Page numbers in this section are from George Orwell: "Essays", Penguin Classics, 1994, except where other sources are mentioned.
New English Weekly, 12 November 1936 [discussing reviewing of novels and mutual praise]
Z writes a book which is published by Y and reviewed by X in the Weekly W. If the review is a bad one Y will remove his advertisement, so X has to hand out 'unforgettable masterpiece' or get the sack. Essentially that is the position, and novel reviewing has sunk to its present depth largely because every reviewer has some publisher or publishers twisting his tail by proxy. But the thing is not so crude as it looks.
The various parties to the swindle are not consciously acting together, and they have been forced into their present position partly against their will. .. all novelists are being told the same, and to be left out presumably means that your books won't sell.
The hack review is in fact a sort of commercial necessity, like the blurb on the dust-jacket, of which it is merely an extension. But even the wretched hack reviewer is not to be blamed for the drivel he writes. In his special circumstances he could write nothing else. For even if there were no question of bribery, direct or indirect, there can be no such thing as good novel criticism so long as it is assumed that every novel is worth reviewing. Volume 1 p. 283
Of course it is not going to happen, nothing advocated by well-meaning literary men ever happens, ...
It is quite common for an Indian coolie's leg to be thinner than the average Englishman's arm. .. This is the system which we all live on and which we denounce when there seems to be no danger of its being altered. Volume 1, p. 434
[on Dickens] All that the book really demonstrated was that a writer's literary personality has little or nothing to do with his private character. p. 35
Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself. [on Dickens or on Orwell himself?] p. 36
Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society. p. 36
The central action of Dickens's stories almost invariably takes place in middleclass surroundings. If one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter is the London commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on - lawyers, clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers, small craftsmen and servants. p. 36
There is not a line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed, its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious. p. 38
.. anyone who was so anxious to give his money away would never have acquired it in the first place. [the Good, Rich Man] p. 38
As usual, he displays no consciousness that the structure of society can be changed. p. 40
In the woolly vagueness of this passage one can see Dickens’s utter lack of any educational theory. He can imagine the moral atmosphere of a good school, but nothing further. [Education] p. 47
The central problem - how to prevent power from being abused - remains unsolved. p. 48
One very striking thing about Dickens .. is his lack of vulgar nationalism p. 51
Dickens's lack of vulgar nationalism is in part the mark of a real largeness of mind, and in part results from his negative, rather unhelpful political attitude. p. 53
No modern man could combine such purposelessness with so much vitality. p. 67
.. for any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about - survival. By this test Dickens's characters have succeeded, even if the people who remember them hardly think of them as human beings. They are monsters, but at any rate they exist. [on art - and economy] p. 73
.. their criticisms of one another's work have always been (to put it mildly) good-natured. p. 118
There is no certainty, therefore, that the next orthodoxy to emerge will be any better than the last. ..
But when he has finished his demonstration there remains the psychological fact that without this 'bourgeois' liberty the creative powers wither away. p. 124
the novel is practically a Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual. .. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened. p. 125
.. writers who do not wish to identify themselves with the historical process of the moment either ignore it or fight against it. If they can ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can understand it well enough to want to fight against it, they probably have enough vision to realize that they cannot win. p. 126
.. there is no reason why any of the events in it should happen. .. for a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity. p. 129
Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships - an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. p. 131
.. what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person p. 5
.. a spelling system that defies analysis, p. 6
At bottom it is the same quality in the English character that repels the tourist and keeps out the invader. p. 16
.. it is fairly certain that the bulk of the English people were behind Chamberlain's foreign policy. p. 18
.. the people picked a leader nearer to their mood, Churchill, who was at any rate able to grasp that wars are not won without fighting. p. 19
[upper class] .. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog. p. 22
[upper class] .. there were only one escape for them - into stupidity. p. 23
[Blimps] They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns - by ignoring it. p. 24
The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. the immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. there is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. p. 29
They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. p. 29
The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it does not recognize any obligations. p. 40
The Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, .. p. 40
Few if any of these people are consciously treacherous, some of them are not even fools, .. p. 44
Pacifism is a psychological curiosity rather than a political movement. .. being negative and irresponsible, it does not inspire much devotion. p. 51
.. Marxism, which was a German theory interpreted by Russians and unsuccessfully transplanted to England. p. 72
Nations do not escape from their past merely by making a revolution. .. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere.. p. 73
[revolution] Its real nature will be apparent from the hatred which the surviving rich men of the world will feel for it. p. 74
.. Mr Kennedy, U.S.A. Ambassador in London, remarked on his return to New York in October 1940 that as a result of the war 'democracy is finished'. By 'democracy', of course, he meant private capitalism [Joseph Kennedy, the father of John, Robert and Ted Kennedy].
p. 78, footnote.
