CONTENTS 

Foreword by George Packer • ix 
Introduction by Keith Gessen • xvii 
Charles Dickens • 1 
Boys' Weeklies • 63 
Inside the Whale • 95 

Drama Reviews: The Tempest, The Peaceful Inn • 141 

Film Review: The Great Dictator • 144 

Wells, Hitler and the World State • 148 

The Art of Donald McGill • 156 

No, Not One • 169 

Rudyard Kipling • 177 

T. S. Eliot • 194 

Can Socialists Be Happy? • 202 

Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali • 210 

Propaganda and Demotic Speech • 223 

Raffles and Miss Blandish • 232 

Good Bad Books • 248 

The Prevention of Literature • 253 

Politics and the English Language • 270 

Confessions of a Book Reviewer • 287 

Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels • 292 




Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool • 316 
Writers and Leviathan • 337 

Review of The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene • 346 
Reflections on Gandhi • 352 
Notes • 363 


FOREWORD 

Before anything else, George Orwell was an essayist. His earliest published pieces were essays; so 
were his last deathbed writings. In between, he never stopped working at the essay’s essential task of 
articulating thoughts out of the stuff of life and art in a compressed space with a distinctly individual 
voice that speaks directly to the reader. The essay perfectly suited Orwell's idiosyncratic talents. It takes 
precedence even in his best-known fiction: During long passages of 1984, the novelistic surface cracks 
and splits open under the pressure of the essayist's concerns. His more obscure novels of social realism 
from the 1930s are marked, and to some extent marred, by an essayist's explaining; and his great 
nonfiction books, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to 
Catalonia, continually slip between particular and general, concrete and abstract, narration and 
exposition, in a way that would be alien to a storytelling purist and that defines Orwell's core purpose as 
a writer. As soon as he began to write something, it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, 
qualify, argue, judge—in short, to think—as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent. In his best 
work, Orwell's arguments are mostly with himself. 

Part of the essay’s congeniality for Orwell is its flexibility. All a reader asks is that the 
essayist mean what he says and say something interesting, in a voice that's recognizably his; beyond that, 
subject matter, length, structure, and occasion are extremely variable. Orwell, who produced a staggering 
amount of prose over the course of a career cut short at forty-six by tuberculosis, was a working 
journalist, and in the two volumes of this new selection of his essays you will find book, film, and theater 
reviews, newspaper columns, and war reporting, as well as cultural commentary, literary criticism, 
political argument, autobiographical fragments, and longer personal narratives. In Orwell's hands, they 
are all essays. He is always pointing to larger concerns beyond the immediate scope of his subject. 

Orwell had the advantage of tradition: He worked in the lineage of the English essay dating 
back to the eighteenth century, whose earlier masters were Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, and William 
Hazlitt, and whose last great representative was Orwell himself. Within this tradition it was entirely 
natural for a writer to move between fiction and nonfiction, journalism and autobiography, the daily 
newspaper, the weekly or monthly magazine, and the quarterly review; and between the subjects of art, 
literature, culture, politics, and himself. This tradition hasn't thrived in the United States. Our national 
literature was born with the anxieties and ambitions of New World arrivistes, and Americans have 
always regarded the novel as the highest form of literary art; if we recognize essays at all, it's as the 
minor work of novelists and poets (and yet some of the greatest modern essayists—James Baldwin and 
Edmund Wilson, to name two—have been Americans). As for journalism of the kind that Orwell routinely 
turned out, the word itself has suggested something like the opposite of literature to an American reader. 
The English essay comes out of a more workmanlike view of what it means to be a writer: This view 




locates the writer squarely within the struggles of his historical time and social place, which is where the 
essayist has to live. 

A tradition in which the line between writer and journalist is hard to draw allows plenty of 
room for the characteristic qualities of the Orwell essay: his informal, direct prose style; his interest in 
sociological criticism that takes in both high and popular culture; his penchant for overstatement and 
attack; his talent for memorable sentences, especially his openings, which a journalist would call the 
lede: "In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life 
that I have been important enough for this to happen to me"; "Saints should always be judged guilty until 
they are proved innocent"; "There is very little in Eliot's later work that makes any deep impression on 
me"; "Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing." The American critic Irving Howe 
wrote in his autobiography A Margin of Hope that when he set out to learn to write essays in the 1940s, 
he turned to Orwell: "How do you begin a literary piece so as to hold attention? George Orwell was 
masterful at this, probably because he had none of the American literary snobbism about doing 'mere 
journalism.'" 


Orwell lived in and wrote about interesting times: war, ideological extremism, intellectual 
combat, dilemmas over the role of the writer in a period of partisanship and upheaval. "In a peaceful age I 
might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my 
political loyalties," he speculates in "Why I Write." "As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of 
pamphleteer." If it's true, then we can be grateful for the timing of Orwell's birth, since his talent was 
never going to lie in updating the nineteenth-century naturalistic novel. The work Orwell started doing to 
pay the bills while he wrote fiction—his reviews, sketches, polemics, columns—turned out to be the 
purest expression of his originality. "Pamphleteer" might suggest a kind of hack, but in Orwell's case it's 
an essayist with a cause. 

Our times are interesting in similar ways and have opened up a space for writers who are 
similarly capable of thinking clearly about history as it's unfolding without surrendering their grip on 
permanent standards of artistic judgment, political idealism, and moral decency. In other words, our age 
demands essayists. So it's an odd fact that even readers who know 1984 well and have read one or two of 
Orwell's other books are likely to be unfamiliar with the most essential Orwell. Aside from "Politics and 
the English Language" and perhaps "Shooting an Elephant," none of his essays are widely read, and some 
of the best remain almost unknown. Those American readers who have read the essays are likely to have 
encountered only the single-volume A Collection of Essays, which includes just fourteen wonderful but 
somewhat randomly chosen pieces—not enough to give a sense of Orwell's growth as a writer, the range 
and evolution of his interests. 

How should one conceive a more generous edition of Orwell's essays? A strictly 
chronological version would function as a kind of autobiography; a division by subject matter— 
socialism, the Spanish civil war, England—would offer a historical primer. But for contemporary 
readers, the particular content of Orwell's life and times can sometimes seem dated and remote, whereas 
the drama of a great writer mastering a form in countless variations is always current. The two volumes of 
this new edition are organized to illuminate Orwell as an essayist—to show readers how he made the 
essay his own. In them, you'll find Orwell engaged in two different modes of writing: The essays in 
Facing Unpleasant Facts build meaning from telling a story; the essays in All Art Is Propaganda hold 
something up to critical scrutiny. The first is based on narrative, the second on analysis, and Orwell was 
equally brilliant at both. He wrote more narrative essays early in his career, in the 1930s, when he was 


drawing on his personal encounters with imperialism, poverty, and war; and more critical essays later on, 
in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him. But he never stopped writing either 
kind; one of his last essays was the posthumously published account of his schooldays, "Such, Such Were 
the Joys." The literary problems raised and the demands imposed by these two types of essay are 
sufficiendy different that they distinguish the essays written across Orwell's career in a more fundamental 
way than subject, period, or publication. 

This division shows the technical difficulties of the essay in especially sharp relief. Essays 
seem to offer almost limidess room to improvise and experiment, and yet their very freedom makes them 
unforgiving of literary faults: sloppiness, vagueness, pretension, structural misshapenness, an immature 
voice, insular material, and the nearly universal plague of bad thinking are all mercilessly exposed under 
the spodight in which the essayist stands alone onstage. There are no props, no sets, no other actors; the 
essayist is the existentialist of literature, and a mediocre talent will wear out his audience within a couple 
of paragraphs. Orwell was a technical master whose essays are so clear and coherent that they act as 
guides to how they were put together. You can learn most of what you need to know about the steps by 
which a narrative essay arrives at a larger truth out of personal experience from "Shooting an Elephant," 
and about the way close reading in a critical essay can open up literary and philosophical commentary 
from "T. S. Eliot." Orwell's essays demonstrate how to be interesting line after line. The emphasis in 
these collections on the two kinds of essay he wrote is directed not just at readers who want to discover 
or rediscover his work, but at writers who want to learn from it. 

Certain essays don't fit my scheme, such as the "As I Please" columns, which appeared in the 
weekly Tribune, and Orwell's short commentaries on English cooking, sports, toads, and coal fires. I've 
included these pardy for the sake of their obscurity, to satisfy the aficionado along with the amateur, and 
pardy because they show how much of life interested him. He could savor and mine the trivial and 
become partisan about things that have nothing to do with politics. On every subject he took up, Orwell 
quickly hit the target of something essential, making an insight that would occur to no other writer and 
would still resonate over half a century later. And it's often a short step from these slighter works to the 
themes of his most famous books. For example, "As I Please, 16," which sentences to death certain 
overused political terms, is the germ of the great essay "Politics and the English Language," which in turn 
crystallizes much of the intellectual content behind the nightmare vision of 1984. Seeing the development 
of a writer's obsessions through his work is just one reason to read these two volumes of essays together. 

A generation of students has gone to school on the banal truth that all literature is 
"constructed," and learned to scoff at the notion that words on the page might express something 
essentially authentic about the writer. The usefulness of this insight runs up against its limits when you 
pick up Orwell's essays. Open these books anywhere and you encounter the same voice. Orwell always 
sounds like Orwell: readier to fight than most writers, toughened but also deepened by hard, largely self- 
inflicted experience, able to zero in on what's essential about a poem or a politician or a memory, 
unsurprised without being cynical, principled without being priggish, direct and yet slighdy reserved. It is 
not a clever or inventive voice, and occasionally it can sound a bit pedestrian. It doesn't seduce and 
exhaust you with literary dazzle; it persuades you with the strength of its prose and the soundness of its 
judgment. Exacdy what relation this voice has to the private individual born with the name Eric Arthur 
Blair is unknowable. Within the confines of these pages, its integrity is consistent and enduring. 

A career like Orwell's would be difficult to undertake today. There is too much 
specialization in writing, too little genuine independence, and not much room in the major newspapers 


and magazines for strongly individual essays. It was hard enough to make a living as an essay writer when 
Orwell was alive—in 1944, one of his most prolific years as an essayist, he earned less than six hundred 
pounds for his one hundred thousand words—and much harder now. Yet for any young writer willing to 
try, these essays don't merely survive as historical artifacts and literary masterpieces. In his openness to 
the world and his insistence on being true to himself, Orwell's essays show readers and writers of any era 
what it means to live by the vocation. 


—George Packer 


INTRODUCTION By Keith Gessen 

Orwell published the essays collected here in the 1940s—and though he was just thirty-seven in 1940, 
this would be the last decade of his life. He had behind him four conventional "social” novels and, more 
significantly, three books of documentary reportage, each one better than the last, culminating in his 
classic account of the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia. Gradually in the others but culminating in 
Homage, Orwell perfected his signature "plain" style, which so resembles someone speaking honestly 
and without pretense directly to you, and he had more or less settled on his political opinions: "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." So he said in 1946. 

But while this may have been settled, there were other matters Orwell was still working out 
in his mind. The subjects of these critical essays are almost all, in one way or another, things Orwell 
doesn't like. The essays are incessantly self-contradicting. First, Orwell declares that no great novel 
could now be written from a Catholic (or Communist) perspective; later he allows that a novel could be 
written from such a perspective, in a pinch; and then in his essay on Graham Greene he comes very near 
to suggesting that only Catholics can now write novels. At one point ("The Art of Donald McGill") he 
praises dirty postcards; at another he suggests that a different sort of dirty postcard ("that used to be sold 
in Mediterranean seaport towns") ought to be censored. In the essay on T. S. Eliot he writes that it is 
"fashionable to say that in verse only the words count and the 'meaning' is irrelevant, but in fact every 
poem contains a prose-meaning, and when the poem is any good it is a meaning which the poet urgently 
wishes to express. All art is to some extent propaganda." Several years later, in "The Prevention of 
Literature," in arguing for the idea that poetry might survive totalitarianism while prose would not, he 
writes that "what the poet is saying—that is, what his poem 'means' if translated into prose—is relatively 
unimportant even to himself." Early in the volume, which also means early in the war, he repeatedly 
points out that the insight of the great totalitarian ideologies (at another point, however, "smelly little 
orthodoxies") is that mankind needs more than simply a bit of pleasure to make life worth living. The 
scientific rationalist H. G. Wells, who insisted on belittling Hider, "was, and still is, quite incapable of 
understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than 
what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the 
present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them." Later in 
the volume, after the war, Orwell will repeatedly plead for a much more humdrum view of human life. 
What's particularly frustrating about these contradictions is that at each successive moment Orwell 
presents them in his great style, his wonderful sharp-edged plainspoken style, which makes you feel that 
there is no way on earth you could possibly disagree with him, unless you're part of the pansy left, or a 
sandal wearer and fruit-juice drinker, or maybe just a crank. 




In a way I'm exaggerating, because the rightness of Orwell on a number of topics has been an 
albatross around his neck for sixty years. In truth, Orwell was wrong about all sorts of things. He is 
wrong in these essays about Eliot's "Four Quartets,” a poem of more profound despair than he admits. He 
is howlingly wrong when he says that Uncle Tom's Cabin will oudive the complete works of Virginia 
Woolf. These are minor things. A major thing he was wrong about was the inner logic of totalitarianism: 
He thought a mature totalitarian system would so deform its citizenry that they would not be able to 
overthrow it. This was the nightmare vision of 1984. In fact, as it turned out in Russia, even the ruling 
elite was not willing to maintain mature totalitarianism after Stalin's death. Other totalitarian regimes 
have repeated the pattern. Orwell was wrong and Orwell contradicted himself. He was more insightful 
about the distant dangers of Communist thought-control, in the Soviet Union, than the more pressing and 
durable thought-control of Western consumerism. Nor did he see the sexual revolution coming, not by a 
long shot; one wonders what the too-frequent taunter of the "pansy left" would have made of the fact that 
the gay movement was one of the most successful, because most militant, of the post-1960s liberation 
struggles. 


But there is a deeper logic to these essays, beneath the contradictions and inevitable 
oversights. The crisis that Orwell was writing himself through in the 1940s was the crisis of the war and, 
even more confusingly, the postwar. It involved a kind of projection into the future of certain tendencies 
latent in the present. Throughout these essays Orwell worries about the potential Sovietization of Europe, 
but also the infection by totalitarian thinking of life outside the Soviet sphere—not just specific threats to 
specific freedoms, but to deeper structures of feeling. As the philologist Syme says to Winston Smith in 
1984: "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?...Every year 
fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller." If Orwell was wrong in 
some sense about the long-term development of totalitarianism, he was right about its deepest intellectual 
intentions, about the rot it wished to create at the center of thinking itself. And he was right that this rot 
could spread. 

One solution would be to cordon off literature from life and politics entirely: This was, in 
some sense, the solution adopted by the writers of the previous generation—Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. 
Lawrence, Ezra Pound—whom Orwell calls the writers of the 1920s and we now call the high 
modernists. And yet Orwell did not want to make a special plea for literature; in fact, of all the writers of 
his time, Orwell was constitutionally the least capable of making this separation. His own writing and 
politics were the fruit of his specific experience—of imperialism in Burma, of the conditions in the 
English coal mines, of the war in Spain. He begins these essays with the insistence that "all art is 
propaganda" (he repeats this several times)—the expression of a particular world-view. In Dickens's 
case this is the worldview of a classic nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal, a worldview Orwell admires 
even as he sees its limitations. ("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.") In the case of boys' weeklies, it is a worldview that is in a sense incidental 
(precisely because they are not art): "These papers exist because of a specialised demand, because boys 
at certain ages find it necessary to read about Martians, death-rays, grizzly bears and gangsters. They get 
what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think 
suitable for them." Orwell was producing these essays contemporaneously with the great Western Marxist 
debates over "committed" literature, but Orwell is, to put it mildly, considerably more down to earth. In 
the case of the boys' weeklies he suggests some reforms: not that they become the Daily Worker, but, since 
it's all the same to the boys so long as the death rays are present, that a more leftist perspective couldn't 
hurt. 


For the Orwell of the early essays, the case of Henry Miller is the tough one. Because while 
Dickens's politics are in the end congenial enough, Miller's quietism is less so. "I first met Miller at the 
end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain,” writes Orwell. "What most intrigued 
me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in 
forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot." Orwell nonetheless went to 
Spain, and fought there. He was a writer who felt it was vital to let politics animate his work; Miller was 
the opposite. As Orwell puts it in perfect Orwell deadpan: "When Tropic of Cancer was published the 
Italians were marching into Abyssinia and Hider's concentration-camps were already bulging. The 
intellectual foci of the world were Rome, Moscow and Berlin. It did not seem to be a moment at which a 
novel of outstanding value was likely to be written about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin 
Quarter." And yet, as Orwell suggests, someone this unfashionable had to be working under the spell of a 
profound conviction. He contrasts Miller favorably to W. H. Auden, who at this time in the famous poem 
"Spain" was miming the thoughts of the good party man about the "necessary murder." Miller is so far 
removed from this sort of sentiment, so profound is his individualism and his conviction, that Orwell 
comes close to endorsing it—"Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism—robbing reality of its terrors 
by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale—or rather, admit that you are inside the whale (for you 
are, of course)." Except Orwell doesn't really mean this. He may be inside the whale but he does not 
intend to stop disturbing its digestion, he does not intend to be any more quietistic—in fact, just a few 
months later, in one of his eccentric moods, Orwell was drawing up a scheme for the guerrilla defense of 
the island, in case the Germans landed, and trying to get it to the government. What he admired above all 
in Miller was his willingness to go against the grain of the time. While all art is propaganda, it needn't 
necessarily propagandize something correct. The important thing is that the writer himself believe it. 

But there are certain things—here is where Orwell begins to extend and then to contradict his 
thinking—that you simply can't believe. "No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition," he 
asserts. Is that true? At almost the exact same moment, Jean-Paul Sartre (a writer Orwell thought, 
incorrectly, was "full of air"), in What Is Literature? was writing, "Nobody can suppose for a moment 
that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism." Is that true? It seems to have been a 
problem that leftist writers of the 1940s were going to face by sheer bluff assertion. For Orwell the 
number of beliefs hostile to literary production seemed to expand and expand. Eliot's "Four Quartets" is 
labeled "Petainist"—a fairly strong term to hurl at a long experimental poem that doesn't even rhyme. And 
Salvador Dali, in "Benefit of Clergy," is a "rat." Orwell wants to chart a middle course between the 
Philistines who would dismiss Dali out of hand for his outrages and the aesthetes unable even to 
acknowledge the problem, but Orwell's own trouble is that he loathes Dalf, above all for abandoning 
France in its moment of danger. After asserting that the painter is more talented than most of the people 
who would denounce his morals, Orwell proceeds to denounce those morals, and the morals of those who 
enjoy Dali's paintings. 

As the war goes on, then ends, Orwell's sense of peril grows sharper, and he looks at 
literature in a different way. He comes to think that no matter who wins, the world will find itself split 
again into armed camps, each of them threatening the others, none of them truly free—and literature will 
simply not survive. This is the landscape of 1984 and it is also the landscape of the later essays in this 
volume—"The Prevention of Fiterature," "Politics and the English Fanguage," "Writers and Feviathan." 
There is even, momentarily, a kind of hallucination, in the curious short piece "Confessions of a Book 
Reviewer," where some of Orwell's old interest in the starving writer crops up, now mixed with the 
wintry gloominess of his later years: "In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and 
half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for 


his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it... He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He is 
bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if only his pair were not chronically 
lost.” Who is this but Winston Smith, the failed hero of 1984, figured as a book reviewer? Or who, 
conversely, is Winston Smith, but a book reviewer figured as the prisoner of a futuristic totalitarian 
regime? 


In the earlier essays Orwell sees totalitarian patterns of thought in the excuses made for 
Stalin by left-wing intellectuals; in the later essays he begins to see the same patterns in writers and 
thinkers of any political stripe who seek too much purity or too much goodness from the world. There is 
perhaps a biographical strain to this: widowed, tubercular, increasingly reclusive, and still brutally 
honest, Orwell was becoming a saint. Three of the late essays—on Leo Tolstoy, Graham Greene, and 
Mahatma Gandhi—deal with saints. Orwell doesn't tike them. He had never particularly liked them: "If 
you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?" he had asked in the great 
essay on dirty postcards. "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 tittle 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.” But back 
then he thought the saint at least exercised a kind of good example for the fat little man inside us; by the 
end of his life he seems to have thought the saint a positive evil. Anything that would interrupt the free 
play of the mind, its commitment to the truth of experience as it actually is rather than as one would tike it 
to be, was an evil. And saints, it turns out, are censorious—Gandhi wanted to throw out cigarettes and 
meat, which was bad enough, but Tolstoy wanted to throw out Shakespeare, which was even worse. 

With great doggedness, then, Orwell keeps delving into the question of literature's position in 
society, and what might be done to keep it alive in a time of total politics. Eventually, the middle ground 
he'd managed to inhabit by admiring Henry Miller, Eliot's early poetry, and that essentially apolitical 
masterpiece, Ulysses, gives way beneath him. The pressure of totalitarianism is too great, and as he 
begins to contemplate the brutal unresolved reality of the postwar, with its two or three warring, nuclear¬ 
armed camps (Orwell was enough of a patriot to think that Britain might not actually be subsumed by the 
United States), he surrenders. In "Writers and Leviathan," dated 1948, he argues that writers must 
ultimately separate themselves from their political work. It's a depressing essay and it ends—one 
wonders whether Orwell was aware of this—with an echo of the tine of Auden's he so reviled: The 
writer capable of separating himself from his political activity will be the one who "stands aside, records 
the things that are done and admits their necessity, but refuses to be deceived as to their true nature." 
Orwell was always a realist who knew that politics was a dirty business—but he was never quite such a 
realist as here. The realm of freedom had finally shrunk to a small, small point, and it had to be defended. 
As Winston Smith says in 1984, "Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your 
skull." 


It's hard not to wonder whether the pessimism of this conclusion—its separation of art and 
politics, after so many attempts at an integration, or at least some kind of accord—was pardy a response 
to the art (or propaganda) Orwell was himself creating in those years. He had published Animal Farm in 
1945; weakened by the tuberculosis that would kill him, he was writing 1984 in 1947-48. After the 
reception of Animal Farm, and with the direction 1984 was taking, it must have been clear to him on 
some level that the world was going to use these books in a certain way. And it did use them that way. The 
socialist critique of Orwell's late work seems essentially correct—they were not only anti-Stalinist but 
antirevolutionary, and were read as such by millions of ordinary people (a fact that Orwell, who was 
always curious to know what ordinary people thought, would have had to respect). It cannot be entirely a 


case of devious propaganda that Orwell the avowed democratic Socialist came eventually to be claimed 
("stolen," as he says here of Dickens) by the Right in the Cold War; that his "social patriotism" soon 
reverted, in the hands of many, into simple nationalism; that it was under the banner of Orwell, a 
convinced anti-imperialist, that some of the best intellectuals in Britain and the United States cheered on 
the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

Writers write because they want to justify themselves to the world. Orwell's essays here, his 
final reflections on the separation of the politics of the man from the art of the man, can serve as a guide to 
the Orwell of the 1940s. Out of "necessity” he had chosen a position, and a way of stating that position, 
that would be used for years to come to bludgeon the antiwar, anti-imperialist left. That he had chosen 
honestly what seemed to him the least bad of a set of bad political options did not make them, in the long 
view of history, any better. 


But what a wonderful writer he had become! That voice—once you've heard it, how do you get it out of 
your head? It feels like the truth, even when it's not telling the truth. It is clear and sharp but unhurried; 
Orwell is not afraid to be boring, which means that he is never boring. He had been shot through the throat 
by a sniper's bullet in 1937. A tall man, well over six feet, he was standing up in a trench at night, telling 
his fellow soldiers—as they later recalled—about some brothels he'd visited in Paris, when the bullet hit. 
It missed Orwell's esophagus by millimeters. He survived, but contemporaries report that Orwell's voice 
changed. It became slightly flattened and metallic. Some people found it disconcerting. 

Orwell's voice as a writer had been formed before Spain, but Spain gave him a jolt—not the 
fighting or the injury, though these had their effects, but the calculated campaign of deception he saw in the 
press when he got back, waged by people who knew better. "Early in life I had noticed that no event is 
ever correctly reported in a newspaper," Orwell recalled, "but in Spain, for the first time, I saw 
newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied 
in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence 
where hundreds of men had been killed....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. After all, the chances are that 
those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history." 

This insight reverberates through Orwell's work for the rest of his life. The answer to lies is 
to tell the truth. But how? How do you even know what the truth is, and how do you create a style in 
which to tell it? Orwell's answer is broadly consistent with the philosophical movements—of which he 
would have been only a little aware—of his time. There is no necessarily anterior truth; language creates 
it. Orwell lays out the method in "Politics and the English Language": You avoid ready phrases, you purge 
your language of dead metaphors, you do not claim to know what you do not know. Far from being a 
relaxed prose (which is how it seems), Orwell's is a supremely vigilant one. It's interesting that Orwell 
didn't go to college. He went to Eton, the most prestigious of the English boarding schools, but he loafed 
around there and, afterward, went off to Burma as a police officer. College is where you sometimes get 
loaded up with fancy terms whose meaning you're not quite sure of. Orwell was an intellectual and a 
highbrow who thought Joyce, Eliot, and Lawrence were the greatest writers of his age, but he never uses 
fancy terms. 


These essays typically open with a very strong, flat, memorable statement: "Autobiography is 
only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful"; "Saints should always be judged guilty until 


they are proved innocent"; or even just, "There is very little in Eliot's later work that makes any deep 
impression on me." They often do a bit of summarizing—Orwell's style is perfecdy adapted to dry, funny 
plot summary, because it often happens that if you summarize the contents of a novel straight they will 
sound very funny. (And much of the time Orwell means them to.) Typically, he moves on to a more general 
philosophical question—"Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a by-word 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." Why is 
that? Orwell goes on to explain that Kipling cannot be defended as a humanitarian, or nonracist, or anti- 
imperialist—he was clearly on the wrong side of all those questions. But then Orwell shows the 
vividness of Kipling's descriptions of life, the singular musicality of his "good bad poetry,” and you begin 
to see what has allowed Kipling to endure. 

You could say that Orwell was not essentially a literary critic, or you could say that he was 
the only kind of literary critic worth reading. He was most interested in the way that literature intersects 
with life, with the world, with groups of actual people. Some of the more enjoyable essays in this volume 
deal with things that a lot of people read and consume—postcards, detective fiction, "good bad books" 
(and poetry)—simply because a lot of people consume them. Postwar intellectuals would celebrate (or 
bemoan) the "rise of mass culture." Orwell never saw it as a novel phenomenon. He was one of the first 
critics to take popular culture seriously because he believed it had always been around and simply 
wanted attention. These essays are part of a deeply democratic commitment to culture in general and 
reading in particular. 

His reading of writers who were more traditionally "literary" is shot through with the same 
commitment. Orwell had read a great deal, and his favorite writers were by many standards difficult 
writers, but he refused to appeal to the occult mechanisms of literary theory. "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 
rationalisation. But 'I like this book' is not, I think, a non-literary reaction." And the "rationalization,” 
Orwell saw, was going to involve your background, your expectations, the historical period you're living 
through. Orwell often launches off on fairly long digressions—like the one on A. E. Housman in "Inside 
the Whale"—that no other literary critic would even consider, much less get away with. But he does get 
away with them (more or less), because they're so clearly in the service of trying to pin down a general 
view of life, and history, and politics. Nothing is ever separate from anything else in Orwell, though at the 
same time nothing is ever allowed to overshadow the task at hand. "While I have been writing this book,” 
he writes in the essay on Miller (the first three essays in this volume were published under the title Inside 
the Whale, in the spring of 1940), "another European war has broken out....What is quite obviously 
happening, war or no war, is the break-up of laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture." 
And this means we ought to read Henry Miller! 

This is great, a belief in the tenacity of politics and bombs but the equally powerful tenacity 
of literature and personality. If we compare Orwell to his near-contemporary Edmund Wilson, who was 
in many senses a more sensitive critic and with whose range in literary interests and languages Orwell 
could not possibly compete, we see Orwell's peculiar strength. At almost the exact moment as Orwell, in 
early 1940, Wilson published a psychobiographical essay on Dickens in which he traced much of 
Dickens's later development to his brush with poverty as a young man. Orwell's treatment is much more 
sociological and political, and in a way less dramatic than Wilson's. Yet at one point Orwell encapsulates 
Wilson's argument with a remarkable concision: "Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be 
terrified of it, and in spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the 


shabby-genteel." This is stark, and fair, and that "terrified" is unforgettable. 

It's possible to imagine a kind of tragedy to Orwell's style. He was a writer who saw both 
sides to every issue, and argued with himself about them, but whose style could only come down on one 
side at a time. You can imagine him trapped in that style, even as he used it to slash through cant and 
falsehood. You can imagine him trapped in it, too, whenever he expressed a vision of what the good 
society should be like; for it is, finally, a destructive style, peculiarly ill suited to expressing positive 
visions of anything. It's a funny, brutal, dry, destructive style. One of the slightly surprising things about 
these essays is how funny they are—in the elegant, deadpan plot summaries, but also in the retorts. To see 
Orwell slash through H. G. Wells, and Dali, and Tolstoy—and to see his glimmer of self-recognition in 
contemplating the work of the fantastically misanthropic Jonathan Swift—is to learn a bit of what 
language is still capable of. 

Orwell might not have admitted, as we would automatically admit today, that there were 
multiple subjective truths in the world, that a writer must negotiate the various possibilities of those many 
truths; and still, even while we know this and Orwell didn't, he always seems to be telling the truth. Part 
of the magic is that he never speaks from a point of view that is anything but his own, while at the same 
time he believes that any normal unprejudiced person—the "common man," the common Englishman— 
would see it the same way. The belief in a common man—in his existence as well as his decency—is a 
profound animating principle of these essays, and Orwell rarely misses an opportunity to stress this 
decency, as when he undramatically notes that anti-Jewish postcards disappeared from British newsstands 
after the rise of Hitler in Germany. Having established the common man's existence and his decency, 
Orwell is empowered to speak for him. There is a doubleness then to the point of view: Orwell is telling 
us only what he himself has seen—in Spain, in the coal mines, in the books he's read—but he's also 
convinced that a whole mass of people, standing behind him, would see it the same way, if only they saw 
it as clearly. And his gift is to convince us that we are those ordinary people, and we see it that way, too. 

You can tie yourself in knots—many leftist intellectuals have done this over the years— 
proving that Orwell's style is a facade, an invention, a mask he put on when he changed his name from 
Eric Blair to "George Orwell"; that by seeming to tell the whole story in plain and honest terms, it 
actually makes it more difficult to see, it obfuscates, the part of the story that's necessarily left out; that 
ultimately it rubber-stamps the status quo. In some sense, intellectually, all this is true enough; you can 
spend a day, a week, a semester proving it. There really are things in the world that Orwell's style would 
never be able to capture. But there are very few such things. 


Orwell did not want to become a saint, but he became a saint anyway. For most of his career a struggling 
writer, eking out a living reviewing books at an astonishing rate, he was gradually acknowledged, 
especially after the appearance of Homage to Catalonia in 1938, to be a great practitioner of English 
prose. With the publication of Animal Farm —a book turned down by several of England's preeminent 
houses (including Eliot's Faber and Faber) because they did not want to offend Britain's ally the Soviet 
Union—Orwell became a household name. Then his influence grew and grew, so that shortly after his 
death he was already a phenomenon. "In the Britain of the fifties," the great cultural critic Raymond 
Williams once lamented, "along every road that you moved, the figure of Orwell seemed to be waiting. If 
you tried to develop a new kind of popular cultural analysis, there was Orwell; if you wanted to report on 
work or ordinary life, there was Orwell; if you engaged in any kind of socialist argument, there was an 
enormously inflated statue of Orwell warning you to go back." In a way the incredible posthumous 


success of Orwell has seemed one of the peculiar episodes in the cultural life of the West. He was not, as 
Lionel Trilling once pointed out, a genius; he was not mysterious; he had served in Burma, washed dishes 
in a Parisian hotel, and fought for a few months in Spain, but this hardly added up to a life of adventure; 
for the most part he lived in London and reviewed books. So odd in fact has the success of Orwell seemed 
to some that there is even a book, George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation, devoted to getting 
to the bottom of it. 

When you return to these essays, the mystery evaporates. You would probably not be able to 
write this way now, even if you learned the craft: The voice would seem put-on, after Orwell; it would 
seem deliberately "hard-boiled." But there is nothing put-on about it here, and it seems to speak, despite 
the specificity of the issues discussed, directly to the present. In Orwell's clear, strong voice we hear a 
warning. Because we, too, live in a time when truth is disappearing from the world, and doing so in just 
the way Orwell worried it would: through language. We move through the world by naming things in it, 
and we explain the world through sentences and stories. The lesson of these essays is clear: Look around 
you. Describe what you see as an ordinary observer—for you are one, you know—would see them. Take 
things seriously. And tell the truth. Tell the truth. 


Charles Dickens 

Inside the Whale, March 11, 1940 

Inside the Whale and Other Essays was published in London by Victor Gollancz Ltd 
on March 11, 1940. It contained three essays: "Charles Dickens," "Boys' Weeklies," 
and "Inside the Whale." 


1 

Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the burial of his body in Westminster 
Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it. 

When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens's works, it 
seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and 
more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson,! h as made spirited efforts to turn Dickens into a 
bloodthirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as "almost" a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as 
"almost" a Catholic, and both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or "the poor," as Chesterton 
would have put it). On the other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in her little book on Lenin, relates that 
towards the end of his life Lenin went to see a dramatised version of The Cricket on the Hearth, and 
found Dickens's "middle-class sentimentality" so intolerable that he walked out in the middle of a scene. 

Taking "middle-class" to mean what Krupskaya might be expected to mean by it, this was 
probably a truer judgment than those of Chesterton and Jackson. But it is worth noticing that the dislike of 
Dickens implied in this remark is something unusual. Plenty of people have found him unreadable, but 
very few seem to have felt any hostility towards the general spirit of his work. Some years ago Mr. 
Bechhofer Roberts published a full-length attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (This Side Idolatry), 
but it was a merely personal attack, concerned for the most part with Dickens's treatment of his wife. It 
dealt with incidents which not one in a thousand of Dickens's readers would ever hear about, and which 
no more invalidate his work than the second-best bed invalidates Hamlet. All that the book really 
demonstrated was that a writer's literary personality has little or nothing to do with his private character. 
It is quite possible that in private life Dickens was just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer 
Roberts makes him appear. But in his published work there is implied a personality quite different from 
this, a personality which has won him far more friends than enemies. It might well have been otherwise, 
for even if Dickens was a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one might truthfully 
say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has felt this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the 
writers on Dickens, was anything but a radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in Dickens and 
wished it were not there, but it never occurred to him to deny it. In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak 
House, Little Dorrit, 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. In its 
attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow 
with a walking-stick as a delightful tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled 
down my throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong resemblance to Mr. 


Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that lawyers delight in Serjeant Buzfuz and that Little 
Dorrit is a favourite in the Home Office. 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. Where exacdy does he stand, socially, morally and politically? As usual, one can 
define his position more easily if one starts by deciding what he was not. 

In the first place he was not, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson seem to imply, a 
"proletarian” writer. To begin with, he does not write about the proletariat, in which he merely resembles 
the overwhelming majority of novelists, past and present. If you look for the working classes in fiction, 
and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole. This statement needs qualifying, perhaps. For 
reasons that are easy enough to see, the agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly good 
showing in fiction, and a great deal has been written about criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the 
working-class intelligentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go round, 
have always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way between the covers of a book, it is 
nearly always as objects of pity or as comic relief. The central action of Dickens's stories almost 
invariably takes place in middle-class 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. He has no portrait of an agricultural worker, and 
only one (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times) of an industrial worker. The Plornishes in Little Dorrit are 
probably his best picture of a working-class family—the Peggottys, for instance, hardly belong to the 
working class—but on the whole he is not successful with this type of character. If you ask any ordinary 
reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to 
mention are Bill Sikes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife—not 
exacdy a representative cross-section of the English working class. 

Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens is not a "revolutionary" 
writer. But his position here needs some defining. 

Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-corner soul-saver, the kind of 
well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will be perfect if you amend a few by-laws and abolish a 
few anomalies. It is worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for instance. Reade was a much better- 
informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited. He really hated the abuses he could 
understand, he showed them up in a series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable, 
and he probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but important points. But it was quite 
beyond him to grasp that, given the existing form of society, certain evils cannot be remedied. Fasten 
upon this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it before a British jury, and all will be 
well—that is how he sees it. Dickens at any rate never imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting them 
off. In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root. It 
is when one asks "Which root?" that one begins to grasp his position. 

The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter 
lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, 
the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of 
course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but 
the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants 
the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were 
overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as "human nature." It would be difficult to 


point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. 
Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book 
like Our Mutual Friend, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with living people by means of 
idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible 
power. Of course one can draw this inference for oneself, and one can draw it again from the remarks 
about Bounderby’s will at the end of Hard Times, and indeed from the whole of Dickens's work one can 
infer the evil of laissez-faire capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It is said that 
Macaulay refused to review Hard Times because he disapproved of its "sullen Socialism." Obviously 
Macaulay is here using the word "Socialism" in the same sense in which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian 
meal or a Cubist picture used to be referred to as "Bolshevism." 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. Bounderby is a bullying 
windbag and Gradgrind has been morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work 
well enough—that, all through, is the implication. And so far as social criticism goes, one can never 
extract much more from Dickens than this, unless one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole 
"message" is one that at first glance looks tike an enormous platitude: If men would behave decendy the 
world would be decent. 

Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of authority and who do behave 
decendy. Hence that recurrent Dickens figure, the Good Rich Man. This character belongs especially to 
Dickens's early optimistic period. He is usually a "merchant" (we are not necessarily told what 
merchandise he deals in), and he is always a superhumanly kind-hearted old gendeman who "trots" to and 
fro, raising his employees' wages, patting children on the head, getting debtors out of jail and, in general, 
acting the fairy godmother. Of course he is a pure dream figure, much further from real life than, say, 
Squeers or Micawber. Even Dickens must have reflected occasionally that anyone who was so anxious to 
give his money away would never have acquired it in the first place. Mr. Pickwick, for instance, had 
"been in the city," but it is difficult to imagine him making a fortune there. Nevertheless this character runs 
tike a connecting thread through most of the earlier books. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, 
Scrooge—It is the same figure over and over again, the good rich man handing out guineas. Dickens does 
however show signs of development here. In the books of the middle period the good rich man fades out 
to some extent. There is no one who plays this part in A Tale of Two Cities, nor in Great Expectations — 
Great Expectations is, in fact, definitely an attack on patronage—and in Hard Times it is only very 
doubtfully played by Gradgrind after his reformation. The character reappears in a rather different form as 
Meagles in Little Dorrit and John Jarndyce in Bleak House —one might perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in 
David Copperfield. But in these books the good rich man has dwindled from a "merchant" to a rentier. 
This is significant. A rentier is part of the possessing class, he can and, almost without knowing it, does 
make other people work for him, but he has very tittle direct power. Unlike Scrooge or the Cheerybles, he 
cannot put everything right by raising everybody's wages. The seeming inference from the rather 
despondent books that Dickens wrote in the 'fifties is that by that time he had grasped the helplessness of 
well-meaning individuals in a corrupt society. Nevertheless in the last completed novel, Our Mutual 
Friend (published 1864-65), the good rich man comes back in full glory in the person of Boffin. Boffin is 
a proletarian by origin and only rich by inheritance, but he is the usual deus ex machina, solving 
everybody's problems by showering money in all directions. He even "trots," tike the Cheerybles. In 
several ways Our Mutual Friend is a return to the earlier manner, and not an unsuccessful return either. 
Dickens’s thoughts seem to have come full circle. Once again, individual kindliness is the remedy for 
everything. 


One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child labour. There are 
plenty of pictures of suffering children in his books, but usually they are suffering in schools rather than in 
factories. The one detailed account of child labour that he gives is the description in David Copperfield 
of little David washing botdes in Murdstone & Grinby's warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. 
Dickens himself, at the age of ten, had worked in Warren's blacking factory in the Strand, very much as he 
describes it here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, pardy because he felt the whole incident to be 
discreditable to his parents, and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they were married. 
Looking back on this period, he says in David Copperfield: 

...it is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown 
away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of 
observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems 
wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was 
made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of 
Murdstone & Grinby. 

And again, having described the rough boys among whom he worked: 

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship 
... and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in 
my bosom. 

Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is Dickens himself. He uses almost 
the same words in the autobiography that he began and abandoned a few months earlier. Of course 
Dickens is right in saying that a gifted child ought not to work ten hours a day pasting labels on bottles, but 
what he does not say is that no child ought to be condemned to such a fate, and there is no reason for 
inferring that he thinks it. David escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes and 
the others are still there, and there is no sign that this troubles Dickens particularly. As usual, he displays 
no consciousness that the structure of society can be changed. He despises politics, does not believe that 
any good can come out of Parliament—he had been a Parliamentary shorthand writer, which was no doubt 
a disillusioning experience—and he is slightly hostile to the most hopeful movement of his day, trade 
unionism. In Hard Times trade unionism is represented as something not much better than a racket, 
something that happens because employers are not sufficiently paternal. Stephen Blackpool's refusal to 
join the union is rather a virtue in Dickens's eyes. Also, as Mr. Jackson has pointed out, the apprentices' 
association in Barnaby Rudge, to which Sim Tappertit belongs, is probably a hit at the illegal or barely 
legal unions of Dickens's own day, with their secret assemblies, passwords and so forth. Obviously he 
wants the workers to be decently treated, but there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into 
their own hands, least of all by open violence. 

As it happens, Dickens deals with revolution in the narrower sense in two novels, Barnaby 
Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities. In Barnaby Rudge it is a case of rioting rather than revolution. The 
Gordon Riots of 1780, though they had religious bigotry as a pretext, seem to have been little more than a 
pointless outburst of looting. Dickens's attitude to this kind of thing is sufficiently indicated by the fact that 
his first idea was to make the ringleaders of the riots three lunatics escaped from an asylum. He was 
dissuaded from this, but the principal figure of the book is in fact a village idiot. In the chapters dealing 
with the riots Dickens shows a most profound horror of mob violence. He delights in describing scenes in 
which the "dregs" of the population behave with atrocious bestiality. These chapters are of great 


psychological interest, because they show how deeply he had brooded on this subject. The things he 
describes can only have come out of his imagination, for no riots on anything like the same scale had 
happened in his lifetime. Here is one of his descriptions, for instance: 

If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued forth such 
maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men there who danced and 
trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod down human enemies, and 
wrenched them from the stalks, like savages who twisted human necks. There were 
men who cast their lighted torches in the air, and suffered them to fall upon their 
heads and faces, blistering the skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who 
rushed up to the fire, and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who 
were restrained by force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On the skull 
of one drunken lad—not twenty, by his looks—who lay upon the ground with a bottle 
to his mouth, the lead from the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, 
white hot, melting his head like wax ... But of all the howling throng not one learnt 
mercy from, or sickened at, these sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage 
of one man glutted. 

You might almost think you were reading a description of "Red” Spain by a partisan of 
General Franco. One ought, of course, to remember that when Dickens was writing, the London "mob" 
still existed. (Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock.) Low wages and the growth and shift of population 
had brought into existence a huge, dangerous slum-proletariat, and until the early middle of the nineteenth 
century there was hardly such a thing as a police force. When the brickbats began to fly there was nothing 
between shuttering your windows and ordering the troops to open fire. In A Tale of Two Cities he is 
dealing with a revolution which was really about something, and Dickens's attitude is different, but not 
entirely different. As a matter of fact, A Tale of Two Cities is a book which tends to leave a false 
impression behind, especially after a lapse of time. 

The one thing that everyone who has read A Tale of Two Cities remembers is the Reign of 
Terror. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine—tumbrils thundering to and fro, bloody knives, 
heads bouncing into the basket, and sinister old women knitting as they watch. Actually these scenes only 
occupy a few chapters, but they are written with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow 
going. But A Tale of Two Cities is not a companion volume to The Scarlet Pimpernels Dickens sees 
clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the people who were 
executed deserved what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French aristocracy had behaved, 
vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We are constantly being reminded that while 
"my lord" is lolling in bed, with four liveried footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving 
outside, somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will presently be sawn into planks for the 
platform of the guillotine, etc. etc. etc. The inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon in 
the clearest terms: 


It was too much the way... to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the one only 
harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown—as if nothing had ever 
been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it—as if observers of the wretched 
millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made 
them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain 
words recorded what they saw. 


And again: 


All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record 
itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with 
its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, 
which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have 
produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, 
and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. 

In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own graves. But there is no perception 
here of what is now called historic necessity. Dickens sees that the results are inevitable, given the 
causes, but he thinks that the causes might have been avoided. The Revolution is something that happens 
because centuries of oppression have made the French peasantry subhuman. If the wicked nobleman could 
somehow have turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge, there would have been no Revolution, no jacquerie, 
no guillotine—and so much the better. This is the opposite of the "revolutionary" attitude. From the 
"revolutionary" point of view the class-struggle is the main source of progress, and therefore the 
nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is playing a necessary part, just as much as the 
Jacobin who guillotines the nobleman. Dickens never writes anywhere a line that can be interpreted as 
meaning this. Revolution as he sees it is merely a monster that is begotten by tyranny and always ends by 
devouring its own instruments. In Sidney Carton's vision at the foot of the guillotine, he foresees Defarge 
and the other leading spirits of the Terror all perishing under the same knife—which, in fact, was 
approximately what happened. 

And Dickens is very sure that revolution is a monster. That is why everyone remembers the 
revolutionary scenes in A Tale of Two Cities ; they have the quality of nightmare, and it is Dickens's own 
nightmare. Again and again he insists upon the meaningless horrors of revolution—the mass-butcheries, 
the injustice, the ever-present terror of spies, the frightful blood-lust of the mob. The descriptions of the 
Paris mob—the description, for instance, of the crowd of murderers struggling round the grindstone to 
sharpen their weapons before butchering the prisoners in the September massacres—outdo anything in 
Barnaby Rudge. The revolutionaries appear to him simply as degraded savages—in fact, as lunatics. He 
broods over their frenzies with a curious imaginative intensity. He describes them dancing the 
"Carmagnole,"- for instance: 

There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five 
thousand demons ... They danced to the popular Revolution song, keeping a ferocious 
time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison... They advanced, retreated, struck at 
one another's hands, clutched at one another's heads, spun round alone, caught one 
another and spun round in pairs, until many of them dropped ... Suddenly they stopped 
again, paused, struck out the time afresh, formed into lines the width of the public 
way, and with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped screaming off. 
No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen 
sport—a something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry.... 

He even credits some of these wretches with a taste for guillotining children. The passage I 
have abridged above ought to be read in full. It and others like it show how deep was Dickens's horror of 
revolutionary hysteria. Notice, for instance, that touch, "with their heads low down and their hands high 
up," etc., and the evil vision it conveys. Madame Defarge is a truly dreadful figure, certainly Dickens's 


most successful attempt at a malignant character. Defarge and others are simply "the new oppressors who 
have risen on the destruction of the old," the revolutionary courts are presided over by "the lowest, 
cruellest and worst populace," and so on and so forth. All the way through Dickens insists upon the 
nightmare insecurity of a revolutionary period, and in this he shows a great deal of prescience. "A law of 
the suspected, which struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over any good and innocent 
person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could 
obtain no hearing"—it would apply pretty accurately to several countries to-day. 

The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimise its horrors; Dickens's impulse is to 
exaggerate them—and from a historical point of view he has certainly exaggerated. Even the Reign of 
Terror was a much smaller thing than he makes it appear. Though he quotes no figures, he gives the 
impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years, whereas in reality the whole of the Terror, so far as 
the number of deaths goes, was a joke compared with one of Napoleon's battles. But the bloody knives 
and the tumbrils rolling to and fro create in his mind a special, sinister vision which he has succeeded in 
passing on to generations of readers. Thanks to Dickens, the very word "tumbril" has a murderous sound; 
one forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of farm-cart. To this day, to the average Englishman, the French 
Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads. It is a strange thing that Dickens, much more 
in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution than most Englishmen of his time, should have played a part 
in creating this impression. 

If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is 
education. Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is always hope for the individual human being, if 
you can catch him young enough. This belief partly accounts for Dickens's preoccupation with childhood. 

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In 
spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now 
comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of 
view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield. The mental atmosphere 
of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been 
written by a child. And yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, 
dwindle from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens 
has been able to stand both inside and outside the child's mind, in such a way that the same scene can be 
wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at which one reads it. Look, for instance, at the 
scene in which David Copperfield is unjustly suspected of eating the mutton chops; or the scene in which 
Pip, in Great Expectations, coming back from Miss Havisham's house and finding himself completely 
unable to describe what he has seen, takes refuge in a series of outrageous lies—which, of course, are 
eagerly believed. All the isolation of childhood is there. And how accurately he has recorded the 
mechanisms of the child's mind, its visualising tendency, its sensitiveness to certain kinds of impression. 
Pip relates how in his childhood his ideas about his dead parents were derived from their tombstones: 

The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, 
stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, 
"A/so Georgiana, Wife of the Above," I drew a childish conclusion that my mother 
was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half 
long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the 
memory of five little brothers of mine ... I am indebted for a belief I religiously 
entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their 


trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence. 

There is a similar passage in David Copperfield. After biting Mr. Murdstone's hand, David 
is sent away to school and obliged to wear on his back a placard saying, "Take care of him. He bites." He 
looks at the door in the playground where the boys have carved their names, and from the appearance of 
each name he seems to know in just what tone of voice the boy will read out the placard: 

There was one boy—a certain J. Steerforth—who cut his name very deep and very 
often, who, I conceived, would read it in a rather strong voice, and afterwards pull 
my hair. There was another boy, one Tommy Traddles, who I dreaded would make 
game of it, and pretend to be dreadfully frightened of me. There was a third, George 
Demple, who I fancied would sing it. 

When I read this passage as a child, it seemed to me that those were exacdy the pictures that 
those particular names would call up. The reason, of course, is the sound-associations of the words 
(Demple—"temple"; Traddles—probably "skedaddle"). But how many people, before Dickens, had ever 
noticed such things? A sympathetic attitude towards children was a much rarer thing in Dickens's day than 
it is now. The early nineteenth century was not a good time to be a child. In Dickens's youth children were 
still being "solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen,” and it was not so long 
since boys of thirteen had been hanged for petty theft. The doctrine of "breaking the child's spirit" was in 
full vigour, and The Fairchild Family was a standard book for children till late into the century. This evil 
book is now issued in pretty-pretty expurgated editions, but it is well worth reading in the original 
version. It gives one some idea of the lengths to which child-discipline was sometimes carried. Mr. 
Fairchild, for instance, when he catches his children quarrelling, first thrashes them, reciting Doctor 
Watts's "Let dogs delight to bark and bite” between blows of the cane, and then takes them to spend the 
afternoon beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is hanging. In the earlier part of the 
century scores of thousands of children, aged sometimes as young as six, were literally worked to death in 
the mines or cotton mills, and even at the fashionable public schools boys were flogged till they ran with 
blood for a mistake in their Latin verses. One thing which Dickens seems to have recognised, and which 
most of his contemporaries did not, is the sadistic sexual element in flogging. I think this can be inferred 
from David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby. But mental cruelty to a child infuriates him as much as 
physical, and though there is a fair number of exceptions, his schoolmasters are generally scoundrels. 

Except for the universities and the big public schools, every kind of education then existing in 
England gets a mauling at Dickens's hands. There is Doctor Blimber's Academy, where little boys are 
blown up with Greek until they burst, and the revolting charity schools of the period, which produced 
specimens like Noah Claypole and Uriah Heep, and Salem House, and Dotheboys Hall, and the 
disgraceful little dame-school kept by Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt. Some of what Dickens says remains true 
even to-day. Salem House is the ancestor of the modern "prep, school," which still has a good deal of 
resemblance to it; and as for Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, some old fraud of much the same stamp is carrying 
on at this moment in nearly every small town in England. But, as usual, Dickens's criticism is neither 
creative nor destructive. He sees the idiocy of an educational system founded on the Greek lexicon and 
the wax-ended cane; on the other hand, he has no use for the new kind of school that is coming up in the 
'fifties and 'sixties, the "modern" school, with its gritty insistence on "facts." What, then, does he want? As 
always, what he appears to want is a moralised version of the existing thing—the old type of school, but 
with no caning, no bullying or underfeeding, and not quite so much Greek. Doctor Strong's school, to 
which David Copperfield goes after he escapes from Murdstone & Grinby's, is simply Salem House with 


the vices left out and a good deal of "old grey stones" atmosphere thrown in: 

Doctor Strong's was an excellent school, as different from Mr. Creakle's as good is 
from evil. It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with 
an appeal, in everything, to the honour and good faith of the boys ... which worked 
wonders. We all felt that we had a part in the management of the place, and in 
sustaining its character and dignity. Hence, we soon became warmly attached to it—I 
am sure I did for one, and I never knew, in all my time, of any boy being otherwise— 
and learnt with a good will, desiring to do it credit. We had noble games out of hours, 
and plenty of liberty; but even then, as I remember, we were well spoken of in the 
town, and rarely did any disgrace, by our appearance or manner, to the reputation of 
Doctor Strong and Doctor Strong's boys. 

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. The boys "learnt with 
a good will," but what did they learn? No doubt it was Doctor Blimber's curriculum, a little watered 
down. Considering the attitude to society that is everywhere implied in Dickens novels, it comes as rather 
a shock to learn that he sent his eldest son to Eton and sent all his children through the ordinary 
educational mill. Gissing seems to think that he may have done this because he was painfully conscious of 
being under-educated himself. Here perhaps Gissing is influenced by his own love of classical learning. 
Dickens had had little or no formal education, but he lost nothing by missing it, and on the whole he seems 
to have been aware of this. If he was unable to imagine a better school than Doctor Strong's, or, in real 
life, than Eton, it was probably due to an intellectual deficiency rather different from the one Gissing 
suggests. 


It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of 
spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still 
more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and his attitude is 
sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong's school being as different from Creakle's "as good is 
from evil." Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the 
same place. Useless to change institutions without a "change of heart"—that, essentially, is what he is 
always saying. 

If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A "change 
of heart" is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not a 
humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries away from his books is 
that of a hatred of tyranny. I said earlier that Dickens is not in the accepted sense a revolutionary writer. 
But it is not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as "revolutionary"—and 
revolution, after all, means turning things upside down—as the politico-economic criticism which is 
fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of 
capitalist society in a poem like "I wander through each charter'd street" than in three-quarters of Socialist 
literature. Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is 
always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old—generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. 
Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you 
have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved 
human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in 
point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded 


a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that 
tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being 
tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet 
more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot yet foresee. The central problem—how 
to prevent power from being abused—remains unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that 
private property is an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. "If men would behave decently the 
world would be decent" is not such a platitude as it sounds. 


2 

More completely than most writers, perhaps, Dickens can be explained in terms of his social origin, 
though actually his family history was not quite what one would infer from his novels. His father was a 
clerk in government service, and through his mother's family he had connections with both the army and 
the navy. But from the age of nine onwards he was brought up in London in commercial surroundings, and 
generally in an atmosphere of struggling poverty. Mentally he belongs to the small urban bourgeoisie, and 
he happens to be an exceptionally fine specimen of this class, with all the "points," as it were, very highly 
developed. That is partly what makes him so interesting. If one wants a modern equivalent, the nearest 
would be H. G. Wells, who has had a rather similar history and who obviously owes something to 
Dickens as a novelist. Arnold Bennett was essentially of the same type, but, unlike the other two, he was a 
midlander, with an industrial and Nonconformist rather than commercial and Anglican background. 

The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited outlook. 
He sees the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside these limits is either laughable or 
slightly wicked. On the one hand, he has no contact with industry or the soil; on the other, no contact with 
the governing classes. Anyone who has studied Wells's novels in detail will have noticed that though he 
hates the aristocrat like poison, he has no particular objection to the plutocrat, and no enthusiasm for the 
proletarian. His most-hated types, the people he believes to be responsible for all human ills, are kings, 
landowners, priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants. At first sight a list beginning with kings 
and ending with peasants looks like a mere omnium gatherum, but in reality all these people have a 
common factor. All of them are archaic types, people who are governed by tradition and whose eyes are 
turned towards the past—the opposite, therefore, of the rising bourgeois who has put his money on the 
future and sees the past simply as a dead hand. 

Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the bourgeoisie was really a rising class, 
he displays this characteristic less strongly than Wells. He is almost unconscious of the future and has a 
rather sloppy love of the picturesque (the "quaint old church,” etc.). Nevertheless his list of most-hated 
types is like enough to Wells's for the similarity to be striking. He is vaguely on the side of the working 
class—has a sort of generalised sympathy with them because they are oppressed—but he does not in 
reality know much about them; they come into his books chiefly as servants, and comic servants at that. At 
the other end of the scale he loathes the aristocrat and—going one better than Wells in this—loathes the 
big bourgeois as well. His real sympathies are bounded by Mr. Pickwick on the upper side and Mr. 
Barkis on the lower. But the term "aristocrat," for the type Dickens hates, is vague and needs defining. 

Actually Dickens's target is not so much the great aristocracy, who hardly enter into his 
books, as their petty offshoots, the cadging dowagers who live up mews in Mayfair, and the bureaucrats 
and professional soldiers. All through his books there are countless hostile sketches of these people, and 


hardly any that are friendly. There are practically no friendly pictures of the landowning class, for 
instance. One might make a doubtful exception of Sir Leicester Dedlock; otherwise there is only Mr. 
Wardle (who is a stock figure—the "good old squire") and Haredale in Barnaby Rudge, who has 
Dickens's sympathy because he is a persecuted Catholic. There are no friendly pictures of soldiers (i.e. 
officers), and none at all of naval men. As for his bureaucrats, judges and magistrates, most of them would 
feel quite at home in the Circumlocution Office. The only officials whom Dickens handles with any kind 
of friendliness are, significandy enough, policemen. 

Dickens's attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman, because it is part of the English 
puritan tradition, which is not dead even at this day. The class Dickens belonged to, at least by adoption, 
was growing suddenly rich after a couple of centuries of obscurity. It had grown up mainly in the big 
towns, out of contact with agriculture, and politically impotent; government, in its experience, was 
something which either interfered or persecuted. Consequendy it was a class with no tradition of public 
service and not much tradition of usefulness. What now strikes us as remarkable about the new moneyed 
class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms of individual 
success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists. On the other hand, a Tite Barnacle, even 
when he was neglecting his duties, would have some vague notion of what duties he was neglecting. 
Dickens's attitude is never irresponsible, still less does he take the money-grubbing Smilesian- line; but at 
the back of his mind there is usually a half-belief that the whole apparatus of government is unnecessary. 
Parliament is simply Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle, the Empire is simply Major Bag-stock and his 
Indian servant, the Army is simply Colonel Chowser and Doctor Slammer, the public services are simply 
Bumble and the Circumlocution Office—and so on and so forth. What he does not see, or only 
intermittendy sees, is that Coodle and Doodle and all the other corpses left over from the eighteenth 
century are performing a function which neither Pickwick nor Boffin would ever bother about. 

And of course this narrowness of vision is in one way a great advantage to him, because it is 
fatal for a caricaturist to see too much. From Dickens's point of view "good" society is simply a 
collection of village idiots. What a crew! Lady Tippins! Mrs. Gowan! Lord Verisopht! The Honourable 
Bob Stables! Mrs. Sparsit (whose husband was a Powler)! The Tite Barnacles! Nupkins! It is practically 
a case-book in lunacy. But at the same time his remoteness from the landowning-military-bureaucratic 
class incapacitates him for full-length satire. He only succeeds with this class when he depicts them as 
mental defectives. The accusation which used to be made against Dickens in his lifetime, that he "could 
not paint a gendeman," was an absurdity, but it is true in this sense, that what he says against the 
"gendeman" class is seldom very damaging. Sir Mulberry Hawk, for instance, is a wretched attempt at the 
wicked-baronet type. Harthouse in Hard Times is better, but he would be only an ordinary achievement 
for Trollope or Thackeray. Trollope's thoughts hardly move outside the "gendeman" class, but Thackeray 
has the great advantage of having a foot in two moral camps. In some ways his oudook is very similar to 
Dickens's. Like Dickens, he identifies with the puritanical moneyed class against the card-playing, debt- 
bilking aristocracy. The eighteenth century, as he sees it, is sticking out into the nineteenth in the person of 
the wicked Lord Steyne. Vanity Fair is a full-length version of what Dickens did for a few chapters in 
Little Dorrit. But by origins and upbringing Thackeray happens to be somewhat nearer to the class he is 
satirising. Consequendy he can produce such comparatively subde types as, for instance, Major 
Pendennis and Rawdon Crawley. Major Pendennis is a shallow old snob, and Rawdon Crawley is a 
thick-headed ruffian who sees nothing wrong in living for years by swindling tradesmen; but what 
Thackeray realises is that according to their tortuous code they are neither of them bad men. Major 
Pendennis would not sign a dud cheque, for instance. Rawdon certainly would, but on the other hand he 
would not desert a friend in a tight corner. Both of them would behave well on the field of batde—a thing 


that would not particularly appeal to Dickens. The result is that at the end one is left with a kind of 
amused tolerance for Major Pendennis and with something approaching respect for Rawdon; and yet one 
sees, better than any diatribe could make one, the utter rottenness of that kind of cadging, toadying life on 
the fringes of smart society. Dickens would be quite incapable of this. In his hands both Rawdon and the 
Major would dwindle to traditional caricatures. And, on the whole, his attacks on "good" society are 
rather perfunctory. The aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie exist in his books chiefly as a kind of "noises 
off," a haw-hawing chorus somewhere in the wings, like Podsnap's dinner-parties. When he produces a 
really subtle and damaging portrait, like John Dorrit or Harold Skimpole, it is generally of some rather 
middling, unimportant person. 

One very striking thing about Dickens, especially considering the time he lived in, is his lack 
of vulgar nationalism. All peoples who have reached the point of becoming nations tend to despise 
foreigners, but there is not much doubt that the English-speaking races are the worst offenders. One can 
see this from the fact that as soon as they become fully aware of any foreign race, they invent an insulting 
nickname for it. Wop, Dago, Froggy, Squarehead, Kike, Sheeny, Nigger, Wog, Chink, Greaser, 
Yellowbelly—these are merely a selection. Any time before 1870 the list would have been shorter, 
because the map of the world was different from what it is now, and there were only three or four foreign 
races that had fully entered into the English consciousness. But towards these, and especially towards 
France, the nearest and best-hated nation, the English attitude of patronage was so intolerable that English 
"arrogance” and "xenophobia" are still a legend. And of course they are not a completely untrue legend 
even now. Till very recently nearly all English children were brought up to despise the southern European 
races, and history as taught in schools was mainly a list of battles won by England. But one has got to 
read, say, the Quarterly Review of the 'thirties to know what boasting really is. Those were the days when 
the English built up their legend of themselves as "sturdy islanders" and "stubborn hearts of oak" and 
when it was accepted as a kind of scientific fact that one Englishman was the equal of three foreigners. 
All through nineteenth-century novels and comic papers there runs the traditional figure of the "Froggy"— 
a small ridiculous man with a tiny beard and a pointed top-hat, always jabbering and gesticulating, vain, 
frivolous and fond of boasting of his martial exploits, but generally taking to flight when real danger 
appears. Over against him was John Bull, the "sturdy English yeoman," or (a more public-school version) 
the "strong, silent Englishman" of Charles Kingsley, Tom Hughes and others. 

Thackeray, for instance, has this outlook very strongly, though there are moments when he 
sees through it and laughs at it. The one historical fact that is firmly fixed in his mind is that the English 
won the battle of Waterloo. One never reads far in his books without coming upon some reference to it. 
The English, as he sees it, are invincible because of their tremendous physical strength, due mainly to 
living on beef. Like most Englishmen of his time, he has the curious illusion that the English are larger 
than other people (Thackeray, as it happened, was larger than most people), and therefore he is capable of 
writing passages like this: 

I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would lay even money that you 
who are reading this are more than five feet seven in height, and weigh eleven stone; 
while a Frenchman is five feet four and does not weigh nine. The Frenchman has after 
his soup a dish of vegetables, where you have one of meat. You are a different and 
superior animal—a French-beating animal (the history of hundreds of years has 
shown you to be so), etc. etc. 

There are similar passages scattered all through Thackeray's works. Dickens would never be 


guilty of anything of the kind. It would be an exaggeration to say that he nowhere pokes fun at foreigners, 
and of course, like nearly all nineteenth-century Englishmen, he is untouched by European culture. But 
never anywhere does he indulge in the typical English boasting, the "island race," "bulldog breed,” "right 
little, tight little island" style of talk. In the whole of A Tale of Two Cities there is not a line that could be 
taken as meaning, "Look how these wicked Frenchmen behave!" The one place where he seems to display 
a normal hatred of foreigners is in the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit. This, however, is simply 
the reaction of a generous mind against cant. If Dickens were alive to-day he would make a trip to Soviet 
Russia and come back with a book rather like Gide's Retour de i'URSS.- But he is remarkably free from 
the idiocy of regarding nations as individuals. He seldom even makes jokes turning on nationality. He 
does not exploit the comic Irishman and the comic Welshman, for instance, and not because he objects to 
stock characters and ready-made jokes, which obviously he does not. It is perhaps more significant that he 
shows no prejudice against Jews. It is true that he takes it for granted (Oliver Twist and Great 
Expectations) that a receiver of stolen goods will be a Jew, which at the time was probably justified. But 
the "Jew joke," endemic in English literature until the rise of Hider, does not appear in his books, and in 
Our Mutual Friend he makes a pious though not very convincing attempt to stand up for the Jews. 

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. He is very much an Englishman, but he is 
hardly aware of it—certainly the thought of being an Englishman does not thrill him. He has no imperialist 
feeling, no discernible views on foreign politics, and is untouched by the military tradition. 
Temperamentally he is much nearer to the small Nonconformist tradesman who looks down on the 
"redcoats” and thinks that war is wicked—a one-eyed view, but, after all, war is wicked. It is noticeable 
that Dickens hardly writes of war, even to denounce it. With all his marvellous powers of description, and 
of describing things he had never seen, he never describes a battle, unless one counts the attack on the 
Bastille in A Tale of Two Cities. Probably the subject would not strike him as interesting, and in any case 
he would not regard a battlefield as a place where anything worth settling could be settled. It is one up to 
the lower-middle- class, puritan mentality. 


3 

Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in spite of his generosity of mind, 
he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim him as a "popular" 
writer, a champion of the "oppressed masses." So he is, so long as he thinks of them as oppressed; but 
there are two things that condition his attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man, and a 
Cockney at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial and 
agricultural labourers. It is interesting to see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens 
as the spokesman of "the poor," without showing much awareness of who "the poor" really are. To 
Chesterton "the poor" means small shopkeepers and 28 george orwell servants. Sam Weller, he says, "is 
the great symbol in English literature of the populace peculiar to England”; and Sam Weller is a valet! The 
other point is that Dickens's early experiences have given him a horror of proletarian roughness. He 
shows this unmistakably whenever he writes of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His 
descriptions of the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion: 

The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people half- 
naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, 
disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and 


the whole quarter reeked with crime, and filth, and misery, etc. etc. 

There are many similar passages in Dickens. From them one gets the impression of whole 
submerged populations whom he regards as being beyond the pale. In rather the same way the modern 
doctrinaire Socialist contemptuously writes off a large block of the population as "lumpenproletariat." 
Dickens also shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect of him. Although he is well 
aware of the social and economic causes of crime, he often seems to feel that when a man has once broken 
the law he has put himself outside human society. There is a chapter at the end of David Copperfield in 
which David visits the prison where Littimer and Uriah Heep are serving their sentences. Dickens 
actually seems to regard the horrible "model" prisons, against which Charles Reade delivered his 
memorable attack in It is Never too Late to Mend, as too humane. He complains that the food is too good! 
As soon as he comes up against crime or the worst depths of poverty, he shows traces of the "I've always 
kept myself respectable" habit of mind. The attitude of Pip (obviously the attitude of Dickens himself) 
towards Magwitch in Great Expectations is extremely interesting. Pip is conscious all along of his 
ingratitude towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he discovers that the 
person who has loaded him with benefits for years is actually a transported convict, he falls into frenzies 
of disgust. "The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which I 
shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast," etc. etc. So far as one 
can discover from the text, this is not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorised by Magwitch 
in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a convict. There is an even more "kept- 
myself-respectable" touch in the fact that Pip feels as a matter of course that he cannot take Magwitch's 
money. The money is not the product of a crime, it has been honestly acquired; but it is an ex-convict's 
money and therefore "tainted." There is nothing psychologically false in this, either. Psychologically the 
latter part of Great Expectations is about the best thing Dickens ever did; throughout this part of the book 
one feels "Yes, that is just how Pip would have behaved." But the point is that in the matter of Magwitch, 
Dickens identifies with Pip, and his attitude is at bottom snobbish. The result is that Magwitch belongs to 
the same queer class of characters as Falstaff and, probably, Don Quixote—characters who are more 
pathetic than the author intended. 

When it is a question of the non-criminal poor, the ordinary, decent, labouring poor, there is 
of course nothing contemptuous in Dickens's attitude. He has the sincerest admiration for people like the 
Peggottys and the Plornishes. But it is questionable whether he really regards them as equals. It is of the 
greatest interest to read Chapter XI of David Copperfield and side by side with it the autobiographical 
fragment (parts of this are given in Forster's Life), in which Dickens expresses his feelings about the 
blacking-factory episode a great deal more strongly than in the novel. For more than twenty years 
afterwards the memory was so painful to him that he would go out of his way to avoid that part of the 
Strand. He says that to pass that way "made me cry, after my eldest child could speak." The text makes it 
quite clear that what hurt him most of all, then and in retrospect, was the enforced contact with "low" 
associates: 


No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; 
compared these every day associates with those of my happier childhood ... But I 
held some station at the blacking warehouse too ... I soon became at least as 
expeditious and as skilful with my hands, as either of the other boys. Though perfectly 
familiar with them, my conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to 
place a space between us. They, and the men, always spoke of me as "the young 
gentleman." A certain man ... used to call me "Charles" sometimes in speaking to me; 


but I think it was mostly when we were very confidential... Poll Green uprose once, 
and rebelled against the "young-gendeman" usage; but Bob Fagin setded him 
speedily. 

It was as well that there should be "a space between us," you see. However much Dickens 
may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them. Given his origins, and the time he 
lived in, it could hardly be otherwise. In the early nineteenth century class-animosities may have been no 
sharper than they are now, but the surface differences between class and class were enormously greater. 
The "gendeman" and the "common man" must have seemed like different species of animal. Dickens is 
quite genuinely on the side of the poor against the rich, but it would be next door to impossible for him not 
to think of a working-class exterior as a stigma. In one of Tolstoy's fables the peasants of a certain village 
judge every stranger who arrives from the state of his hands. If his palms are hard from work, they let him 
in; if his palms are soft, out he goes. This would be hardly intelligible to Dickens; all his heroes have soft 
hands. His younger heroes—Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Edward Chester, David Copperfield, 
John Harmon—are usually of the type known as "walking gendemen." He likes a bourgeois exterior and a 
bourgeois (not aristocratic) accent. One curious symptom of this is that he will not allow anyone who is to 
play a heroic part to speak like a working man. A comic hero like Sam Weller, or a merely pathetic figure 
like Stephen Blackpool, can speak with a broad accent, but the jeune premier always speaks the then 
equivalent of B.B.C. This is so, even when it involves absurdities. Litde Pip, for instance, is brought up 
by people speaking broad Essex, but talks upper-class English from his earliest childhood; actually he 
would have talked the same dialect as Joe, or at least as Mrs. Gargery. So also with Biddy Wopsle, Lizzie 
Hexam, Sissie Jupe, Oliver Twist—one ought perhaps to add Litde Dorrit. Even Rachel in Hard Times 
has barely a trace of Lancashire accent, an impossibility in her case. 

One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist's real feelings on the class question is the 
attitude he takes up when class collides with sex. This is a thing too painful to be lied about, and 
consequendy it is one of the points at which the "I'm-not-a-snob" pose tends to break down. 

One sees that at its most obvious where a class-distinction is also a colour-distinction. And 
something resembling the colonial attitude ("native" women are fair game, white women are sacrosanct) 
exists in a veiled form in all-white communities, causing bitter resentment on both sides. When this issue 
arises, novelists often revert to crude class-feelings which they might disclaim at other times. A good 
example of "class-conscious" reaction is a rather forgotten novel, The People of Clopton, by George 
Bartram. The author's moral code is quite clearly mixed up with class-hatred. He feels the seduction of a 
poor girl by a rich man to be something atrocious, a kind of defilement, something quite different from her 
seduction by a man in her own walk of life. Trollope deals with this theme twice ( The Three Clerks and 
The Small House at Allington) and, as one might expect, entirely from the upper-class angle. As he sees 
it, an affair with a barmaid or a landlady's daughter is simply an "entanglement" to be escaped from. 
Trollope's moral standards are strict, and he does not allow the seduction actually to happen, but the 
implication is always that a working-class girl's feelings do not gready matter. In The Three Clerks he 
even gives the typical class-reaction by noting that the girl "smells." Meredith (Rhoda Fleming) takes 
more the "class-conscious" viewpoint. Thackeray, as often, seems to hesitate. In Pendennis (Fanny 
Bolton) his attitude is much the same as Trollope's; in A Shabby Genteel Story it is nearer to Meredith's. 

One could divine a good deal about Trollope's social origin, or Meredith's, or Bartram's, 
merely from their handling of the class-sex theme. So one can with Dickens, but what emerges, as usual, is 
that he is more inclined to identify himself with the middle class than with the proletariat. The one 


incident that seems to contradict this is the tale of the young peasant-girl in Doctor Manette's manuscript 
in A Tale of Two Cities. This, however, is merely a costume-piece put in to explain the implacable hatred 
of Madame Defarge, which Dickens does not pretend to approve of. In David Copperfield, where he is 
dealing with a typical nineteenth-century seduction, the class-issue does not seem to strike him as 
paramount. It is a law of Victorian novels that sexual misdeeds must not go unpunished, and so Steerforth 
is drowned on Yarmouth sands, but neither Dickens, nor old Peggotty, nor even Ham, seems to feel that 
Steerforth has added to his offence by being the son of rich parents. The Steerforths are moved by class- 
motives, but the Peggottys are not—not even in the scene between Mrs. Steerforth and old Peggotty; if 
they were, of course, they would probably turn against David as well as against Steerforth. 

In Our Mutual Friend Dickens treats the episode of Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam 
very realistically and with no appearance of class bias. According to the "unhand me, monster" tradition, 
Lizzie ought either to "spurn” Eugene or to be ruined by him and throw herself off Waterloo Bridge; 
Eugene ought to be either a heardess betrayer or a hero resolved upon defying society. Neither behaves in 
the least tike this. Lizzie is frightened by Eugene's advances and actually runs away from them, but hardly 
pretends to dislike them; Eugene is attracted by her, has too much decency to attempt seducing her and 
dare not marry her because of his family. Finally they are married and no one is any the worse, except 
perhaps Mr. Twemlow, who will lose a few dinner engagements. It is all very much as it might have 
happened in real life. But a "class-conscious" novelist would have given her to Bradley Headstone. 

But when it is the other way about—when it is a case of a poor man aspiring to some woman 
who is "above" him—Dickens instandy retreats into the middle-class attitude. He is rather fond of the 
Victorian notion of a woman (woman with a capital W) being "above" a man. Pip feels that Estella is 
"above" him, Esther Summerson is "above" Guppy, Littie Dorrit is "above" John Chivery, Lucy Manette is 
"above" Sydney Carton. In some of these the "above"-ness is merely moral, but in others it is social. 
There is a scarcely mistakable class-reaction when David Copperfield discovers that Uriah Heep is 
plotting to marry Agnes Wickfield. The disgusting Uriah suddenly announces that he is in love with her: 

"Oh, Master Copperfield, with what a pure affection do I love the ground my Agnes 

walks on!" 


I believe I had a delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of the fire, 
and running him through with it. It went from me with a shock, tike a ball fired from a 
rifle: but the image of Agnes, outraged by so much as a thought of this red-headed 
animal's, remained in my mind when I looked at him, sitting all awry as if his mean 
soul griped his body, and made me giddy..."I believe Agnes Wickfield to be as far 
above you (David says later on), and as far removed from all your aspirations, as 
that moon herself!" 

