable about all these writers is that what 'purpose'

  they have is very much up in the air. There is no attention to the urgent

  problems of the moment, above all no politics in the narrower sense. Our

  eyes are directed to Rome, to Byzantium, to Montparnasse, to Mexico, to

  the Etruscans, to the Subconscious, to the solar plexus--to everywhere

  except the places where things are actually happening. When one looks

  back at the twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every

  important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English

  intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution, for instance, all but vanishes

  from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin and the Ukraine

  famine--about ten years. Throughout those years Russia means Tolstoy,

  Dostoievsky, and exiled counts driving taxi-cabs. Italy means

  picture-galleries, ruins, churches, and museums--but not Black-shirts.

  Germany means films, nudism, and psychoanalysis--but not Hitler, of whom

  hardly anyone had heard till 1931. In 'cultured' circles

  art-for-art's-saking extended practically to a worship of the

  meaningless. Literature was supposed to consist solely in the

  manipulation of words. To judge a book by its subject matter was the

  unforgivable sin, and even to be aware of its subject matter was looked

  on as a lapse of a taste. About 1928, in one of the three genuinely funny

  jokes that PUNCH has produced since the Great War, an intolerable youth

  is pictured informing his aunt that he intends to 'write'. 'And what are

  you going to write about, dear?' asks the aunt. 'My dear aunt,' says the

  youth crushingly, 'one doesn't write ABOUT anything, one just WRITES.'

  The best writers of the twenties did not subscribe to this doctrine,

  their 'purpose' is in most cases fairly overt, but it is usually

  'purpose' along moral-religious-cultural lines. Also, when translatable

  into political terms, it is in no case 'left'. In one way or another the

  tendency of all the writers in this group is conservative. Lewis, for

  instance, spent years in frenzied witch-smellings after 'Bolshevism',

  which he was able to detect in very unlikely places. Recently he has

  changed some of his views, perhaps influenced by Hitler's treatment of

  artists, but it is safe to bet that he will not go very far leftward.

  Pound seems to have plumped definitely for Fascism, at any rate the

  Italian variety. Eliot has remained aloof, but if forced at the pistol's

  point to choose between Fascism and some more democratic form of

  socialism, would probably choose Fascism. Huxley starts off with the

  usual despair-of-life, then, under the influence of Lawrence's 'dark

  abdomen', tries something called Life-Worship, and finally arrives at

  pacifism--a tenable position, and at this moment an honourable one, but

  probably in the long run involving rejection of socialism. It is also

  noticeable that most of the writers in this group have a certain

  tenderness for the Catholic Church, though not usually of a kind that an

  orthodox Catholic would accept.

  The mental connexion between pessimism and a reactionary outlook is no

  doubt obvious enough. What is perhaps less obvious is just WHY the

  lea
ding writers of the twenties were predominantly pessimistic. Why

  always the sense of decadence, the skulls and cactuses, the yearning

  after lost faith and impossible civilizations? Was it not, after all,

  BECAUSE these people were writing in an exceptionally comfortable epoch?

  It is just in such times that 'cosmic despair' can flourish. People with

  empty bellies never despair of the universe, nor even think about the

  universe, for that matter. The whole period 1910-30 was a prosperous one,

  and even the war years were physically tolerable if one happened to be a

  non-combatant in one of the Allied countries. As for the twenties, they

  were the golden age of the RENTIER-intellectual, a period of

  irresponsibility such as the world had never before seen. The war was

  over, the new totalitarian states had not arisen, moral and religious

  tabus of all descriptions had vanished, and the cash was rolling in.

  'Disillusionment' was all the fashion. Everyone with a safe �500 a year

  turned highbrow and began training himself in TAEDIUM VITAE. It was an

  age of eagles and of crumpets, facile despairs, backyard Hamlets, cheap

  return tickets to the end of the night. In some of the minor

  characteristic novels of the period, books like TOLD BY AN IDIOT, the

  despair-of-life reaches a Turkish-bath atmosphere of self-pity. And even

  the best writers of the time can be convicted of a too Olympian attitude,

  a too great readiness to wash their hands of the immediate practical

  problem. They see life very comprehensively, much more so than those who

  come immediately before or after them, but they see it through the wrong

  end of the telescope. Not that that invalidates their books, as books.

  The first test of any work of art is survival, and it is a fact that a

  great deal that was written in the period 1910-30 has survived and looks

  like continuing to survive. One has only to think of ULYSSES, OF HUMAN

  BONDAGE, most of Lawrence's early work, especially his short stories, and

  virtually the whole of Eliot's poems up to about 1930, to wonder what is

  now being written that will wear so well.

  But quite Suddenly, in the years 1930-5, something happens. The literary

  climate changes. A new group of writers, Auden and Spender and the rest

  of them, has made its appearance, and although technically these writers

  owe something to their predecessors, their 'tendency' is entirely

  different. Suddenly we have got out of the twilight of the gods into a

  sort of Boy Scout atmosphere of bare knees and community singing. The

  typical literary man ceases to be a cultured expatriate with a leaning

  towards the Church, and becomes an eager-minded schoolboy with a leaning

  towards Communism. If the keynote of the writers of the twenties is

  'tragic sense of life', the keynote of the new writers is 'serious

  purpose'.

  The differences between the two schools are discussed at some length in

  Mr Louis MacNeice's book MODERN POETRY. This book is, of course, written

  entirely from the angle of the younger group and takes the superiority of

  their standards for granted. According to Mr MacNeice:

  The poets of NEW SIGNATURES, [Note: Published in 1932.(Author's footnote)]

  unlike Yeats and Eliot, are emotionally partisan. Yeats proposed to turn

  his back on desire and hatred; Eliot sat back and watched other people's

  emotions with ennui and an ironical self-pity...The whole poetry, on

  the other hand, of Auden, Spender, and Day Lewis implies that they have

  desires and hatreds of their own and, further, that they think some things

  ought to be desired and others hated.

  And again:

  The poets of NEW SIGNATURES have swung back...to the Greek preference

  for information or statement. Then first requirement is to have something

  to say, and after that you must say it as well as you can.

  In other words, 'purpose' has come back, the younger writers have 'gone

  into politics'. As I have pointed out already, Eliot & Co. are not really

  so non-partisan as Mr MacNeice seems to suggest. Still, it is broadly