Hitler's positive achievement appeals to the emptiness of these people, and, in the case of those with pacifist leanings, to their masochism. p. 80
It is the difference between land power and sea power, between cruelty and inefficiency, between lying and self-deception, between the S.S. man and the rent-collector. p. 80
.. For there is no such thing as neutrality in war; in practice one must help one side or the other. p. 81
[Wells] always with an air of angry surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp anything so obvious. What is the use of saying that we need federal world control of the air? The whole question is how we are to get it. p. 189
The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action. p. 191
The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves. p. 193
Who are you, Don Quixote or Sacho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with 'voluptuous' figures. .. But it is simply a lie to say that Don Quixote is not part of you either, though most of what is said and written consists of one lie or the other, usually the first. p. 201
It was not possible that nineteenth-century England should produce a book like War and Peace, .. not because the talent was necessarily lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write such books would ever have made the appropriate contacts. p. 211
War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases. p. 218
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. p. 224
I saw newspaper reports which did not bear nay relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. p. 223
But suppose Fascims is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the firly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the Government side are recoverable - even so, how is a true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the Government also deals extensively in lies. p. 224
[by now, the government in Barcelona has named a place in Barri Gotic in Barcelona after George Orwell].
Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'science'. There is only 'German science', 'Jewish science' etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. p. 224-225
And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force? p. 225 [cf. USSR 1991]
They are all alike in that they are trying to write contemporary history, but unofficial history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied about in the newspapers. Volume 3, p. 271
His main theme is the decadence of revolutions owing to the corrupting effects of power, ..Volume 3, p. 272
.. if one bothers with history it is in order to find modern meanings there. Volume 3, p. 273
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. Volume 3, p. 277
The young Nazi inArrival and Departure makes the penetrating remark that one can see what is wrong with the left-wing movement by the ugliness of its women. Volume 3, p. 280
Actions have results, irrespective of their motives. Marx’s ultimate motives may well have been envy and spite, but this does not prove that his conclusions were false. Volume 3, p. 280
It is quite possible that man’s major problems will never be solved. But it is also unthinkable! ..
So you get the quasi-mystical belief that for the present there is no remedy, all political action is useless, but that somewhere in space and time human life will cease to be the miserable brutish thing it now is. ..
The only easy way out is that of the religious believer, who regards this life merely as a preparation for the next. .. The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final. Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
.. perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure. Volume 3, p. 281-282
In the matter of drink, the only result of a century of ‘temperance’ agitation has been a slight increase in hypocrisy. Volume 3, p. 26
Orthodoxies, whether of the Right or the Left, flourish chieftly among the literaty intelligentsia, the people who ought in theory to be the guardians of freedom of thought. Volume 3, p. 27
But during the last twenty years the tendency of these two parties has been to resemble one another more and more. Volume 3, p. 29
When the British and Russian policy diverge, the Communists revert to a ‘revolutionary’ line and membership slumps again. They can, in fact, only get themselves a worth-while following by abandoning their essential objectives.
The various other Marxist parties, all of them claiming to be the true and uncorrupted successors of Lenin, are in an even more hopeless position. The average Englishman is unable to grasp their doctrines and uninterested in their grievances. ..
The ruthless ideologies .. are accepted in their pure form only by the intelligentsia, who constitute a sort of island of bigotry amid the general vagueness. Volume 3, p. 31
As for the word ‘bourgeois’, it is used almost exclusively by people who are of bourgeois origin themselves. Volume 3, p. 32
To write or even to speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable rules: there is only the general principle that concrete words are better than abstract ones, and that the shortest way of saying anything is always the best. Volume 3, p. 42
To write or even to speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable rules: there is only the general principle that concrete words are better than abstract ones, and that the shortest way of saying anything is always the best. Mere correctness is no guarantee whatever of good writing. .. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up. ...
