true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political purpose.--Using the word 'political' in the widest
possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter
other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.
Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion
that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political
attitude.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another,
and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.
By nature--taking your 'nature' to be the state you have attained when
you are first adult--I am a person in whom the first three motives would
outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or
merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my
political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of
pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the
Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the
sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made
me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working
classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the
nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me
an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil
War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.
I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my
dilemma:
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and
thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have
written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, AGAINST
totalitarianism and FOR democratic socialism, as I understand it. It
seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can
avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or
another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what
approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political
bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing
one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make
political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of
partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do
not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art'. I write it
because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I
want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I
could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article,
if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine
my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains
much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not
able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I
acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall
continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the
earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless
information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job
is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially
public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.
It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and
it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one
example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the
Spanish civil war, HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, is of course a frankly political
book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard
for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without
violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a
long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the
Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a
chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any
ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a
lecture about it. 'Why did you put in all that stuff?' he said. 'You've
turned what might have been a good book into journalism.' What he said
was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what
very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men
were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should
never have written the book.
In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of
language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say
that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more
exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style
of writing, you have always outgrown it. ANIMAL FARM was the first book
in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse
political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written
a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is
bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some
clarity what kind of book I want to write.
Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it
appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I
don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain,
selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a
mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting s
truggle, like a long
bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if
one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor
understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that
makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can
write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's
own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with
certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them
deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it
is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless
books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning,
decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
LEAR, TOLSTOY AND THE FOOL
Tolstoy's pamphlets are the least-known part of his work, and his attack
on Shakespeare [Note, below] is not even an easy document to get hold of,
at any rate in an English translation. Perhaps, therefore, it will be
useful if I give a summary of the pamphlet before trying to discuss it.
[Note: SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA. Written about 1903 as an introduction to
another pamphlet, SHAKESPEARE AND THE WORKING CLASSES, by Ernest Crosby.
(Author's footnote)]
Tolstoy begins by saying that throughout life Shakespeare has aroused in
him "an irresistible repulsion and tedium". Conscious that the opinion
of the civilized world is against him, he has made one attempt after
another on Shakespeare's works, reading and re-reading them in Russian,
English and German; but "I invariably underwent the same feelings;
repulsion, weariness and bewilderment". Now, at the age of seventy-five,
he has once again re-read the entire works of Shakespeare, including the
historical plays, and I have felt with an even greater force, the same
feelings--this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm,
indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius
which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to
imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent
merits--thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding--is
a great evil, as is every untruth.
Shakespeare, Tolstoy adds, is not merely no genius, but is not even "an
average author", and in order to demonstrate this fact he will examine
KING LEAR, which, as he is able to show by quotations from Hazlitt,
Brandes and others, has been extravagantly praised and can be taken as an
example of Shakespeare's best work.
Tolstoy then makes a sort of exposition of the plot of KING LEAR, finding
it at every step to be stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible,
bombastic, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, "wild ravings",
"mirthless jokes", anachronisms, irrelevancies, obscenities, worn-out
stage conventions and other faults both moral and aesthetic. LEAR is, in
any case, a plagiarism of an earlier and much better play, KING LEIR, by
an unknown author, which Shakespeare stole and then ruined. It is worth
quoting a specimen paragraph to illustrate the manner in which Tolstoy
goes to work. Act III, Scene 2 (in which Lear, Kent and the Fool are
together in the storm) is summarized thus:
Lear walks about the heath and says word which are meant to express his
despair: he desires that the winds should blow so hard that they (the
winds) should crack their cheeks and that the rain should flood
everything, that lightning should singe his white bead, and the thunder
flatten the world and destroy all germs "that make ungrateful man"! The
fool keeps uttering still more senseless words. Enter Kent: Lear says
that for some reason during this storm all criminals shall be found out
and convicted. Kent, still unrecognized by Lear, endeavours to persuade
him to take refuge in a hovel. At this point the fool utters a prophecy
in no wise related to the situation and they all depart.
Tolstoy's final verdict on LEAR is that no unhypnotized observer, if such
an observer existed, could read it to the end with any feeling except
"aversion and weariness". And exactly the same is true of "all the other
extolled dramas of Shakespeare, not to mention the senseless dramatized
tales, PERICLES, TWELFTH NIGHT, THE TEMPEST, CYMBELINE, TROILUS AND
CRESSIDA."
Having dealt with Lear Tolstoy draws up a more general indictment against
Shakespeare. He finds that Shakespeare has a certain technical skill
which is partly traceable to his having been an actor, but otherwise no
merits whatever. He has no power of delineating character or of making
words, and actions spring naturally out of situations, Us language is
uniformly exaggerated and ridiculous, he constantly thrusts his own
random thoughts into the mouth of any character who happens to be handy,
he displays a "complete absence of aesthetic feeling", and his words
"have nothing whatever in common with art and poetry".
