have any genuine popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few
people, the least tolerated of the arts. Perhaps that statement needs a
certain amount of qualification. True poetry can sometimes be acceptable
to the mass of the people when it disguises itself as something else. One
can see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still
possesses, certain nursery rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and
the songs that soldiers make up, including the words that go to some of
the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a civilization in which the very
word 'poetry' evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen
disgust that most people feel when they hear the word 'God'. If you are
good at playing the concertina you could probably go into the nearest
public bar and get yourself an appreciative audience within five minutes.
But what would be the attitude of that same audience if you suggested
reading them Shakespeare's sonnets, for instance? Good bad poetry,
however, can get across to the most unpromising audiences if the right
atmosphere has been worked up beforehand. Some months back Churchill
produced a great effect by quoting Clough's 'Endeavour' in one of his
broadcast speeches. I listened to this speech among people who could
certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that
the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them. But not
even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much
better than this.
In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been and
probably still is popular. In his own lifetime some of his poems
travelled far beyond the bounds of the reading public, beyond the world
of school prize-days, Boy Scout sing-songs, limp-leather editions,
poker-work and calendars, and out into the yet vaster world of the music
halls. Nevertheless, Mr. Eliot thinks it worth while to edit him, thus
confessing to a taste which others share but are not always honest enough
to mention. The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a
sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary
man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in
certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But
what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful
monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form--for verse is a
mnemonic device, among other things--some emotion which very nearly
every human being can share. The merit of a poem like 'When all the world
is young, lad' is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is
'true' sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself
thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you
happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better
than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a
fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious. One
example from Kipling will do:
White hands cling to the bridle rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel;
Tenderest voices cry 'Turn again!'
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel:
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.
There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but
at any rate it is a thought that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you
will have occasion to feel that he travels the fastest who travels alone,
and there the thought is, ready made and, as it were, waiting for you. So
the chances are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it.
One reason for Kipling's power as a good bad poet I have already
suggested--his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him
to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. Although
he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a
Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call
themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices
of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the
opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even
disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain
grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, 'In
such and such circumstances, what would you DO?', whereas the opposition
is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where
it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of
its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out
with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by
events, for Utopia never arrives and 'the gods of the copybook headings',
as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British
governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his
political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he
imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he
gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine
what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his
favour that he is not witty, not 'daring', has no wish to �PATER LES
BOURGEOIS. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world
of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem
less shallow and less irritating than the 'enlightened' utterances of the
same period, such as Wilde's epigrams or the collection of
cracker-mottoes at the end of MAN AND SUPERMAN.
MARK TWAIN--THE LICENSED JESTER (1943)
Mark Twain has crashed the lofty gates of the Everyman library, but only
with TOM SAWYER and HUCKLEBERRY FINN, already fairly well known under the
guise of 'children's books' (which they are not). His best and most
characteristic books, ROUGHING IT, THE INNOCENTS AT HOME, and even LIFE
ON THE MISSISSIPPI, are little remembered in this country, though no
doubt in America the patriotism which is everywhere mixed up with
literary judgement keeps them alive.
Although Mark Twain produced a surprising variety of books, ranging from
a namby-pamby 'life' of Joan of Arc to a pamphlet so obscene that it has
never been publicly printed, all that is best in his work centres about
the Mississippi river and the wild mining towns of the West. Born in 1835
(he came of a Southern family, a family just rich enough to own one or
perhaps two slaves), he had had his youth and early manhood in the golden
age of America, the period when the great plains were opened up, when
wealth and opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free,
indeed were free, as they had never been before and may not be again for
centuries. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and the two other books that I have
mentioned are a ragbag of anecdotes, scenic descriptions and social
history both serious and burlesque, but they have a central theme which
could perhaps be put into these words: 'This is how human beings behave
when they are not fri
ghtened of the sack.' In writing these books Mark
Twain is not consciously writing a hymn to liberty. Primarily he is
interested in 'character', in the fantastic, almost lunatic variations
which human nature is capable of when economic pressure and tradition are
both removed from it. The raftsmen, Mississippi pilots, miners and
bandits whom he describes are probably not much exaggerated, but they are
as different from modern men, and from one another, as the gargoyles of a
medieval cathedral. They could develop their strange and sometimes
sinister individuality because of the lack of any outside pressure. The
State hardly existed, the churches were weak and spoke with many voices,
and land was to be had for the taking. If you disliked your job you
simply hit the boss in the eye and moved further west; and moreover,
money was so plentiful that the smallest coin in circulation was worth a
shilling. The American pioneers were not supermen, and they were not
especially courageous. Whole towns of hardy gold miners let themselves be
terrorized by bandits whom they lacked the public spirit to put down.