But probably the deadliest enemy of good English is what is called 'Standard English'. This dreary dialect, the language of leading articles, White Papers, political speeches, and B.B.C. news bulletins, is undoubtedly spreading: it is spreading downwards in the social scale, and outwards into the spoken language. Its characteristic is its reliance on ready-made phrases - .. - which may once have been fresh and vivid, but have now become mere thought-saving devices, having the same relation to living English as a crutch has to a leg. Volume 3, p. 43.
Even a very snobbish English person would probably not mind calling a policeman a cop, which is American, but he would object to calling him a copper, which is working-class English. To the working classes, on the other hand, the use of Americanisms is a way of escaping from cockney without adopting the B.B.C. dialect, which they instinctively dislike and cannot easily master. Volume 3, p. 56.
The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘art’, and everything is OK. Volume 3, p. 190
On the Palestine issue, too, it was de rigeur among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid examining the claims of the Arabs — a decision which might be correct on its own merits, but which was adopted primarily because the Jews were in trouble and it was felt that one must not criticize them. Volume 3, p. 382
.. many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in an inverted form. Volume 3, p. 387
What vitiates nearly all that is written about antisemitism is the assumption in the writer's mind that he himself is immune to it. 'Since I know that antisemitism is irrational,' he argues, 'it follows that I do not share it.' He thus fails to start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable evidence - that is, in his own mind.
It will be seen, therefore that the starting point for any investigation of antisemitism should not be 'Why does this obviously irrational belief appeal to other people?' but 'Why does antisemitism appeal to me? What is there about it that I feel to be true? Volume 3, p. 286
Most of the full-length books, off course, contain a ‘love interest’, but it is always at the light-comedy level: the love affair, with its complications and its idyllic scenes, goes on and on, but as the saying goes, ‘nothing happens’. Volume 3, p. 396
[def. nationalism] I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.
Nationalism on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. _The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. p. 300
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. p. 301
I think it will be admitted that the habit of mind I am talking about is widespread among the English intelligentsia. p. 301-302
And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of all the 'experts' of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939. And when the news of the Pact broke, the most wildly divergent explanations of it were given, and predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties. [cf. Enzensberger on Italy] p. 302
[England, 1945] Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism — using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members but ‘fellow-travellers’ and russophiles generally. p. 303
[p. 303 ff. Orwell treats Obsession, Instability, Indifference to Reality, Positive nationalism (Neo-Toryism, Celtic nationalism, Zionism), Transferred nationalism (Communism, Political Catholicism, Colour Feeling, Class Feeling, Pacifism), Negative nationalism (Anglophobia, Antisemitism, Trotskyism)]
Instability: The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. p. 305
Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct. p. 307
[Positive nationalism]: .. this school of thought seem to be gaining ground among youngish intellectual, sometimes ex-Communists, who have passed through the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. p. 310
Zionism. This has the usual characteristics of a nationalist movement, but the American variant of it seems to be more violent and malignant than the British. p. 310
Antisemitism. .. Anyone educated enough to have heard the word ‘antisemitism’ claims as a matter of course to be free of it, .. p. 313
In the classification I have attempted above, it will seem that I have often exaggerated, oversimplified, made unwarranted assumptions and have left out of account the existence of ordinarily decent motives. p. 314
I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts. p. 315
The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sens of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when 'our' side commits it. .. Loyalty is involved, an so pity ceases to function. p. 316
Exhibitionism and self-pity are the bane of the novelist, and yet if he is too frightened of them his creative gift may suffer. p. 320
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, bostfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting. p. 323
.. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes .. I think there are four great motives for writing, .. They are:
By nature, .. I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. .. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. .. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, p. 26
.. 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. p. 28
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an 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. .. I am not able, and I 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 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. p. 28
My book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, is, of course, a frankly political book, .. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book. p. 28-29
The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of later years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. .. 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. p. 29
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy. p. 29
Good prose is like a window pane. 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, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally. p. 30
[page numbers from "Books v. Cigarettes", Penguin 1984]
.. freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. p. 21
What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary event truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers. p. 24
But slipped in with this is the quite unfounded claim that the Communist Party is itself aiming at the establisment of the classless society, and that in the U.S.S.R. this aim is actually on the way to being realized. If the first claim is allowed to entail the second, there is almost no assault on common sense and common decency that cannot be justified. But meanwhile, the real point has been dodged. Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings. p. 25
.. fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent - for they were not of great importance in England - against Fascists. Today one has to defend it against Communists and 'fellow-travellers'. One ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of the small English Communist Party, but there can be no question about the poisonous effect of the Russian mythos on English intellectual life. p. 26
The friends of totalitarianism in this country tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. p. 28
.. so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply vulgar philistinism. p. 29
.. if you possess information that conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy you are expected to distort it or to keep quiet about it.. p. 29-30
Does one have to assume that every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is an exceptional person? p. 30
Above a quite low level, literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one's contemporaries by recording experience. There is no such thing as genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone's consciousness. p. 30
[the journalist] cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties dry up. Nor can he solve the problem by keeping away from controversial topics. There is no such thing as genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone's consciousness. Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any rate a lyric poet, might possible find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society that survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that prose literature, of the kind that has existed during the past four hundred years, must actually come to an end. p. 31
.. for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. p. 32
What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. .. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English communist or 'fellow-traveller' has had to adopt towards the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September 1939 he was expected to be in a continuous stew about 'The horrors of Nazism' and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word 'Nazi", at least so far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on the morning of 22 June 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for a politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. p. 33
To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. p. 33
A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts, or the emotional sincerity, that literary creation demands. p. 33
Prose is a different matter, since the prose writer cannot narrow the range of his thoughts without killing his inventiveness. p. 35
The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition. p. 36
Prose literature as we know it is the product of rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic and the poet, in that order. p. 36
Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, .. p. 37
Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum. p. 37
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write boks by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. p. 37
But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. p. 39
When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and perscution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. p. 39
.. any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. p. 41
At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it now is, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact – and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial – is, in effect, demanding his own destruction. p. 41
This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing ..
Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose constructions is habitually dodged:
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions .. p. 353
Outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. p. 354
The writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink ..
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
And he will probably ask himself two more:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. .. p. 355
A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. .. his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so'. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement." .. p. 356-357.
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. ..
When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, ..
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. p. 357
Happiness is notoriously difficult to describe, and pictures of a just and well-ordered society are seldom either attractive or convincing. Most creators of 'favourable' Utopias, however, are concerned to show what life could be like if it were lived more fully. p. 383
If one is capable of intellectual detachment, one can perceive merit in a writer whom one deeply disagrees with, but enjoyment is a different matter.
Supposing that there is such a thing as good or bad art, then the goodness or badness must reside in the work of art itself - not independently of the observer, indeed, but independently of the mood of the observer. In one sense, therefore, it cannot be true that a poem is good on Monday and bad on Tuesday.
But if one judges the poem by the appreciation it arouses, then it can certainly be true, because appreciation, or enjoyment, is a subjective condition which cannot be commanded. For a great deal of his waking life, even the most cultivated person has no aesthetic feelings whatever, and the power to have aesthetic feelings is very easily destroyed. When you are frightened, or hungry, or are suffering from toothache or seasickness, King Lear is no better from your point of view than Peter Pan. ..
Current literary criticism consists quite largely of this kind of dodging to and fro between two sets of standards. ..
Some people have a native gift for using words, as some people have a naturally 'good eye' at games. It is largely a question of timing and of instinctively knowing how much emphasis to use. p. 384 [my split into paragraphs]
Swift is not actually inventing anything, he is merely leaving something out. p. 386
The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask of him is talent, which is probably another name for conviction. p. 386
And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots. p. 395
Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? ..
.. favourable reference to 'Nature' in one of my articles is liable to bring me abusive letters .. 'sentimental', two ideas seem to be mixed up in them.
- One is that any pleasure in the actual process of life encourages a sort of political quietism. ..
- The other idea is that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.
.. if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves?