Considering how Heep's general lowness—his servile manners, dropped aitches and so forth 
—has been rubbed in throughout the book, there is not much doubt about the nature of Dickens's feelings. 
Heep, of course, is playing a villainous part, but even villains have sexual lives; it is the thought of the 
"pure" Agnes in bed with a man who drops his aitches that really revolts Dickens. But his usual tendency 
is to treat a man in love with a woman who is "above" him as a joke. It is one of the stock jokes of 
English literature, from Malvolio onwards. Guppy in Bleak House is an example, John Chivery is 
another, and there is a rather ill-natured treatment of this theme in the "swarry" in Pickwick Papers. Here 
Dickens describes the Bath footmen as living a kind of fantasy-life, holding dinner-parties in imitation of 


their "betters" and deluding themselves that their young mistresses are in love with them. This evidendy 
strikes him as very comic. So it is, in a way, though one might question whether it is not better for a 
footman even to have delusions of this kind than simply to accept his status in the spirit of the catechism. 

In his attitude towards servants Dickens is not ahead of his age. In the nineteenth century the 
revolt against domestic service was just beginning, to the great annoyance of everyone with over £500 a 
year. An enormous number of the jokes in nineteenth-century comic papers deal with the uppishness of 
servants. For years Punch ran a series of jokes called "Servant Gal-isms," all turning on the then 
astonishing fact that a servant is a human being. Dickens is sometimes guilty of this kind of thing himself. 
His books abound with the ordinary comic servants; they are dishonest ( Great Expectations ), incompetent 
(David Copperfield), turn up their noses at good food (Pickwick Papers), etc. etc.—all rather in the spirit 
of the suburban housewife with one downtrodden cook-general. But what is curious, in a nineteenth- 
century radical, is that when he wants to draw a sympathetic picture of a servant, he creates what is 
recognisably a feudal type. Sam Weller, Mark Tapley, Clara Peggotty are all of them feudal figures. They 
belong to the genre of the "old family retainer"; they identify themselves with their master's family and are 
at once doggishly faithful and completely familiar. No doubt Mark Tapley and Sam Weller are derived to 
some extent from Smollett, and hence from Cervantes; but it is interesting that Dickens should have been 
attracted by such a type. Sam Weller's attitude is definitely medieval. He gets himself arrested in order to 
follow Mr. Pickwick into the Fleet, and afterwards refuses to get married because he feels that Mr. 
Pickwick still needs his services. There is a characteristic scene between them: 

"...vages or no vages, notice or no notice, board or no board, lodgin' or no lodgin', 
Sam Veller, as you took from the old inn in the Borough, sticks by you, come what 
come may..." 

"My good fellow," said Mr. Pickwick, when Mr. Weller had sat down 
again, rather abashed at his own enthusiasm, "you are bound to consider the young 
woman also." 

"I do consider the young 'ooman, sir," said Sam. "I have considered the 
young 'ooman. I've spoke to her, I've told her how I'm sitivated, she's ready to vait till 
I'm ready, and I believe she vill. If she don't, she's not the young 'ooman I take her for, 
and I give her up vith readiness." 

It is easy to imagine what the young woman would have said to this in real life. But notice the 
feudal atmosphere. Sam Weller is ready as a matter of course to sacrifice years of life to his master, and 
he can also sit down in his master's presence. A modern manservant would never think of doing either. 
Dickens's views on the servant question do not get much beyond wishing that master and servant would 
love one another. Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend, though a wretched failure as a character, represents the 
same kind of loyalty as Sam Weller. Such loyalty, of course, is natural, human and likeable; but so was 
feudalism. 


What Dickens seems to be doing, as usual, is to reach out for an idealised version of the 
existing thing. He was writing at a time when domestic service must have seemed a completely inevitable 
evil. There were no labour-saving devices, and there was huge inequality of wealth. It was an age of 
enormous families, pretentious meals and inconvenient houses, when the slavey drudging fourteen hours a 
day in the basement kitchen was something too normal to be noticed. And given the fact of servitude, the 
feudal relationship is the only tolerable one. Sam Weller and Mark Tapley are dream figures, no less than 


the Cheerybles. If there have got to be masters and servants, how much better that the master should be 
Mr. Pickwick and the servant should be Sam Weller. Better still, of course, if servants did not exist at all 
—but this Dickens is probably unable to imagine. Without a high level of mechanical development, human 
equality is not practically possible; Dickens goes to show that it is not imaginable either. 


4 

It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about 
food. He was a Cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the 
centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilised but not primarily useful. A 
thing that strikes one when one looks below the surface of Dickens books is that, as nineteenth-century 
novelists go, he is rather ignorant. He knows very little about the way things really happen. At first sight 
this statement looks flady untrue, and it needs some qualification. 

Dickens had had vivid glimpses of "low life"—life in a debtor's prison, for example—and he 
was also a popular novelist and able to write about ordinary people. So were all the characteristic 
English novelists of the nineteenth century. They felt at home in the world they lived in, whereas a writer 
nowadays is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modern novel is a novel about a novelist. Even when 
Joyce, for instance, spends a decade or so in patient efforts to make contact with the "common man," his 
"common man" finally turns out to be a Jew, and a bit of a highbrow at that. Dickens at least does not 
suffer from this kind of thing. He has no difficulty in introducing the common motives, love, ambition, 
avarice, vengeance and so forth. What he does not noticeably write about, however, is work. 

In Dickens's novels anything in the nature of work happens off-stage. The only one of his 
heroes who has a plausible profession is David Copperfield, who is first a shorthand writer and then a 
novelist, like Dickens himself. With most of the others, the way they earn their living is very much in the 
background. Pip, for instance, "goes into business" in Egypt; we are not told what business, and Pip's 
working life occupies about half a page of the book. Clennam has been in some unspecified business in 
China, and later goes into another barely-specified business with Doyce. Martin Chuzzlewit is an 
architect, but does not seem to get much time for practising. In no case do their adventures spring direcdy 
out of their work. Here the contrast between Dickens and, say, Trollope is starding. And one reason for 
this is undoubtedly that Dickens knows very little about the professions his characters are supposed to 
follow. What exacdy went on in Gradgrind's factories? How did Podsnap make his money? How did 
Merdle work his swindles? One knows that Dickens could never follow up the details of Parliamentary 
elections and Stock Exchange rackets as Trollope could. As soon as he has to deal with trade, finance, 
industry or politics he takes refuge in vagueness, or in satire. This is the case even with legal processes, 
about which actually he must have known a good deal. Compare any lawsuit in Dickens with the lawsuit 
in Orley Farm, for instance. 

And this pardy accounts for the needless ramifications of Dickens's novels, the awful 
Victorian "plot." It is true that not all his novels are alike in this. A Tale of Two Cities is a very good and 
fairly simple story, and so in its different way is Hard Times; but these are just the two which are always 
rejected as "not tike Dickens"—and incidentally they were not published in monthly numbers. ; The two 
first-person novels are also good stories, apart from their subplots. But the typical Dickens novel, 
Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Our Mutual Friend, always exists round a 
framework of melodrama. The last thing anyone ever remembers about these books is their central story. 


On the other hand, I suppose no one has ever read them without carrying the memory of individual pages 
to the day of his death. Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but he sees them 
always in private life, as "characters," not as functional members of society; that is to say, he sees them 
statically. Consequendy his greatest success is The Pickwick Papers, which is not a story at all, merely a 
series of sketches; there is little attempt at development—the characters simply go on and on, behaving 
like idiots, in a kind of eternity. As soon as he tries to bring his characters into action, the melodrama 
begins. He cannot make the action revolve round their ordinary occupations; hence the crossword puzzle 
of coincidences, intrigues, murders, disguises, buried wills, long-lost brothers, etc. etc. In the end even 
people like Squeers and Micawber get sucked into the machinery. 

Of course it would be absurd to say that Dickens is a vague or merely melodramatic writer. 
Much that he wrote is extremely factual, and in the power of evoking visual images he has probably never 
been equalled. When Dickens has once described something you see it for the rest of your life. But in a 
way the concreteness of his vision is a sign of what he is missing. For, after all, that is what the merely 
casual onlooker always sees—the outward appearance, the non-functional, the surfaces of things. No one 
who is really involved in the landscape ever sees the landscape. Wonderfully as he can describe an 
appearance, Dickens does not often describe a process. The vivid pictures that he succeeds in leaving in 
one's memory are nearly always the pictures of things seen in leisure moments, in the coffee-rooms of 
country inns or through the windows of a stage-coach; the kind of things he notices are inn-signs, brass 
door-knockers, painted jugs, the interiors of shops and private houses, clothes, faces and, above all, food. 
Everything is seen from the consumer-angle. When he writes about Coketown he manages to evoke, in just 
a few paragraphs, the atmosphere of a Lancashire town as a slightly disgusted southern visitor would see 
it. "It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with evil-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings 
full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the 
steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy 
madness." That is as near as Dickens ever gets to the machinery of the mills. An engineer or a cotton- 
broker would see it differently, but then neither of them would be capable of that impressionistic touch 
about the heads of the elephants. 

In a rather different sense his attitude to life is extremely unphysical. He is a man who lives 
through his eyes and ears rather than through his hands and muscles. Actually his habits were not so 
sedentary as this seems to imply. In spite of rather poor health and physique, he was active to the point of 
restlessness; throughout his life he was a remarkable walker, and he could at any rate carpenter well 
enough to put up stage scenery. But he was not one of those people who feel a need to use their hands. It is 
difficult to imagine him digging at a cabbage-patch, for instance. He gives no evidence of knowing 
anything about agriculture, and obviously knows nothing about any kind of game or sport. He has no 
interest in pugilism, for instance. Considering the age in which he was writing, it is astonishing how little 
physical brutality there is in Dickens's novels. Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley, for instance, behave 
with the most remarkable mildness towards the Americans who are constantly menacing them with 
revolvers and bowie-knives. The average English or American novelist would have had them handing out 
socks on the jaw and exchanging pistol-shots in all directions. Dickens is too decent for that; he sees the 
stupidity of violence, and also he belongs to a cautious urban class which does not deal in socks on the 
jaw, even in theory. And his attitude towards sport is mixed up with social feelings. In England, for 
mainly geographical reasons, sport, especially fieldsports, and snobbery are inextricably mingled. 
English Socialists are often flatly incredulous when told that Lenin, for instance, was devoted to shooting. 
In their eyes shooting, hunting, etc., are simply snobbish observances of the landed gentry; they forget that 
these things might appear differently in a huge virgin country like Russia. From Dickens's point of view 


almost any kind of sport is at best a subject for satire. Consequently one side of nineteenth-century life— 
the boxing, racing, cockfighting, badger-digging, poaching, rat-catching side of life, so wonderfully 
embalmed in Leech's illustrations to Surtees—is outside his scope. 

What is more striking, in a seemingly "progressive" radical, is that he is not mechanically 
minded. He shows no interest either in the details of machinery or in the things machinery can do. As 
Gissing remarks, Dickens nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he 
shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books one has a curious feeling that one 
is living in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and in fact, he does tend to return to this period. 
Little Dorrit, written in the middle 'fifties, deals with the late 'twenties; Great Expectations (1861) is not 
dated, but evidently deals with the 'twenties and 'thirties. Several of the inventions and discoveries which 
have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, india-rubber, coal 
gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens's lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. 
Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce's "invention" in Little Dorrit. It is 
represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, "of great importance to his country and 
his fellow-creatures,” and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the 
"invention" is! On the other hand, Doyce's physical appearance is hit off with the typical Dickens touch; 
he has a peculiar way of moving his thumb, a way characteristic of engineers. After that, Doyce is firmly 
anchored in one's memory; but, as usual, Dickens has done it by fastening on something external. 

There are people (Tennyson is an example) who lack the mechanical faculty but can see the 
social possibilities of machinery. Dickens has not this stamp of mind. He shows very little consciousness 
of the future. When he speaks of human progress it is usually in terms of moral progress—men growing 
better; probably he would never admit that men are only as good as their technical development allows 
them to be. At this point the gap between Dickens and his modern analogue H. G. Wells, is at its widest. 
Wells wears the future round his neck like a millstone, but Dickens's unscientific cast of mind is just as 
damaging in a different way. What it does is to make any positive attitude more difficult for him He is 
hostile to the feudal, agricultural past and not in real touch with the industrial present. Well, then, all that 
remains is the future (meaning Science, "progress" and so forth), which hardly enters into his thoughts. 
Therefore, while attacking everything in sight, he has no definable standard of comparison. As I have 
pointed out already, he attacks the current educational system with perfect justice, and yet, after all, he has 
no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why did he not indicate what a school might have 
been? Why did he not have his own sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of sending 
them to public schools to be stuffed with Greek? Because he lacked that kind of imagination. He has an 
infallible moral sense, but very little intellectual curiosity. And here one comes upon something which 
really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens, something that really does make the nineteenth century seem 
remote from us—that he has no ideal of work. 

With the doubtful exception of David Copperfield (merely Dickens himself), one cannot point 
to a single one of his central characters who is primarily interested in his job. His heroes work in order to 
make a living and to marry the heroine, not because they feel a passionate interest in one particular 
subject. Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance, is not burning with zeal to be an architect; he might just as well 
be a doctor or a barrister. In any case, in the typical Dickens novel, the deus ex machina enters with a bag 
of gold in the last chapter and the hero is absolved from further struggle. The feeling, "This is what I came 
into the world to do. Everything else is uninteresting. I will do this even if it means starvation,” which 
turns men of differing temperaments into scientists, inventors, artists, priests, explorers and 
revolutionaries—this motif is almost entirely absent from Dickens's books. He himself, as is well known, 


worked like a slave and believed in his work as few novelists have ever done. But there seems to be no 
calling except novel-writing (and perhaps acting) towards which he can imagine this kind of devotion. 
And, after all, it is natural enough, considering his rather negative attitude towards society. In the last 
resort there is nothing he admires except common decency. Science is uninteresting and machinery is cruel 
and ugly (the heads of the elephants). Business is only for ruffians like Bounderby. As for politics—leave 
that to the Tite Barnacles. Really there is no objective except to marry the heroine, settle down, live 
solventiy and be kind. And you can do that much better in private life. 

Here, perhaps, one gets a glimpse of Dickens's secret imaginative background. What did he 
think of as the most desirable way to live? When Martin Chuzzlewit had made it up with his uncle, when 
Nicholas Nickleby had married money, when John Harmon had been enriched by Boffin—what did they 
do? 


The answer evidently is that they did nothing. Nicholas Nickleby invested his wife's money 
with the Cheerybles and "became a rich and prosperous merchant," but as he immediately retired into 
Devonshire, we can assume that he did not work very hard. Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass "purchased and 
cultivated a small farm, more for occupation than profit." That is the spirit in which most of Dickens's 
books end—a sort of radiant idleness. Where he appears to disapprove of young men who do not work 
(Harthouse, Harry Gowan, Richard Carstone, Wrayburn before his reformation), it is because they are 
cynical and immoral or because they are a burden on somebody else; if you are "good," and also self- 
supporting, there is no reason why you should not spend fifty years in simply drawing your dividends. 
Home life is always enough. And, after all, it was the general assumption of his age. The "genteel 
sufficiency," the "competence," the "gentleman of independent means" (or "in easy circumstances")—the 
very phrases tell one all about the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle 
bourgeoisie. It was a dream of complete idleness. Charles Reade conveys its spirit perfectly in the ending 
of Hard Cash. Alfred Hardie, hero of Hard Cash, is the typical nineteenth-century novel-hero (public- 
school style), with gifts which Reade describes as amounting to "genius." He is an old Etonian and a 
scholar of Oxford, he knows most of the Greek and Latin classics by heart, he can box with prize-fighters 
and win the Diamond Sculls at Henley. He goes through incredible adventures in which, of course, he 
behaves with faultless heroism, and then, at the age of twenty-five, he inherits a fortune, marries his Julia 
Dodd and settles down in the suburbs of Liverpool, in the same house as his parents-in-law: 

They all lived together at Albion Villa, thanks to Alfred ... Oh, you happy little villa! 
You were as like Paradise as any mortal dwelling can be. A day came, however, 
when your walls could no longer hold all the happy inmates. Julia presented Alfred 
with a lovely boy; enter two nurses, and the villa showed symptoms of bursting. Two 
months more, and Alfred and his wife overflowed into the next villa. It was but 
twenty yards off; and there was a double reason for the migration. As often happens 
after a long separation, Heaven bestowed on Captain and Mrs. Dodd another infant to 
play about their knees, etc. etc. etc. 

This is the type of the Victorian happy ending—a vision of a huge, loving family of three or 
four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters. 
What is striking about it is the utterly soft, sheltered, effortless life that it implies. It is not even a violent 
idleness, like Squire Western's. That is the significance of Dickens's urban background and his non¬ 
interest in the blackguardly-sporting-military side of life. His heroes, once they had come into money and 
"settled down," would not only do no work; they would not even ride, hunt, shoot, fight duels, elope with 


actresses or lose money at the races. They would simply live at home in feather-bed respectability, and 
preferably next door to a blood-relation living exacdy the same life: 

The first act of Nicholas, when he became a rich and prosperous merchant, was to 
buy his father's old house. As time crept on, and there came gradually about him a 
group of lovely children, it was altered and enlarged; but none of the old rooms were 
ever pulled down, no old tree was ever rooted up, nothing with which there was any 
association of bygone times was ever removed or changed. 

Within a stone's-throw was another retreat, enlivened by children's pleasant 
voices too; and here was Kate ... the same true, gende creature, the same fond sister, 
the same in the love of all about her, as in her girlish days. 

It is the same incestuous atmosphere as in the passage quoted from Reade. And evidendy this 
is Dickens's ideal ending. It is perfecdy attained in Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit and Pickwick, 
and it is approximated to in varying degrees in almost all the others. The exceptions are Hard Times and 
Great Expectations —the latter actually has a "happy ending," but it contradicts the general tendency of 
the book, and it was put in at the request of Bulwer Lytton. 

The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like this: a hundred thousand 
pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a sweedy womanly wife, a horde of children, and no 
work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the moss-grown churchyard down the 
road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away before the happy ending happened. The servants 
are comic and feudal, the children prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of 
past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals, the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather 
beds and warming-pans, the Christmas parties with charades and blind man's buff; but nothing ever 
happens, except the yearly childbirth. The curious thing is that it is a genuinely happy picture, or so 
Dickens is able to make it appear. The thought of that kind of existence is satisfying to him. This alone 
would be enough to tell one that more than a hundred years have passed since Dickens's first book was 
written. No modern man could combine such purposelessness with so much vitality. 


5 

By this time anyone who is a lover of Dickens, and who has read as far as this, will probably be angry 
with me. 


I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his "message," and almost ignoring his 
literary qualities. But every writer, especially every novelist, has a "message," whether he admits it or 
not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens 
himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not 
all propaganda is art. As I said earlier, Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. 
He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives. The question is, What is 
there to steal? Why does anyone care about Dickens? Why do I care about Dickens? 

That kind of question is never easy to answer. As a rule, an aesthetic preference is either 
something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by non-aesthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the 
whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug. In Dickens's case the complicating factor is 


his familiarity. He happens to be one of those "great authors" who are ladled down everyone's throat in 
childhood. At the time this causes rebellion and vomiting, but it may have different after-effects in later 
life. For instance, nearly everyone feels a sneaking affection for the patriotic poems that he learned by 
heart as a child. "Ye Mariners of England," the "Charge of the Light Brigade"- and so forth. What one 
enjoys is not so much the poems themselves as the memories they call up. And with Dickens the same 
forces of association are at work. Probably there are copies of one or two of his books lying about in an 
actual majority of English homes. Many children begin to know his characters by sight before they can 
even read, for on the whole Dickens was lucky in his illustrators. A thing that is absorbed as early as that 
does not come up against any critical judgment. And when one thinks of this, one thinks of all that is bad 
and silly in Dickens—the cast-iron "plots," the characters who don't come off, the longueurs, the 
paragraphs in blank verse, the awful pages of "pathos." And then the thought arises, when I say I like 
Dickens, do I simply mean that I like thinking about my childhood? Is Dickens merely an institution? 

If so, he is an institution that there is no getting away from. How often one really thinks about 
any writer, even a writer one cares for, is a difficult thing to decide; but I should doubt whether anyone 
who has actually read Dickens can go a week without remembering him in one context or another. 
Whether you approve of him or not, he is there, like the Nelson Column. At any moment some scene or 
character, which may come from some book you cannot even remember the name of, is liable to drop into 
your mind. Micawber's letters! Winkle in the witness-box! Mrs. Gamp! Mrs. Wititterly and Sir Tumley 
Snuffim! Todgers's! (George Gissing said that when he passed the Monument it was never of the Fire of 
London that he thought, always of Todgers's). Mrs. Leo Hunter! Squeers! Silas Wegg and the Decline and 
Fall-off of the Russian Empire! Miss Mills and the Desert of Sahara! Wopsle acting Hamlet! Mrs. Jellyby! 
Mantalini, Jerry Cruncher, Barkis, Pumblechook, Tracy Tupman, Skimpole, Joe Gargery, Pecksniff—and 
so it goes on and on. It is not so much a series of books, it is more like a world. And not a purely comic 
world either, for part of what one remembers in Dickens is his Victorian morbidness and necrophilia and 
the blood-and-thunder scenes—the death of Sikes, Krook's spontaneous combustion, Fagin in the 
condemned cell, the women knitting round the guillotine. To a surprising extent all this has entered even 
into the minds of people who do not care about it. A music-hall comedian can (or at any rate could quite 
recently) go on the stage and impersonate Micawber or Mrs. Gamp with a fair certainty of being 
understood, - although not one in twenty of the audience had ever read a book of Dickens's right through. 
Even people who affect to despise him quote him unconsciously. 

Dickens is a writer who can be imitated, up to a certain point. In genuinely popular literature 
—for instance, the Elephant and Castle version of Sweeny Todd —he has been plagiarised quite 
shamelessly. What has been imitated, however, is simply a tradition that Dickens himself took from 
earlier novelists and developed, the cult of "character," i.e. eccentricity. The thing that cannot be imitated 
is his fertility of invention, which is invention not so much of characters, still less of "situations," as of 
turns of phrase and concrete details. The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens's writing is the 
unnecessary detail. Here is an example of what I mean. The story given below is not particularly funny, 
but there is one phrase in it that is as individual as a fingerprint. Mr. Jack Hopkins, at Bob Sawyer's party, 
is telling the story of the child who swallowed its sister's necklace: 

Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he treated himself to three, 
and so on, till in a week's time he had got through the necklace—five-and-twenty 
beads in all. The sister, who was an industrious girl, and seldom treated herself to a 
bit of finery, cried her eyes out, at the loss of the necklace; looked high and low for it; 
but I needn't say didn't find it. A few days afterwards, the family were at dinner— 


baked shoulder of mutton, and potatoes under it—the child, who wasn't hungry, was 
playing about the room, when suddenly there was heard a devil of a noise, like a 
small hail storm. "Don't do that, my boy," says the father. "I ain't a-doin' nothing," said 
the child. "Well, don't do it again," said the father. There was a short silence, and then 
the noise began again, worse than ever. "If you don't mind what I say, my boy," said 
the father, "you'll find yourself in bed, in something less than a pig's whisper." He 
gave the child a shake to make him obedient, and such a ratding ensued as nobody 
ever heard before. "Why, damme, it's in the child!" said the father; "he's got the croup 
in the wrong place!" "No, I haven't father," said the child, beginning to cry, "it's the 
necklace; I swallowed it, father"—The father caught the child up, and ran with him to 
the hospital: the beads in the boy’s stomach ratding all the way with the jolting; and 
the people looking up in the air, and down in the cellars to see where the unusual 
sound came from. "He's in the hospital now," said Jack Hopkins, "and he makes such 
a devil of a noise when he walks about, that they’re obliged to muffle him in a 
watchman's coat, for fear he should wake the patients!" 

As a whole, this story might come out of any nineteenth-century comic paper. But the 
unmistakable Dickens touch, the thing nobody else would have thought of, is the baked shoulder of mutton 
and potatoes under it. How does this advance the story? The answer is that it doesn't. It is something 
totally unnecessary, a florid little squiggle on the edge of the page; only, it is by just these squiggles that 
the special Dickens atmosphere is created. The other thing one would notice here is that Dickens's way of 
telling a story takes a long time. An interesting example, too long to quote, is Sam Weller's story of the 
obstinate patient in Chapter XLIV of The Pickwick Papers. As it happens, we have a standard of 
comparison here, because Dickens is plagiarising, consciously or unconsciously. The story is also told by 
some ancient Greek writer. I cannot now find the passage, but I read it years ago as a boy at school, and it 
runs more or less like this: 

A certain Thracian, renowned for his obstinacy, was warned by his physician that if 
he drank a flagon of wine it would kill him. The Thracian thereupon drank the flagon 
of wine and immediately jumped off the house-top and perished. "For," said he, "in 
this way I shall prove that the wine did not kill me." 

As the Greek tells it, that is the whole story—about six lines. As Sam Weller tells it, it takes 
round about a thousand words. Long before getting to the point we have been told all about the patient's 
clothes, his meals, his manners, even the newspapers he reads, and about the peculiar construction of the 
doctor's carriage, which conceals the fact that the coachman's trousers do not match his coat. Then there is 
the dialogue between the doctor and the patient. "'Crumpets is wholesome, sir,' said the patient. 'Crumpets 
is not wholesome, sir,' says the doctor, wery fierce," etc. etc. In the end the original story has been buried 
under the details. And in all of Dickens's most characteristic passages it is the same. His imagination 
overwhelms everything, like a kind of weed. Squeers stands up to address his boys, and immediately we 
are hearing about Bolder's father who was two pounds ten short, and Mobbs's stepmother who took to her 
bed on hearing that Mobbs wouldn't eat fat and hoped Mr. Squeers would flog him into a happier state of 
mind. Mrs. Leo Hunter writes a poem, "Expiring Frog”; two full stanzas are given. Boffin takes a fancy to 
pose as a miser, and instantly we are down among the squalid biographies of eighteenth-century misers, 
with names like Vulture Hopkins and the Rev. Blewberry Jones, and chapter headings like "The Story of 
the Mutton Pies" and "The Treasures of a Dunghill." Mrs. Harris, who does not even exist, has more 
detail piled onto her than any three characters in an ordinary novel. Merely in the middle of a sentence we 


learn, for instance, that her infant nephew has been seen in a bottle at Greenwich Fair, along with the 
pink-eyed lady, the Prussian dwarf and the living skeleton. Joe Gargery describes how the robbers broke 
into the house of Pumblechook, the corn and seed merchant—"and they took his till, and they took his 
cashbox, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his witdes, and they slapped his face, and they 
pulled his nose, and they tied him up to his bedpust, and they give him a dozen, and they stuffed his mouth 
full of flowering annuals to perwent his crying out." Once again the unmistakable Dickens touch, the 
flowering annuals; but any other novelist would only have mentioned about half of these outrages. 
Everything is piled up and up, detail on detail, embroidery on embroidery. It is futile to object that this 
kind of thing is rococo—one might as well make the same objection to a wedding-cake. Either you like it 
or you do not like it. Other nineteenth-century writers, Surtees, Barham, Thackeray, even Marryat, have 
something of Dickens's profuse, overflowing quality, but none of them on anything like the same scale. 
The appeal of all these writers now depends pardy on period-flavour, and though Marryat is still 
officially a "boys' writer" and Surtees has a sort of legendary fame among hunting men, it is probable that 
they are read mosdy by bookish people. 

Significandy, Dickens's most successful books (not his best books) are The Pickwick Papers, 
which is not a novel, and Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities, which are not funny. As a novelist his 
natural fertility gready hampers him, because the burlesque which he is never able to resist is constandy 
breaking into what ought to be serious situations. There is a good example of this in the opening chapter of 
Great Expectations. The escaped convict, Magwitch, has just captured the six-year-old Pip in the 
churchyard. The scene starts terrifyingly enough, from Pip's point of view. The convict, smothered in mud 
and with his chain trailing from his leg, suddenly starts up among the tombs, grabs the child, turns him 
upside down and robs his pockets. Then he begins terrorising him into bringing food and a file: 

...he held me by the arms in an upright position on the top of the stone, and went on in 
these fearful terms: 

"You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them witdes. You 
bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it, and you never dare to 
say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as me, 
or any person sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my 
words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall 
be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain't alone, as you may think I am. There's a young 
man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man 
hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of 
getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to 
hide himself from that young man. A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may 
tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable 
and safe, but that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him 
open. I am keeping that young man from harming of you at the present moment, with 
great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Now, 
what do you say?" 

Here Dickens has simply yielded to temptation. To begin with, no starving and hunted man 
would speak in the least like that. Moreover, although the speech shows a remarkable knowledge of the 
way in which a child's mind works, its actual words are quite out of tune with what is to follow. It turns 
Magwitch into a sort of pantomime wicked uncle, or, if one sees him through the child's eyes, into an 


appalling monster. Later in the book he is to be represented as neither, and his exaggerated gratitude, on 
which the plot turns, is to be incredible because of just this speech. As usual, Dickens's imagination has 
overwhelmed him. The picturesque details were too good to be left out. Even with characters who are 
more of a piece than Magwitch he is liable to be tripped up by some seductive phrase. Mr. Murdstone, for 
instance, is in the habit of ending David Copperfield's lessons every morning with a dreadful sum in 
arithmetic. "If I go into a cheese-monger's shop, and buy five thousand double-Gloucester cheeses at 
fourpence halfpenny each, present payment,” it always begins. Once again the typical Dickens detail, the 
double-Gloucester cheeses. But it is far too human a touch for Murdstone; he would have made it five 
thousand cashboxes. Every time this note is struck, the unity of the novel suffers. Not that it matters very 
much, because Dickens is obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his wholes. He is all fragments, 
all details—rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles—and never better than when he is building up 
some character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently. 

Of course it is not usual to urge against Dickens that he makes his characters behave 
inconsistently. Generally he is accused of doing just the opposite. His characters are supposed to be mere 
"types," each crudely representing some single trait and fitted with a kind of label by which you recognise 
him. Dickens is "only a caricaturist"—that is the usual accusation, and it does him both more and less than 
justice. To begin with, he did not think of himself as a caricaturist, and was constantly setting into action 
characters who ought to have been purely static. Squeers, Micawber, Miss Mowcher, : Wegg, Skimpole, 
Pecksniff and many others are finally involved in "plots" where they are out of place and where they 
behave quite incredibly. They start off as magic-lantern slides and they end by getting mixed up in a third- 
rate movie. Sometimes one can put one's finger on a single sentence in which the original illusion is 
destroyed. There is such a sentence in David Copperfield. After the famous dinner-party (the one where 
the leg of mutton was underdone), David is showing his guests out. He stops Traddles at the top of the 
stairs: 


"Traddles," said I, "Mr. Micawber don't mean any harm, poor fellow; but, if I were 
you, I wouldn't lend him anything." 

"My dear Copperfield," returned Traddles, smiling, "I haven't got anything 

to lend." 


"You have got a name, you know," said I. 

At the place where one reads it this remark jars a little, though something of the kind was 
inevitable sooner or later. The story is a fairly realistic one, and David is growing up; ultimately he is 
bound to see Mr. Micawber for what he is, a cadging scoundrel. Afterwards, of course, Dickens's 
sentimentality overcomes him and Micawber is made to turn over a new leaf. But from then on, the 
original Micawber is never quite recaptured, in spite of desperate efforts. As a rule, the "plot" in which 
Dickens's characters get entangled is not particularly credible, but at least it makes some pretence at 
reality, whereas the world to which they belong is a never-never land, a kind of eternity. But just here one 
sees that "only a caricaturist" is not really a condemnation. The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a 
caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of his 
genius. The monstrosities that he created are still remembered as monstrosities, in spite of getting mixed 
up in would-be probable melodramas. Their first impact is so vivid that nothing that comes afterwards 
effaces it. As with the people one knew in childhood, one seems always to remember them in one 
particular attitude, doing one particular thing. Mrs. Squeers is always ladling out brimstone and treacle, 


Mrs. Gummidge is always weeping, Mrs. Gargery is always banging her husband's head against the wall, 
Mrs. Jellyby is always scribbling tracts while her children fall into the area—and there they all are, fixed 
for ever like little twinkling miniatures painted on snuffbox lids, completely fantastic and incredible, and 
yet somehow more solid and infinitely more memorable than the efforts of serious novelists. Even by the 
standards of his time Dickens was an exceptionally artificial writer. As Ruskin said, he "chose to work in 
a circle of stage fire." His characters are even more distorted and simplified than Smollett's. But there are 
no rules in novel-writing, and 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. 

But all the same there is a disadvantage in writing about monsters. It amounts to this, that it is 
only certain moods that Dickens can speak to. There are large areas of the human mind that he never 
touches. There is no poetic feeling anywhere in his books, and no genuine tragedy, and even sexual love is 
almost outside his scope. Actually his books are not so sexless as they are sometimes declared to be, and 
considering the time in which he was writing, he is reasonably frank. But there is not a trace in him of the 
feeling that one finds in Manon Lescaut, Salammbo, Carmen, Wuthering Heights. According to Aldous 
Huxley, D. H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was "a gigantic dwarf,” and in a sense the same is true of 
Dickens. There are whole worlds which he either knows nothing about or does not wish to mention. 
Except in a rather roundabout way, one cannot learn very much from Dickens. And to say this is to think 
almost immediately of the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. Why is it that Tolstoy's grasp 
seems to be so much larger than Dickens's—why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more about 
yourself ? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is 
writing about people who are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas 
Dickens's are already finished and perfect. In my own mind Dickens's people are present far more often 
and far more vividly than Tolstoy's, but always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces 
of furniture. You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character as you can with, say, 
Peter Bezukhov. And this is not merely because of Tolstoy's greater seriousness, for there are also comic 
characters that you can imagine yourself talking to—Bloom, for instance, or Pecuchet, or even Wells's Mr. 
Polly. It is because Dickens characters have no mental life. They say perfecdy the thing that they have to 
say, but they cannot be conceived as talking about anything else. They never learn, never speculate. 
Perhaps the most meditative of his characters is Paul Dombey, and his thoughts are mush. Does this mean 
that Tolstoy's novels are "better" than Dickens's? The truth is that it is absurd to make such comparisons in 
terms of "better" and "worse." If I were forced to compare Tolstoy with Dickens, I should say that 
Tolstoy's appeal will probably be wider in the long run, because Dickens is scarcely intelligible outside 
the English-speaking culture; on the other hand, Dickens is able to reach simple people, which Tolstoy is 
not. Tolstoy’s characters can cross a frontier, Dickens's can be portrayed on a cigarette-card. But one is no 
more obliged to choose between them than between a sausage and a rose. Their purposes barely intersect. 


6 

If Dickens had been merely a comic writer, the chances are that no one would now remember his name. 

Or at best a few of his books would survive in rather the same way as books like Frank Fairleigh, Mr 
Verdant Green and Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures,— as a sort of hangover of the Victorian atmosphere, a 
pleasant little whiff of oysters and brown stout. Who has not felt sometimes that it was "a pity" that 
Dickens ever deserted the vein of Pickwick for things like Little Dorrit and Hard Times ? What people 
always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting 


that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not 
utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one. 
Joyce has to start with the frigid competence of Dubliners and end with the dream-language of Finnegans 
Wake, but Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist are part of the trajectory. The thing that drove Dickens 
forward into a form of art for which he was not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember 
him, was simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness of "having something to say." He is 
always preaching a sermon, and that is the final secret of his inventiveness. For you can only create if you 
can care. Types like Squeers and Micawber could not have been produced by a hackwriter looking for 
something to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a 
subversive idea. Dickens is able to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and 
authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always room for one more custard pie. 

His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it is there. That is the 
difference between being a moralist and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear 
grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong. 
All he can finally say is, "Behave decently," which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as 
it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right 
by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any 
other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its 
permanence. What he is out against is not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, "an expression 
on the human face." Roughly speaking, his morality is the Christian morality, but in spite of his Anglican 
upbringing he was essentially a Bible-Christian, as he took care to make plain when writing his will. In 
any case he cannot properly be described as a religious man. He "believed," undoubtedly, but religion in 
the devotional sense does not seem to have entered much into his thoughts. Where he is Christian is in his 
quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against the oppressors. As a matter of course he is on the side 
of the underdog, always and everywhere. To carry this to its logical conclusion one has got to change 
sides when the underdog becomes an upperdog, and in fact Dickens does tend to do so. He loathes the 
Catholic Church, for instance, but as soon as the Catholics are persecuted ( Barnaby Rudge) he is on their 
side. He loathes the aristocratic class even more, but as soon as they are really overthrown (the 
revolutionary chapters in A Tale of Two Cities) his sympathies swing round. Whenever he departs from 
this emotional attitude he goes astray. A well-known example is at the ending of David Copperfield, in 
which everyone who reads it feels that something has gone wrong. What is wrong is that the closing 
chapters are pervaded, faintly but noticeably, by the cult of success. It is the gospel according to Smiles, 
instead of the gospel according to Dickens. The attractive, out-at-elbow characters are got rid of, 
Micawber makes a fortune, Heep gets into prison—both of these events are flagrantly impossible—and 
even Dora is killed off to make way for Agnes. If you like, you can read Dora as Dickens's wife and 
Agnes as his sister-in-law, but the essential point is that Dickens has "turned respectable" and done 
violence to his own nature. Perhaps that is why Agnes is the most disagreeable of his heroines, the real 
legless angel of Victorian romance, almost as bad as Thackeray's Laura. 

No grown-up person can read Dickens without feeling his limitations, and yet there does 
remain his native generosity of mind, which acts as a kind of anchor and nearly always keeps him where 
he belongs. It is probably the central secret of his popularity. A good-tempered antinomianism rather of 
Dickens's type is one of the marks of Western popular culture. One sees it in folk-stories and comic songs, 
in dream-figures like Mickey Mouse and Popeye the Sailor (both of them variants of Jack the Giant- 
killer), in the history of working-class Socialism, in the popular protests (always ineffective but not 
always a sham) against imperialism, in the impulse that makes a jury award excessive damages when a 


rich man's car runs over a poor man; it is the feeling that one is always on the side of the underdog, on the 
side of the weak against the strong. In one sense it is a feeling that is fifty years out of date. The common 
man is still living in the mental world of Dickens, but nearly every modern intellectual has gone over to 
some or other form of totalitarianism. From the Marxist or Fascist point of view, nearly all that Dickens 
stands for can be written off as "bourgeois morality." But in moral oudook no one could be more 
"bourgeois” than the English working classes. The ordinary people in the Western countries have never 
entered, mentally, into the world of "realism" and power-politics. They may do so before long, in which 
case Dickens will be as out of date as the cab-horse. But in his own age and ours he has been popular 
chiefly because he was able to express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the native 
decency of the common man. And it is important that from this point of view people of very different types 
can be described as "common." In a country tike England, in spite of its class-structure, there does exist a 
certain cultural unity. All through the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the 
Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is only an idea, but it has 
penetrated to all ranks of society. The most atrocious injustices, cruelties, ties, snobberies exist 
everywhere, but there are not many people who can regard these things with the same indifference as, say, 
a Roman slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, tike a dog eating a stolen 
leg of mutton. Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of 
human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code which was and on the whole still is believed in, even by 
people who violate it. It is difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both read by working people (a 
thing that has happened to no other novelist of his stature) and buried in Westminster Abbey. 