They were not even free from class distinctions. The desperado who
stalked through the streets of the mining settlement, with a Derringer
pistol in his waistcoat pocket and twenty corpses to his credit, was
dressed in a frock coat and shiny top-hat, described himself firmly as a
'gentleman' and was meticulous about table manners. But at least it was
NOT the case that a man's destiny was settled from his birth. The 'log
cabin to White House' myth was true while the free land lasted. In a way,
it was for this that the Paris mob had stormed the Bastille, and when one
reads Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Whitman it is hard to feel that their
effort was wasted.
However, Mark Twain aimed at being something more than a chronicler of
the Mississippi and the Gold Rush. In his own day he was famous all over
the world as a humorist and comic lecturer. In New York, London, Berlin,
Vienna, Melbourne and Calcutta vast audiences rocked with laughter over
jokes which have now, almost without exception, ceased to be funny. (It
is worth noticing that Mark Twain's lectures were only a success with
Anglo-Saxon and German audiences. The relatively grown-up Latin
races--whose own humour, he complained, always centred round sex and
politics--never cared for them.) But in addition, Mark Twain had some
pretensions to being a social critic, even a species of philosopher. He
had in him an iconoclastic, even revolutionary vein which he obviously
wanted to follow up and yet somehow never did follow up. He might have
been a destroyer of humbugs and a prophet of democracy more valuable
than Whitman, because healthier and more humorous. Instead he became
that dubious thing a 'public figure', flattered by passport officials
and entertained by royalty, and his career reflects the deterioration in
American life that set in after the Civil War.
Mark Twain has sometimes been compared with his contemporary, Anatole
France. This comparison is not so pointless as it may sound. Both men
were the spiritual children of Voltaire, both had an ironical, sceptical
view of life, and a native pessimism overlaid by gaiety; both knew that
the existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly
delusions. Both were bigoted atheists and convinced (in Mark Twain's case
this was Darwin's doing) of the unbearable cruelty of the universe. But
there the resemblance ends. Not only is the Frenchman enormously more
learned, more civilized, more alive aesthetically, but he is also more
courageous. He does attack the things he disbelieves in; he does not,
like Mark swain, always take refuge behind the amiable mask of the
'public figure' and the licensed jester. He is ready to risk the anger of
the Church and to take the unpopular side in a controversy--in the
Dreyfus case, for example. Mark Twain, except perhaps in one short essay
'What is Man?', never attacks established beliefs in a way that is likely
to get him into trouble. Nor could he ever wean himself from the notion,
which is perhaps especially an American notion, that success and virtue
are the same thing.
In LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI there is a queer little illustration of the
central weakness of Mark Twain's character. In the earlier part of this
mainly autobiographical book the dates have been altered. Mark Twain
describes his adventures as a Mississippi pilot as though he had been a
boy of about seventeen at the time, whereas in fact he was a young man of
nearly thirty. There is a reason for this. The same part of the book
describes his exploits in the Civil War, which were distinctly
inglorious. Moreover, Mark Twain started by fighting, if he can be said
to have fought, on the Southern side, and then changed his allegiance
before the war was over. This kind of behaviour is more excusable in a
boy than in a man, whence the adjustment of the dates. It is also clear
enough, however, that he changed sides because he saw that the North was
going to win; and this tendency to side with the stronger whenever
possible, to believe that might must be right, is apparent throughout his
career. In ROUGHING IT there is an interesting account of a bandit named
Slade, who, among countless other outrages, had committed twenty-eight
murders. It is perfectly clear that Mark Twain admires this disgusting
scoundrel. Slade was successful; therefore he was admirable. This
outlook, no less common today, is summed up in the significant American
expression 'to MAKE GOOD'.