.. the atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it. Volume 4, pp. 174-175
Shakespeare starts by assuming that to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack. This does not mean that everyone will turn against you (Kent and the Fool stand by Lear from first to last), but in all probability someone will. If you throw away your weapons, some less scrupulous person will pick them up. If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen. The second blow is, so to speak, part of the act of turning the other cheek. First of all, therefore, there is the vulgar, common-sense moral drawn by the Fool: 'Don't relinquish power, don't give away your lands.' But there is also another moral. Shakespeare never utters it in so many words, and it does not very much matter whether he was fully aware of it. It is contained in the story, which, after all, he made up, or altered to suit his purposes. It is: 'Give away your lands if you want to, but don't expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won't gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live for others, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself'. p. 411 [def. power]
But a normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue. This is not solely because he is 'weak', 'sinful' and anxious for a 'good time'. Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. p. 412
If one has read Shakespeare with attention, it is not easy to go a day without quoting him, because there are not may subjects of major importance that he does not discuss or at least mention somewhere or other, in his unsystematic but illuminating way. p. 413
Shakespeare .. loved the surface of the earth and the process of life. p. 413
.. and certainly the music is something that belongs to this world. p. 414
Tolstoy renounced wealth, fame and privilege; he abjured violence in all its forms and was ready to suffer for doing so; but is is not so easy to believe that he abjured the principles of coercion, or at least the desire to coerce others. There are families in which the father will say to his child, 'You'll get a thick ear if you do that again,', while the mother, her eyes brimming over with tears, will take the child in her arms and mumur lovingly, 'Now, darling is it kind to Mummy to do that?' And who would maintain that the second method is less tyrannous than the first? The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power.
There are people who are convinced of the wickedness bot of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use your violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, 'Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison,' but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise. p. 414-5, mit afsnit.
.. every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One's real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually, 'I like this book' or 'I don't like it', and what follows is a rationalization. But 'I like this book' is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is 'This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.' Of course, when one praises a book for political reasons one may be emotionally sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but also it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie. Anyone used to reviewing books for political periodicals is well aware of this. In general, if you are writing for a paper that you are in agreement with, you sin by commission, and if for a paper of the opposite stamp, by omission. At any rate, innumerable controversial books .. are judged before they are read, and in effect before they are written. One knows in advance what reception they will get in what papers. And yet, with a dishonesty that sometimes is not even quarter-conscious, the pretence is kept up that genuinely literary standards are being applied. p. 453-454
A modern literary intellectual lives and writes in constant dread - not, indeed, of public opinion in the wider sense, but of public opinion within his own group. As a rule, luckily, there is more than one group, but also at any given moment there is a dominant orthodoxy, to offend against which neds a thick skin and sometimes means cutting one's income in half for years on end. Obviously, for about fifteen years past, the dominant orthodoxy, especially among the young, has been 'left'. The key works are 'progressive', 'democratic' and 'revolutionary', while the labels which you must at all costs avoid having gummed upon you are 'bourgeois', 'reactionary' and 'Fascist'. Almost everyone nowadays, even the majority of Catholics and Conservatives, is 'progressive', or at least wishes to be thought so. No one, so far as I know, ever describes himself as a 'bourgeois', just as no one literate enough to have heard the word ever admits to being guilty of antisemitism. We are all of us good democrats, anti-Fascist, anti-imperialist, contemptuous of class distinctions, impervious to colour prejudice, and so on and so forth. Nor is there much doubt that the present-day 'left' orthodoxy is better than the rather snobbish, pietistic Conservative orthodoxy .. For at the least its implied objective is a viable form of society which large numbers of people actually want. But is also has its own falsities which, because they cannot be admitted, make it impossible for certain questions to be seriously discussed. p. 454-455
The whole left-wing ideology, scientific and utopian, was evolved by people who had no immediate prospect of attaining power. It was, therefore, an extremist ideology, utterly contemptuous of kings, governments, laws, prisons, police forces, armies, flags, frontiers, patriotism, religion, conventional morality, and, in fact, the whole existing scheme of things. Until well within living memory the forces of the Left in all countries were fighting against a tyranny which appeared to be invincible, and it was easy to assume that if only that particular tyranny - capitalism - could be overthrown, Socialism would follow. Moreover, the Left had inherited from Liberalism certain distinctly questionable beliefs, such as the belief that the truth will prevail and persecution defeats itself, or that man is naturally good and is only corrupted by his environment. .. But we have also accumulated in our minds a whole series of unadmitted contradictions, as a result of successive bumps against reality. p. 455
The first big bump was the Russian Revolution. For somewhat complex reasons, nearly the whole of the English Left has been driven to accept the Russian régime as 'Socialist', while silently recognizing that its spirit and practice are quite alien to anything that is meant by 'Socialism' in this country. Hence there has arisen a sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking, in which works like 'democracy' can bear two irreconcilable meanings, and such things as concentration camps and mass deportations can be right and wrong simultaneously.