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a 
face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly 
with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not 
know what these people looked tike and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer 
ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, 
though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is 
laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is 
always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who 
is generously angry —in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with 
equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls. 


Boys’ Weeklies 

Inside the Whale, March 11, 1940 

You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a small newsagent's 
shop. The general appearance of these shops is always very much the same: a few posters for the Daily 
Mail and the News of the World outside, a poky little window with sweet-botdes and packets of Players, 
and a dark interior smelling of liquorice allsorts and festooned from floor to ceiling with vilely printed 
twopenny papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours. 

Except for the daily and evening papers, the stock of these shops hardly overlaps at all with 
that of the big newsagents. Their main selling line is the twopenny weekly, and the number and variety of 
these are almost unbelievable. Every hobby and pastime—cage-birds, fretwork, carpentering, bees, 
carrier-pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess—has at least one paper devoted to it, and generally 
several. Gardening and livestock-keeping must have at least a score between them. Then there are the 
sporting papers, the radio papers, the children's comics, the various snippet papers such as Tit-bits, the 
large range of papers devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women's legs, the various 
trade papers, the women's story-papers (the Oracle, Secrets, Peg's Paper, etc. etc.), the needlework 
papers—these so numerous that a display of them alone will often fill an entire window—and in addition 
the long series of "Yank Mags” ( Fight Stories, Action Stories, Western Short Stories, etc.), which are 
imported shop-soiled from America and sold at twopence halfpenny or threepence. And the periodical 
proper shades off into the fourpenny novelette, the Aldine Boxing Novels, the Boys' Friend Library, the 
Schoolgirls' Own Library and many others. 

Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of what the mass of the 
English people really feels and thinks. Certainly nothing half so revealing exists in documentary form. 
Best-seller novels, for instance, tell one a great deal, but the novel is aimed almost exclusively at people 
above the £4-a-week level. The movies are probably a very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the 
film industry is virtually a monopoly, which means that it is not obliged to study its public at all closely. 
The same applies to some extent to the daily papers, and most of all to the radio. But it does not apply to 
the weekly paper with a smallish circulation and specialised subject-matter. Papers like the Exchange 
and Mart, for instance, or Cage-Birds, or the Oracle, or Prediction, or the Matrimonial Times, only exist 
because there is a definite demand for them, and they reflect the minds of their readers as a great national 
daily with a circulation of millions cannot possibly do. 

Here I am only dealing with a single series of papers, the boys' twopenny weeklies, often 
inaccurately described as "penny dreadfuls." Falling strictly within this class there are at present ten 
papers, the Gem, Magnet, Modern Boy, Triumph and Champion, all owned by the Amalgamated Press, 
and the Wizard, Rover, Skipper, Hotspur and Adventure, all owned by D. C. Thomson & Co. What the 
circulations of these papers are, I do not know. The editors and proprietors refuse to name any figures, 
and in any case the circulation of a paper carrying serial stories is bound to fluctuate widely. But there is 
no question that the combined public of the ten papers is a very large one. They are on sale in every town 
in England, and nearly every boy who reads at all goes through a phase of reading one or more of them. 
The Gem and Magnet, which are much the oldest of these papers, are of rather different type from the 
rest, and they have evidently lost some of their popularity during the past few years. A good many boys 
now regard them as old fashioned and "slow." Nevertheless I want to discuss them first, because they are 


more interesting psychologically than the others, and also because the mere survival of such papers into 
the nineteen-thirties is a rather starding phenomenon. 

The Gem and Magnet are sister-papers (characters out of one paper frequendy appear in the 
other), and were both started more than thirty years ago. At that time, together with Chums and the old 
B.O.P.,- they were the leading papers for boys, and they remained dominant till quite recently. Each of 
them carries every week a fifteen-or twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually 
more or less connected with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school story carries 
one or more adventure serials. Otherwise the two papers are so much alike that they can be treated as one, 
though the Magnet has always been the better known of the two, probably because it possesses a really 
first-rate character in the fat boy, Billy Bunter. 

The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school life, and the schools (Greyfriars 
in the Magnet and St. Jim's in the Gem ) are represented as ancient and fashionable foundations of the type 
of Eton or Winchester. All the leading characters are fourth-form boys aged fourteen or fifteen, older or 
younger boys only appearing in very minor parts. Like Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee, these boys continue 
week after week and year after year, never growing any older. Very occasionally a new boy arrives or a 
minor character drops out, but in at any rate the last twenty-five years the personnel has barely altered. 
All the principal characters in both papers—Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy 
Bunter and the rest of them—were at Greyfriars or St. Jim's long before the Great War, exactly the same 
age as at present, having much the same kind of adventures and talking almost exactly the same dialect. 
And not only the characters but the whole atmosphere of both Gem and Magnet has been preserved 
unchanged, partly by means of very elaborate stylisation. The stories in the Magnet are signed "Frank 
Richards" and those in the Gem, "Martin Clifford" but a series lasting thirty years could hardly be the 
work of the same person every week.= Consequently they have to be written in a style that is easily 
imitated—an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style, quite different from anything else now existing in 
English literature. A couple of extracts will do as illustrations. Here is one from the Magnet: 

Groan! 

"Shut up, Bunter!" 

Groan! 

Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter's line. He seldom shut up, though 
often requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was 
less inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not shut up! He groaned, and groaned, 
and went on groaning. 

Even groaning did not fully express Bunter's feelings. His feelings, in fact, 
were inexpressible. 

There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of 
woe and lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough for the 
whole party and a little over. 

Harry Wharton & Co. stood in a wrathy and worried group. They were 
landed and stranded, diddled, dished and done! etc. etc. etc. 


Here is one from the Gem: 


"Ohcwumbs!" 

"Oh gum!” 

"Oooogh!" 

"Urrggh!" 

Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily. He grabbed his handkerchief and pressed it 
to his damaged nose. Tom Merry sat up, gasping for breath. They looked at one 
another. 


"Bai Jove! This is a go, deah boy!" gurgled Arthur Augustus. "I have been 
thwown into quite a fluttah! Oogh! The wottahs! The wuffians! The feahful outsidahs! 
Wow!" etc. etc. etc. 

Both of these extracts are entirely typical; you would find something like them in almost 
every chapter of every number, today or twenty-five years ago. The first thing that anyone would notice is 
the extraordinary amount of tautology (the first of these two passages contains a hundred and twenty-five 
words and could be compressed into about thirty), seemingly designed to spin out the story, but actually 
playing its part in creating the atmosphere. For the same reason various facetious expressions are 
repeated over and over again; "wrathy,” for instance, is a great favourite, and so is "diddled, dished and 
done." "Oooogh!," "Grooo!" and "Yaroo!" (stylised cries of pain) recur constandy, and so does "Ha! ha! 
ha!," always given a line to itself, so that sometimes a quarter of a column or thereabouts consists of "Ha! 
ha! ha!" The slang ("Go and eat coke!," "What the thump!," "You frabjous ass!," etc. etc.) has never been 
altered, so that the boys are now using slang which is at least thirty years out of date. In addition, the 
various nicknames are rubbed in on every possible occasion. Every few lines we are reminded that Harry 
Wharton & Co. are "the Famous Five," Bunter is always "the fat Owl" or "the Owl of the Remove," 
Vernon-Smith is always "the Bounder of Greyfriars," Gussy (the Honourable Arthur Augustus D'Arcy) is 
always "the swell of St. Jim's," and so on and so forth. There is a constant, untiring effort to keep the 
atmosphere intact and to make sure that every new reader learns immediately who is who. The result has 
been to make Greyfriars and St. Jim's into an extraordinary little world of their own, a world which 
cannot be taken seriously by anyone over fifteen, but which at any rate is not easily forgotten. By a 
debasement of the Dickens technique a series of stereotyped "characters" has been built up, in several 
cases very successfully. Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one of the best-known figures in English 
fiction; for the mere number of people who know him he ranks with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock 
Holmes and a handful of characters in Dickens. 

Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at a real public school. They run in 
cycles of rather differing types, but in general they are the clean-fun, knockabout type of story, with 
interest centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging masters, fights, canings, football, cricket and 
food. A constandy recurring story is one in which a boy is accused of some misdeed committed by another 
and is too much of a sportsman to reveal the truth. The "good" boys are "good" in the clean-living 
Englishman tradition—they keep in hard training, wash behind their ears, never hit below the belt, etc. 
etc.—and by way of contrast there is a series of "bad" boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder and others, whose 
badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes and frequenting public-houses. All these boys are 


constantly on the verge of expulsion, but as it would mean a change of personnel if any boy were actually 
expelled, no one is ever caught out in any really serious offence. Stealing, for instance, barely enters as a 
motif. Sex is completely taboo, especially in the form in which it actually arises at public schools. 
Occasionally girls enter into the stories, and very rarely there is something approaching a mild flirtation, 
but it is always entirely in the spirit of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides together— 
that is all it ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would be regarded as "soppy." Even the bad boys are 
presumed to be completely sexless. When the Gem and Magnet were started, it is probable that there was 
a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden atmosphere that pervaded so much of the 
earlier literature for boys. In the 'nineties the Boy's Own Paper, for instance, used to have its 
correspondence columns full of terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like St. Winifred's 
and Tom Brown's Schooldays were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the authors were not 
fully aware of it. In the Gem and Magnet sex simply does not exist as a problem. Religion is also taboo; 
in the whole thirty years' issue of the two papers the word "God" probably does not occur, except in "God 
save the King.” On the other hand, there has always been a very strong "temperance" strain. Drinking and, 
by association, smoking are regarded as rather disgraceful even in an adult ("shady" is the usual word), 
but at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of substitute for sex. In their moral 
atmosphere the Gem and Magnet have a great deal in common with the Boy Scout movement, which 
started at about the same time. 

All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism. Sexton Blake, for instance, started off quite 
frankly as an imitation of Sherlock Holmes, and still resembles him fairly strongly; he has hawklike 
features, lives in Baker Street, smokes enormously and puts on a dressing-gown when he wants to think. 
The Gem and Magnet probably owe something to the school story writers who were flourishing when 
they began, Gunby Hadath, Desmond Coke- and the rest, but they owe more to nineteenth-century models. 
In so far as Greyfriars and St. Jim's are like real schools at all, they are much more like Tom Brown's 
Rugby than a modern public school. Neither school has an O.T.C., - for instance, games are not 
compulsory, and the boys are even allowed to wear what clothes they like. But without doubt the main 
origin of these papers is Stalky & Co. This book has had an immense influence on boys' literature, and it 
is one of those books which have a sort of traditional reputation among people who have never even seen 
a copy of it. More than once in boys' weekly papers I have come across a reference to Stalky & Co. in 
which the word was spelt "Storky." Even the name of the chief comic among the Greyfriars masters, Mr. 
Prout, is taken from Stalky & Co., and so is much of the slang; "jape," "merry," "giddy," "bizney" 
(business), "frabjous," "don't" for "doesn't"—all of them out of date even when Gem and Magnet started. 
There are also traces of earlier origins. The name "Greyfriars" is probably taken from Thackeray, and 
Gosling, the school porter in the Magnet, talks in an imitation of Dickens's dialect. 

With all this, the supposed "glamour" of public-school life is played for all it is worth. There 
is all the usual paraphernalia—lock-up, roll-call, house matches, fagging, prefects, cosy teas round the 
study fire, etc. etc.—and constant reference to the "old school," the "old grey stones" (both schools were 
founded in the early sixteenth century), the "team spirit" of the "Greyfriars men." As for the snob-appeal, 
it is completely shameless. Each school has a tided boy or two whose titles are constantly thrust in the 
reader's face; other boys have the names of well-known aristocratic families, Talbot, Manners, Lowther. 
We are for ever being reminded that Gussy is the Honourable Arthur A. D'Arcy, son of Lord Eastwood, 
that Jack Blake is heir to "broad acres," that Hurree Jamset Ram Singh (nicknamed Inky) is the Nabob of 
Bhanipur, that Vernon-Smith's father is a millionaire. Till recently the illustrations in both papers always 
depicted the boys in clothes imitated from those of Eton; in the last few years Greyfriars has changed over 
to blazers and flannel trousers, but St. Jim's still sticks to the Eton jacket, and Gussy sticks to his top-hat. 


In the school magazine which appears every week as part of the Magnet, Harry Wharton writes an article 
discussing the pocket-money received by the "fellows in the Remove," and reveals that some of them get 
as much as five pounds a week! This kind of thing is a perfecdy deliberate incitement to wealth-fantasy. 
And here it is worth noticing a rather curious fact, and that is that the school story is a thing peculiar to 
England. So far as I know, there are extremely few school stories in foreign languages. The reason, 
obviously, is that in England education is mainly a matter of status. The most definite dividing-line 
between the petite-bourgeoisie and the working class is that the former pay for their education, and within 
the bourgeoisie there is another unbridgeable gulf between the "public" school and the "private" school. It 
is quite clear that there are tens and scores of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a "posh" 
public school is wildly thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic world of 
quadrangles and house-colours, but they yearn after it, day-dream about it, live mentally in it for hours at a 
stretch. The question is, Who are these people? Who reads the Gem and Magnet ? 

Obviously one can never be quite certain about this kind of thing. All I can say from my own 
observation is this. Boys who are likely to go to public schools themselves generally read the Gem and 
Magnet, but they nearly always stop reading them when they are about twelve; they may continue for 
another year from force of habit, but by that time they have ceased to take them seriously. On the other 
hand, the boys at very cheap private schools, the schools that are designed for people who can't afford a 
public school but consider the Council schools "common," continue reading the Gem and Magnet for 
several years longer. A few years ago I was a teacher at two of these schools myself. I found that not only 
did virtually all the boys read the Gem and Magnet, but that they were still taking them fairly seriously 
when they were fifteen or even sixteen. These boys were the sons of shopkeepers, office employees and 
small business and professional men, and obviously it is this class that the Gem and Magnet are aimed at. 
But they are certainly read by working-class boys as well. They are generally on sale in the poorest 
quarters of big towns, and I have known them to be read by boys whom one might expect to be completely 
immune from public-school "glamour." I have seen a young coal-miner, for instance, a lad who had 
already worked a year or two underground, eagerly reading the Gem. Recently I offered a batch of 
English papers to some British legionaries of the French Foreign Legion in North Africa; they picked out 
the Gem and Magnet first. Both papers are much read by girls, and the Pen Pals department of the Gem 
shows that it is read in every corner of the British Empire, by Australians, Canadians, Palestine Jews, 
Malays, Arabs, Straits Chinese, etc. etc. The editors evidently expect their readers to be aged round about 
fourteen, and the advertisements (milk chocolate, postage stamps, water pistols, blushing cured, home 
conjuring tricks, itching powder, the Phine Phun Ring which runs a needle into your friend's hand, etc. 
etc.) indicate roughly the same age; there are also the Admiralty advertisements, however, which call for 
youths between seventeen and twenty-two. And there is no question that these papers are also read by 
adults. It is quite common for people to write to the editor and say that they have read every number of the 
Gem or Magnet for the past thirty years. Here, for instance, is a letter from a lady in Salisbury: 

I can say of your splendid yarns of Harry Wharton & Co., of Greyfriars, that they 
never fail to reach a high standard. Without doubt they are the finest stories of their 
type on the market to-day, which is saying a good deal. They seem to bring you face 
to face with Nature. I have taken the Magnet from the start, and have followed the 
adventures of Harry Wharton & Co. with rapt interest. I have no sons, but two 
daughters, and there's always a rush to be the first to read the grand old paper. My 
husband, too, was a staunch reader of the Magnet until he was suddenly taken away 
from us. 


It is well worth getting hold of some copies of the Gem and Magnet, especially the Gem, 
simply to have a look at the correspondence columns. What is truly starding is the intense interest with 
which the pettiest details of life at Greyfriars and St. Jim's are followed up. Here, for instance, are a few 
of the questions sent in by readers: 

"What age is Dick Roylance?" "How old is St. Jim's?" "Can you give me a list of the 
Shell and their studies?" "How much did D'Arcy's monocle cost?" "How is it fellows 
like Crooke are in the Shell and decent fellows like yourself are only in the Fourth?" 
"What are the Form captain's three chief duties?" "Who is the chemistry master at St. 
Jim's?" (From a girl) "Where is St. Jim's situated? Could you tell me how to get 
there, as I would love to see the building? Are you boys just 'phoneys,' as I think you 
are?" 

It is clear that many of the boys and girls who write these letters are living a complete 
fantasy-life. Sometimes a boy will write, for instance, giving his age, height, weight, chest and bicep 
measurements and asking which member of the Shell or Fourth Form he most exacdy resembles. The 
demand for a list of the studies on the Shell passage, with an exact account of who lives in each, is a very 
common one. The editors, of course, do everything in their power to keep up the illusion. In the Gem Jack 
Blake is supposed to write the answers to correspondents, and in the Magnet a couple of pages is always 
given up to the school magazine (the Greyfriars Herald, edited by Harry Wharton), and there is another 
page in which one or other character is written up each week. The stories run in cycles, two or three 
characters being kept in the foreground for several weeks at a time. First there will be a series of 
rollicking adventure stories, featuring the Famous Five and Billy Bunter; then a run of stories turning on 
mistaken identity, with Wibley (the make-up wizard) in the star part; then a run of more serious stories in 
which Vernon-Smith is trembling on the verge of expulsion. And here one comes upon the real secret of 
the Gem and Magnet and the probable reason why they continue to be read in spite of their obvious out- 
of-dateness. 


It is that the characters are so carefully graded as to give almost every type of reader a 
character he can identify himself with. Most boys' papers aim at doing this, hence the boy-assistant 
(Sexton Blake's Tinker, Nelson Lee's Nipper, etc.) who usually accompanies the explorer, detective or 
what-not on his adventures. But in these cases there is only one boy, and usually it is much the same type 
of boy. In the Gem and Magnet there is a model for very nearly everybody. There is the normal, athletic, 
high-spirited boy (Tom Merry, Jack Blake, Frank Nugent), a slightly rowdier version of this type (Bob 
Cherry), a more aristocratic version (Talbot, Manners), a quieter, more serious version (Harry Wharton), 
and a stolid, "bulldog" version ( Johnny Bull). Then there is the reckless, dare-devil type of boy (Vernon- 
Smith), the definitely "clever," studious boy (Mark Linley, Dick Penfold), and the eccentric boy who is 
not good at games but possesses some special talent (Skinner, Wibley). And there is the scholarship-boy 
(Tom Redwing), an important figure in this class of story because he makes it possible for boys from very 
poor homes to project themselves into the public-school atmosphere. In addition there are Australian, 
Irish, Welsh, Manx, Yorkshire and Lancashire boys to play upon local patriotism. But the subtlety of 
characterisation goes deeper than this. If one studies the correspondence columns one sees that there is 
probably no character in the Gem and Magnet whom some or other reader does not identify with, except 
the out-and-out comics, Coker, Billy Bunter, Fisher T. Fish (the money-grubbing American boy) and, of 
course, the masters. Bunter, though in his origin he probably owed something to the fat boy in Pickwick, is 
a real creation. His tight trousers against which boots and canes are constantly thudding, his astuteness in 
search of food, his postal order which never turns up, have made him famous wherever the Union Jack 


waves. But he is not a subject for daydreams. On the other hand, another seeming figure of fun, Gussy (the 
Honourable Arthur A. D'Arcy, "the swell of St. Jim's"), is evidendy much admired. Like everything else 
in the Gem and Magnet, Gussy is at least thirty years out of date. He is the "knut" of the early twentieth 
century or even the "masher" of the 'nineties ("Bai Jove, deah boy!" and "Weally, I shall be obliged to 
give you a feahful thwashin'!"), the monocled idiot who made good on the fields of Mons and Le Cateau.- 
And his evident popularity goes to show how deep the snob-appeal of this type is. English people are 
extremely fond of the tided ass (cf. Lord Peter Wimsey) who always turns up trumps in the moment of 
emergency. Here is a letter from one of Guss^s girl admirers: 

I think you're too hard on Gussy. I wonder he's still in existence, the way you treat 
him. He's my hero. Did you know I write lyrics? How's this—to the tune of "Goody 
Goody"? 

Gonna get my gas-mask, join the A. R. P. 

'Cos I'm wise to all those bombs you drop on me. 

Gonna dig myself a trench 
Inside the garden fence; 

Gonna seal my windows up with tin 
So that the tear gas can't get in; 

Gonna park my cannon right outside the kerb 
With a note to Adolf Hitler: "Don't disturb!" 

And if I never fall in Nazi hands 

That's soon enough for me 

Gonna get my gas-mask, join the A. R. P.- 

P.S.—Do you get on well with girls? 


I quote this in full because (dated April 1939) it is interesting as being probably the earliest 
mention of Hider in the Gem. In the Gem there is also a heroic fat boy, Fatty Wynn, as a set-off against 
Bunter. Vernon-Smith, "the Bounder of the Remove," a Byronic character, always on the verge of the sack, 
is another great favourite. And even some of the cads probably have their following. Loder, for instance, 
"the rotter of the Sixth," is a cad, but he is also a highbrow and given to saying sarcastic things about 
football and the team spirit. The boys of the Remove only think him all the more of a cad for this, but a 
certain type of boy would probably identify with him. Even Racke, Crooke and Co. are probably admired 
by small boys who think it diabolically wicked to smoke cigarettes. (A frequent question in the 
correspondence column: "What brand of cigarettes does Racke smoke?") 

Naturally the politics of the Gem and Magnet are Conservative, but in a completely pre-1914 
style, with no Fascist tinge. In reality their basic political assumptions are two: nothing ever changes, and 
foreigners are funny. In the Gem of 1939 Frenchmen are still Froggies and Italians are still Dagoes. 
Mossoo, the French master at Greyfriars, is the usual comic-paper Frog, with pointed beard, peg-top 
trousers, etc. Inky, the Indian boy, though a rajah, and therefore possessing snob-appeal, is also the comic 


babu of the Punch tradition. ("'The rowfulness is not the proper caper, my esteemed Bob,' said Inky. 'Let 
dogs delight in the barkfulness and bitefulness, but the soft answer is the cracked pitcher that goes longest 
to a bird in the bush, as the English proverb remarks.'") Fisher T. Fish is the old-style stage Yankee 
("'Waal, I guess,"' etc.) dating from a period of Anglo-American jealousy. Wun Fung, the Chinese boy (he 
has rather faded out of late, no doubt because some of the Magnets readers are Straits Chinese), is the 
nineteenth-century pantomime Chinaman, with saucer-shaped hat, pigtail and pidgin-English. The 
assumption all along is not only that foreigners are comics who are put there for us to laugh at, but that 
they can be classified in much the same way as insects. That is why in all boys' papers, not only the Gem 
and Magnet, a Chinese is invariably portrayed with a pigtail. It is the thing you recognise him by, like the 
Frenchman's beard or the Italian's barrel-organ. In papers of this kind it occasionally happens that when 
the setting of a story is in a foreign country some attempt is made to describe the natives as individual 
human beings, but as a rule it is assumed that foreigners of any one race are all alike and will conform 
more or less exactly to the following patterns: 

frenchman: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly. 

Spaniard, Mexican, etc.: Sinister, treacherous. 

Arab, Afghan, etc.: Sinister, treacherous. 

Chinese: Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail. 

Italian: Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto. 

swede, dane, etc.: Kind hearted, stupid. 

negro: Comic, very faithful. 

The working classes only enter into the Gem and Magnet as comics or semi-villains (race¬ 
course touts, etc.). As for class-friction, trade unionism, strikes, slumps, unemployment, Fascism and civil 
war—not a mention. Somewhere or other in the thirty years' issue of the two papers you might perhaps 
find the word "Socialism," but you would have to look a long time for it. If the Russian Revolution is 
anywhere referred to, it will be indirectly, in the word "Bolshy" (meaning a person of violent 
disagreeable habits). Hitler and the Nazis are just beginning to make their appearance, in the sort of 
reference I quoted above. The war-crisis of September 1938 made just enough impression to produce a 
story in which Mr. Vernon-Smith, the Bounder's millionaire father, cashed in on the general panic by 
buying up country houses in order to sell them to "crisis scutders." But that is probably as near to noticing 
the European situation as the Gem and Magnet will come, until the war actually starts.- That does not 
mean that these papers are unpatriotic—quite the contrary! Throughout the Great War the Gem and 
Magnet were perhaps the most consistently and cheerfully patriotic papers in England. Almost every 
week the boys caught a spy or pushed a conchy into the army, and during the rationing period "eat less 
bread" was printed in large type on every page. But their patriotism has nothing whatever to do with 
power-politics or "ideological" warfare. It is more akin to family loyalty, and actually it gives one a 
valuable clue to the attitude of ordinary people, especially the huge untouched block of the middle class 
and the better-off working class. These people are patriotic to the middle of their bones, but they do not 
feel that what happens in foreign countries is any of their business. When England is in danger they rally 
to its defence as a matter of course, but in between-times they are not interested. After all, England is 
always in the right and England always wins, so why worry? It is an attitude that has been shaken during 
the past twenty years, but not so deeply as is sometimes supposed. Failure to understand it is one of the 
reasons why left-wing political parties are seldom able to produce an acceptable foreign policy. 

The mental world of the Gem and Magnet, therefore, is something like this: 


The year is 1910—or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy 
of fourteen in posh tailor-made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an 
exciting game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the 
study, and outside the wind is whisding. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on 
his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and 
gesticulating, but the grim grey batdeships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the 
outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay. Lord Mauleverer has just got 
another fiver and we are all setding down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted 
meat, jam and doughnuts. After tea we shall sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter 
and discussing the team for next week's match against Rookwood. Everything is safe, solid and 
unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever. That approximately is the atmosphere. 

But now turn from the Gem and Magnet to the more up-to-date papers which have appeared 
since the Great War. The truly significant thing is that they have more points of resemblance to the Gem 
and Magnet than points of difference. But it is better to consider the differences first. 

There are eight of these newer papers, the Modern Boy, Triumph, Champion, Wizard, Rover, 
Skipper, Hotspur and Adventure. All of these have appeared since the Great War, but except for the 
Modern Boy none of them is less than five years old. Two papers which ought also to be mentioned 
briefly here, though they are not stricdy in the same class as the rest, are the Detective Weekly and the 
Thriller, both owned by the Amalgamated Press. The Detective Weekly has taken over Sexton Blake. Both 
of these papers admit a certain amount of sex-interest into their stories, and though certainly read by boys, 
they are not aimed at them exclusively. All the others are boys' papers pure and simple, and they are 
sufficiendy alike to be considered together. There does not seem to be any notable difference between 
Thomson's publications and those of the Amalgamated Press. 

As soon as one looks at these papers one sees their technical superiority to the Gem and 
Magnet. To begin with, they have the great advantage of not being written entirely by one person. Instead 
of one long complete story, a number of the Wizard or Hotspur consists of half a dozen or more serials, 
none of which goes on for ever. Consequendy there is far more variety and far less padding, and none of 
the tiresome stylisation and facetiousness of the Gem and Magnet. Look at these two extracts, for 
example: 


Billy Bunter groaned. 

A quarter of an hour had elapsed out of the two hours that Bunter was 
booked for extra French. 

In a quarter of an hour there were only fifteen minutes! But every one of 
those minutes seemed inordinately long to Bunter. They seemed to crawl by like tired 
snails. 


Looking at the clock in Class-room No. 10 the fat Owl could hardly believe 
that only fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed more like fifteen hours, if not fifteen 
days! 


Other fellows were in extra French as well as Bunter. They did not matter. 
Bunter did! (Magnet). 


After a terrible climb, hacking out handholds in the smooth ice every step of the way 
up, Sergeant Lionheart Logan of the Mounties was now clinging like a human fly to 
the face of an icy cliff, as smooth and treacherous as a giant pane of glass. 

An Arctic blizzard, in all its fury, was buffeting his body, driving the 
blinding snow into his face, seeking to tear his fingers loose from their handholds and 
dash him to death on the jagged boulders which lay at the foot of the cliff a hundred 
feet below. 

Crouching among those boulders were eleven villainous trappers who had 
done their best to shoot down Lionheart and his companion, Constable Jim Rogers— 
until the blizzard had blotted the two Mounties out of sight from below. (Wizard). 

The second extract gets you some distance with the story, the first takes a hundred words to 
tell you that Bunter is in the detention class. Moreover, by not concentrating on school stories (in point of 
numbers the school story slightly predominates in all these papers, except the Thriller and Detective 
Weekly), the Wizard, Hotspur, etc., have far greater opportunities for sensationalism. Merely looking at 
the cover illustrations of the papers which I have on the table in front of me, here are some of the things I 
see. On one a cowboy is clinging by his toes to the wing of an aeroplane in mid-air and shooting down 
another aeroplane with his revolver. On another a Chinese is swimming for his life down a sewer with a 
swarm of ravenous-looking rats swimming after him. On another an engineer is lighting a stick of 
dynamite while a steel robot feels for him with its claws. On another a man in airman's costume is fighting 
barehanded against a rat somewhat larger than a donkey. On another a nearly naked man of terrific 
muscular development had just seized a lion by the tail and flung it thirty yards over the wall of an arena, 
with the words, "Take back your blooming lion!" Clearly no school story can compete with this kind of 
thing. From time to time the school buildings may catch fire or the French master may turn out to be the 
head of an international anarchist gang, but in a general way the interest must centre round cricket, school 
rivalries, practical jokes, etc. There is not much room for bombs, death-rays, sub-machine guns, 
aeroplanes, mustangs, octopuses, grizzly bears or gangsters. 

Examination of a large number of these papers shows that, putting aside school stories, the 
favourite subjects are Wild West, Frozen North, Foreign Legion, crime (always from the detective's 
angle), the Great War (Air Force or Secret Service, not the infantry), the Tarzan motif in varying forms, 
professional football, tropical exploration, historical romance (Robin Hood, Cavaliers and Roundheads, 
etc.) and scientific invention. The Wild West still leads, at any rate as a setting, though the Red Indian 
seems to be fading out. The one theme that is really new is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, 
invisible men, robots, helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely; here and there there are even 
far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless-glands. Whereas the Gem and Magnet derive from Dickens 
and Kipling, the Wizard, Champion, Modern Boy, etc., owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather than 
Jules Verne, is the father of "Scientifiction." Naturally it is the magical, Martian aspect of science that is 
most exploited, but one or two papers include serious articles on scientific subjects, besides quantities of 
informative snippets. (Examples: "A Kauri tree in Queensland, Australia, is over 12,000 years old"; 
"Nearly 50,000 thunderstorms occur every day"; "Helium gas costs £1 per 1000 cubic feet"; "There are 
over 500 varieties of spiders in Great Britain"; "London firemen use 14,000,000 gallons of water 
annually," etc. etc.). There is a marked advance in intellectual curiosity and, on the whole, in the demand 
made on the reader's attention. In practice the Gem and Magnet and the postwar papers are read by much 
the same public, but the mental age aimed at seems to have risen by a year or two years—an improvement 


probably corresponding to the improvement in elementary education since 1909. 

The other thing that has emerged in the post-war boys' papers, though not to anything like the 
extent one would expect, is bully-worship and the cult of violence. 

If one compares the Gem and Magnet with a genuinely modern paper, the thing that 
immediately strikes one is the absence of the leader-principle. There is no central dominating character; 
instead there are fifteen or twenty characters, all more or less on an equality, with whom readers of 
different types can identify. In the more modern papers this is not usually the case. Instead of identifying 
with a schoolboy of more or less his own age, the reader of the Skipper, Hotspur, etc., is led to identify 
with a G-man, with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant of Tarzan, with an air ace, a master spy, an 
explorer, a pugilist—at any rate with some single all-powerful character who dominates everyone about 
him and whose usual method of solving any problem is a sock on the jaw. This character is intended as a 
superman, and as physical strength is the form of power that boys can best understand, he is usually a sort 
of human gorilla; in the Tarzan type of story he is sometimes actually a giant, eight or ten feet high. At the 
same time the scenes of violence in nearly all these stories are remarkably harmless and unconvincing. 
There is a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English paper and the threepenny 
Yank Mags, Fight Stories, Action Stories, etc. (not strictly boys' papers, but largely read by boys). In the 
Yank Mags you get real blood-lust, really gory descriptions of the all-in, jump-on-his-testicles style of 
fighting, written in a jargon that has been perfected by people who brood endlessly on violence. A paper 
like Fight Stories, for instance, would have very little appeal except to sadists and masochists. You can 
see the comparative gentleness of the English civilisation by the amateurish way in which prize-fighting is 
always described in the boys' weeklies. There is no specialised vocabulary. Look at these four extracts, 
two English, two American: 

When the gong sounded, both men were breathing heavily, and each had great red 
marks on his chest. Bill's chin was bleeding, and Ben had a cut over his right eye. 

Into their corners they sank, but when the gong clanged again they were up 
swiftly, and they went like tigers at each other (Rover). 

He walked in stolidly and smashed a clublike right to my face. Blood spattered and I 
went back on my heels, but surged in and ripped my right under the heart. Another 
right smashed full on Sven's already battered mouth, and, spitting out the fragments of 
a tooth, he crashed a flailing left to my body (Fight Stories). 

It was amazing to watch the Black Panther at work. His muscles rippled and slid 
under his dark skin. There was all the power and grace of a giant cat in his swift and 
terrible onslaught. 

He volleyed blows with a bewildering speed for so huge a fellow. In a 
moment Ben was simply blocking with his gloves as well as he could. Ben was really 
a past-master of defence. He had many fine victories behind him. But the Negro's 
rights and lefts crashed through openings that hardly any other fighter could have 
found (Wizard). 

Haymakers which packed the bludgeoning weight of forest monarchs crashing down 
under the ax hurled into the bodies of the two heavies as they swapped punches 


(Fight Stories ). 

Notice how much more knowledgeable the American extracts sound. They are written for 
devotees of the prize-ring, the others are not. Also, it ought to be emphasised that on its level the moral 
code of the English boys' papers is a decent one. Crime and dishonesty are never held up to admiration, 
there is none of the cynicism and corruption of the American gangster story. The huge sale of the Yank 
Mags in England shows that there is a demand for that kind of thing, but very few English writers seem 
able to produce it. When hatred of Hider became a major emotion in America, it was interesting to see 
how promptly "anti-Fascism" was adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank Mags. 
One magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete story, "When Hell Came to 
America," in which the agents of a "blood-maddened European dictator" are trying to conquer the U.S.A. 
with death-rays and invisible aeroplanes. There is the frankest appeal to sadism, scenes in which the 
Nazis tie bombs to women's backs and fling them off heights to watch them blown to pieces in mid-air, 
others in which they tie naked girls together by their hair and prod them with knives to make them dance, 
etc. etc. The editor comments solemnly on all this, and uses it as a plea for tightening up restrictions 
against immigrants. On another page of the same paper: "lives of the hotcha chorus girls. Reveals all the 
intimate secrets and fascinating pastimes of the famous Broadway Hotcha girls, nothing is omitted. 
Price 10c." "how to love, toe." "french photo ring. 25c." "naughty nudies transfers. From the 
outside of the glass you see a beautiful girl, innocently dressed. Turn it around and look through the glass 
and oh! what a difference! Set of 3 transfers 2; c.," etc. etc. etc. There is nothing at all like this in any 
English paper likely to be read by boys. But the process of Americanisation is going on all the same. The 
American ideal, the "he-man," the "tough guy," the gorilla who puts everything right by socking everybody 
else on the jaw, now figures in probably a majority of boys' papers. In one serial now running in the 
Skipper he is always portrayed, ominously enough, swinging a rubber truncheon. 

The development of the Wizard, Hotspur, etc., as against the earlier boys' papers, boils down 
to this: better technique, more scientific interest, more bloodshed, more leader-worship. But, after all, it 
is the lack of development that is the really striking thing. 

To begin with, there is no political development whatever. The world of the Skipper and the 
Champion is still the pre-1914 world of the Magnet and the Gem. The Wild West story, for instance, with 
its cattle-rustlers, lynch-law and other paraphernalia belonging to the 'eighties, is a curiously archaic 
thing. It is worth noticing that in papers of this type it is always taken for granted that adventures only 
happen at the ends of the earth, in tropical forests, in Arctic wastes, in African deserts, on Western 
prairies, in Chinese opium dens—everywhere, in fact, except the places where things really do happen. 
That is a belief dating from thirty or forty years ago, when the new continents were in process of being 
opened up. Nowadays, of course, if you really want adventure, the place to look for it is in Europe. But 
apart from the picturesque side of the Great War, contemporary history is carefully excluded. And except 
that Americans are now admired instead of being laughed at, foreigners are exactly the same figures of fun 
that they always were. If a Chinese character appears, he is still the sinister pig-tailed opium-smuggler of 
Sax Rohmer; no indication that things have been happening in China since 1912—no indication that a war 
is going on there, for instance. If a Spaniard appears, he is still a "dago" or "greaser" who rolls cigarettes 
and stabs people in the back; no indication that things have been happening in Spain. Hitler and the Nazis 
have not yet appeared, or are barely making their appearance. There will be plenty about them in a little 
while, but it will be from a strictly patriotic angle (Britain versus Germany), with the real meaning of the 
struggle kept out of sight as much as possible. As for the Russian Revolution, it is extremely difficult to 
find any reference to it in any of these papers. When Russia is mentioned at all it is usually in an 


information snippet (example: "There are 29,000 centenarians in the U.S.S.R."), and any reference to the 
Revolution is indirect and twenty years out of date. In one story in the Rover, for instance, somebody has a 
tame bear, and as it is a Russian bear, it is nicknamed Trotsky—obviously an echo of the f917-23 period 
and not of recent controversies. The clock has stopped at 1910. Britannia rules the waves, and no one has 
heard of slumps, booms, unemployment, dictatorships, purges or concentration camps. 