"Shakespeare might have been whatever you like," Tolstoy concludes, "but
he was not an artist." Moreover, his opinions are not original or
interesting, and his tendency is "of the lowest and most immoral".
Curiously enough, Tolstoy does not base this last judgement on
Shakespeare's own utterances, but on the statements of two critics,
Gervinus and Brandes. According to Gervinus (or at any, rate Tolstoy's
reading of Gervinus) "Shakespeare taught...THAT ONE MAY BE TOO GOOD",
while according to Brandes: "Shakespeare's fundamental principle...is
that THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS." Tolstoy adds on his own account that
Shakespeare was a jingo patriot of the worst type, but apart from this he
considers that Gervinus and Brandes have given a true and adequate
description of Shakespeare's view of life.
Tolstoy then recapitulates in a few paragraphs the theory of art which he
had expressed at greater length elsewhere. Put still more shortly, it
amounts to a demand for dignity of subject matter, sincerity, and good
craftsmanships. A great work of art must deal with some subject which is
"important to the life of mankind", it must express something which the
author genuinely feels, and it must use such technical methods as will
produce the desired effect. As Shakespeare is debased in outlook,
slipshod in execution and incapable of being sincere even for a moment,
he obviously stands condemned.
But here there arises a difficult question. If Shakespeare is all that
Tolstoy has shown him to be, how did he ever come to be so generally
admired? Evidently the answer can only lie in a sort of mass hypnosis, or
"epidemic suggestion". The whole civilized world has somehow been deluded
into thinking Shakespeare a good writer, and even the plainest
demonstration to the contrary makes no impression, because one is not
dealing with a reasoned opinion but with something akin to religious
faith. Throughout history, says Tolstoy, there has been an endless series
of these "epidemic suggestions"--for example, the Crusades, the search
for the Philosopher's Stone, the craze for tulip growing which once swept
cites, rather significantly, the Dreyfus case, over which the whole world
grew violently excited for no sufficient reason. There are also sudden
short-lived crazes for new political and philosophical theories, or for
this or that writer, artist or scientist--for example, Darwin who (in
1903) is "beginning to be forgotten". And in some cases a quite worthless
popular idol may remain in favour for centuries, for "it also happens
that such crazes, having arisen in consequence of special reasons
accidentally favouring their establishment correspond in such a degree to
the views of life spread in society, and especially in literary circles,
that they are maintained for a long time". Shakespeare's plays have
continued to be admired over a long period because "they corresponded to
the irreligious and unmoral frame of mind of the upper classes of his
time and ours".
As to the manner in which Shakespeare's fame STARTED, Tolstoy explains it
as having been "got up" by German professors towards the end of the
eighteenth century. His reputation "originated in Germany, and thence was
transferred to England". The Germans chose to elevate Shakespeare
because, at a time when there was no German drama worth speaking about
and French classical literature was beginning to seem frigid and
artificial, they were captivated by Shakespeare's "clever development of
scenes" and also found in him a good expression of their own attitude
towards life. Goethe pronounced Shakespeare a great poet, whereupon all
the other critics flocked after him like a troop of parrots, and the
general infatuation has lasted ever since. The result has been a further
debasement of the drama--Tolstoy is careful to include his own plays
when condemning the contemporary stage--and a further corruption of the
prevailing moral outlook. It follows that "the false glorification of
Shakespeare" is an important evil which Tolstoy feels it his duty to
combat.
This, then, is the substance of Tolstoy's pamphlet. One's first feeling
is that in describing Shakespeare as a bad writer he is saying something
demonstrably untrue. But this is not the case. In reality there is no
kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or
any other writer, is "good". Nor is there any way of definitely proving
that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is "bad". Ultimately there is no
test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to
majority opinion. Artistic theories such as Tolstoy's are quite
worthless, because they not only start out with arbitrary assumptions,
but depend on vague terms ("sincere", "important" and so forth) which can
be interpreted in any way one chooses. Properly speaking one cannot
ANSWER Tolstoy's attack. The interesting question is: why did he make it?
But it should be noticed in passing that he uses many weak or dishonest
arguments. Some of these are worth pointing out, not because they
invalidate his main charge but because they are, so to speak, evidence of
malice.
To begin with, his examination of KING LEAR is not "impartial", as he
twice claims. On the contrary, it is a prolonged exercise in
misrepresentation. It is obvious that when you are summarizing KING LEAR
for the benefit of someone who has not read it, you are not really being
impartial if you introduce an important speech (Lear's speech when
Cordelia is dead in his arms) in this manner: "Again begin Lear's awful
ravings, at which one feels ashamed, as at unsuccessful jokes." And in a
long series of instances Tolstoy slightly alters or colours the passages
he is criticizing, always in such a way as to make the plot appear a
little more complicated and improbable, or the language a little more
exaggerated. For example, we are told that Lear "has no necessity or
motive for his abdication", although his reason for abdicating (that he
is old and wishes to retire from the cares of state) has been clearly
Fifty Orwell Essays Page 69
