Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their actions are

  most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several

  contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel

  that Stalin's foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as

  it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any

  rate, the Spanish civil war demonstrated that the Nazis knew what they

  were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at a low

  technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which

  had arms would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to the Spanish

  Fascist friends, and the western democracies and the Russians didn't give

  arms to those who should have been their friends. So the Spanish Republic

  perished, having' gained what no republic missed'.

  Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly

  did, to encourage the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win

  is a question hard to answer. I myself think it was right, because I

  believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to

  fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting. The effects on

  the grand strategy of the struggle against Fascism cannot be assessed

  yet. The ragged, weaponless armies of the Republic held out for two and a

  half years, which was undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But

  whether that dislocated the Fascist timetable, or whether, on the other

  hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the Nazis extra time to

  get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.

  7

  I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming into my

  mind. One is of the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather sad voices of

  the wounded militiamen singing some song with a refrain that ended--

  UNA RESOLUCION,

  LUCHAR HAST' AL FIN!

  Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of

  the war the Republican armies must have been fighting almost without

  cigarettes, and with precious little food. Even when I left Spain in the

  middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce, tobacco a rarity, coffee and

  sugar almost unobtainable.

  The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the

  guardroom, the day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the

  beginning of my book on the Spanish war [Homage to Catalonia], and do not

  want to repeat what I said there. When I remember--oh, how vividly!--his

  shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues

  of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate

  no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and

  journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of

  people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their

  birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man's probable

  end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin

  Barracks he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the

  peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed

  by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the G.P.U. But that does not

  affect the long-term issues. This man's face, which I saw only for a

  minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the

  war was really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European

  working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who

  fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune

  of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.

  When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism,

  one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme

  which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman,

  Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan

  March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold

  Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti

  all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all

  people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical

  society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings.

  Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about 'godless' Russia and the

  'materialism' of the working class lies the simple intention of those

  with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a

  partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social

  reconstruction not accompanied by a 'change of heart'. The pious ones,

  from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the' change of

  heart', much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in

  the economic system. Petain attributes the fall of France to the common

  people's 'love of pleasure'. One sees this in its right perspective if

  one stops to wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant's or

  working-man's life would contain compared with P�tain's own. The damned

  impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what-not

  who lecture the working-class socialist for his 'materialism'! All that

  the working man demands is what these others would consider the

  indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all.

  Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the

  knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day,

  clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn't leak, and short enough

  working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not

  one of those who preach against 'materialism' would consider life livable

  without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we

  chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard

  of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater

  undertaking than the war we have just fought. I don't claim, and I don't

  know who does, that that wouldn't solve anything in itself. It is merely

  that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real

  problems of humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the

  decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with

  while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering

  in fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are in their

  'materialism'! How right they are to realize that the belly comes before

  the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand

  that, and the long horror that we are enduring becomes at least

  intelligible. All the considerations are likely to make one falter--the

  siren voices of a P�tain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact that in

  order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position

  of Britain, with its democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the

  sinister development of Soviet Russia, the squalid farce of left-wing

  politics--all this fades away and one sees only the struggle of the

  gradually awakening common people against the lords of
property and their

  hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people

  like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life

  which is now technically achievable, or shan't they? Shall the common man

  be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps

  on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or

  later, but I want it to be sooner and not later--some time within the

  next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand

  years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war,

  and perhaps of other wars yet to come.

  I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name.

  It can be taken as quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later,

  when the war was visibly lost, I wrote these verses in his memory:

  The Italian soldier shook my hand

  Beside the guard-room table;

  The strong hand and the subtle hand

  Whose palms are only able

  To meet within the sound of guns,

  But oh! what peace I knew then

  In gazing on his battered face

  Purer than any woman's!

  For the flyblown words that make me spew

  Still in his ears were holy,

  And he was born knowing what I had learned

  Out of books and slowly.