And in social oudook there is hardly any advance. The snobbishness is somewhat less open 
than in the Gem and Magnet —that is the most one can possibly say. To begin with, the school story, 
always pardy dependent on snob-appeal, is by no means eliminated. Every number of a boys' paper 
includes at least one school story, these stories slighdy outnumbering the Wild Westerns. The very 
elaborate fantasy-life of the Gem and Magnet is not imitated and there is more emphasis on extraneous 
adventure, but the social atmosphere (old grey stones) is much the same. When a new school is introduced 
at the beginning of a story we are often told in just those words that "it was a very posh school.” From 
time to time a story appears which is ostensibly directed against snobbery. The scholarship-boy (cf. Tom 
Redwing in the Magnet) makes fairly frequent appearances, and what is essentially the same theme is 
sometimes presented in this form: there is great rivalry between two schools, one of which considers 
itself more "posh" than the other, and there are fights, practical jokes, football matches, etc., always 
ending in the discomfiture of the snobs. If one glances very superficially at some of these stories it is 
possible to imagine that a democratic spirit has crept into the boys' weeklies, but when one looks more 
closely one sees that they merely reflect the bitter jealousies that exist within the white-collar class. Their 
real function is to allow the boy who goes to a cheap private school (not a Council school) to feel that his 
school is just as "posh" in the sight of God as Winchester or Eton. The sentiment of school loyalty ("We're 
better than the fellows down the road”), a thing almost unknown to the real working class, is still kept up. 
As these stories are written by many different hands, they do, of course, vary a good deal in tone. Some 
are reasonably free from snobbishness, in others money and pedigree are exploited even more 
shamelessly than in the Gem and Magnet. In one that I came cross an actual majority of the boys 
mentioned were tided. 

Where working-class characters appear, it is usually either as comics (jokes about tramps, 
convicts, etc.), or as prize-fighters, acrobats, cowboys, professional footballers and Foreign Legionaries 
—in other words, as adventurers. There is no facing of the facts about working-class life, or, indeed, 
about working life of any description, very occasionally one may come across a realistic description of, 
say, work in a coal-mine, but in all probability it will only be there as the background of some lurid 
adventure. In any case the central character is not likely to be a coal-miner. Nearly all the time the boy 
who reads these papers—in nine cases out of ten a boy who is going to spend his life working in a shop, 
in a factory or in some subordinate job in an office—is led to identify with people in positions of 
command, above all with people who are never troubled by shortage of money. The Lord Peter Wimsey 
figure, the seeming idiot who drawls and wears a monocle but is always to the fore in moments of danger, 
turns up over and over again. (This character is a great favourite in Secret Service stories.) And, as usual, 
the heroic characters all have to talk B.B.C.; they may talk Scottish or Irish or American, but no one in a 
star part is ever permitted to drop an aitch. Here it is worth comparing the social atmosphere of the boys' 
weeklies with that of the women's weeklies, the Oracle, the Family Star, Peg's Paper, etc. 

The women's papers are aimed at an older public and are read for the most part by girls who 
are working for a living. Consequently they are on the surface much more realistic. It is taken for granted, 
for example, that nearly everyone has to live in a big town and work at a more or less dull job. Sex, so far 
from being taboo, is the subject. The short, complete stories, the special feature of these papers, are 


generally of the "came the dawn" type: the heroine narrowly escapes losing her "boy" to a designing rival, 
or the "boy" loses his job and has to postpone marriage, but presendy gets a better job. The changeling- 
fantasy (a girl brought up in a poor home is "really" the child of rich parents) is another favourite. Where 
sensationalism comes in, usually in the serials, it arises out of the more domestic type of crime, such as 
bigamy, forgery or sometimes murder; no Martians, death-rays or international anarchist gangs. These 
papers are at any rate aiming at credibility, and they have a link with real life in their correspondence 
columns, where genuine problems are being discussed. Ruby M. Ayres's- column of advice in the Oracle, 
for instance, is 9° george orwell extremely sensible and well written. And yet the world of the Oracle 
and Peg's Paper is a pure fantasy-world. It is the same fantasy all the time: pretending to be richer than 
you are. The chief impression that one carries away from almost every story in these papers is of a 
frightful, overwhelming "refinement." Ostensibly the characters are working-class people, but their habits, 
the interiors of their houses, their clothes, their outlook and, above all, their speech are entirely middle 
class. They are all living at several pounds a week above their income. And needless to say, that is just 
the impression that is intended. The idea is to give the bored factory-girl or worn-out mother of five a 
dream-life in which she pictures herself—not actually as a duchess (that convention has gone out) but as, 
say, the wife of a bank-manager. Not only is a five-to-six-pound-a-week standard of life set up as the 
ideal, but it is tacitly assumed that that is how working-class people really do live. The major facts are 
simply not faced. It is admitted, for instance, that people sometimes lose their jobs; but then the dark 
clouds roll away and they get better jobs instead. No mention of unemployment as something permanent 
and inevitable, no mention of the dole, no mention of trade unionism. No suggestion anywhere that there 
can be anything wrong with the system as a system; there are only individual misfortunes, which are 
generally due to somebody's wickedness and can in any case be put right in the last chapter. Always the 
dark clouds roll away, the kind employer raises Alfred's wages, and there are jobs for everybody except 
the drunks. It is still the world of the Wizard and the Gem, except that there are orange-blossoms instead 
of machine-guns. 

The outlook inculcated by all these papers is that of a rather exceptionally stupid member of 
the Navy League— in the year 1910. Yes, it may be said, but what does it matter? And in any case, what 
else do you expect? 

Of course no one in his senses would want to turn the so-called penny dreadful into a 
realistic novel or a Socialist tract. An adventure story must of its nature be more or less remote from real 
life. But, as I have tried to make clear, the unreality of the Wizard and the Gem is not so artless as it looks. 
These papers exist because of a specialised demand, because boys at certain ages find it necessary to 
read about Martians, death-rays, grizzly bears and gangsters. They get what they are looking for, but they 
get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them. To what extent 
people draw their ideas from fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that most people are influenced 
far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth, and that from this 
point of view the worst books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones that are read 
earliest in life. It is probable that many people who would consider themselves extremely sophisticated 
and "advanced" are actually carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in 
childhood from (for instance) Sapper and Ian Hay.— If that is so, the boys' twopenny weeklies are of the 
deepest importance. Here is the stuff that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a 
very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including many who will never read 
anything else except newspapers; and along with it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be 
regarded as hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party. All the better because 
it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into them the conviction that the major problems of our time do 


not exist, that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are unimportant comics 
and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns 
these papers, it is difficult to believe that this is unintentional. Of the twelve papers I have been 
discussing (i.e. twelve including the Thriller and Detective Weekly) seven are the property of the 
Amalgamated Press, which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more than a 
hundred different papers. The Gem and Magnet, therefore, are closely linked up with the Daily Telegraph 
and the Financial Times. This in itself would be enough to rouse certain suspicions, even if it were not 
obvious that the stories in the boys' weeklies are politically vetted. So it appears that if you feel the need 
of a fantasy-life in which you travel to Mars and fight lions bare-handed (and what boy doesn't?), you can 
only have it by delivering yourself over, mentally, to people like Lord Camrose. For there is no 
competition.— Throughout the whole of this run of papers the differences are negligible, and on this level 
no others exist. This raises the question, why is there no such thing as a left-wing boys' paper? 

At first glance such an idea merely makes one slightly sick. It is so horribly easy to imagine 
what a left-wing boys' paper would be like, if it existed. I remember in 1920 or 1921 some optimistic 
person handing round Communist tracts among a crowd of public-school boys. The tract I received was of 
the question-and-answer kind: 

Q. "Can a Boy Communist be a Boy Scout, Comrade?" 

A "No, Comrade." 

Q. "Why, Comrade?" 

A "Because, Comrade, a Boy Scout must salute the Union Jack, which is 
the symbol of tyranny and oppression." Etc. etc. 

Now, suppose that at this moment somebody started a left-wing paper deliberately aimed at 
boys of twelve or fourteen. I do not suggest that the whole of its contents would be exactly like the tract I 
have quoted above, but does anyone doubt that they would be something like it? Inevitably such a paper 
would either consist of dreary uplift or it would be under Communist influence and given over to 
adulation of Soviet Russia; in either case no normal boy would ever look at it. Highbrow literature apart, 
the whole of the existing left-wing Press, in so far as it is at all vigorously "left," is one long tract. The 
one Socialist paper in England which could live a week on its merits as a paper is the Daily Herald: and 
how much Socialism is there in the Daily Herald ? At this moment, therefore, a paper with a "left" slant 
and at the same time likely to have an appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something almost beyond 
hoping for. 


But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear reason why every adventure 
story should necessarily be mixed up with snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after all, the stories in 
the Hotspur and the Modern Boy are not Conservative tracts; they are merely adventure stories with a 
Conservative bias. It is fairly easy to imagine the process being reversed. It is possible, for instance, to 
imagine a paper as thrilling and lively as the Hotspur, but with subject-matter and "ideology" a little more 
up to date. It is even possible (though this raises other difficulties) to imagine a women's paper at the 
same literary level as the Oracle, dealing in approximately the same kind of story, but taking rather more 
account of the realities of working-class life. Such things have been done before, though not in England. In 
the last years of the Spanish monarchy there was a large output in Spain of left-wing novelettes, some of 
them evidently of Anarchist origin. Unfortunately at the time when they were appearing I did not see their 


social significance, and I lost the collection of them that I had, but no doubt copies would still be 
procurable. In get-up and style of story they were very similar to the English fourpenny novelette, except 
that their inspiration was "left." If, for instance, a story described police pursuing Anarchists through the 
mountains, it would be from the point of view of the Anarchists and not of the police. An example nearer 
to hand is the Soviet film Chapaiev,— which has been shown a number of times in London. Technically, 
by the standards of the time when it was made, Chapaiev is a first-rate film, but mentally, in spite of the 
unfamiliar Russian background, it is not so very remote from Hollywood. The one thing that lifts it out of 
the ordinary is the remarkable performance by the actor who takes the part of the White officer (the fat 
one)—a performance which looks very like an inspired piece of gagging. Otherwise the atmosphere is 
familiar. All the usual paraphernalia is there—heroic fight against odds, escape at the last moment, shots 
of galloping horses, love interest, comic relief. The film is in fact a fairly ordinary one, except that its 
tendency is "left." In a Hollywood film of the Russian Civil War the Whites would probably be angels and 
the Reds demons. In the Russian version the Reds are angels and the Whites demons. That also is a lie, 
but, taking the long view, it is a less pernicious lie than the other. 

Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their general nature is obvious enough, 
and I do not want to discuss them. I am merely pointing to the fact that, in England, popular imaginative 
literature is a field that left-wing thought has never begun to enter. All fiction from the novels in the 
mushroom libraries downwards is censored in the interests of the ruling class. And boys' fiction above 
all, the blood-and-thunder stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or other, is sodden in the 
worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only unimportant if one believes that what is read in childhood leaves 
no impression behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently believe nothing of the kind, and, after 
all, Lord Camrose ought to know. 


Inside the Whale 

Inside the Whale, March 11, 1940 


1 

When Henry Miller's novel, Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1935, it was greeted with rather cautious 
praise, obviously conditioned in some cases by a fear of seeming to enjoy pornography. Among the 
people who praised it were T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, John dos Passos, Ezra Pound—on 
the whole, not the writers who are in fashion at this moment. And in fact the subject-matter of the book, 
and to a certain extent its mental atmosphere, belong to the 'twenties rather than to the 'thirties. 

Tropic of Cancer is a novel in the first person, or autobiography in the form of a novel, 
whichever way you like to look at it. Miller himself insists that it is straight autobiography, but the tempo 
and method of telling the story are those of a novel. It is a story of the American Paris, but not along quite 
the usual lines, because the Americans who figure in it happen to be people without money. During the 
boom years, when dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low, Paris was invaded 
by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees and plain idlers as the 
world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists must actually have 
outnumbered the working population—indeed, it has been reckoned that in the late 'twenties there were as 
many as 30,000 painters in Paris, most of them impostors. The populace had grown so hardened to artists 
that gruff-voiced Lesbians in corduroy breeches and young men in Grecian or medieval costume could 
walk the streets without attracting a glance, and along the Seine banks by Notre Dame it was almost 
impossible to pick one's way between the sketching-stools. It was the age of dark horses and neglected 
genii; the phrase on everybody's lips was " Quandje serai lance” As it turned out, nobody was "lance," 
the slump descended like another Ice Age, the cosmopolitan mob of artists vanished, and the huge 
Montparnasse cafes which only ten years ago were filled till the small hours by hordes of shrieking 
poseurs have turned into darkened tombs in which there are not even any ghosts. It is this world— 
described in, among other novels, Wyndham Lewis's Tarr -—that Miller is writing about, but he is dealing 
only with the under side of it, the lumpenproletarian fringe which has been able to survive the slump 
because it is composed partly of genuine artists and partly of genuine scoundrels. The neglected genii, the 
paranoiacs who are always "going to" write the novel that will knock Proust into a cocked hat, are there, 
but they are only genii in the rather rare moments when they are not scouting about for the next meal. For 
the most part it is a story of bug-ridden rooms in workingmen's hotels, of fights, drinking bouts, cheap 
brothels, Russian refugees, cadging, swindling and temporary jobs. And the whole atmosphere of the poor 
quarters of Paris as a foreigner sees them—the cobbled alleys, the sour reek of refuse, the bistros with 
their greasy zinc counters and worn brick floors, the green waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks of the 
Republican Guard, the crumbling iron urinals, the peculiar sweetish smell of the Metro stations, the 
cigarettes that come to pieces, the pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens—it is all there, or at any rate the 
feeling of it is there. 

On the face of it no material could be less promising. When Tropic of Cancer was published 
the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and Hitler's concentration-camps were already bulging. 


The intellectual foci of the world were Rome, Moscow and Berlin. It did not seem to be a 
moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be written about American dead-beats 
cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter. Of course a novelist is not obliged to write directly about 
contemporary history, but a novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the moment is 
generally either a footier or a plain idiot. From a mere account of the subject-matter of Tropic of Cancer 
most people would probably assume it to be no more than a bit of naughty-naughty left over from the 
'twenties. Actually, nearly everyone who read it saw at once that it was nothing of the kind, but a very 
remarkable book. How or why remarkable? That question is never easy to answer. It is better to begin by 
describing the impression that Tropic of Cancer has left on my own mind. 

When I first opened Tropic of Cancer and saw that it was full of unprintable words, my 
immediate reaction was a refusal to be impressed. Most people's would be the same, I believe. 
Nevertheless, after a lapse of time the atmosphere of the book, besides innumerable details, seemed to 
linger in my memory in a peculiar way. A year later Miller's second book, Black Spring, was published. 
By this time Tropic of Cancer was much more vividly present in my mind than it had been when I first 
read it. My first feeling about Black Spring was that it showed a falling-off, and it is a fact that it has not 
the same unity as the other book. Yet after another year there were many passages in Black Spring that had 
also rooted themselves in my memory. Evidently these books are of the sort to leave a flavour behind 
them—books that "create a world of their own," as the saying goes. The books that do this are not 
necessarily good books, they may be good bad books like Raffles- or the Sherlock Holmes stories, or 
perverse and morbid books like Wuthering Heights or The House with the Green Shutters.- But now and 
again there appears a novel which opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by 
revealing what is familiar. The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the 
commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in Ulysses than this, because Joyce is a 
kind of poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar onto 
paper. He dared—for it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique—to expose the imbecilities of 
the inner mind, and in doing so he discovered an America which was under everybody’s nose. Here is a 
whole world of stuff which you have lived with since childhood, stuff which you supposed to be of its 
nature incommunicable, and somebody has managed to communicate it. The effect is to break down, at any 
rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human being lives. When you read certain passages in Ulysses 
you feel that Joyce's mind and your mind are one, that he knows all about you though he has never heard 
your name, that there exists some world outside time and space in which you and he are together. And 
though he does not resemble Joyce in other ways, there is a touch of this quality in Henry Miller. Not 
everywhere, because his work is very uneven, and sometimes, especially in Black Spring, tends to slide 
away into mere verbiage or into the squashy universe of the surrealists. But read him for five pages, ten 
pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being 
understood. "He knows all about me," you feel; "he wrote this specially for me." It is as though you could 
hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely 
an implicit assumption that we are all alike. For the moment you have got away from the lies and 
simplifications, the stylised, marionnette-like quality of ordinary fiction, even quite good fiction, and are 
dealing with the recognisable experiences of human beings. 

But what kind of experience? What kind of human beings? Miller is writing about the man in 
the street, and it is incidentally rather a pity that it should be a street full of brothels. That is the penalty of 
leaving your native land. It means transferring your roots into shallower soil. Exile is probably more 
damaging to a novelist than to a painter or even a poet, because its effect is to take him out of contact with 
working life and narrow down his range to the street, the cafe, the church, the brothel and the studio. On 


the whole, in Miller's books you are reading about people living the expatriate life, people drinking, 
talking, meditating and fornicating, not about people working, marrying and bringing up children; a pity, 
because he would have described the one set of activities as well as the other. In Black Spring there is a 
wonderful flashback of New York, the swarming Irish-infested New York of the O. Henry period, but the 
Paris scenes are the best, and, granted their utter worthlessness as social types, the drunks and dead-beats 
of the cafes are handled with a feeling for character and a mastery of technique that are unapproached in 
any at all recent novel. All of them are not only credible but completely familiar; you have the feeling that 
all their adventures have happened to yourself. Not that they are anything very startling in the way of 
adventures. Henry gets a job with a melancholy Indian student, gets another job at a dreadful French 
school during a cold snap when the lavatories are frozen solid, goes on drinking bouts in Le Havre with 
his friend Collins, the sea captain, goes to brothels where there are wonderful negresses, talks with his 
friend Van Norden, the novelist, who has got the great novel of the world in his head but can never bring 
himself to begin writing it. His friend Karl, on the verge of starvation, is picked up by a wealthy widow 
who wishes to marry him. There are interminable, Hamlet-like conversations in which Karl tries to 
decide which is worse, being hungry or sleeping with an old woman. In great detail he describes his 
visits to the widow, how he went to the hotel dressed in his best, how before going in he neglected to 
urinate, so that the whole evening was one long crescendo of torment, etc., etc. And after all, none of it is 
true, the widow doesn't even exist—Karl has simply invented her in order to make himself seem 
important. The whole book is in this vein, more or less. Why is it that these monstrous trivialities are so 
engrossing? Simply because the whole atmosphere is deeply familiar, because you have all the while the 
feeling that these things are happening to you. And you have this feeling because somebody has chosen to 
drop the Geneva language of the ordinary novel and drag the real-politik of the inner mind into the open. 
In Miller's case it is not so much a question of exploring the mechanisms of the mind as of owning up to 
everyday facts and everyday emotions. For the truth is that many ordinary people, perhaps an actual 
majority, do speak and behave in just the way that is recorded here. The callous coarseness with which 
the characters in Tropic of Cancer talk is very rare in fiction, but it is extremely common in real life; 
again and again I have heard just such conversations from people who were not even aware that they were 
talking coarsely. It is worth noticing that Tropic of Cancer is not a young man's book. Miller was in his 
forties when it was published, and though since then he has produced three or four others, it is obvious 
that this first book had been lived with for years. It is one of those books that are slowly matured in 
poverty and obscurity, by people who know what they have got to do and therefore are able to wait. The 
prose is astonishing, and in parts of Black Spring it is even better. Unfortunately I cannot quote; 
unprintable words occur almost everywhere. But get hold of Tropic of Cancer, get hold of Black Spring 
and read especially the first hundred pages. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this 
late date, with English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken language, but spoken without fear, 
i.e., without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetical word. The adjective has come back, after its ten 
years' exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it, something quite different from the 
flat cautious statements and snackbar dialects that are now in fashion. 

When a book like Tropic of Cancer appears, it is only natural that the first thing people 
notice should be its obscenity. Given our current notions of literary decency, it is not at all easy to 
approach an unprintable book with detachment. Either one is shocked and disgusted, or one is morbidly 
thrilled, or one is determined above all else not to be impressed. The last is probably the commonest 
reaction, with the result that unprintable books often get less attention than they deserve. It is rather the 
fashion to say that nothing is easier than to write an obscene book, that people only do it in order to get 
themselves talked about and make money, etc., etc. What makes it obvious that this is not the case is that 
books which are obscene in the police-court sense are distinctly uncommon. If there were easy money to 


be made out of dirty words, a lot more people would be making it. But, because "obscene" books do not 
appear very frequendy, there is a tendency to lump them together, as a rule quite unjustifiably. Tropic of 
Cancer has been vaguely associated with two other books, Ulysses and Voyage au Bout de la Nuit,- but 
in neither case is there much resemblance. What Miller has in common with Joyce is a willingness to 
mention the inane squalid facts of everyday life. Putting aside differences of technique, the funeral scene 
in Ulysses, for instance, would fit into Tropic of Cancer; the whole chapter is a sort of confession, an 
expose of the frightful inner callousness of the human being. But there the resemblance ends. As a novel, 
Tropic of Cancer is far inferior to Ulysses. Joyce is an artist, in a sense in which Miller is not and 
probably would not wish to be, and in any case he is attempting much more. He is exploring different 
states of consciousness, dream, reverie (the "bronze-by-gold" chapter), drunkenness, etc., and dovetailing 
them all into a huge complex pattern, almost like a Victorian "plot." Miller is simply a hard-boiled person 
talking about life, an ordinary American businessman with intellectual courage and a gift for words. It is 
perhaps significant that he looks exacdy like everyone's idea of an American businessman. As for the 
comparison with Voyage au Bout de la Nuit, it is even further from the point. Both books use unprintable 
words, both are in some sense autobiographical, but that is all. Voyage au Bout de la Nuit is a book-with- 
a-purpose, and its purpose is to protest against the horror and meaninglessness of modern life—actually, 
indeed, of life. It is a cry of unbearable disgust, a voice from the cesspool. Tropic of Cancer is almost 
exacdy the opposite. The thing has become so unusual as to seem almost anomalous, but it is the book of a 
man who is happy. So is Black Spring, though slighdy less so, because tinged in places with nostalgia. 
With years of lumpenproletarian life behind him, hunger, vagabondage, dirt, failure, nights in the open, 
batdes with immigration officers, endless struggles for a bit of cash, Miller finds that he is enjoying 
himself. Exacdy the aspects of life that fill Celine with horror are the ones that appeal to him. So far from 
protesting, he is accepting. And the very word "acceptance" calls up his real affinity, another American, 
Walt Whitman. 

But there is something rather curious in being Whitman in the nineteen-thirties. It is not 
certain that if Whitman himself were alive at this moment he would write anything in the least degree 
resembling Leaves of Grass. For what he is saying, after all, is "I accept," and there is a radical 
difference between acceptance now and acceptance then. Whitman was writing in a time of unexampled 
prosperity, but more than that, he was writing in a country where freedom was something more than a 
word. The democracy, equality and comradeship that he is always talking about are not remote ideals, but 
something that existed in front of his eyes. 

In mid-nineteenth-century America men felt themselves free and equal, were free and equal, so far as that 
is possible outside a society of pure communism. There was poverty and there were even class- 
distinctions, but except for the Negroes there was no permanently submerged class. Everyone had inside 
him, like a kind of core, the knowledge that he could earn a decent living, and earn it without bootlicking. 
When you read about Mark Twain's Mississippi raftsmen and pilots, or Bret Harte's Western gold-miners, 
they seem more remote than the cannibals of the Stone Age. The reason is simply that they are free human 
beings. But it is the same even with the peaceful domesticated America of the Eastern states, the America 
of Little Women, Helen's Babies and "Riding Down from Bangor."- Life has a buoyant, carefree quality 
that you can feel as you read, like a physical sensation in your belly. It is this that Whitman is celebrating, 
though actually he does it very badly, because he is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to 
feel instead of making you feel it. Luckily for his beliefs, perhaps, he died too early to see the 
deterioration in American life that came with the rise of large-scale industry and the exploiting of cheap 
immigrant labour. 


Miller's outlook is deeply akin to that of Whitman, and nearly everyone who has read him has 
remarked on this. Tropic of Cancer ends with an especially Whitmanesque passage, in which, after the 
lecheries, the swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts and the imbecilities, he simply sits down and 
watches the Seine flowing past, in a sort of mystical acceptance of the thing-as-it-is. Only, what is he 
accepting? In the first place, not America, but the ancient bone-heap of Europe, where every grain of soil 
has passed through innumerable human bodies. Secondly, not an epoch of expansion and liberty, but an 
epoch of fear, tyranny and regimentation. To say "I accept" in an age tike our own is to say that you accept 
concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hider, Statin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine-guns, 
putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, - gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, 
secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murders. Not only those things, of course, but 
those things among others. And on the whole this is Henry Miller's attitude. Not quite always, because at 
moments he shows signs of a fairly ordinary kind of literary nostalgia. There is a long passage in the 
earlier part of Black Spring, in praise of the Middle Ages, which as prose must be one of the most 
remarkable pieces of writing in recent years, but which displays an attitude not very different from that of 
Chesterton. In Max and the White Phagocytes z there is an attack on modern American civilisation 
(breakfast cereals, cellophane, etc.) from the usual angle of the literary man who hates industrialism. But 
in general the attitude is "Let's swallow it whole.” And hence the seeming preoccupation with indecency 
and with the dirty-handkerchief side of life. It is only seeming, for the truth is that life, ordinary everyday 
life, consists far more largely of horrors than writers of fiction usually care to admit. Whitman himself 
"accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the 
prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the "grey sick faces 
of onanists," etc., etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and 
less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. 
The "democratic vistas" have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and 
less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. 
To accept civilisation as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude 
and become a passive attitude—even "decadent," if that word means anything. 

But precisely because, in one sense, he is passive to experience, Miller is able to get nearer 
to the ordinary man than is possible to more purposive writers. For the ordinary man is also passive. 
Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade union or local politics) he feels himself master 
of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to 
influence the future, he simply ties down and lets things happen to him. During the past ten years literature 
has involved itself more and more deeply in politics, with the result that there is now less room in it for 
the ordinary man than at any time during the past two centuries. One can see the change in the prevailing 
literary attitude by comparing the books written about the Spanish Civil War with those written about the 
war of 1914-18. The immediately striking thing about the Spanish war books, at any rate those written in 
English, is their shocking dullness and badness. But what is more significant is that almost all of them, 
right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you what to think, 
whereas the books about the Great War were written by common soldiers or junior officers who did not 
even pretend to understand what the whole thing was about. Books tike All Quiet on the Western Front, 
Le Feu, AFarewell to Arms, Death of a Hero, Good-bye to Ml That, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and 
A Subaltern on the Somme- were written not by propagandists but by victims. They are saying in effect, 
"What the hell is all this about? God knows. All we can do is to endure." And though he is not writing 
about war, nor, on the whole, about unhappiness, this is nearer to Miller's attitude than the omniscience 
which is now fashionable. The Booster,- a short-lived periodical of which he was part-editor, used to 
describe itself in its advertisements as "non-political, non-educational, non-progressive, non- 


cooperative, non- ethical, non- literary, non-consistent, non-contemporary," and Miller's own work could 
be described in nearly the same terms. It is a voice from the crowd, from the underling, from the third- 
class carriage, from the ordinary, non-political, non-moral, passive man. 

I have been using the phrase "ordinary man" rather loosely, and I have taken it for granted that 
the "ordinary man" exists, a thing now denied by some people. I do not mean that the people Miller is 
writing about constitute a majority, still less that he is writing about proletarians. No English or American 
novelist has as yet seriously attempted that. And again, the people in Tropic of Cancer fall short of being 
ordinary to the extent that they are idle, disreputable and more or less "artistic.” As I have said already, 
this is a pity, but it is the necessary result of expatriation. Miller's "ordinary man" is neither the manual 
worker nor the suburban householder, but the derelict, the declasse, the adventurer, the American 
intellectual without roots and without money. Still, the experiences even of this type overlap fairly widely 
with those of more normal people. Miller has been able to get the most out of his rather limited material 
because he has had the courage to identify with it. The ordinary man, the "average sensual man," has been 
given the power of speech, tike Balaam's ass. 

It will be seen that this is something out of date, or at any rate out of fashion. The average 
sensual man is out of fashion. The passive, non-political attitude is out of fashion. Preoccupation with sex 
and truthfulness about the inner life are out of fashion. American Paris is out of fashion. A book tike 
Tropic of Cancer, published at such a time, must be either a tedious preciosity or something unusual, and I 
think a majority of the people who have read it would agree that it is not the first. It is worth trying to 
discover just what this escape from the current literary fashion means. But to do that one has got to see it 
against its background—that is, against the general development of English literature in the twenty years 
since the Great War. 


2 

When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people 
under thirty. At the beginning of the period I am speaking of, the years during and immediately after the 
war, the writer who had the deepest hold upon the thinking young was almost certainly Housman.— 
Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910-25, Housman had an influence which was 
enormous and is now not at all easy to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew 
the whole of A Shropshire Lad by heart. I wonder how much impression A Shropshire Lad makes at this 
moment on a boy of the same age and more or less the same cast of mind? No doubt he has heard of it and 
even glanced into it; it might strike him as rather cheaply clever—probably that would be about all. Yet 
these are the poems that I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of 
ecstasy, just as earlier generations had recited Meredith's "Love in a Valley," Swinburne's "Garden of 
Proserpine," etc., etc. 

With rue my heart is laden 
For golden friends I had, 

For many a rose-lipt maiden 
And many a lightfoot lad. 

By brooks too broad for leaping 
The lightfoot boys are laid; 


The rose-lipt girls are sleeping 
In fields where roses fade. 

It just tinkles. But it did not seem to tinkle in 1920. Why does the bubble always burst? To 
answer that question one has to take account of the external conditions that make certain writers popular 
at certain times. Housman's poems had not attracted much notice when they were first published. What 
was there in them that appealed so deeply to a single generation, the generation born round about 1900? 

In the first place, Housman is a "country" poet. His poems are full of the charm of buried 
villages, the nostalgia of place-names, Clunton and Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow, "on Wenlock Edge," "in 
summer time on Bredon," thatched roofs and the jingle of smithies, the wild jonquils in the pastures, the 
"blue, remembered hills." War poems apart, English verse of the 1910-25 period is mosdy "country." The 
reason no doubt was that the rentier-professional class was ceasing once and for all to have any real 
relationship with the soil; but at any rate there prevailed then, far more than now, a kind of snobbism of 
belonging to the country and despising the town. England at that time was hardly more an agricultural 
country than it is now, but before the light industries began to spread themselves it was easier to think of it 
as one. Most middle-class boys grew up within sight of a farm, and naturally it was the picturesque side 
of farm life that appealed to them—the ploughing, harvesting, stack-thrashing and so forth. Unless he has 
to do it himself a boy is not likely to notice the horrible drudgery of hoeing turnips, milking cows with 
chapped teats at four o'clock in the morning, etc., etc. Just before, just after and, for that matter, during the 
war was the great age of the "Nature poet," the heyday of Richard Jefferies and W H. Hudson.— Rupert 
Brooke's "Grantchester," the star poem of 1913,— is nothing but an enormous gush of "country" sentiment, 
a sort of accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem 
"Grantchester" is something worse than worthless, but as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class 
young of that period felt it is a valuable document. 

Housman, however, did not enthuse over the rambler roses in the week-ending spirit of 
Brooke and the others. The "country” motif is there all the time, but mainly as a background. Most of the 
poems have a quasi-human subject, a kind of idealised rustic, in reality Strephon or Corydon brought up 
to date. This in itself had a deep appeal. Experience shows that over-civilised people enjoy reading about 
rustics (key-phrase, "close to the soil") because they imagine them to be more primitive and passionate 
than themselves. Hence the "dark earth” novels of Sheila Kaye-Smith, — etc. And at that time a middle- 
class boy, with his "country" bias, would identify with an agricultural worker as he would never have 
thought of doing with a town worker. Most boys had in their minds a vision of an idealised ploughman, 
gypsy, poacher, or gamekeeper, always pictured as a wild, free, roving blade, living a life of rabbit- 
snaring, cockfighting, horses, beer and women. Masefield's Everlasting Mercy,— another valuable 
period-piece, immensely popular with boys round about the war years, gives you this vision in a very 
crude form. But Housman's Maurices and Terences could be taken seriously where Masefield's Saul Kane 
could not; on this side of him, Housman was Masefield with a dash of Theocritus. Moreover all his 
themes are adolescent—murder, suicide, unhappy love, early death. They deal with the simple, 
intelligible disasters that give you the feeling of being up against the "bedrock facts" of life: 

The sun burns on the half-mown hill, 

By now the blood has dried; 

And Maurice amongst the hay lies still 
And my knife is in his side. 


And again: 


They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail: 

And whisdes blow forlorn, 

And trains all night groan on the rail 
To men that die at morn. 

It is all more or less in the same tune. Everything comes unstuck. "Dick lies long in the 
churchyard and Ned lies long in jail." And notice also the exquisite self-pity—the "nobody loves me" 
feeling: 


The diamond drops adorning 
The low mound on the lea, 

Those are the tears of morning, 

That weeps, but not for thee.— 

Hard cheese, old chap! Such poems might have been written expressly for adolescents. And 
the unvarying sexual pessimism (the girl always dies or marries somebody else) seemed like wisdom to 
boys who were herded together in public schools and were half-inclined to think of women as something 
unattainable. Whether Housman ever had the same appeal for girls I doubt. In his poems the woman's 
point of view is not considered, she is merely the nymph, the siren, the treacherous half-human creature 
who leads you a little distance and then gives you the slip. 

But Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were young in 1920 if it 
had not been for another strain in him, and that was his blasphemous, antinomian, "cynical" strain. The 
fight that always occurs between the generations was exceptionally bitter at the end of the Great War; this 
was pardy due to the war itself, and pardy it was an indirect result of the Russian Revolution, but an 
intellectual struggle was in any case due at about that date. Owing probably to the ease and security of life 
in England, which even the war hardly disturbed, many people whose ideas were formed in the 'eighties 
or earlier had carried them quite unmodified into the nineteen-twenties. Meanwhile, so far as the younger 
generation was concerned, the official beliefs were dissolving like sand-castles. The slump in religious 
belief, for instance, was spectacular. For several years the old—young antagonism took on a quality of 
real hatred. What was left of the war generation had crept out of the massacre to find their elders still 
bellowing the slogans of 1914, and a slightly younger generation of boys were writhing under dirty- 
minded celibate schoolmasters. It was to these that Housman appealed, with his implied sexual revolt and 
his personal grievance against God. He was patriotic, it was true, but in a harmless old-fashioned way, to 
the tune of red coats and "God save the Queen" rather than steel helmets and "Hang the Kaiser." And he 
was satisfyingly anti-Christian—he stood for a kind of bitter, defiant paganism, a conviction that life is 
short and the gods are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young; and all in 
charming fragile verse that was composed almost entirely of words of one syllable. 

It will be seen that I have discussed Housman as though he were merely a propagandist, an 
utterer of maxims and quotable "bits." Obviously he was more than that. There is no need to under-rate 
him now because he was overrated a few years ago. Although one gets into trouble nowadays for saying 
so, there is a number of poems ("Into my heart an air that kills," for instance, and "Is my team ploughing?") 
that are not likely to remain long out of favour. But at bottom it is always a writer's tendency, his 
"purpose," his "message," that makes him liked or disliked. The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of 
seeing any literary merit in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs. And no book is ever truly 


neutral. Some or other tendency is always discernible, in verse as much as in prose, even if it does no 
more than determine the form and the choice of imagery. But poets who attain wide popularity, like 
Housman, are as a rule definitely gnomic writers. 

After the war, after Housman and the Nature-poets, there appears a group of writers of 
completely different tendency—Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Lytton 
Strachey. So far as the middle and late 'twenties go, these are "the movement," as surely as the Auden— 
Spender group have been "the movement" during the past few years. It is true that not all of the gifted 
writers of the period can be fitted into the pattern. E. M. Lorster, for instance, though he wrote his best 
book in 1923 or thereabouts, was essentially pre-war, and Yeats does not seem in either of his phases to 
belong to the 'twenties. Others who were still living, Moore, Conrad, Bennett, Wells, Norman Douglas,— 
had shot their bolt before the war ever happened. On the other hand, a writer who should be added to the 
group, though in the narrowly literary sense he hardly "belongs," is Somerset Maugham. Of course the 
dates do not fit exactly; most of these writers had already published books before the war, but they can be 
classified as post-war in the same sense that the younger men now writing are post-slump. Equally of 
course, you could read through most of the literary papers of the time without grasping that these people 
are "the movement." Even more then than at most times the big shots of literary journalism were busy 
pretending that the age-before-last had not come to an end. Squire ruled the London Mercury, Gibbs and 
Walpole - were the gods of the lending libraries, there was a cult of cheeriness and manliness, beer and 
cricket, briar pipes and monogamy, and it was at all times possible to earn a few guineas by writing an 
article denouncing "highbrows." But all the same it was the despised highbrows who had captured the 
young. The wind was blowing from Europe, and long before 1930 it had blown the beer-and-cricket 
school naked, except for their knighthoods. 

But the first thing one would notice about the group of writers I have named above is that they 
do not look like a group. Moreover several of them would strongly object to being coupled with several 
of the others. Lawrence and Eliot were in reality antipathetic, Huxley worshipped Lawrence but was 
repelled by Joyce, most of the others would have looked down on Huxley, Strachey and Maugham, and 
Lewis attacked everyone in turn; indeed, his reputation as a writer rests largely on these attacks. And yet 
there is a certain temperamental similarity, evident enough now, though it would not have been so a dozen 
years ago. What it amounts to is pessimism of outlook. But it is necessary to make clear what is meant by 
pessimism. 


If the keynote of the Georgian poets was "beauty of Nature,” the keynote of the post-war 
writers would be "tragic sense of life.” The spirit behind Housman's poems, for instance, is not tragic, 
merely querulous; it is hedonism disappointed. The same is true of Hardy, though one ought to make an 
exception of The Dynasts. But the Joyce—Eliot group come later in time, puritanism is not their main 
adversary, they are able from the start to "see through" most of the things that their predecessors had 
fought for. All of them are temperamentally hostile to the notion of "progress"; it is felt that progress not 
only doesn't happen, but ought not to happen. Given this general similarity, there are, of course, 
differences of approach between the writers I have named as well as very different degrees of talent. 
Eliot's pessimism is partly the Christian pessimism, which implies a certain indifference to human misery, 
partly a lament over the decadence of Western civilisation ("We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed 
men," etc., etc.), a sort of twilight-of-the-gods feeling, which finally leads him, in "Sweeney Agonistes," 
for instance, to achieve the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is. With Strachey it 
is merely a polite eighteenth-century scepticism mixed up with a taste for debunking. With Maugham it is 
a kind of stoical resignation, the stiff upper lip of the pukka sahib somewhere East of Suez, carrying on 


with his job without believing in it, like an Antonine Emperor. Lawrence at first sight does not seem to be 
a pessimistic writer, because, like Dickens, he is a ”change-of-heart" man and constandy insisting that life 
here and now would be all right if only you looked at it a little differendy. But what he is demanding is a 
movement away from our mechanised civilisation, which is not going to happen, and which he knows is 
not going to happen. Therefore his exasperation with the present turns once more into idealisation of the 
past, this time a safely mythical past, the Bronze Age. When Lawrence prefers the Etruscans ( his 
Etruscans) to ourselves it is difficult not to agree with him, and yet, after all, it is a species of defeatism, 
because that is not the direction in which the world is moving. The kind of life that he is always pointing 
to, a life centring round the simple mysteries—sex, earth, fire, water, blood—is merely a lost cause. All 
he has been able to produce, therefore, is a wish that things would happen in a way in which they are 
manifestly not going to happen. "A wave of generosity or a wave of death," he says, but it is obvious that 
there are no waves of generosity this side of the horizon. So he flees to Mexico, and then dies at forty- 
five, a few years before the wave of death gets going. It will be seen that once again I am speaking of 
these people as though they were not artists, as though they were merely propagandists putting a 
"message" across. And once again it is obvious that all of them are more than that. It would be absurd, for 
instance, to look on Ulysses as merely a show-up of the horror of modern life, the "dirty Daily Mail era," 
as Pound put it. Joyce actually is more of a "pure artist” than most writers. But Ulysses could not have 
been written by someone who was merely dabbling with word-patterns; it is the product of a special 
vision of life, the vision of a Catholic who has lost his faith. What Joyce is saying is "Here is life without 
God. Just look at it!" and his technical innovations, important though they are, are there primarily to serve 
this purpose. 