In the money-grubbing period that followed the Civil War it was hard for
anyone of Mark Twain's temperament to refuse to be a success. The old,
simple, stump-whittling, tobacco-chewing democracy which Abraham Lincoln
typified was perishing: it was now the age of cheap immigrant labour and
the growth of Big Business. Mark Twain mildly satirized his
contemporaries in The GILDED AGE, but he also gave himself up to the
prevailing fever, and made and lost vast sums of money. He even for a
period of years deserted writing for business; and he squandered his time
on buffooneries, not merely lecture tours and public banquets, but, for
instance, the writing of a book like A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING
ARTHUR'S COURT, which is a deliberate flattery of all that is worst and
most vulgar in American life. The man who might have been a kind of
rustic Voltaire became the world's leading after-dinner speaker, charming
alike for his anecdotes and his power to make businessmen feel themselves
public benefactors.
It is usual to blame Mark Twain's wife for his failure to write the books
he ought to have written, and it is evident that she did tyrannize over
him pretty thoroughly. Each morning, Mark Twain would show her what he
had written the day before, and Mrs. Clemens (Mark Twain's real name was
Samuel Clemens) would go over it with the blue pencil, cutting out
everything that she thought unsuitable. She seems to have been a drastic
blue-penciller even by nineteenth-century standards. There is an accou
nt
in W.D. Howells's book MY MARK TWAIN of the fuss that occurred over a
terrible expletive that had crept into HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Mark Twain
appealed to Howells, who admitted that it was 'just what Huck would have
said', but agreed with Mrs. Clemens that the word could not possibly be
printed. The word was 'hell'. Nevertheless, no writer is really the
intellectual slave of his wife. Mrs. Clemens could not have stopped Mark
Twain writing any book he really wanted to write. She may have made his
surrender to society easier, but the surrender happened because of that
flaw in his own nature, his inability to despise success.
Several of Mark Twain's books are bound to survive, because they contain
invaluable social history. His life covered the great period of American
expansion. When he was a child it was a normal day's outing to go with a
picnic lunch and watch the hanging of an Abolitionist, and when he died
the aeroplane was ceasing to be a novelty. This period in America
produced relatively little literature, and but for Mark Twain our picture
of a Mississippi paddle-steamer, or a stage-coach crossing the plains,
would be much dimmer than it is. But most people who have studied his
work have come away with a feeling that he might have done something
more. He gives all the while a strange impression of being about to say
something and then funking it, so that LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and the
rest of them seem to be haunted by the ghost of a greater and much more
coherent book. Significantly, he starts his autobiography by remarking
that a man's inner life is indescribable. We do not know what he would
have said--it is just possible that the unprocurable pamphlet, 1601,
would supply a clue but we may guess that it would have wrecked his
reputation and reduced his income to reasonable proportions.
POETRY AND THE MICROPHONE (1943)
About a year ago I and a number of others were engaged in broadcasting
literary programmes to India, and among other things we broadcast a good
deal of verse by contemporary and near-contemporary English writers--for
example, Eliot, Herbert Read, Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas, Henry
Treece, Alex Comfort, Robert Bridges, Edmund Blunden, D.H. Lawrence.
Whenever it was possible we had poems broadcast by the people who wrote
them. Just why these particular programmes (a small and remote
out-flanking movement in the radio war) were instituted there is no need
to explain here, but I should add that the fact that we were
broadcasting to an Indian audience dictated our technique to some
extent. The essential point was that our literary broadcasts were aimed
at the Indian university students, a small and hostile audience,
unapproachable by anything that could be described as British
propaganda. It was known in advance that we could not hope for more than
a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave us an excuse to be
more "highbrow" than is generally possible on the air.
If you are broadcasting poetry to people who know your language but
don't share your cultural background, a certain amount of comment and
explanation is unavoidable, and the formula we usually followed was to
broadcast what purported to be a monthly literary magazine. The
editorial staff were supposedly sitting in their office, discussing what
to put into the next number. Somebody suggested one poem, someone else
suggested another, there was a short discussion and then came the poem
itself, read in a different voice, preferably the author's own. This
poem naturally called up another, and so the programme continued,
usually with at least half a minute of discussion between any two items.
For a half-hour programme, six voices seemed to be the best number. A
programme of this sort was necessarily somewhat shapeless, but it could
be given a certain appearance of unity by making it revolve round a
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