  The treacherous guns had told their tale

  And we both had bought it,

  But my gold brick was made of gold--Oh! who ever would have thought it?

  Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!

  But luck is not for the brave;

  What would the world give back to you?

  Always less than you gave.

  Between the shadow and the ghost,

  Between the white and the red,

  Between the bullet and the lie,

  Where would you hide your head?

  For where is Manuel Gonzalez,

  And where is Pedro Aguilar,

  And where is Ramon Fenellosa?

  The earthworms know where they are.

  Your name and your deeds were forgotten

  Before your bones were dry,

  And the lie that slew you is buried

  Under a deeper lie;

  But the thing that I saw in your face

  No power can disinherit:

  No bomb that ever burst

  Shatters the crystal spirit.

  RUDYARD KIPLING (1942)

  It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the

  long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry,

  but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about

  Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets

  of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar

  position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary

  generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of

  that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and

  Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily

  explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge

  that Kipling is a 'Fascist', he falls into the opposite error of

  defending him where he is not defensible. It is no use pretending that

  Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by

  any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when

  Kipling describes a British soldier beating a 'nigger' with a cleaning

  rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter

  and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the

  slightest sign anywhere in Kipling's work that he disapproves of that

  kind of conduct--on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism

  in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to

  have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and

  aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and

  then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined

  people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

  And yet the 'Fascist' charge has to be answered, because the first clue

  to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that

  he was NOT a Fascist. He was further from being one than the most humane

  or the most 'progressive' person is able to be nowadays. An interesting

  instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without

  any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the

  line from 'Recessional', 'Lesser breeds without the Law'. This line is

  always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a

  matter of course that the 'lesser breeds' are 'natives', and a mental

  picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a

  coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite

  of this. The phrase 'lesser breeds' refers almost certainly to the

  Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are 'without the Law'

  in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The

  whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a

  denunciation of power politics, British as well as German. Two stanzas

  are worth quoting (I am quoting this as politics, not as poetry):

  If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

  Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

  Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

  Or lesser breeds without the Law--Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,

  Lest we forget--lest we forget!

  For heathen heart that puts her trust

  In reeking tube and iron shard,

  All valiant dust that builds on dust,

  And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

  For frantic boast and foolish word--Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

  Much of Kipling's phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in

  the second stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: 'Except the

  lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord

  keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.' It is not a text that

  makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time,

  believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes

  that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is

  no 'Law', there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true

  belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually

  hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or

  power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up

  with the age they are living in. Kipling's outlook is pre-fascist. He

  still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish

  HUBRIS. He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and

  the secret police, or their psychological results.

  But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling's

  jingoism and brutality? No, one is merely saying that the

  nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern gangster outlook

  are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to the period

  1885-1902. The Great War and its aftermath embittered him, but he shows

  little
sign of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer

  War. He was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase

  (even more than his poems, his solitary novel, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED,

  gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the unofficial historian

  of the British Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its

  shape in 1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang

  out of limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.

  Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was

  political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for

  this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest

  victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before,

  and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out

  of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected,

  the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand

  what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic

  forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not

  seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial

  administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern.

  Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a

  Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed 'natives', and then you establish 'the

  Law', which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not

  foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into

  existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for

  example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber

  estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to

  the Japanese. The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the

  nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both

  attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move

  forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that

  after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who

  despises the 'box-wallah' and often lives a lifetime without realizing

  that the 'box-wallah' calls the tune.

  But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does

  possess one thing which 'enlightened' people seldom or never possess, and

  that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for

  this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing

  parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham,

  because they make it their business to fight against something which they

  do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at

  the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which

  those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and

  those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought

  to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our

  'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian

  is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the

  central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be

  difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words

  than in the phrase, 'making mock of uniforms that guard you while you

  sleep'. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect

  of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see

  that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be

  exploited. Instead of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but

  even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very

  sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other

  men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

  How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators,

  soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is

  sometimes assumed. He had travelled very widely while he was still a