But what is noticeable about all these writers is that what "purpose" they have is very much 
up in the air. There is no attention to the urgent problems of the moment, above all no politics in the 
narrower sense. Our eyes are directed to Rome, to Byzantium, to Montparnasse, to Mexico, to the 
Etruscans, to the Subconscious, to the solar plexus—to everywhere except the places where things are 
actually happening. When one looks back at the 'twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every 
important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution, for 
instance, all but vanishes from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin and the Ukraine 
famine—about ten years. Throughout those years Russia means Tolstoy, Dostoievski and exiled counts 
driving taxi-cabs. Italy means picture-galleries, ruins, churches and museums—but not Blackshirts. 
Germany means films, nudism and psychoanalysis—but not Hitler, of whom hardly anyone had heard till 
1931. In "cultured" circles art-for-art's-saking extended practically to a worship of the meaningless. 
Literature was supposed to consist solely in the manipulation of words. To judge a book by its subject- 
matter was the unforgivable sin, and even to be aware of its subject-matter was looked on as a lapse of 
taste. About 1928, in one of the three genuinely funny jokes that Punch has produced since the Great War, 
an intolerable youth is pictured informing his aunt that he intends to "write." "And what are you going to 
write about, dear?" asks the aunt. "My dear aunt," says the youth crushingly, "one doesn't write about 
anything, one just writes ." The best writers of the 'twenties did not subscribe to this doctrine, their 
"purpose" is in most cases fairly overt, but it is usually a "purpose" along moral-religious-cultural lines. 
Also, when translatable into political terms, it is in no case "left." In one way or another the tendency of 
all the writers in this group is conservative. Lewis, for instance, spent years in frenzied witch-smellings 
after "Bolshevism," which he was able to detect in very unlikely places. Recently he has changed some of 
his views, perhaps influenced by Hitler's treatment of artists, but it is safe to bet that he will not go very 
far leftward. Pound seems to have plumped definitely for Fascism, at any rate the Italian variety. Eliot has 
remained aloof, but if forced at the pistol's point to choose between Fascism and some more democratic 
form of Socialism, would probably choose Fascism. Huxley starts off with the usual despair-of-life, then, 


under the influence of Lawrence's "dark abdomen,” tries something called Life-Worship, and finally 
arrives at pacifism—a tenable position, and at this moment an honourable one, but probably in the long 
run involving rejection of Socialism. It is also noticeable that most of the writers in this group have a 
certain tenderness for the Catholic Church, though not usually of a kind that an orthodox Catholic would 
accept. 


The mental connexion between pessimism and a reactionary outlook is no doubt obvious 
enough. What is perhaps less obvious is just why the leading writers of the 'twenties were predominantly 
pessimistic. Why always the sense of decadence, the skulls and cactuses, the yearning after lost faith and 
impossible civilisations? Was it not, after all, because these people were writing in an exceptionally 
comfortable epoch? It is just in such times that "cosmic despair" can flourish. People with empty bellies 
never despair of the universe, nor even think about the universe, for that matter. The whole period 1910- 
30 was a prosperous one, and even the war years were physically tolerable if one happened to be a non- 
combatant in one of the Allied countries. As for the 'twenties, they were the golden age of the rentier- 
intellectual, a period of irresponsibility such as the world had never before seen. The war was over, the 
new totalitarian states had not arisen, moral and religious tabus of all descriptions had vanished, and the 
cash was rolling in. "Disillusionment" was all the fashion. Everyone with a safe £500 a year turned 
highbrow and began training himself in taedium vitae. It was an age of eagles and of crumpets,— facile 
despairs, backyard Hamlets, cheap return tickets to the end of the night. In some of the minor 
characteristic novels of the period, books like Told by an Idiot,— the despair-of-life reaches a Turkish- 
bath atmosphere of self-pity. And even the best writers of the time can be convicted of a too Olympian 
attitude, a too great readiness to wash their hands of the immediate practical problem. They see life very 
comprehensively, much more so than those who come immediately before or after them, but they see it 
through the wrong end of the telescope. Not that that invalidates their books, as books. The first test of any 
work of art is survival, and it is a fact that a great deal that was written in the period 1910-30 has 
survived and looks like continuing to survive. One has only to think of Ulysses, Of Human Bondage,— 
most of Lawrence's early work, especially his short stories, and virtually the whole of Eliot's poems up to 
about 1930, to wonder what is now being written that will wear so well. 

But quite suddenly, in the years 1930-35, something happens. The literary climate changes. A 
new group of writers, Auden and Spender and the rest of them, has made its appearance, and although 
technically these writers owe something to their predecessors, their "tendency" is entirely different. 
Suddenly we have got out of the twilight of the gods into a sort of Boy Scout atmosphere of bare knees 
and community singing. The typical literary man ceases to be a cultured expatriate with a leaning towards 
the Church, and becomes an eager-minded schoolboy with a leaning towards Communism. If the keynote 
of the writers of the 'twenties is "tragic sense of life," the keynote of the new writers is "serious purpose." 

The differences between the two schools are discussed at some length in Mr. Louis 
MacNeice's book Modern Poetry.— This book is, of course, written entirely from the angle of the younger 
group and takes the superiority of their standards for granted. According to Mr. MacNeice: 

The poets of New Signatures ,- unlike Yeats and Eliot, are emotionally partisan. Yeats 
proposed to turn his back on desire and hatred; Eliot sat back and watched other 
people's emotions with ennui and an ironical self-pity... The whole poetry, on the 
other hand, of Auden, Spender and Day-Lewis implies that they have desires and 
hatreds of their own and, further, that they think some things ought to be desired and 
others hated. 


And again: 


The poets of New Signatures have swung back... to the Greek preference for 
information or statement. The first requirement is to have something to say, and after 
that you must say it as well as you can. 


In other words, "purpose" has come back, the younger writers have "gone into politics." As I 
have pointed out already, Eliot & Co. are not really so non-partisan as Mr. MacNeice seems to suggest. 
Still, it is broadly true that in the 'twenties the literary emphasis was more on technique and less on 
subject-matter than it is now. 

The leading figures in this group are Auden, Spender, Day-Lewis, MacNeice, and there is a 
long string of writers of more or less the same tendency, Isherwood, John Lehmann, Arthur Calder- 
Marshall, Edward Upward, Alec Brown, Philip Henderson, and many others. As before, I am lumping 
them together simply according to tendency. Obviously there are very great variations in talent. But when 
one compares these writers with the Joyce—Eliot generation, the immediately striking thing is how much 
easier it is to form them into a group. Technically they are closer together, politically they are almost 
indistinguishable, and their criticisms of one another's work have always been (to put it mildly) good 
natured. The outstanding writers of the 'twenties were of very varied origins, few of them had passed 
through the ordinary English educational mill (incidentally, the best of them, barring Lawrence, were not 
Englishmen), and most of them had had at some time to struggle against poverty, neglect, and even 
downright persecution. On the other hand, nearly all the younger writers fit easily into the public-school 
—university—Bloomsbury pattern. The few who are of proletarian origin are of the kind that is declassed 
early in life, first by means of scholarships and then by the bleaching-tub of London "culture." It is 
significant that several of the writers in this group have been not only boys but, subsequently, masters at 
public schools. Some years ago I described Auden as "a sort of gudess Kipling."— As criticism this was 
quite unworthy, indeed it was merely a spiteful remark, but it is a fact that in Auden's work, especially his 
earlier work, an atmosphere of uplift—something rather like Kipling's "If" or Newbolt's "Play up, Play 
up, and Play the Game!"—never seems to be very far away. Take, for instance, a poem like "You're 
leaving now, and it's up to you boys."— It is pure scoutmaster, the exact note of the ten-minutes' straight 
talk on the dangers of self-abuse. No doubt there is an element of parody that he intends, but there is also a 
deeper resemblance that he does not intend. And of course the rather priggish note that is common to most 
of these writers is a symptom of release. By throwing "pure art" overboard they have freed themselves 
from the fear of being laughed at and vastly enlarged their scope. The prophetic side of Marxism, for 
example, is new material for poetry and has great possibilities: 

We are nothing. 

We have fallen 

Into the dark and shall be destroyed. 

Think though, that in this darkness 

We hold the secret hub of an idea 

Whose living sunlit wheel revolves in future years outside. 

(Spender, Trial of a Judge)— 

But at the same time, by being Marxised literature has moved no nearer to the masses. Even 


allowing for the time-lag, Auden and Spender are somewhat farther from being popular writers than Joyce 
and Eliot, let alone Lawrence. As before, there are many contemporary writers who are outside the 
current, but there is not much doubt about what is the current. For the middle and late 'thirties, Auden, 
Spender & Co. are "the movement," just as Joyce, Eliot & Co. were for the 'twenties. And the movement 
is in the direction of some rather ill-defined thing called Communism. As early as 1934 or 1935 it was 
considered eccentric in literary circles not to be more or less "left," and in another year or two there had 
grown up a left-wing orthodoxy that made a certain set of opinions absolutely de rigueur on certain 
subjects. The idea had begun to gain ground (vide Edward Upward— and others) that a writer must either 
be actively "left" or write badly. Between 193 5 and 1939 the Communist Party had an almost irresistible 
fascination for any writer under forty. It became as normal to hear that so-and-so had "joined" as it had 
been a few years earlier, when Roman Catholicism was fashionable, to hear that so-and-so had "been 
received." For about three years, in fact, the central stream of English literature was more or less direcdy 
under Communist control. How was it possible for such a thing to happen? And at the same time, what is 
meant by "Communism"? It is better to answer the second question first. 

The Communist movement in Western Europe began as a movement for the violent overthrow 
of capitalism, and degenerated within a few years into an instrument of Russian foreign policy. This was 
probably inevitable when the revolutionary ferment that followed the Great War had died down. So far as 
I know, the only comprehensive history of this subject in English is Franz Borkenau's book. The 
Communist International. What Borkenau's facts even more than his deductions make clear is that 
Communism could never have developed along its present lines if any real revolutionary feeling had 
existed in the industrialised countries. In England, for instance, it is obvious that no such feeling has 
existed for years past. The pathetic membership-figures of all extremist parties show this clearly. It is 
only natural, therefore, that the English Communist movement should be controlled by people who are 
mentally subservient to Russia and have no real aim except to manipulate British foreign policy in the 
Russian interest. Of course such an aim cannot be openly admitted, and it is this fact that gives the 
Communist Party its very peculiar character. The more vocal kind of Communist is in effect a Russian 
publicity agent posing as an international Socialist. It is a pose that is easily kept up at normal times, but 
becomes difficult in moments of crisis, because of the fact that the U.S.S.R. is no more scrupulous in its 
foreign policy than the rest of the Great Powers. Alliances, changes of front, etc., which only make sense 
as part of the game of power politics have to be explained and justified in terms of international 
Socialism. Every time Stalin swaps partners, "Marxism" has to be hammered into a new shape. This 
entails sudden and violent changes of "line," purges, denunciations, systematic destruction of party 
literature, etc., etc. Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental 
convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy 
of Tuesday, and so on. This has happened at least three times during the past ten years. It follows that in 
any Western country a Communist Party is always unstable and usually very small. Its long-term 
membership really consists of an inner ring of intellectuals who have identified with the Russian 
bureaucracy, and a slighdy larger body of working-class people who feel a loyalty towards Soviet Russia 
without necessarily understanding its policies. Otherwise there is only a shifting membership, one lot 
coming and another going with each change of "line." 

In 1930 the English Communist Party was a tiny, barely legal organisation whose main 
activity was libelling the Labour Party. But by 1935 the face of Europe had changed, and left-wing 
politics changed with it. Hider had risen to power and begun to rearm, the Russian five-year plans had 
succeeded, Russia had reappeared as a great military Power. As Hider's three targets of attack were, to 
all appearances, Great Britain, France and the U.S.S.R., the three countries were forced into a sort of 


uneasy rapprochement. This meant that the English or French Communist was obliged to become a good 
patriot and imperialist—that is, to defend the very things he had been attacking for the past fifteen years. 
The Comintern slogans suddenly faded from red to pink. "World revolution" and "Social-fascism" gave 
way to "Defence of democracy” and "Stop Hider!" The years 1935-39 were the period of anti-Fascism 
and the Popular Front, the heyday of the Feft Book Club, when red duchesses and "broad-minded" deans 
toured the batdefields of the Spanish war and Winston Churchill was the blue-eyed boy of the Daily 
Worker. Since then, of course, there has been yet another change of "line." But what is important for my 
purpose is that it was during the "anti-Fascist" phase that the younger English writers gravitated towards 
Communism. 

The Fascism-democracy dogfight was no doubt an attraction in itself, but in any case their 
conversion was due at about that date. It was obvious that laissez-faire capitalism was finished and that 
there had got to be some kind of reconstruction; in the world of 1935 it was hardly possible to remain 
politically indifferent. But why did these young men turn towards anything so alien as Russian 
Communism? Why should writers be attracted by a form of Socialism that makes mental honesty 
impossible? The explanation really lies in something that had already made itself felt before the slump 
and before Hider: middle-class unemployment. 

Unemployment is not merely a matter of not having a job. Most people can get a job of sorts, 
even at the worst of times. The trouble was that by about 1930 there was no activity, except perhaps 
scientific research, the arts and left-wing politics, that a thinking person could believe in. The debunking 
of Western civilisation had reached its climax and "disillusionment" was immensely widespread. Who 
now could take it for granted to go through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a soldier, a 
clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil Servant or what-not? And how many of the values by which our 
grandfathers lived could now be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity 
of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline—anyone of ordinary education could 
turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes. But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of 
such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something 
to believe in. There had been a sort of false dawn a few years earlier when numbers of young 
intellectuals, including several quite gifted writers (Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Hollis and others), had 
fled into the Catholic Church. It is significant that these people went almost invariably to the Roman 
Church and not, for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church or the Protestant sects. They went, that is, 
to the Church with a world-wide organisation, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power and 
prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noticing that the only latter-day convert of really first-rate 
gifts, Eliot, has embraced not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical equivalent of 
Trotskyism. But I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the 
'thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. It was simply something to believe in. Here was a 
church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and—at any rate since 1935 or 
thereabouts—a Fiihrer. All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could 
come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory—all in one 
word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, saviour—all in one word, Stalin. God—Stalin. The devil— 
Hider. Heaven—Moscow. Hell—Berlin. All the gaps were filled up. So, after all, the "Communism" of 
the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated. 

But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the 
English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in England itself. With 
all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the overwhelming majority of English 


people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is 
not at all easy to imagine what a despotic regime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the 'thirties 
belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of 
the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, 
imprisonment without trial, etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism 
because they have no experience of anything except liberalism. Look, for instance, at this extract from Mr. 
Auden's poem Spain (incidentally this poem is one of the few decent things that have been written about 
the Spanish war): 


To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs, 

The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion; 

To-morrow the bicycle races 

Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle. 

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, 

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder; 

To-day the expending of powers 
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting. 

The second stanza is intended as a sort of tabloid picture of a day in the life of a "good party 
man." In the morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes' interlude to stifle "bourgeois" remorse, 
and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All 
very edifying. But notice the phrase "necessary murder." It could only be written by a person to whom 
murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen 
the bodies of numbers of murdered men—I don't mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have 
some conception of what murder means—the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the postmortems, 
the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The 
Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don't advertise their callousness, and they don't speak 
of it as murder; it is "liquidation," "elimination" or some other soothing phrase. Mr. Auden's brand of 
amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger 
is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that 
fire is hot. The war-mongering to which the English intelligentsia gave themselves up in the period 193 5- 
39 was largely based on a sense of personal immunity. The attitude was very different in France, where 
the military service is hard to dodge and even literary men know the weight of a pack. 

Towards the end of Mr. Cyril Connolly's recent book, Enemies of Promise,— there occurs an 
interesting and revealing passage. The first part of the book is, more or less, an evaluation of present-day 
literature. Mr. Connolly belongs exactly to the generation of the writers of "the movement,” and with not 
many reservations their values are his values. It is interesting to notice that among prose-writers he 
admires chiefly those specialising in violence—the would-be tough American school, Hemingway, etc. 
The latter part of the book, however, is autobiographical and consists of an account, fascinatingly 
accurate, of life at a preparatory school and Eton in the years 1910-20. Mr. Connolly ends by remarking: 


Were I to deduce anything from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The 
Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by 
boys at the great public schools are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest 
their development. 

When you read the second sentence in this passage, your natural impulse is to look for the 
misprint. Presumably there is a "not" left out, or something. But no, not a bit of it! He means it! And what 
is more, he is merely speaking the truth, in an inverted fashion. "Cultured” middle-class life has reached a 
depth of softness at which a public-school education—five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery—can 
actually be looked back upon as an eventful period. To nearly all the writers who have counted during the 
'thirties, what more has ever happened than Mr. Connolly records in Enemies of Promise? It is the same 
pattern all the time; public school, university, a few trips abroad, then London. Hunger, hardship, solitude, 
exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour—hardly even words. No wonder that the huge tribe known 
as "the right left people" found it so easy to condone the purge-and-Ogpu side of the Russian regime and 
the horrors of the first Five-Year Plan. They were so gloriously incapable of understanding what it all 
meant. 


By 1937 the whole of the intelligentsia was mentally at war. Left-wing thought had narrowed 
down to "anti-Fascism," i.e., to a negative, and a torrent of hate-literature directed against Germany and 
the politicians supposedly friendly to Germany was pouring from the Press. The thing that, to me, was 
truly frightening about the war in Spain was not such violence as I witnessed, nor even the party feuds 
behind the lines, but the immediate reappearance in left-wing circles of the mental atmosphere of the 
Great War. The very people who for twenty years had sniggered over their own superiority to war 
hysteria were the ones who rushed straight back into the mental slum of 1915. All the familiar war-time 
idiocies, spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good anti-Fascist?), the retailing of 
incredible atrocity-stories, came back into vogue as though the intervening years had never happened. 
Before the end of the Spanish war, and even before Munich, some of the better of the left-wing writers 
were beginning to squirm. Neither Auden nor, on the whole, Spender wrote about the Spanish war in quite 
the vein that was expected of them. Since then there has been a change of feeling and much dismay and 
confusion, because the actual course of events has made nonsense of the left-wing orthodoxy of the last 
few years. But then it did not need very great acuteness to see that much of it was nonsense from the start. 
There is no certainty, therefore, that the next orthodoxy to emerge will be any better than the last. 

On the whole the literary history of the 'thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer does 
well to keep out of politics. For any writer who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political 
party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up. It is, of course, possible to toe 
the line and go on writing—after a fashion. Any Marxist can demonstrate with the greatest of ease that 
"bourgeois" liberty of thought is an illusion. But when he has finished his demonstration there remains the 
psychological fact that without this "bourgeois" liberty the creative powers wither away. In the future a 
totalitarian literature may arise, but it will be quite different from anything we can now imagine. 
Literature as we know it is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship. 
And this is even truer of prose than of verse. It is probably not a coincidence that the best writers of the 
'thirties have been poets. The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is 
completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. How many Roman 
Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one could name have usually been bad Catholics. 
The novel is practically a Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the autonomous 
individual. No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has been so barren of imaginative prose as the 


nineteen-thirties. There have been good poems, good sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but 
practically no fiction of any value at all. From 1933 onwards the mental climate was increasingly against 
it. Anyone sensitive enough to be touched by the Zeitgeist was also involved in politics. Not everyone, of 
course, was definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone was on its periphery and more or 
less mixed up in propaganda-campaigns and squalid controversies. Communists and near-Communists 
had a disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It was a time of labels, slogans and 
evasions. At the worst moments you were expected to lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies; 
at the best a sort of voluntary censorship ("Ought I to say this? is it pro-Fascist?") was at work in nearly 
everyone's mind. It is almost inconceivable that good novels should be written in such an atmosphere. 
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their 
own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened. This brings me back to 
Henry Miller. 


3 

If this were a likely moment for the launching of "schools" of literature, Henry Miller might be the 
starting-point of a new "school." He does at any rate mark an unexpected swing of the pendulum. In his 
books one gets right away from the "political animal" and back to a viewpoint not only individualistic but 
completely passive—the viewpoint of a man who believes the world-process to be outside his control 
and who in any case hardly wishes to control it. 

I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain. 
What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He 
merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could 
understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix 
oneself up in such things from a sense of obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my ideas about 
combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all boloney. Our civilisation was destined to be 
swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human—a 
prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit throughout his work. 
Everywhere there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm, and almost everywhere the implied belief 
that it doesn't matter. The only political declaration which, so far as I know, he has ever made in print is a 
purely negative one. A year or so ago an American magazine, the Marxist Quarterly, sent out a 
questionnaire to various American writers asking them to define their attitude on the subject of war. 
Miller replied in terms of extreme pacifism, but a merely personal pacifism, an individual refusal to fight, 
with no apparent wish to convert others to the same opinion—practically, in fact, a declaration of 
irresponsibility. 

However, there is more than one kind of irresponsibility. As a rule, 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 realise that they cannot win. Look, for instance, at a poem like "The 
Scholar Gypsy,"— with its railing against the "strange disease of modern life" and its magnificent defeatist 
simile in the final stanza. It expresses one of the normal literary attitudes, perhaps actually the prevailing 
attitude during the last hundred years. And on the other hand there are the "progressives," the yea-sayers, 
the Shaw—Wells type, always leaping forward to embrace the ego-projections which they mistake for the 
future. On the whole the writers of the 'twenties took the first line and the writers of the 'thirties the 


second. And at any given moment, of course, there is a huge tribe of Barries and Deepings and Dells — 
who simply don't notice what is happening. Where Miller's work is symptomatically important is in its 
avoidance of any of these attitudes. He is neither pushing the world-process forward nor trying to drag it 
back, but on the other hand he is by no means ignoring it. I should say that he believes in the impending 
ruin of Western civilisation much more firmly than the majority of "revolutionary" writers; only he does 
not feel called upon to do anything about it. He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the 
enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face towards the flames. 

In Max and the White Phagocytes there is one of those revealing passages in which a writer 
tells you a great deal about himself while talking about somebody else. The book includes a long essay on 
the diaries of Ana'is Nin, which I have never read, except for a few fragments, and which I believe have 
not been published.— Miller claims that they are the only truly feminine writing that has ever appeared, 
whatever that may mean. But the interesting passage is one in which he compares Ana'is Nin—evidently a 
completely subjective, introverted writer—to Jonah in the whale's belly. In passing he refers to an essay 
that Aldous Huxley wrote some years ago about El Greco's picture, "The Dream of Philip the Second."— 
Huxley remarks that the people in El Greco's pictures always look as though they were in the bellies of 
whales, and professes to find something peculiarly horrible in the idea of being in a "visceral prison." 
Miller retorts that, on the contrary, there are many worse things than being swallowed by whales, and the 
passage makes it clear that he himself finds the idea rather attractive. Here he is touching upon what is 
probably a very widespread fantasy. It is perhaps worth noticing that everyone, at least every English- 
speaking person, invariably speaks of Jonah and the whale. Of course the creature that swallowed Jonah 
was a fish, and is so described in the Bible ( Jonah i. 17), but children naturally confuse it with a whale, 
and this fragment of baby-talk is habitually carried into later life—a sign, perhaps, of the hold that the 
Jonah myth has upon our imaginations. For the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, 
cosy, homelike thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to escape, but in 
imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of course, quite obvious why. The 
whale's belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that 
exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the 
completest indifference, no matter what happens. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world 
would hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale's own movements would probably be imperceptible 
to you. He might be wallowing among the surface waves or shooting down into the blackness of the 
middle seas (a mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the difference. 
Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility. And however it may be with 
Ana'is Nin, there is no question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most characteristic 
passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted—quite 
the contrary. In his case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to alter or control 
the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be 
swallowed, remaining passive, accepting. 

It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism, implying either complete 
unbelief or else a degree of belief amounting to mysticism. The attitude is "Je m'en fous " or "Though He 
slay me, yet will I trust in Him,"— whichever way you like to look at it; for practical purposes both are 
identical, the moral in either case being "Sit on your bum” But in a time like ours, is this a defensible 
attitude? Notice that it is almost impossible to refrain from asking this question. At the moment of writing 
we are still in a period in which it is taken for granted that books ought always to be positive, serious and 
"constructive." A dozen years ago this idea would have been greeted with titters. ("My dear aunt, one 
doesn't write about anything, one just writes.") Then the pendulum swung away from the frivolous notion 


that art is merely technique, but it swung a very long distance, to the point of asserting that a book can only 
be "good" if it is founded on a "true" vision of life. Naturally the people who believe this also believe 
that they are in possession of the truth themselves. Catholic critics, for instance, tend to claim that books 
are only "good" when they are of Catholic tendency. Marxist critics make the same claim more boldly for 
Marxist books. For instance, Mr. Edward Upward ("A Marxist Interpretation of Literature," in The Mind 
in Chains—): 


Literary criticism which aims at being Marxist must... proclaim that no book written 
at the present time can be "good" unless it is written from a Marxist or near-Marxist 
viewpoint. 

Various other writers have made similar or comparable statements. Mr. Upward italicises "at 
the present time" because he realises that you cannot, for instance, dismiss Hamlet on the ground that 
Shakespeare was not a Marxist. Nevertheless his interesting essay only glances very shortly at this 
difficulty. Much of the literature that comes to us out of the past is permeated by and in fact founded on 
beliefs (the belief in the immortality of the soul, for example) which now seem to us false and in some 
cases contemptibly silly. Yet it is "good" literature, if survival is any test. Mr. Upward would no doubt 
answer that a belief which was appropriate several centuries ago might be inappropriate and therefore 
stultifying now. But this does not get one much farther, because it assumes that in any age there will be one 
body of belief which is the current approximation to truth, and that the best literature of the time will be 
more or less in harmony with it. Actually no such uniformity has ever existed. In seventeenth-century 
England, for instance, there was a religious and political cleavage which distinctly resembled the left- 
right antagonism of today. Looking back, most modern people would feel that the bourgeois-Puritan 
viewpoint was a better approximation to truth than the Catholic-feudal one. But it is certainly not the case 
that all or even a majority of the best writers of the time were Puritans. And more than this, there exist 
"good" writers whose world-view would in any age be recognised as false and silly. Edgar Allan Poe is 
an example. Poe's outlook is at best a wild romanticism and at worst is not far from being insane in the 
literal clinical sense. Why is it, then, that stories like "The Black Cat," "The Tell-tale Heart," "The Pall of 
the House of Usher" and so forth, which might very nearly have been written by a lunatic, do not convey a 
feeling of falsity? Because they are true within a certain framework, they keep the rules of their own 
peculiar world, like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to write successfully about such a world you 
have got to believe in it. One sees the difference immediately if one compares Poe's Tales with what is, in 
my opinion, an insincere attempt to work up a similar atmosphere, Julian Green's Minuit.— The thing that 
immediately strikes one about Minuit is that there is no reason why any of the events in it should happen. 
Everything is completely arbitrary; there is no emotional sequence. But this is exactly what one does not 
feel with Poe's stories. Their maniacal logic, in its own setting, is quite convincing. When, for instance, 
the drunkard seizes the black cat and cuts its eye out with his penknife, one knows exactly why he did it, 
even to the point of feeling that one would have done the same oneself. It seems therefore that for a 
creative writer possession of the "truth” is less important than emotional sincerity. Even Mr. Upward 
would not claim that a writer needs nothing beyond a Marxist training. He also needs talent. But talent, 
apparently, is a matter of being able to care, of really believing in your beliefs, whether they are true or 
false. The difference between, for instance, Celine and Evelyn Waugh is a difference of emotional 
intensity. It is the difference between a genuine despair and a despair that is at least partly a pretence. And 
with this there goes another consideration which is perhaps less obvious: that there are occasions when 
an "untrue" belief is more likely to be sincerely held than a "true" one. 

If one looks at the books of personal reminiscence written about the war of 1914-18, one 


notices that nearly all that have remained readable after a lapse of time are written from a passive, 
negative angle. They are the records of something completely meaningless, a nightmare happening in a 
void. That was not actually the truth about the war, but it was the truth about the individual reaction. The 
soldier advancing into a machine-gun barrage or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that 
here was an appalling experience in which he was all but helpless. He was likelier to make a good book 
out of his helplessness and his ignorance than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in 
perspective. As for the books that were written during the war itself, the best of them were nearly all the 
work of people who simply turned their backs and tried not to notice that the war was happening. Mr. E. 
M. Forster— has described how in 1917 he read "Prufrock" and others of Eliot's early poems, and how it 
heartened him at such a time to get hold of poems that were "innocent of public-spiritedness": 

They sang of private disgust and diffidence, and of people who seemed genuine 
because they were unattractive or weak... Here was a protest, and a feeble one, and 
the more congenial for being feeble ... He who could turn aside to complain of ladies 
and drawing-rooms preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human 
heritage. 

That is very well said. Mr. MacNeice, in the book I have referred to already, quotes this 
passage and somewhat smugly adds: 

Ten years later less feeble protests were to be made by poets and the human heritage 
carried on rather differently... The contemplation of a world of fragments becomes 
boring and Eliot's successors are more interested in tidying it up. 

Similar remarks are scattered throughout Mr. MacNeice's book. What he wishes us to believe 
is that Eliot's "successors" (meaning Mr. MacNeice and his friends) have in some way "protested" more 
effectively than Eliot did by publishing "Prufrock" at the moment when the Allied armies were assaulting 
the Hindenburg Line. Just where these "protests" are to be found I do not know. But in the contrast 
between Mr. Forster's comment and Mr. MacNeice's lies all the difference between a man who knows 
what the 1914-18 war was like and a man who barely remembers it. The truth is that in 1917 there was 
nothing that a thinking and sensitive person could do, except to remain human, if possible. And a gesture 
of helplessness, even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had been a soldier fighting in the 
Great War, I would sooner have got hold of "Prufrock” than The First Hundred Thousand or Horatio 
Bottomley's Letters to the Boys in the Trenches.— I should have felt, like Mr. Forster, that by simply 
standing aloof and keeping touch with pre-war emotions, Eliot was carrying on the human heritage. What 
a relief it would have been at such a time, to read about the hesitations of a middle-aged highbrow with a 
bald spot! So different from bayonet-drill! After the bombs and the food-queues and the recruiting- 
posters, a human voice! What a relief! 

But, after all, the war of 1914-18 was only a heightened moment in an almost continuous 
crisis. At this date it hardly even needs a war to bring home to us the disintegration of our society and the 
increasing helplessness of all decent people. It is for this reason that I think that the passive, non- 
cooperative attitude implied in Henry Miller's work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of 
what people ought to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they do feel. Once again 
it is the human voice among the bomb-explosions, a friendly American voice, "innocent of public¬ 
spiritedness." No sermons, merely the subjective truth. And along those lines, apparently, it is still 
possible for a good novel to be written. Not necessarily an edifying novel, but a novel worth reading and 


likely to be remembered after it is read. 

While I have been writing this book another European war has broken out. It will either last 
several years and tear Western civilisation to pieces, or it will end inconclusively and prepare the way 
for yet another war which will do the job once and for all. But war is only "peace intensified." What is 
quite obviously happening, war or no war, is the break-up of laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal- 
Christian culture. Until recently the full implications of this were not foreseen, because it was generally 
imagined that Socialism could preserve and even enlarge the atmosphere of liberalism. It is now 
beginning to be realised how false this idea was. 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. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence. But this 
means that literature, in the form in which we know it, must suffer at least a temporary death. The 
literature of liberalism is coming to an end and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is 
barely imaginable. As for the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg; he is merely an anachronism, a 
hangover from the bourgeois age, as surely doomed as the hippopotamus. Miller seems to me a man out of 
the common because he saw and proclaimed this fact a long while before most of his contemporaries—at 
a time, indeed, when many of them were actually burbling about a renaissance of literature. Wyndham 
Lewis had said years earlier that the major history of the English language was finished, but he was 
basing this on different and rather trivial reasons. But from now onwards the all-important fact for the 
creative writer is going to be that this is not a writer's world. That does not mean that he cannot help to 
bring the new society into being, but he can take no part in the process as a writer. For as a writer he is a 
liberal, and what is happening is the destruction of liberalism. It seems likely, therefore, that in the 
remaining years of free speech any novel worth reading will follow more or less along the lines that 
Miller has followed—I do not mean in technique or subject-matter, but in implied outlook. The passive 
attitude will come back, and it will be more consciously passive than before. Progress and reaction have 
both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism—robbing reality of its terrors 
by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale—or rather, admit that you are inside the whale (for you 
are, of course). Give yourself over to the world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you 
control it; simply accept it, endure it, record it. That seems to be the formula that any sensitive novelist is 
now likely to adopt. A novel on more positive, "constructive" lines, and not emotionally spurious, is at 
present very difficult to imagine. 

But do I mean by this that Miller is a "great author," a new hope for English prose? Nothing 
of the kind. Miller himself would be the last to claim or want any such thing. No doubt he will go on 
writing—anybody who has once started always goes on writing—and associated with him there is a 
number of writers of approximately the same tendency, Lawrence Durrell, Michael Fraenkel — and others, 
almost amounting to a "school." But he himself seems to me essentially a man of one book. Sooner or later 
I should expect him to descend into unintelligibility, or into charlatanism; there are signs of both in his 
later work. His last book, Tropic of Capricorn, I have not even read. This was not because I did not want 
to read it, but because the police and customs authorities have so far managed to prevent me from getting 
hold of it. But it would surprise me if it came anywhere near Tropic of Cancer or the opening chapters of 
Black Spring. Like certain other autobiographical novelists, he had it in him to do just one thing perfectly, 
and he did it. Considering what the fiction of the nineteen-thirties has been like, that is something. 

Miller's books are published by the Obelisk Press in Paris. What will happen to the Obelisk 
Press, now that war has broken out and Jack Kahane,— the publisher, is dead, I do not know, but at any 
rate the books are still procurable. I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read at least Tropic 


of Cancer. With a little ingenuity, or by paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and 
even if parts of it disgust you, it will stick in your memory. It is also an ''important" book, in a sense 
different from the sense in which that word is generally used. As a rule novels are spoken of as 
"important" when they are either a "terrible indictment" of something or other or when they introduce 
some technical innovation. Neither of these applies to Tropic of Cancer. Its importance is merely 
symptomatic. Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has 
appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an 
overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a 
single glance; and, after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a 
passive accepter of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. Symptomatically, that is more significant 
than the mere fact that five thousand novels are published in England every year and four thousand nine 
hundred of them are tripe. It is a demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the world 
has shaken itself into its new shape. 


Drama Reviews 


Time and Tide, June 8, 1940 

The Tempest by William Shakespeare; The Old Vic 

If there is really such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise. The 
production of The Tempest at the Old Vic has no doubt given him another nasty jolt, though one must 
admire the enterprise of the managers in putting it on at such a moment. 

Why is it that Shakespeare is nearly always acted in a way that makes anyone who cares for 
him squirm? The real fault lies not with the actors but with the audiences. These plays have to be 
performed in front of people who for the most part have no acquaintance with Elizabethan English and are 
therefore incapable of following any but the simplest passages. The tragedies, which are better-known 
than the others and in any case are chock-full of murders, often succeed reasonably well, but the comedies 
and the best of the histories (Henry IV and Henry V), especially their prose interludes, are hopeless, 
because nine-tenths of the people watching don't know the text and can be counted on to miss the point of 
any joke that is not followed up by a kick on the buttocks. All that the actors can do is to gabble their lines 
at top speed and throw in as much horseplay as possible, well knowing that if the audience ever laughs it 
will be at a gag and not at anything that Shakespeare wrote. The Tempest at the Old Vic was no exception. 
All the Stephano and Trinculo scenes were ruined by the usual clowning and roaring on the stage, not to 
mention the noise and fidgeting which seem to be a cherished tradition with Old Vic audiences. As for 
Ariel and Caliban, they looked like something that had escaped from a circus. Admittedly these are 
difficult parts to cast, but there was no need to make them quite so grotesque as was done on this 
occasion. Caliban was got up definitely as a monkey, complete with tail and, apparendy, with some 
disgusting disease of the face. This would have ruined the effect of his lines even if he had spoken them 
more musically. Ariel, although for some reason he was painted bright blue, was horribly whimsical and 
indulged in exaggeratedly homosexual mannerisms, a sort of Peter Pansy. 

John Gielgud, as a middle-aged rather than elderly Prospero, with the minimum of 
abracadabra, gave a performance that was a long way ahead of the rest of the company. Miss Jessica 
Tandy, as Miranda, spoke her lines well, but was wrongly cast for the part. No Miranda ought to have 
blue eyes and fair hair, any more than Cordelia ought to have dark hair. The best feature of the evening 
was the incidental music, which fitted the romantic setting of the play a great deal better than did the 
scenery. All in all, a well-intentioned performance, but demonstrating once again that Shakespeare, except 
for about half a dozen well-known plays, will remain unactable until the general public takes to reading 
him. 