The next blow to the left-wing ideology was the rise of Fascism, which shook the pacifism and internationalism of the Left without bringing about a definite restatement of doctrine. The experience of German occupation taught the European peoples something that the colonial peoples knew already, namely, that class antagonisms are not all-important and that there is such a thing as national interest. After Hitler it was difficult to maintain seriously that 'the enemy is in your own country' and that national independence is of no value. But though we all know this and act upon it when necessary, we still feel that to say it aloud would be a kind of treachery. And finally, the greatest difficulty of all, there is the fact that the Left is now in power and is obliged to take responsibility and make genuine decisions. p. 455-456
Left governments almost invariably disappoint their supporters .. p. 456
The lowering of wages and raising of working hours are felt to be inherently anti-Socialist measures, and must therefore be dismissed in advance, whatever the economic situation may be. To suggest that they may be unavoidable is merely to risk being plastered with those labels that we are all terrified of. It is far safer to evade the issue and pretend that we can put everything right by redistributing the existing income. p. 456
To accept an orthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions. Take for instance the fact that all sensitive people are revolted by industrialism and its products, and yet are aware that the conquest of poverty and the emancipation of the working class demand not less industrialization, but more and more. Or take the fact that certain jobs are absolutely necessary and yet are never done except under some kind of coercion. Or take the fact that it is impossible to have a positive foreign policy without having powerful armed forces. One could multiply examples. In every such case there is a conclusion which is perfectly plain but which can only be drawn if one is privately disloyal to the official ideology. The normal response is to push the question, unanswered, into a coner of one's mind, and then continue repeating contradictory catchwords. One does not have to search far through the reviews and magazines to discover the effects of this kind of thinking. p. 456-457
I am not, of course, suggesting that mental dishonesty is peculiar to Socialists and left-wingers generally, or is commonest among them. It is merely that acceptance of any political discipline seems to be incompatible with literary integrity. .. Group loyalties are necessary, and yet they are poisonous to literature, so long as literature is the product of individuals. As soon as they are allowed to have any influence, even a negative one, on creative writing, the result is not only falsification, but often the actual drying-up of the inventive faculties.
Well, then what? Do we have to conclude that it is the duty of every writer to 'keep out of politics'? Certainly not! In any case .. no thinking person can or does genuinely keep out of politics, in an age like the present one. I only suggest that we should draw a sharper distinction than we do at present between our political and our literary loyalties, and should recognize that a willingness to do certain distasteful but necessary things does not carry with it any obligation to swallow the beliefs that usually go with them. When a writer engages in politics he should do so as a citizen, as a human being, but not as a writer. ..
But whatever else he does in the service of his party, he should never write for it. He should make it clear that his writing is a thing apart. And he should be able to act co-operatively while, if he chooses, completely rejecting the official idology. He should never turn back from a train of thought because it may lead to a heresy, and he should not mind very much if his unorthodoxy is smelt out, as it probably will be. Perhaps it is even a bad sign in a writer if he is not suspected of reactionary tendencies today, just as it was a bad sign if he was not suspected of Communist sympathies twenty years ago. p. 457-458
Sometimes, if a writer is honest, his writings and his political activities may actually contradict one another. There are occasions when that is plainly undesirable: but the the remedy is not to falsify one's impulses, but to remain silent. p. 458
To lock yourself up in an ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, .. to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. .. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the lesser, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic. War, for example, may be necessary, but it is certainly not right or sane. p. 458
For most people the problem does not arise in the same form, because their lives are split already. They are truly alive only in their leisure hours, and there is no emotional connexion between their work and their political activities. Nor are they generally asked, in the name of political loyalty, to debase themselves as workers. The artist, and especially the writer, is asked just that - in fact, it is the only thing the politicians ever ask of him. p. 458-459
It is like being allowed to choose only among albinos, and left-handed albinos at that. Volume 4, p. 485
Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child's vision of the world. Volume 4, p. 420