The Peaceful Inn by Denis Ogden; Duke of York's 

An uncanny play possibly owing something to Outward Bound. Six travellers find themselves stranded by 
chance at a country inn which in fact does not exist, and a murder which happened there exacdy a year 
earlier is re-enacted in front of them As a result the various personal problems which brought them there 


are solved. The dialogue is convincing and the mysterious atmosphere is well worked up, but the play's 
weakness is that the problems of the six main personages are of such a nature that it is impossible to take 
them seriously. The clergyman has lost his faith because his brother died of pneumonia, the young society 
beauty finds her life hollow, etc., etc. Although cast in 1940, the play makes no reference to the war, 
direct or indirect; bourgeois peacetime life, with all interest centring round financial success, motor-cars, 
divorce, etc., is apparendy looked upon as something eternal. Miss Louise Hampton gave a very fine 
performance as Joanna Spring, successful journalist and editor of the Women's Page ("Write to Auntie 
Madge about it"), and the acting as a whole was worthy of better material. 


Film Review 

Time and Tide, December 21, 1940 

The Great Dictator ; Prince of Wales, 

Gaumont Haymarket, Marble Arch Pavilion 

France, 1918, Charlie Chaplin, in field grey and German steel helmet, is pulling the string of Big Bertha, 
falling down every time she fires. A little later, losing his way in the smoke screen, he finds himself 
attacking in the middle of the American infantry. Later he is in flight with a wounded staff officer, in an 
aeroplane which flies upside down for such lengths of time that Charlie is puzzled to know why his watch 
persists in standing up on the end of its chain. Finally, falling out of the aeroplane into a mud-hole, he 
loses his memory and is shut up in a mental home for twenty years, completely ignorant of what is 
happening in the world outside. 

At this point the film really begins. Hynkel, Dictator of Tomania, who happens to be 
Charlie's double (Chaplin plays both parts) is directing an extra-special purge against the Jews at the 
moment when Charlie, his mind restored, escapes from the asylum and goes back to his little barber's 
shop in the Ghetto. There are some glorious scenes of fights against Storm Troopers which are not less, 
perhaps actually more moving because the tragedy of wrecked Jewish households is mixed up with the 
kind of humour that depends on mishaps with pails of whitewash and blows on the head with a frying-pan. 
But the best farcical interludes are those that take place in the Dictator's palace, especially in his scenes 
with his hated rival, Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria. (Jack Oakie, in this part, has an even closer physical 
resemblance to Mussolini than Chaplin has to Hider.) There is a lovely moment at the supper table when 
Hynkel is so intent on outwitting Napaloni that he does not notice that he is ladling mustard on to his 
strawberries by mistake for cream. The invasion of Osterlich (Austria) is about to take place, and 
Charlie, who has been incarcerated for resisting the Storm Troopers, escapes from the concentration camp 
in a stolen uniform just at the moment when Hynkel is due to cross the frontier. He is mistaken for the 
Dictator and carried into the capital of the conquered country amid cheering crowds. The little Jewish 
barber finds himself raised upon an enormous rostrum, with serried ranks of Nazi dignitaries behind him 
and thousands of troops below, all waiting to hear his triumphal speech. 

And here occurs the big moment of the film. Instead of making the speech that is expected of 
him, Charlie makes a powerful fighting speech in favour of democracy, tolerance, and common decency. It 
is really a tremendous speech, a sort of version of Lincoln's Gettysburg address done into Hollywood 
English, one of the strongest pieces of propaganda I have heard for a long time. It is, of course, 
understating the matter to say that it is out of tune with the rest of the film. It has no connection with it 
whatever, except the sort of connection that exists in a dream—the kind of dream, for instance, in which 
you are Emperor of China at one moment and a dormouse the next. So completely is the thread broken that 
after that the story can go no further, and the film simply fades out, leaving it uncertain whether the speech 
takes effect or whether the Nazis on the platform detect the impostor and shoot him dead on the spot. 

How good a film is this, simply as a film? I should be falsifying my own opinion if I did not 
admit that it has very great faults. Although it is good at almost every level it exists at so many levels that 
it has no more unity than one finds, for instance, in a pantomime. Some of the early scenes are simply the 
old Chaplin of the two-reelers of thirty years ago, bowler hat, shuffling walk and all. The Ghetto scenes 


are sentimental comedy with a tendency to break into farce, the scenes between Hynkel and Napaloni are 
the lowest kind of slapstick, and mixed up with all this is a quite serious political "message." Chaplin 
never seems to have profited by certain modern advances of technique, so that all his films have a kind of 
jerkiness, an impression of being tied together with bits of string. Yet this film gets away with it. The 
hard-boiled audience of the press show to which I went laughed almost continuously and were visibly 
moved by the great speech at the end. What is Chaplin's peculiar gift? It is his power to stand for a sort of 
concentrated essence of the common man, for the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the hearts of 
ordinary people, at any rate in the West. We live in a period in which democracy is almost everywhere in 
retreat, supermen in control of three-quarters of the world, liberty explained away by sleek professors, 
Jew-baiting defended by pacifists. And yet everywhere, under the surface, the common man sticks 
obstinately to the beliefs that he derives from the Christian culture. The common man is wiser than the 
intellectuals, just as animals are wiser than men. Any intellectual can make you out a splendid "case" for 
smashing the German Trade Unions and torturing the Jews. But the common man, who has no intellect, 
only instinct and tradition, knows that "it isn't right." Anyone who has not lost his moral sense—and an 
education in Marxism and similar creeds consists largely in destroying your moral sense—knows that "it 
isn't right" to march into the houses of harmless little Jewish shopkeepers and set fire to their furniture. 
More than in any humorous trick, I believe, Chaplin's appeal lies in his power to reassert the fact, 
overlaid by Fascism and, ironically enough, by Socialism, that vox populi is vox Dei- and giants are 
vermin. 


No wonder that Hider, from the moment he came to power, has banned Chaplin's films in 
Germany! The resemblance between the two men (almost twins, it is interesting to remember) is 
ludicrous, especially in the wooden movements of their arms. And no wonder that pro-Fascist writers of 
the type of Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell have always pursued Chaplin with such a peculiar 
venomous hatred! From the point of view of anyone who believes in supermen, it is a most disastrous 
accident that the greatest of all the supermen should be almost the double of an absurd little Jewish 
foundling with a tendency to fall into pails of whitewash. It is the sort of fact that ought to be kept dark. 
However, luckily, it can't be kept dark, and the allure of power politics will be a fraction weaker for 
every human being who sees this film. 

If our Government had a little more imagination they would subsidize The Great Dictator 
heavily and would make every effort to get a few copies into Germany—a thing that ought not to be 
beyond human ingenuity. At present it is opening at three West End picture houses whose seats the 
majority of people cannot afford. But though it will probably get a mixed reception from the critics, I think 
it is safe to prophesy for it the nationwide success it deserves. Apart from Chaplin himself, Jack Oakie, 
Henry Daniell (as Goebbels), Maurice Moscovitch and the exceptionally attractive Paulette Goddard 
supply the best of the acting. 


Wells, Hitler and the World State 

Horizon, August 1941 

"In March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a stupendous knockout blow at Britain.... What Hider 
has to do it with, I cannot imagine. His ebbing and dispersed military resources are now probably not so 
very much greater than the Italians' before they were put to the test in Greece and Africa." 

"The German air power has been largely spent. It is behind the times and its first-rate 
men are mosdy dead or disheartened or worn out." 

"In 1914 the Hohenzollern army was the best in the world. Behind that screaming little defective in Berlin 
there is nothing of the sort.... Yet our military 'experts' discuss the waiting phantom. In their imaginations it 
is perfect in its equipment and invincible in discipline. Sometimes it is to strike a decisive 'blow' through 
Spain and North Africa and on, or march through the Balkans, march from the Danube to Ankara, to 
Persia, to India, or 'crush Russia,' or 'pour' over the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass and the phantom 
does none of these things—for one excellent reason. It does not exist to that extent. Most of such 
inadequate guns and munitions as it possessed must have been taken away from it and fooled away in 
Hitler's silly feints to invade Britain. 

And its raw jerry-built discipline is wilting under the creeping realisation that the 
Blitzkrieg is spent, and the war is coming home to roost." 

These quotations are not taken from the Cavalry Quarterly but from a series of newspaper articles by Mr. 
H. G. Wells, written at the beginning of this year and now reprinted in a book entitled Guide to the New 
World. Since they were written, the German Army has overrun the Balkans and reconquered Cyrenaica, it 
can march through Turkey or Spain at such time as may suit it, and it has undertaken the invasion of 
Russia. How that campaign will turn out I do not know, but it is worth noticing that the German general 
staff, whose opinion is probably worth something, would not have begun it if they had not felt fairly 
certain of finishing it within three months. So much for the idea that the German Army is a bogey, its 
equipment inadequate, its morale breaking down, etc. etc. 

What has Wells to set against the "screaming little defective in Berlin"? The usual rigmarole 
about a World State, plus the Sankey Declaration,- which is an attempted definition of fundamental human 
rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency. Except that he is now especially concerned with federal world control 
of air power, it is the same gospel as he has been preaching almost without interruption for the past forty 
years, 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. What is the use of pointing out that a World State is desirable? What matters is that 
not one of the five great military powers would think of submitting to such a thing. All sensible men for 
decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr. Wells says; but the sensible men have no 
power and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and 
Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a 
great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, 
whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly 


a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood. Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or 
even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not 
necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to "enlightened" and 
hedonistic people. What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague 
idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the 
English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object of 
English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might 
be watching the S.S. men patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians 
fighting like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of 
ETtopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the "sacred soil of the Fatherland," etc. etc.), 
which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered form. The energy that actually shapes the world 
springs from emotions—racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war—which liberal 
intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so 
completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action. 

The people who say that Hitler is Antichrist, or alternatively, the Holy Ghost, are nearer an 
understanding of the truth than the intellectuals who for ten dreadful years have kept it up that he is merely 
a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously. All that this idea really reflects is the sheltered 
conditions of English life. The Left Book Club was at bottom a product of Scotland Yard, just as the 
Peace Pledge Union is a product of the Navy. One development of the last ten years has been the 
appearance of the "political book," a sort of enlarged pamphlet combining history with political criticism, 
as an important literary form. But the best writers in this line—Trotsky, Rauschning, Rosenberg, Silone, 
Borkenau, Koestier - and others—have none of them been Englishmen, and nearly all of them have been 
renegades from one or other extremist party, who have seen totalitarianism at close quarters and known 
the meaning of exile and persecution. Only in the English-speaking countries was it fashionable to 
believe, right up to the outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made 
of cardboard. Mr. Wells, it will be seen from the quotations I have given above, believes something of the 
kind still. I do not suppose that either the bombs or the German campaign in Greece have altered his 
opinion. A lifelong habit of thought stands between him and an understanding of Hitler's power. 

Mr. Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class. The thunder of guns, the 
jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an 
invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life, symbolised in all his early books by 
a violent propaganda against horses. The principal villain of his Outline of History is the military 
adventurer, Napoleon. If one looks through nearly any book that he has written in the last forty years one 
finds the same idea constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who is 
working towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past. In 
novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the 
one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side 
war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a 
series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man. Now, he is probably right in 
assuming that a "reasonable," planned form of society, with scientists rather than witch-doctors in control, 
will prevail sooner or later, but that is a different matter from assuming that it is just round the corner. 
There survives somewhere or other an interesting controversy which took place between Wells and 
Churchill at the time of the Russian Revolution. Wells accuses Churchill of not really believing his own 
propaganda about the Bolsheviks being monsters dripping with blood, etc., but of merely fearing that they 
were going to introduce an era of common sense and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like 


Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill's estimate of the Bolsheviks, however, was nearer the 
mark than Wells's. The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to 
regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but 
a Rule of the Saints, which, like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by 
witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells's attitude to the Nazis. 
Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an 
absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the 
equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked 
forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the 
symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much 
of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, 
the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the 
service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fightwells, hitler and the world state 153 ing on 
the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the 
world-view on which his own works are based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors must fail, the 
common-sense World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century Liberal whose heart does not leap at the 
sound of bugles, must triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler cannot be a danger. That he should 
finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration. 

But is it not a sort of parricide for a person of my age (thirty-eight) to find fault with H. G. 
Wells? Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells's own 
creation. How much influence any mere writer has, and especially a "popular" writer whose work takes 
effect quickly, is questionable, but I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 
1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and 
therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed. Only, just the 
singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the 
Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now. When Wells was young, the antithesis 
between science and reaction was not false. Society was ruled by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious 
people, predatory business men, dull squires, bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never 
heard of algebra. Science was faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, 
stupidity, snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side; there 
was need of someone who could state the opposite point of view. Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a 
wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, 
clergymen and golfers, with your future employers exhorting you to "get on or get out," your parents 
systematically warping your sexual life, and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin 
tags; and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the 
bottom of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined. A 
decade or so before aeroplanes were technically feasible Wells knew that within a little while men would 
be able to fly. He knew that because he himself wanted to be able to fly, and therefore felt sure that 
research in that direction would continue. On the other hand, even when I was a little boy, at a time when 
the Wright brothers had actually lifted their machine off the ground for fifty-nine seconds, the generally 
accepted opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given us wings. Up to 1914 Wells 
was in the main a true prophet. In physical details his vision of the new world has been fulfilled to a 
surprising extent. 

But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class, he 
could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his mind by fox- 


hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry 
and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures 
out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts 
which need a strong magic to lay them. 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. A crude book 
like The Iron Heel, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than either Brave New 
World or The Shape of Things to Come. If one had to choose among Wells's own contemporaries a writer 
who could stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil 
voices of power and military "glory." Kipling would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that 
matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is too sane to understand the modern 
world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement stopped short at 
the other war and never really began again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper 
dragons. But how much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander. 


The Art of Donald McGill 


Horizon, September 1941- 

Who does not know the "comics" of the cheap stationers' windows, the penny or twopenny coloured post 
cards with their endless succession of fat women in tight bathing-dresses and their crude drawing and 
unbearable colours, chiefly hedge-sparrow's egg tint and Post Office red? 

This question ought to be rhetorical, but it is a curious fact that many people seem to be 
unaware of the existence of these things, or else to have a vague notion that they are something to be found 
only at the seaside, like nigger minstrels or peppermint rock. Actually they are on sale everywhere—they 
can be bought at nearly any Woolworth's, for example—and they are evidendy produced in enormous 
numbers, new series constandy appearing. They are not to be confused with the various other types of 
comic illustrated post card, such as the sentimental ones dealing with puppies and kittens or the Wendyish, 
sub-pornographic ones which exploit the love-affairs of children. They are a genre of their own, 
specialising in very "low" humour, the mother-in-law, baby's nappy, policemen's boots type of joke, and 
distinguishable from all the other kinds by having no artistic pretensions. Some half-dozen publishing 
houses issue them, though the people who draw them seem not to be numerous at any one time. 

I have associated them especially with the name of Donald McGill because he is not only the 
most prolific and by far the best of contemporary post card artists, but also the most representative, the 
most perfect in the tradition. Who Donald McGill is, I do not know. - He is apparendy a trade name, for at 
least one series of post cards is issued simply as "The Donald McGill Comics," but he is also 
unquestionably a real person with a style of drawing which is recognisable at a glance. Anyone who 
examines his post cards in bulk will notice that many of them are not despicable even as drawings, but it 
would be mere dilettantism to pretend that they have any direct aesthetic value. A comic post card is 
simply an illustration to a joke, invariably a "low" joke, and it stands or falls by its ability to raise a 
laugh. Beyond that it has only "ideological" interest. McGill is a clever draughtsman with a real 
caricaturist's touch in the drawing of faces, but the special value of his post cards is that they are so 
completely typical. They represent, as it were, the norm of the comic post card. Without being in the least 
imitative, they are exactly what comic post cards have been any time these last forty years, and from them 
the meaning and purpose of the whole genre can be inferred. 

Get hold of a dozen of these things, preferably McGill's—if you pick out from a pile the ones 
that seem to you funniest, you will probably find that most of them are McGill's—and spread them out on 
a table. What do you see? 

Your first impression is of overpowering vulgarity. This is quite apart from the ever-present 
obscenity, and apart also from the hideousness of the colours. They have an utter lowness of mental 
atmosphere which comes out not only in the nature of the jokes but, even more, in the grotesque, staring, 
blatant quality of the drawings. The designs, like those of a child, are full of heavy lines and empty 
spaces, and all the figures in them, every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and 
vacuous, the women monstrously parodied, with bottoms like Hottentots. Your second impression, 
however, is of indefinable familiarity. What do these things remind you of? What are they so like? In the 
first place, of course, they remind you of the barely different post cards which you probably gazed at in 
your childhood. But more than this, what you are really looking at is something as traditional as Greek 


tragedy, a sort of sub-world of smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is a part of Western 
European consciousness. Not that the jokes, taken one by one, are necessarily stale. Not being debarred 
from smuttiness, comic post cards repeat themselves less often than the joke columns in reputable 
magazines, but their basic subject-matter, the kind of joke they are aiming at, never varies. A few are 
genuinely witty, in a Max Millerish style. Examples: 

"I like seeing experienced girls home." 

"But I'm not experienced!" 

"You're not home yet!" 

"I've been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you get yours?" 

"I left off struggling." 

judge: "You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this 

woman?" 


co-respondent: "Not a wink, my lord!" 

In general, however, they are not witty but humorous, and it must be said for McGill's post 
cards, in particular, that the drawing is often a good deal funnier than the joke beneath it. Obviously the 
outstanding characteristic of comic post cards is their obscenity, and I must discuss that more fully later. 
But I give here a rough analysis of their habitual subject-matter, with such explanatory remarks as seem to 
be needed: 


Sex .—More than half, perhaps three-quarters, of the jokes are sex jokes, ranging from the 
harmless to the all but unprintable. First favourite is probably the illegitimate baby. Typical captions: 
"Could you exchange this lucky charm for a baby's feeding-botde?" "She didn't ask me to the christening, 
so I'm not going to the wedding." Also newlyweds, old maids, nude statues and women in bathing- 
dresses. All of these are ipso facto funny, mere mention of them being enough to raise a laugh. The 
cuckoldry joke is very seldom exploited, and there are no references to homosexuality. 

Conventions of the sex joke: 

(i) Marriage only benefits the women. Every man is plotting seduction and every woman is 
plotting marriage. No woman ever remains unmarried voluntarily. 

(ii) Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-preserved and good-looking 
people beyond their first youth are never represented. The amorous honeymooning couple reappear as the 
grim-visaged wife and shapeless, moustachioed, red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being allowed 
for. 


Home life .—Next to sex, the henpecked husband is the favourite joke. Typical caption: "Did 
they get an X-ray of your wife's jaw at the hospital?"—"No, they got a moving picture instead." 


Conventions: 


(i) There is no such thing as a happy marriage. 

(ii) No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument. 

Drunkenness. —Both drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto funny. 

Conventions: 

(i) All drunken men have optical illusions. 

(ii) Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men. Drunken youths or women are 
never represented. 


W.C. jokes. —There is not a large number of these. Chamber-pots are ipso facto funny, and so 
are public lavatories. A typical post card, captioned "A Friend in Need," shows a man's hat blown off his 
head and disappearing down the steps of a ladies' lavatory. 


Inter-working-class snobbery. —Much in these post cards suggests that they are aimed at the 
better-off working class and poorer middle class. There are many jokes turning on malapropisms, 
illiteracy, dropped aitches and the rough manners of slum-dwellers. Countless post cards show draggled 
hags of the stage-charwoman type exchanging "unladylike" abuse. Typical repartee: "I wish you were a 
statue and I was a pigeon!” A certain number produced since the war treat evacuation from the anti¬ 
evacuee angle. There are the usual jokes about tramps, beggars and criminals, and the comic maidservant 
appears fairly frequently. Also the comic navvy, bargee, etc.; but there are no anti Trade-Union jokes. 
Broadly speaking, everyone with much over or much under £5 a week is regarded as laughable. The 
"swell" is almost as automatically a figure of fun as the slum-dweller. 


Stock figures. —Foreigners seldom or never appear. The chief locality joke is the Scotsman, 
who is almost inexhaustible. The lawyer is always a swindler, the clergyman always a nervous idiot who 
says the wrong thing. The "knut" or "masher" still appears, almost as in Edwardian days, in out-of-date- 
looking evening-clothes and an opera hat, or even with spats and a knobby cane. Another survival is the 
Suffragette, one of the big jokes of the pre-1914 period and too valuable to be relinquished. She has 
reappeared, unchanged in physical appearance, as the Feminist lecturer or Temperance fanatic. A feature 
of the last few years is the complete absence of anti-Jew post cards. The "Jew joke," always somewhat 
more ill-natured than the "Scotch joke,” disappeared abruptly soon after the rise of Hider. 


Politics. —Any contemporary event, cult or activity which has comic possibilities (for 


example, "free love," feminism, A.R.P.,- nudism) rapidly finds its way into the picture post cards, but 
their general atmosphere is extremely old-fashioned. The implied political oudook is a Radicalism 
appropriate to about the year 1900. At normal times they are not only not patriotic, but go in for a mild 
guying of patriotism, with jokes about "God save the King," the Union Jack, etc. The European situation 
only began to reflect itself in them at some time in 1939, and first did so through the comic aspects of 
A.R.R Even at this date few post cards mention the war except in A.R.R jokes (fat woman stuck in the 
mouth of Anderson shelter,- Wardens neglecting their duty while young woman undresses at window she 
has forgotten to black out, etc. etc.). A few express anti-Hider sentiments of a not very vindictive kind. 
One, not McGill's, shows Hider, with the usual hyperdophied backside, bending down to pick a flower. 
Caption: "What would you do, chums?" This is about as high a flight of patiiotism as any post card is 
likely to attain. Unlike the twopenny weekly papers, comic post cards are not the product of any great 
monopoly company, and eventually they are not regarded as having any importance in forming public 
opinion. There is no sign in them of any attempt to induce an oudook acceptable to the ruling class. 


Here one comes back to the outstanding, all-important feature of comic post cards—their 
obscenity. It is by this that everyone remembers them, and it is also cential to their purpose, though not in 
a way that is immediately obvious. 

A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic post cards is the woman with the stuck-out 
behind. In perhaps half of them, or more than half, even when the point of the joke has nothing to do with 
sex, the same female figure appears, a plump "voluptuous" figure with the dress clinging to it as tightly as 
another skin and with breasts or buttocks grossly over-emphasised, according to which way it is turned. 
There can be no doubt that these pictures lift the lid off a very widespread repression, natural enough in a 
country whose women when young tend to be slim to the point of skimpiness. But at the same time the 
McGill post card—and this applies to all other post cards in this genre —is not intended as pornography 
but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography. The Hottentot figures of the women are caricatures of the 
Englishman's secret ideal, not portraits of it. When one examines McGill's post cards more closely, one 
notices that his brand of humour only has meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code. Whereas in 
papers like Esquire, for instance, or La Vie Parisienne, the imaginary background of the jokes is always 
promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the McGill post card is marriage. 
The four leading jokes are nakedness, illegitimate babies, old maids and newly married couples, none of 
which would seem funny in a really dissolute or even "sophisticated" society. The post cards dealing with 
honeymoon couples always have the enthusiastic indecency of those village weddings where it is still 
considered screamingly funny to sew bells to the bridal bed. In one, for example, a young bridegroom is 
shown getting out of bed the morning after his wedding night. "The first morning in our own little home, 
darling!" he is saying; "I'll go and get the milk and paper and bring you up a cup of tea." Inset is a picture 
of the front doorstep; on it are four newspapers and four bottles of milk. 

This is obscene, if you like, but it is not immoral. Its implication—and this is just the implication [that] 
Esquire or the New Yorker would avoid at all costs—i's that marriage is something profoundly exciting 
and important, the biggest event in the average human being's life. So also with j okes about nagging wives 
and tyrannous mothers-in-law. They do at least imply a stable society in which marriage is indissoluble 
and family loyalty taken for granted. And bound up with this is something I noted earlier, the fact that there 
are no pictures, or hardly any, of good-looking people beyond their first youth. There is the "spooning” 
couple and the middle-aged, cat-and-dog couple, but nothing in between. The liaison, the illicit but more 


or less decorous love-affair which used to be the stock joke of French comic papers, is not a post card 
subject. And this reflects, on a comic level, the working-class oudook which takes it as a matter of course 
that youth and adventure—almost, indeed, individual life—end with marriage. One of the few authentic 
class-differences, as opposed to class-distinctions, still existing in England is that the working classes 
age very much earlier. They do not live less long, provided that they survive their childhood, nor do they 
lose their physical activity earlier, but they do lose very early their youthful appearance. This fact is 
observable everywhere, but can be most easily verified by watching one of the higher age groups 
registering for military service; the middle- and upper-class members look, on average, ten years younger 
than the others. It is usual to attribute this to the harder lives that the working classes have to live, but it is 
doubtful whether any such difference now exists as would account for it. More probably the truth is that 
the working classes reach middle age earlier because they accept it earlier. For to look young after, say, 
thirty is largely a matter of wanting to do so. This generalisation is less true of the better-paid workers, 
especially those who live in council houses and labour-saving flats, but it is true enough even of them to 
point to a difference of outlook. And in this, as usual, they are more traditional, more in accord with the 
Christian past than the well-to-do women who try to stay young at forty by means of physical jerks, 
cosmetics and avoidance of child-bearing. The impulse to cling to youth at all costs, to attempt to 
preserve your sexual attraction, to see even in middle age a future for yourself and not merely for your 
children, is a thing of recent growth and has only precariously established itself. It will probably 
disappear again when our standard of living drops and our birth-rate rises. "Youth's a stuff will not 
endure" expresses the normal, traditional attitude. It is this ancient wisdom that McGill and his colleagues 
are reflecting, no doubt unconsciously, when they allow for no transition stage between the honeymoon 
couple and those glamourless figures, Mum and Dad. 

I have said that at least half McGill's post cards are sex jokes, and a proportion, perhaps ten 
per cent, are far more obscene than anything else that is now printed in England. Newsagents are 
occasionally prosecuted for selling them, and there would be many more prosecutions if the broadest 
jokes were not invariably protected by double meanings. A single example will be enough to show how 
this is done. In one post card, captioned "They didn't believe her," a young woman is demonstrating, with 
her hands held apart, something about two feet long to a couple of open-mouthed acquaintances. Behind 
her on the wall is a stuffed fish in a glass case, and beside that is a photograph of a nearly naked athlete. 
Obviously it is not the fish that she is referring to, but this could never be proved. Now, it is doubtful 
whether there is any paper in England that would print a joke of this kind, and certainly there is no paper 
that does so habitually. There is an immense amount of pornography of a mild sort, coundess illustrated 
papers cashing in on women's legs, but there is no popular literature specialising in the "vulgar," farcical 
aspect of sex. On the other hand, jokes exactly like McGill's are the ordinary small change of the revue 
and music-hall stage, and are also to be heard on the radio, at moments when the censor happens to be 
nodding. In England the gap between what can be said and what can be printed is rather exceptionally 
wide. Remarks and gestures which hardly anyone objects to on the stage would raise a public outcry if 
any attempt were made to reproduce them on paper. (Compare Max Miller's stage patter with his weekly 
column in the Sunday Dispatch.) The comic post cards are the only existing exception to this rule, the 
only medium in which really "low" humour is considered to be printable. Only in post cards and on the 
variety stage can the stuck-out behind, dog and lamp-post, baby’s nappy type of joke be freely exploited. 
Remembering that, one sees what function these post cards, in their humble way, are performing. 

What they are doing is to give expression to the Sancho Panza view of life, the attitude to life 
that Miss Rebecca West once summed up as "extracting as much fun as possible from smacking behinds in 
basement kitchens." The Don Quixote—Sancho Panza combination, which of course is simply the ancient 


dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs more frequendy in the literature of the last four hundred 
years than can be explained by mere imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless variations, 
Bouvard and Pecuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus, Holmes and Watson (the Holmes- 
Watson variant is an exceptionally subde one, because the usual physical characteristics of two partners 
have been transposed). Evidendy it corresponds to something enduring in our civilisation, not in the sense 
that either character is to be found in a "pure" state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, 
noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own 
mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho 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. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, 
to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be 
influenced by him is a different question. But it is simply a lie to say that he is not part of you, just as it is 
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. 

But though in varying forms he is one of the stock figures of literature, in real life, especially 
in the way society is ordered, his point of view never gets a fair hearing. There is a constant worldwide 
conspiracy to pretend that he is not there, or at least that he doesn't matter. Codes of law and morals, or 
religious systems, never have much room in them for a humorous view of life. Whatever is funny is 
subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes 
centre round obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, have to insist on a fairly high 
standard of sexual morality. A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of 
mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which 
always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to 
encourage. Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. It 
has to demand fauldess discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their 
taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to die on the batdefield and 
women want to wear themselves out with child-bearing. The whole of what one may call official 
literature is founded on such assumptions. I never read the proclamations of generals before batde, the 
speeches of fiihrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and Left Wing political 
parties, national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and 
contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of 
common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal. Nevertheless the high sentiments always win 
in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat - always get more out of their followers than 
those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face 
childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, 
batdeships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that the other 
element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed 
altogether and needs a hearing occasionally. 

The comic post cards are one expression of his point of view, a humble one, less important 
than the music halls, but still worthy of attention. In a society which is still basically Christian they 
naturally concentrate on sex jokes; in a totalitarian society, if they had any freedom of expression at all, 
they would probably concentrate on laziness or cowardice, but at any rate on the unheroic in one form or 
another. It will not do to condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exacdy what 


they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed lowness, not only in the 
sense of obscenity, but lowness of oudook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint of "higher" 
influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm's-eye view of life, for the music-hall world 
where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the clothes are 
always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the 
newlyweds make fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red¬ 
nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them 
behind the front door, poker in hand. Their existence, the fact that people want them, is symptomatically 
important. Like the music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue. They 
express only one tendency in the human mind, but a tendency which is always there and will find its own 
outlet, like water. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the 
time. For: 


"there is a just man that perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that 
prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not righteous over much; neither make 
thyself over wise; why shouldst thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch wicked, 
neither be thou foolish: why shouldst thou die before thy time?"- 

In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of literature, 
and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's 
tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 
or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in 
cheap stationers' windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself 
in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish. 


No, Not One 

Review of No Such Liberty by Alex Comfort, The Adelphi, October 1941 

Mr. Murry said years ago that the works of the best modern writers, Joyce, Eliot and the like, simply 
demonstrated the impossibility of great art in a time like the present, and since then we have moved 
onwards into a period in which any sort of joy in writing, any such notion as telling a story for the 
purpose of pure entertainment, has also become impossible. All writing nowadays is propaganda. If, 
therefore, I treat Mr. Comfort's novel as a tract, I am only doing what he himself has done already. It is a 
good novel as novels go at this moment, but the motive for writing it was not what Trollope or Balzac, or 
even Tolstoy, would have recognised as a novelist's impulse. It was written in order to put forward the 
"message" of pacifism, and it was to fit that "message" that the main incidents in it were devised. I think I 
am also justified in assuming that it is autobiographical, not in the sense that the events described in it 
have actually happened, but in the sense that the author identifies himself with the hero, thinks him worthy 
of sympathy and agrees with the sentiments that he expresses. 

Here is the outline of the story. A young German doctor who has been convalescent for two 
years in Switzerland returns to Cologne a little before Munich to find that his wife has been helping war- 
resisters to escape from the country and is in imminent danger of arrest. He and she flee to Holland just in 
time to escape the massacre which followed on vom Rath's assassination. 1 Partly by accident they reach 
England, he having been seriously wounded on the way. After his recovery he manages to get a hospital 
appointment, but at the outbreak of war he is brought before a tribunal and put in the B class of aliens. The 
reason for this is that he has declared that he will not fight against the Nazis, thinking it better to 
"overcome Hitler by love." Asked why he did not stay in Germany and overcome Hider by love there, he 
admits that there is no answer. In the panic following on the invasion of the Low Countries he is arrested a 
few minutes after his wife has given birth to a baby and kept for a long time in a concentration camp 
where he cannot communicate with her and where the conditions of dirt, overcrowding, etc., are as bad as 
anything in Germany. Finally he is packed on to the "Arandora Star" (it is given another name, of course), 
- sunk at sea, rescued, and put in another somewhat better camp. When he is at last released and makes 
contact with his wife, it is to find that she has been confined in another camp in which the baby has died 
of neglect and underfeeding. The book ends with the couple looking forward to sailing for America and 
hoping that the war fever will not by this time have spread there as well. 

Now, before considering the implications of this story, just consider one or two facts which 
underlie the structure of modern society and which it is necessary to ignore if the pacifist "message" is to 
be accepted uncritically. 

(i) Civilisation rests ultimately on coercion. What holds society together is not the policeman 
but the good will of common men, and yet that good will is powerless unless the policeman is there to 
back it up. Any government which refused to use violence in its own defence would cease almost 
immediately to exist, because it could be overthrown by any body of men, or even any individual, that 
was less scrupulous. Objectively, whoever is not on the side of the policeman is on the side of the 
criminal, and vice versa. In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of 
the Nazis, and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the U.S.S.R. Since pacifists have 
more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively 
against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi. 


( ii) Since coercion can never be altogether dispensed with, the only difference is between 
degrees of violence. During the last twenty years there has been less violence and less militarism inside 
the English-speaking world than outside it, because there has been more money and more security. The 
hatred of war which undoubtedly characterises the English-speaking peoples is a reflection of their 
favoured position. Pacifism is only a considerable force in places where people feel themselves very 
safe, chiefly maritime states. Even in such places, turn-the-other-cheek pacifism only flourishes among the 
more prosperous classes, or among workers who have in some way escaped from their own class. The 
real working class, though they hate war and are immune to jingoism, are never really pacifist, because 
their life teaches them something different. To abjure violence it is necessary to have no experience of it. 

If one keeps the above facts in mind one can, I think, see the events, in Mr. Comfort's novel in 
truer perspective. It is a question of putting aside subjective feelings and trying to see whither one's 
actions will lead in practice and where one's motives ultimately spring from. The hero is a research 
worker—a pathologist. He has not been especially fortunate, he has a defective lung, thanks to the 
carrying-on of the British blockade into 1919, but in so far as he is a member of the middle class, doing 
work which he has chosen for himself, he is one of a few million favoured human beings who live 
ultimately on the degradation of the rest. He wants to get on with his work, wants to be out of reach of 
Nazi tyranny and regimentation, but he will not act against the Nazis in any other way than by running 
away from them. Arrived in England, he is in terror of being sent back to Germany, but refuses to take part 
in any physical effort to keep the Nazis out of England. His greatest hope is to get to America, with 
another three thousand miles of water between himself and the Nazis. He will only get there, you note, if 
British ships and planes protect him on the way, and having got there he will simply be living under the 
protection of American ships and planes instead of British ones. If he is lucky he will be able to continue 
with his work as a pathologist, at the same time keeping up his attitude of moral superiority towards the 
men who make his work possible. And underlying everything there will still be his position as a research- 
worker, a favoured person living ultimately on dividends which would cease forthwith if not extorted by 
the threat of violence. 

I do not think this is an unfair summary of Mr. Comfort's book. And I think the relevant fact is 
that this story of a German doctor is written by an Englishman. The argument which is implied all the way 
through, and sometimes explicitly stated, that there is next to no difference between Britain and Germany, 
political persecution is as bad in one as in the other, those who fight against the Nazis always go Nazi 
themselves, would be more convincing if it came from a German. There are probably sixty thousand 
German refugees in this country, and there would be hundreds of thousands more if we had not meanly 
kept them out. Why did they come here if there is virtually no difference between the social atmosphere of 
the two countries? And how many of them have asked to go back? They have "voted with their feet," as 
Lenin put it. As I pointed out above, the comparative gentleness of the English-speaking civilisation is due 
to money and security, but that is not to say that no difference exists. Once let it be admitted, however, that 
there is a certain difference, that it matters quite a lot who wins, and the usual short-term case for 
pacifism falls to the ground. You can be explicitly pro-Nazi without claiming to be a pacifist—and there 
is a very strong case for the Nazis, though not many people in this country have the courage to utter it—but 
you can only pretend that Nazism and capitalist democracy are Tweedledum and Tweedledee if you also 
pretend that every horror from the June purge onwards has been cancelled by an exactly similar horror in 
England. In practice this has to be done by means of selection and exaggeration. Mr. Comfort is in effect 
claiming that a "hard case" is typical. The sufferings of this German doctor in a so-called democratic 
country are so terrible, he implies, as to wipe out every shred of moral justification for the struggle 
against Fascism. One must, however, keep a sense of proportion. Before raising a squeal because two 


thousand internees have only eighteen latrine buckets between them, one might as well remember what has 
happened these last few years in Poland, in Spain, in Czechoslovakia, etc., etc. If one clings too closely to 
the "those who fight against Fascism become Fascist themselves" formula, one is simply led into 
falsification. It is not true, for instance, as Mr. Comfort implies, that there is widespread spy-mania and 
that the prejudice against foreigners increases as the war gathers in momentum. The feeling against 
foreigners, which was one of the factors that made the internment of the refugees possible, has gready 
died away, and Germans and Italians are now allowed into jobs that they would have been debarred from 
in peace time. It is not true, as he explicidy says, that the only difference between political persecution in 
England and in Germany is that in England nobody hears about it. Nor is it true that all the evil in our life 
is traceable to war or war-preparation. "I knew," he says, "that the English people, like the Germans, had 
never been happy since they put their trust in rearmament." Were they so conspicuously happy before? Is it 
not the truth, on the contrary, that rearmament, by reducing unemployment, made the English people 
somewhat happier, if anything? From my own observation I should say that, by and large, the war itself 
has made England happier; and this is not an argument in favour of war, but simply tells one something 
about the nature of so-called peace. 

The fact is that the ordinary short-term case for pacifism, the claim that you can best frustrate 
the Nazis by not resisting them, cannot be sustained. If you don't resist the Nazis you are helping them, and 
ought to admit it. For then the long-term case for pacifism can be made out. You can say: "Yes, I know I 
am helping Flider, and I want to help him. Let him conquer Britain, the U.S.S.R. and America. Let the 
Nazis rule the world; in the end they will grow into something different." That is at any rate a tenable 
position. It looks forward into human history, beyond the term of our own lives. What is not tenable is the 
idea that everything in the garden would be lovely now if only we stopped the wicked fighting, and that to 
fight back is exacdy what the Nazis want us to do. Which does Flider fear more, the P.P.U. or the R.A.F.? 
Which has he made greater efforts to sabotage? Is he trying to bring America into the war or to keep 
America out of it? Would he be deeply distressed if the Russians stopped fighting tomorrow? And after 
all, the history of the last ten years suggests that Flider has a pretty shrewd idea of his own interests. 

The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from 
fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and 
reality. But why should they want to make this flight, in any case? Because, righdy hating violence, they 
do not wish to recognise that it is integral to modern society and that their own fine feelings and noble 
attitudes are all the fruit of injustice backed up by force. They do not want to learn where their incomes 
come from. Underneath this lies the hard fact, so difficult for many people to face, that individual 
salvation is not possible, that the choice before human beings is not, as a rule, between good and evil but 
between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world; that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, 
which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out 
with clean hands. It seems to me that the text for our time is not "Woe to him through whom the evil 
cometh" but the one from which I took the tide of this article, "There is not one that is righteous, no, not 
one." - We have all touched pitch, we are all perishing by the sword. We do not have the chance, in a time 
like this, to say "Tomorrow we can all start being good." That is moonshine. We only have the chance of 
choosing the lesser evil and of working for the establishment of a new kind of society in which common 
decency will again be possible. There is no such thing as neutrality in this war. The whole population of 
the world is involved in it, from the Esquimos to the Andamanese, and since one must inevitably help one 
side or the other, it is better to know what one is doing and count the cost. Men like Darlan and Laval 
have at any rate had the courage to make their choice and proclaim it openly. The New Order, they say, 
must be established at all costs, and "il faut erabouiller l'Angleterre.” Mr. Murry appears, at any rate at 


moments, to think likewise. The Nazis, he says, are "doing the dirty work of the Lord" (they certainly did 
an exceptionally dirty job when they attacked Russia), and we must be careful "lest in fighting against 
Hider we are fighting against God." Those are not pacifist sentiments, since if carried to their logical 
conclusion they involve not only surrendering to Hider but helping him in his various forthcoming wars, 
but they are at least straightforward and courageous. I do not myself see Hider as the saviour, even the 
unconscious saviour, of humanity, but there is a strong case for thinking him so, far stronger than most 
people in England imagine. What there is no case for is to denounce Hitler and at the same time look 
down your nose at the people who actually keep you out of his clutches. That is simply a highbrow variant 
of British hypocrisy, a product of capitalism in decay, and the sort of thing for which Europeans, who at 
any rate understand the nature of a policeman and a dividend, justifiably despise us. 


Rudyard Kipling- 

Horizon, February 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 by-word 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 civilised 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," "Fesser breeds without the Faw."- 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 Faw" 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 Faw— 

Ford God of Hosts, be with us yet, 

Fest 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-Hider 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-Lascist. 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 Lascist or 
near-Lascist shares. 

Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment 
rather than literary vanity that accounted 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 idealised, 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 realise, 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 evangelising. 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 realising 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 middleclass Left 
hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly 
industrialised 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 civilised while other men, inevitably 
less civilised, 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 young man, he had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and 
some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive 
man. The nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate 
people who did things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is 
instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India with that of the surrounding 
countries), whereas they could have achieved nothing, could not have maintained themselves in power for 
a single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had been that of, say, E. M. Forster. Tawdry and 
shallow though it is, Kipling's is the only literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo- 
India, and he could only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth 
shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did not greatly resemble the people he admired. I know from 
several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were Kipling's contemporaries did not like or 
approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that he knew nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was 
from their point of view too much of a highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with "the wrong" 
people, and because of his dark complexion he was wrongly suspected of having a streak of Asiatic 
blood. Much in his development is traceable to his having been born in India and having left school early. 
With a slightly different background he might have been a good novelist or a superlative writer of music- 
hall songs. But how true is it that he was a vulgar flag-waver, a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes? 
It is true, but it is not true that he was a yes-man or a time-server. After his early days, if then, he never 
courted public opinion. Mr. Eliot says that what is held against him is that he expressed unpopular views 
in a popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that "unpopular" means unpopular with the 
intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling's "message" was one that the big public did not want, and, 
indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the people, in the 'nineties as now, were anti-militarist, bored by 
the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic. Kipling's official admirers are and were the "service" 
middle class, the people who read Blackwood's. In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, 
having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on 
a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as "If," were given almost Biblical status. But it 
is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than they have read the Bible. 
Much of what he says they could not possibly approve. Few people who have criticised England from the 
inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot. As a rule it is the British working class 
that he is attacking, but not always. That phrase about "the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied 
oafs at the goals" 2 sticks like an arrow to this day, and it is aimed at the Eton and Harrow match as well 
as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of the verses he wrote about the Boer War have a curiously modern ring, so 
far as their subject-matter goes. "Stellenbosch,"- which must have been written about 1902, sums up what 


every intelligent infantry officer was saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter. 

Kipling's romantic ideas about England and the Empire might not have mattered if he could 
have held them without having the class-prejudices which at that time went with them. If one examines his 
best and most representative work, his soldier poems, especially Barrack-Room Ballads, one notices that 
what more than anything else spoils them is an underlying air of patronage. Kipling idealises the army 
officer, especially the junior officer, and that to an idiotic extent, but the private soldier, though lovable 
and romantic, has to be a comic. He is always made to speak in a sort of stylised Cockney, not very broad 
but with all the aitches and final "g's" carefully omitted. Very often the result is as embarrassing as the 
humorous recitation at a church social. And this accounts for the curious fact that one can often improve 
Kipling's poems, make them less facetious and less blatant, by simply going through them and translating 
them from Cockney into standard speech. This is especially true of his refrains, which often have a truly 
lyrical quality. Two examples will do (one is about a funeral and the other about a wedding): 

"So it's knock out your pipes and follow me! 

And it's finish up your swipes and follow me! 

Oh, hark to the big drum calling, 

Follow me—follow me homel¬ 


and again: 

"Cheer for the Sergeant's wedding— 

Give them one cheer more! 

Grey gun-horses in the lando, 

And a rogue is married to a whore!"— 

Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have known better. He ought to have seen that the 
two closing lines of the first of these stanzas are very beautiful lines, and that ought to have overriden his 
impulse to make fun of a working-man's accent. In the ancient ballads the lord and the peasant speak the 
same language. This is impossible to Kipling, who is looking down a distorting class-perspective, and by 
a piece of poetic justice one of his best lines is spoiled—for "follow me ’ome" is much uglier than 
"follow me home." But even where it makes no difference musically the facetiousness of his stage 
Cockney dialect is irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud than read on the printed page, and 
most people instinctively make the necessary alterations when they quote him. 

Can one imagine any private soldier, in the 'nineties or now, reading Barrack-Room Ballads 
and feeling that here was a writer who spoke for him? It is very hard to do so. Any soldier capable of 
reading a book of verse would notice at once that Kipling is almost unconscious of the class war that goes 
on in an army as much as elsewhere. It is not only that he thinks the soldier comic, but that he thinks him 
patriotic, feudal, a ready admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen. Of course that is 
partly true, or battles could not be fought, but "What have I done for thee, England, my England?" is 
essentially a middle-class query. — Almost any working-man would follow it up immediately with "What 
has England done for me?" In so far as Kipling grasps this, he simply sets it down to "the intense 
selfishness of the lower classes” (his own phrase).— When he is writing not of British but of "loyal" 
Indians he carries the "Salaam, sahib" motif to sometimes disgusting lengths. Yet it remains true that he 
has far more interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the 


"liberals" of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid and 
hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards. "I came to realise," he says in his 
posthumous memoirs, "the bare horrors of the private's life, and the unnecessary torments he endured."— 
He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so, but not in the usual manner, by pretending that 
war is a sort of football match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had never been 
in battle,— but his vision of war is realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is 
terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or what is happening except in his 
own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other troops, frequently run away: 

"I 'eard the knives be'ind me, but I dursn't face my man, 

Nor I don't know where I went to, 'cause I didn't stop to see, 

Till I 'eard a beggar squealin' out for quarter as 'e ran, 

Arf I thought I knew the voice arf—it was me!"— 

Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of one of the debunking war books of the nineteen- 
twenties. Or again: 

"An' now the hugly bullets come peckin' through the dust, 

An' no one wants to face 'em, but every beggar must; 

So, like a man in irons, which isn't glad to go, 

They moves 'em off by companies uncommon stiff an' slow."— 

Compare this with: 

"Forward the Light Brigade! 

Was there a man dismayed? 

No! though the soldier knew 
Someone had blundered."— 

If anything, Kipling overdoes the horrors, for the wars of his youth were hardly wars at all by our 
standards. Perhaps that is due to the neurotic strain in him, the hunger for cruelty. But at least he knows 
that men ordered to attack impossible objectives are dismayed, and also that fourpence a day is not a 
generous pension. 

How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the long-service, mercenary army of 
the late nineteenth century? One must say of this, as of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century 
Anglo-India, that it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we have. He has put on record 
an immense amount of stuff that one could otherwise only gather from verbal tradition or from unreadable 
regimental histories. Perhaps his picture of army life seems fuller and more accurate than it is because any 
middle-class English person is likely to know enough to fill up the gaps. At any rate, reading the essay on 
Kipling that Mr. Edmund Wilson has just published or is just about to publish, I was struck by the number 
of things that are boringly familiar to us and seem to be barely intelligible to an American. But from the 
body of Kipling's early work there does seem to emerge a vivid and not seriously misleading picture of 
the old pre-machine-gun army—the sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or Lucknow, the red coats, the 
pipeclayed belts and the pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the 
bugle-calls, the smell of oats and horse-piss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the 
bloody skirmishes, invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the cholera-stricken camps, the 


"native" concubines, the ultimate death in the workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a patriotic 
music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola's gorier passages, but from it future 
generations will be able to gather some idea of what a long-term volunteer army was like. On about the 
same level they will be able to learn something of British India in the days when motorcars and 
refrigerators were unheard of. It is an error to imagine that we might have had better books on these 
subjects if, for example, George Moore, or Gissing, or Thomas Hardy, had had Kipling's opportunities. 
That is the kind of accident that cannot happen. It was not possible that nineteenth-century England should 
produce a book like War and Peace, or like Tolstoy's minor stories of army life, such as Sebastopol or 
The Cossacks, 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. Tolstoy lived in a great 
military empire in which it seemed natural for almost any young man of family to spend a few years in the 
army, whereas the British Empire was and still is demilitarised to a degree which continental observers 
find almost incredible. Civilised men do not readily move away from the centres of civilisation, and in 
most languages there is a great dearth of what one might call colonial literature. It took a very improbable 
combination of circumstances to produce Kipling's gaudy tableau, in which Private Ortheris and Mrs. 
Hauksbee pose against a background of palm trees to the sound of temple bells, and one necessary 
circumstance was that Kipling himself was only half civilised. 

Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language. The 
phrases and neologisms which we take over and use without remembering their origin do not always 
come from writers we admire. It is strange, for instance, to hear the Nazi broadcasters referring to the 
Russian soldiers as "robots," thus unconsciously borrowing a word from a Czech democrat whom they 
would have killed if they could have laid hands on him.— Here are half a dozen phrases coined by 
Kipling which one sees quoted in leaderettes in the gutter press or overhears in saloon bars from people 
who have barely heard his name. It will be seen that they all have a certain characteristic in common: 

"East is East, and West is West. 

The white man's burden. 

What do they know of England who only England know? 

The female of the species is more deadly than the male. 

Somewhere East of Suez. 

Paying the Dane-geld."— 

There are various others, including some that have oudived their context by many years. The phrase 
"killing Kruger with your mouth,"— for instance, was current till very recendy. It is also possible that it 
was Kipling who first let loose the use of the word "Huns" for Germans; at any rate he began using it as 
soon as the guns opened fire in 1914. But what the phrases I have listed above have in common is that 
they are all of them phrases which one utters semi-derisively (as it might be "For I'm to be Queen o' the 
May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May"—), but which one is bound to make use of sooner or later. 
Nothing could exceed the contempt of the New Statesman, for instance, for Kipling, but how many times 
during the Munich period did the New Statesman find itself quoting that phrase about paying the Dane- 
geld? The fact is that Kipling, apart from his snack-bar wisdom and his gift for packing much cheap 
picturesqueness into a few words ("Palm and Pine"—"East of Suez"—"The Road to Mandalay"), is 
generally talking about things that are of urgent interest. It does not matter, from this point of view, that 
thinking and decent people generally find themselves on the other side of the fence from him. "White 
man's burden" instandy conjures up a real problem, even if one feels that it ought to be altered to "black 
man's burden." One may disagree to the middle of one's bones with the political attitude implied in "The 


Islanders,' - but one cannot say that it is a frivolous attitude. Kipling deals in thoughts which are both 
vulgar and permanent. This raises the question of his special status as a poet, or verse-writer. 

Mr. Eliot describes Kipling's metrical work as "verse" and not "poetry," but adds that it is 
"great verse," and further qualifies this by saying that a writer can only be described as a "great verse- 
writer" if there is some of his work "of which we cannot say whether it is verse or poetry." Apparently 
Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in which case it was a pity that Mr. Eliot did not 
specify these poems by name. The trouble is that whenever an aesthetic judgment on Kipling's work seems 
to be called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able to speak plainly. What he does not say, 
and what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling's verse is 
so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall 
performer recite "The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu" with the purple limelight on his face, and yet there is much 
of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his 
most vital, in poems like "Gunga Din” or "Danny Deever," — Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like 
the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best 
passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. 
Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get 
any pleasure out of such lines as: 

"For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say, 

'Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"'— 

and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as "Felix Randal" or "When icicles hang 
by the wall" are poetry. One can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily than by juggling with the 
words "verse" and "poetry," if one describes him simply as a good bad poet. He is as a poet what Harriet 
Beecher Stowe was as a novelist.— And the mere existence of work of this kind, which is perceived by 
generation after generation to be vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the age we 
live in. 


There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should say, subsequent to 
1790. Examples of good bad poems—I am deliberately choosing diverse ones—are "The Bridge of 
Sighs," "When all the World is Young, Lad," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," Bret Harte's "Dickens in 
Camp," "The Burial of Sir John Moore," "Jenny Kissed Me," "Keith of Ravelston," "Casablanca."— All 
of these reek of sentimentality, and yet—not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are 
capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a 
fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is 
usually too well known to be worth reprinting. It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, "good" 
poetry can 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 civilisation 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 singsongs, limp-leather editions, pokerwork 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 tightened rein, 

Slipping the spur from the booted heel, 

Tenderest voices cry 'Turn again,' 

Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel, 

High hopes faint on a warm hearth-stone— 

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 connection 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 judgment, 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 epater 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. 


T. S. Eliot 

Poetry (London), October—November 1942 

This review article discusses Eliot's Burnt Norton, East Coker, and The Dry 
Salvages, each of which was published separately. 

There is very little in Eliot's later work that makes any deep impression on me. That is a confession of 
something lacking in myself, but it is not, as it may appear at first sight, a reason for simply shutting up 
and saying no more, since the change in my own reaction probably points to some external change which 
is worth investigating. 

I know a respectable quantity of Eliot's earlier work by heart. I did not sit down and learn it, 
it simply stuck in my mind as any passage of verse is liable to do when it has really rung the bell. 
Sometimes after only one reading it is possible to remember the whole of a poem of, say, twenty or thirty 
lines, the act of memory being partly an act of reconstruction. But as for these three latest poems, I 
suppose I have read each of them two or three times since they were published, and how much do I 
verbally remember? "Time and the bell have buried the day," "At the still point of the turning world," 
"The vast waters of the petrel and the porpoise," and bits of the passage beginning "O dark dark dark. 
They all go into the dark." (I don't count "In my end is my beginning," which is a quotation.) That is about 
all that sticks in my head of its own accord. Now one cannot take this as proving that Burnt Norton and 
the rest are worse than the more memorable early poems, and one might even take it as proving the 
contrary, since it is arguable that that which lodges itself most easily in the mind is the obvious and even 
the vulgar. But it is clear that something has departed, some kind of current has been switched off, the 
later verse does not contain the earlier, even if it is claimed as an improvement upon it. I think one is 
justified in explaining this by a deterioration in Mr. Eliot's subject-matter. Before going any further, here 
are a couple of extracts, just near enough to one another in meaning to be comparable. The first is the 
concluding passage of The Dry Salvages: 

And right action is freedom 
From past and future also. 

For most of us, this is the aim 
Never here to be realised; 

Who are only undefeated 
Because we have gone on trying; 

We, content at the last 

If our temporal reversion nourish 

(Not too far from the yew-tree) 

The life of significant soil. 

Here is an extract from a much earlier poem: 

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls 
Stared from the sockets of the eyes! 

He knew that thought clings round dead limbs 
Tightening its lusts and luxuries. 


He knew the anguish of the marrow 
The ague of the skeleton; 

No contact possible to flesh 
Allayed the fever of the bone.- 

The two passages will bear comparison since they both deal with the same subject, namely 
death. The first of them follows upon a longer passage in which it is explained, first of all, that scientific 
research is all nonsense, a childish superstition on the same level as fortune-telling, and then that the only 
people ever likely to reach an understanding of the universe are saints, the rest of us being reduced to 
"hints and guesses." The keynote of the closing passage is, "resignation." There is a "meaning" in life and 
also in death; unfortunately we don't know what it is, but the fact that it exists should be a comfort to us as 
we push up the crocuses, or whatever it is that grows under the yew trees in country churchyards. But now 
look at the other two stanzas I have quoted. Though fathered on to somebody else, they probably express 
what Mr. Eliot himself felt about death at that time, at least in certain moods. They are not voicing 
resignation. On the contrary, they are voicing the pagan attitude towards death, the belief in the next world 
as a shadowy place full of thin, squeaking ghosts, envious of the living, the belief that however bad life 
may be, death is worse. This conception of death seems to have been general in antiquity, and in a sense it 
is general now. "The anguish of the marrow, the ague of the skeleton," Horace's famous ode Eheu fugaces, 
and Bloom's unuttered thoughts during Paddy Dignam's funeral, are all very much of a muchness. So long 
as man regards himself as an individual, his attitude towards death must be one of simple resentment. And 
however unsatisfactory this may be, if it is intensely felt it is more likely to produce good literature than a 
religious faith which is not really felt at all, but merely accepted against the emotional grain. So far as 
they can be compared, the two passages I have quoted seem to me to bear this out. I do not think it is 
questionable that the second of them is superior as verse, and also more intense in feeling, in spite of a 
tinge of burlesque. 

What are these three poems, Burnt Norton and the rest, "about"? It is not so easy to say what 
they are about, but what they appear on the surface to be about is certain localities in England and 
America with which Mr. Eliot has ancestral connections. Mixed up with this is a rather gloomy musing 
upon the nature and purpose of life, with the rather indefinite conclusion I have mentioned above. Life has 
a "meaning,” but it is not a meaning one feels inclined to grow lyrical about; there is faith, but not much 
hope, and certainly no enthusiasm. Now the subject-matter of Mr. Eliot's early poems was very different 
from this. They were not hopeful, but neither were they depressed or depressing. If one wants to deal in 
antitheses, one might say that the later poems express a melancholy faith and the earlier ones a glowing 
despair. They were based on the dilemma of modern man, who despairs of life and does not want to be 
dead, and on top of this they expressed the horror of an over-civilised intellectual confronted with the 
ugliness and spiritual emptiness of the machine age. Instead of "not too far from the yew-tree" the keynote 
was "weeping, weeping multitudes," or perhaps "the broken fingernails of dirty hands.” Naturally these 
poems were denounced as "decadent" when they first appeared, the attacks only being called off when it 
was perceived that Eliot's political and social tendencies were reactionary. There was, however, a sense 
in which the charge of "decadence" could be justified. Clearly these poems were an end-product, the last 
gasp of a cultural tradition, poems which spoke only for the cultivated third-generation rentier, for people 
able to feel and criticise but no longer able to act. E. M. Forster praised Prufrock on its first appearance 
because "it sang of people who were ineffectual and weak" and because it was "innocent of public spirit" 
(this was during the other war, when public spirit was a good deal more rampant than it is now). The 


qualities by which any society which is to last longer than a generation actually has to be sustained— 
industry, courage, patriotism, frugality, philoprogenitiveness—obviously could not find any place in 
Eliot's early poems. There was only room for rentier values, the values of people too civilised to work, 
fight or even reproduce themselves. But that was the price that had to be paid, at any rate at that time, for 
writing a poem worth reading. The mood of lassitude, irony, disbelief, disgust, and not the sort of beefy 
enthusiasm demanded by the Squires - and Herberts,- was what sensitive people actually felt. It is 
fashionable to say that in verse only the words count and the "meaning" is irrelevant, but in fact every 
poem contains a prose-meaning, and when the poem is any good it is a meaning which the poet urgendy 
wishes to express. All art is to some extent propaganda. Prufrock is an expression of futility, but it is also 
a poem of wonderful vitality and power, culminating in a sort of rocket-burst in the closing stanzas: 

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves 
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back 
When the wind blows the water white and black. 

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea 
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.- 

There is nothing like that in the later poems, although the rentier despair on which these lines are founded 
has been consciously dropped. 

But the trouble is that conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on 
"despairing of life" into a ripe old age. One cannot go on and on being "decadent,” since decadence means 
falling and one can only be said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon. Sooner 
or later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude towards life and society. It would be putting it too 
crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the 
Communist Party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines. 
There are other deaths besides physical deaths, and there are other sects and creeds besides the Catholic 
Church and the Communist Party, but it remains true that after a certain age one must either stop writing or 
dedicate oneself to some purpose not wholly aesthetic. Such a dedication necessarily means a break with 
the past: 


...every attempt 

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure 
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words 
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which 
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture 
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate 
With shabby equipment always deteriorating 
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, 

Undisciplined squads of emotion. 

Eliot's escape from individualism was into the Church, the Anglican Church as it happened. One ought not 
to assume that the gloomy Petainism to which he now appears to have given himself over was the 
unavoidable result of his conversion. The Anglo-Catholic movement does not impose any political "tine" 
on its followers, and a reactionary or Austrofascist tendency had always been apparent in his work, 


especially his prose writings. In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without 
being intellectually crippled in the process; but it is far from easy, and in practice books by orthodox 
believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered oudook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others 
who are mentally unfree. The reason is that the Christian churches still demand assent to doctrines which 
no one seriously believes in. The most obvious case is the immortality of the soul. The various "proofs" 
of personal immortality which can be advanced by Christian apologists are psychologically of no 
importance; what matters, psychologically, is that hardly anyone nowadays feels himself to be immortal. 
The next world may be in some sense "believed in" but it has not anywhere near the same actuality in 
people's minds as it had a few centuries ago. Compare for instance the gloomy mumblings of these three 
poems with Jerusalem my happy home ; the comparison is not altogether poindess. In the second case you 
have a man to whom the next world is as real as this one. It is true that his vision of it is incredibly vulgar 
—a choir practice in a jeweller's shop—but he believes in what he is saying and his belief gives vitality 
to his words. In the other case you have a man who does not really feel his faith, but merely assents to it 
for complex reasons. It does not in itself give him any fresh literary impulse. At a certain stage he feels 
the need for a "purpose," and he wants a "purpose" which is reactionary and not progressive; the 
immediately available refuge is the Church, which demands intellectual absurdities of its members; so his 
work becomes a continuous nibbling round those absurdities, an attempt to make them acceptable to 
himself. The Church has not now any living imagery, any new vocabulary to offer: 

The rest 

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. 

Perhaps what we need is prayer, observance, etc., but you do not make a line of poetry by stringing those 
words together. Mr. Eliot speaks also of 


the intolerable wrestle 

With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter. 

I do not know, but I should imagine that the struggle with meanings would have loomed smaller, and the 
poetry would have seemed to matter more, if he could have found his way to some creed which did not 
start off by forcing one to believe the incredible. 

There is no saying whether Mr. Eliot's development could have been much other than it has 
been. All writers who are any good develop throughout life, and the general direction of their 
development is determined. It is absurd to attack Eliot, as some left-wing critics have done, for being a 
"reactionary" and to imagine that he might have used his gifts in the cause of democracy and Socialism. 
Obviously a scepticism about democracy and a disbelief in "progress" are an integral part of him; without 
them he could not have written a line of his works. But it is arguable that he would have done better to go 
much further in the direction implied in his famous "Anglo-Catholic and Royalist" declaration. He could 
not have developed into a Socialist, but he might have developed into the last apologist of aristocracy. 

Neither feudalism nor indeed Fascism is necessarily deadly to poets, though both are to 
prose-writers. The thing that is really deadly to both is Conservatism of the half-hearted modern kind. 

It is at least imaginable that if Eliot had followed wholeheartedly the anti-democratic, anti¬ 
perfectionist strain in himself he might have struck a new vein comparable to his earlier one. But the 
negative, Petainism, which turns its eyes to the past, accepts defeat, writes off earthly happiness as 
impossible, mumbles about prayer and repentance and thinks it a spiritual advance to see life as "a pattern 


of living worms in the guts of the women of Canterbury"—that, surely, is the least hopeful road a poet 
could take. 


Can Socialists Be Happy?- 

Tribune, December 24, 1943 

The thought of Christmas raises almost automatically the thought of Charles Dickens, and for two very 
good reasons. To begin with, Dickens is one of the few English writers who have actually written about 
Christmas. Christmas is the most popular of English festivals, and yet it has produced astonishingly little 
literature. There are the carols, mostly medieval in origin; there is a tiny handful of poems by Robert 
Bridges, T. S. Eliot, and some others, and there is Dickens; but there is very little else. Secondly, Dickens 
is remarkable, indeed almost unique, among modern writers in being able to give a convincing picture of 
happiness. 


Dickens dealt successfully with Christmas twice—in a well-known chapter of The Pickwick 
Papers and in The Christmas Carol. The latter story was read to Lenin on his deathbed and, according to 
his wife, he found its "bourgeois sentimentality" completely intolerable. Now in a sense Lenin was right; 
but if he had been in better health he would perhaps have noticed that the story has some interesting 
sociological implications. To begin with, however thick Dickens may lay on the paint, however disgusting 
the "pathos" of Tiny Tim may be, the Cratchit family do give the impression of enjoying themselves. They 
sound happy as, for instance, the citizens of William Morris's News From Nowhere don't sound happy. 
Moreover—and Dickens's understanding of this is one of the secrets of his power—their happiness 
derives mainly from contrast. They are in high spirits because for once in a way they have enough to eat. 
The wolf is at the door, but he is wagging his tail. The steam of the Christmas pudding drifts across a 
background of pawnshops and sweated labour, and in a double sense the ghost of Scrooge stands beside 
the dinner table. Bob Cratchit even wants to drink Scrooge's health, which Mrs. Cratchit rightly refuses. 
The Cratchits are able to enjoy their Christmas precisely because Christmas only comes once a year. 
Their happiness is convincing just because it is described as incomplete. 

All efforts to describe permanent happiness, on the other hand, have been failures, from 
earliest history onwards. Utopias (incidentally the coined word Utopia doesn't mean "a good place," it 
means merely "a non-existent place") have been common in the literature of the past three or four hundred 
years, but the "favourable" ones are invariably unappetising, and usually lacking in vitality as well. 

By far the best known modern Utopias are those of H. G. Wells. Wells's vision of the future, 
implicit all through his early work and partly set forth in Anticipations and A Modern Utopia, is most 
fully expressed in two books written in the early 'twenties, The Dream and Men Like Gods. Here you 
have a picture of the world as Wells would like to see it—or thinks he would like to see it. It is a world 
whose keynotes are enlightened hedonism and scientific curiosity. All the evils and miseries that we now 
suffer from have vanished. Ignorance, war, poverty, dirt, disease, frustration, hunger, fear, overwork, 
superstition—all vanished. So expressed, it is impossible to deny that that is the kind of world we all 
hope for. We all want to abolish the things that Wells wants to abolish. But is there anyone who actually 
wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia? On the contrary, not to live in a world like that, not to wake up in a 
hygienic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually become a conscious political motive. 
A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised 
hedonistic society which it is within his power to create. A Catholic writer said recently that Utopias are 
now technically feasible and that in consequence how to avoid Utopia had become a serious problem. 
With the Fascist movement in front of our eyes we cannot write this off as a merely silly remark. For one 


of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world. 


All "favourable" Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to 
suggest happiness. News From Nowhere is a sort of goody-goody version of the Wellsian Utopia. 
Everyone is kindly and reasonable, all the upholstery comes from Liberty's, but the impression left behind 
is of a sort of watery melancholy. Lord Samuel's recent effort in the same direction, An Unknown 
Country, is even more dismal. The inhabitants of Bensalem (the word is borrowed from Lrancis Bacon) 
give the impression of looking on life as simply an evil to be got through with as little fuss as possible. 
All that their wisdom has brought them is permanent low spirits. But it is more impressive that Jonathan 
Swift, one of the greatest imaginative writers who have ever lived, is no more successful in constructing a 
"favourable" Utopia than the others. 

The earlier parts of Gulliver's Travels are probably the most devastating attack on human 
society that has ever been written. Every word of them is relevant to-day; in places they contain quite 
detailed prophecies of the political horrors of our own time. Where Swift fails, however, is in trying to 
describe a race of beings whom he does admire. In the last part, in contrast with the disgusting Yahoos, 
we are shown the noble Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses who are free from human failings. Now 
these horses, for all their high character and unfailing common sense, are remarkably dreary creatures. 
Like the inhabitants of various other Utopias, they are chiefly concerned with avoiding fuss. They live 
uneventful, subdued, "reasonable" lives, free not only from quarrels, disorder or insecurity of any kind, 
but also from "passion," including physical love. They choose their mates on eugenic principles, avoid 
excesses of affection, and appear somewhat glad to die when their time comes. In the earlier parts of the 
book Swift has shown where man's folly and scoundrelism lead him: but take away the folly and the 
scoundrelism, and all you are left with, apparently, is a tepid sort of existence, hardly worth leading. 

Attempts at describing a definitely other-worldly happiness have been no more successful. 
Heaven is as great a flop as Utopia—though Hell, it is worth noting, occupies a respectable place in 
literature, and has often been described most minutely and convincingly. 

It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody. 
Almost all Christian writers dealing with Heaven either say frankly that it is indescribable or conjure up a 
vague picture of gold, precious stones, and the endless singing of hymns. This has, it is true, inspired 
some of the best poems in the world: 

Thy walls are of chalcedony, 

Thy bulwarks diamonds square, 

Thy gates are of right orient pearl 
Exceeding rich and rare! 


Or: 


Holy, holy, holy, all the saints adore Thee, 

Casting down their golden crowns about the glassy sea, 

Cherubim and seraphim falling down before Thee, 

Thatwast, and art, and evermore shaltbe! 

But what it could not do was to describe a place or condition in which the ordinary human being actively 
wanted to be. Many a revivalist minister, many a Jesuit priest (see, for instance, the terrific sermon in 


James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist) has frightened his congregation almost out of their skins with his 
word-pictures of Hell. But as soon as it comes to Heaven, there is a prompt falling-back on words like 
"ecstasy" and "bliss," with little attempt to say what they consist in. Perhaps the most vital bit of writing 
on this subject is the famous passage in which Tertullian explains that one of the chief joys of Heaven is 
watching the tortures of the damned. 

The various pagan versions of Paradise are little better, if at all. One has the feeling that it is 
always twilight in the Elysian fields. Olympus, where the gods lived, with their nectar and ambrosia, and 
their nymphs and Hebes, the "immortal tarts" as D. H. Lawrence called them, might be a bit more 
homelike than the Christian Heaven, but you would not want to spend a long time there. As for the 
Moslem Paradise, with its seventy-seven houris per man, all presumably clamouring for attention at the 
same moment, it is just a nightmare. Nor are the Spiritualists, though constandy assuring us that "all is 
bright and beautiful," able to describe any next-world activity which a thinking person would find 
endurable, let alone attractive. 

It is the same with attempted descriptions of perfect happiness which are neither Utopian nor 
other-worldly, but merely sensual. They always give an impression of emptiness or vulgarity, or both. At 
the beginning of La Pucelle Vbltaire describes the life of Charles IX with his mistress, Agnes Sorel. They 
were "always happy," he says. And what did their happiness consist in? Apparendy in an endless round of 
feasting, drinking, hunting and love-making. Who would not sicken of such an existence after a few 
weeks? Rabelais describes the fortunate spirits who have a good time in the next world to console them 
for having had a bad time in this one. They sing a song which can be roughly translated: "To leap, to 
dance, to play tricks, to drink the wine both white and red, and to do nothing all day long except count 
gold crowns"—how boring it sounds, after all! The emptiness of the whole notion of an everlasting "good 
time" is shown up in Breughel's picture "The Land of the Sluggard," where the three great lumps of fat lie 
asleep, head to head, with the boiled eggs and roast legs of pork coming up to be eaten of their own 
accord. 


It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness 
except in terms of contrast. That is why the conception of Heaven or Utopia varies from age to age. In 
pre-industrial society Heaven was described as a place of endless rest, and as being paved with gold, 
because the experience of the average human being was overwork and poverty. The houris of the Moslem 
Paradise reflected a polygamous society where most of the women disappeared into the harems of the 
rich. But these pictures of "eternal bliss" always failed because as soon as the bliss became eternal 
(eternity being thought of as endless time), the contrast ceased to operate. Some of the conventions which 
have become embedded in our literature first arose from physical conditions which have now ceased to 
exist. The cult of spring is an example. In the Middle Ages spring did not primarily mean swallows and 
wild flowers. It meant green vegetables, milk and fresh meat after several months of living on salt pork in 
smoky windowless huts. The spring songs were gay— 

Do nothing but eat and make good cheer, 

And thank Heaven for the merry year 
When flesh is cheap and females dear, 

And lusty lads roam here and there, 

So merrily, 

And ever among so merrily! 


because there was something to be gay about. The winter was over, that was the great thing. Christmas 
itself, a pre-Christian festival, probably started because there had to be an occasional outburst of 
overeating and drinking to make a break in the unbearable northern winter. 

The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort 
or pain, presents Socialists with a serious problem. Dickens can describe a poverty-stricken family 
tucking into a roast goose, and can make them appear happy; on the other hand, the inhabitants of perfect 
universes seem to have no spontaneous gaiety and are usually somewhat repulsive into the bargain. But 
clearly we are not aiming at the kind of world Dickens described, nor, probably, at any world he was 
capable of imagining. The Socialist objective is not a society where everything comes right in the end, 
because kind old gendemen give away turkeys. What are we aiming at, if not a society in which "charity" 
would be unnecessary? We want a world where Scrooge, with his dividends, and Tiny Tim, with his 
tuberculous leg, would both be unthinkable. But does that mean that we are aiming at some painless, 
effordess Utopia? 

At the risk of saying something which the editors of Tribune may not endorse, I suggest that 
the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we 
know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt 
to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart¬ 
breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the 
Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but 
because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering 
one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the 
attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue. 

Socialist thought has to deal in prediction, but only in broad terms. One often has to aim at 
objectives which one can only very dimly see. At this moment, for instance, the world is at war and wants 
peace. Yet the world has no experience of peace, and never has had, unless the Noble Savage once 
existed. The world wants something which it is dimly aware could exist, but which it cannot accurately 
define. This Christmas day, thousands of men will be bleeding to death in the Russian snows, or drowning 
in icy waters, or blowing one another to pieces with hand grenades on swampy islands of the Pacific; 
homeless children will be scrabbling for food among the wreckage of German cities. To make that kind of 
thing impossible is a good objective. But to say in detail what a peaceful world would be like is a 
different matter, and to attempt to do so is apt to lead to the horrors so enthusiastically presented by 
Gerald Heard.= 

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore 
thinks that happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an 
endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wiser 
course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is 
mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply 
reveals his own emptiness. This is the case even with a great writer like Swift, who can flay a bishop or a 
politician so neatly, but who, when he tries to create a superman, merely leaves one with the impression 
—the very last he can have intended—that the stinking Yahoos had in them more possibility of 
development than the enlightened Houyhnhnms. 


Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali 

Intended for Saturday Book, 4, 1944 

"Benefit of Clergy" is entered in Orwell's Payments Book against June i, 1944. He 
was paid £25 for the essay, although, as he explained in a note when it was 
published, in 1946, in Critical Essays (and the U.S. edition, Dickens, Dali & Others, 
1946), it did not appear in copies of the Saturday Book that were intended for 
distribution to the public. '"Benefit of Clergy’ made a sort of phantom appearance in 
the Saturday Book for 1944. The book was in print when its publishers, Messrs 
Hutchinson, decided that this essay must be suppressed on grounds of obscenity. It 
was accordingly cut out of each copy, though for technical reasons it was impossible 
to remove its title from the table of contents." 

Orwell's own copy of the Saturday Book (and a few others that eluded 
Hutchinson's censors) included the essay, and it is from that copy that this essay is 
reproduced here. 

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good 
account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of 
defeats. However, even the most flagrantly dishonest book (Frank Harris's autobiographical writings are 
an example) can without intending it give a true picture of its author. Dali's recently-published Life- 
comes under this heading. Some of the incidents in it are flady incredible, others have been re-arranged 
and romanticised, and not merely the humiliation but the persistent ordinariness of everyday life has been 
cut out. Dali is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a striptease act 
conducted in pink limelight. But as a record of fantasy, of the perversion of instinct that has been made 
possible by the machine age, it has great value. 

Here then are some of the episodes in Dali's life, from his earliest years onward. Which of 
them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali 
would have liked to do. 

When he is six years old there is some excitement over the appearance of Halley's comet: 

"Suddenly one of my father's office clerks appeared in the drawing-room doorway 
and announced that the comet could be seen from the terrace.... While crossing the 
hall I caught sight of my little three-year-old sister crawling unobtrusively through a 
doorway. I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head as 
though it had been a ball, and continued running carried away with a 'delirious joy 1 
induced by this savage act. But my father, who was behind me, caught me and led me 
down into his office, where I remained as a punishment till dinner time." 

A year earlier than this Dali had "suddenly, as most of my ideas occur" flung another little 
boy off a suspension bridge. Several other incidents of the same kind are recorded, including (this was 
when he was twenty-nine years old) knocking down and trampling on a girl "until they had to tear her, 
bleeding, out of my reach." 


When he is about five he gets hold of a wounded bat which he puts into a tin pail. Next 
morning he finds that the bat is almost dead and is covered with ants which are devouring it. He puts it in 
his mouth, ants and all, and bites it almost in half. 

When he is adolescent a girl falls desperately in love with him. He kisses and caresses her 
so as to excite her as much as possible, but refuses to go further. He resolves to keep this up for five years 
(he calls it his "five year plan”), enjoying her humiliation and the sense of power it gives him. He 
frequently tells her that at the end of five years he will desert her, and when the time comes he does so. 

Till well into adult life he keeps up the practice of masturbation, and likes to do this, 
apparently, in front of a looking-glass. For ordinary purposes he is impotent, it appears, till the age of 
thirty or so. When he first meets his future wife, Gala, he is greatly tempted to push her off a precipice. He 
is aware that there is something that she wants him to do to her, and after their first kiss the confession is 
made: 


"I threw back Gala's head, pulling it by the hair, and, trembling with complete 
hysteria, I commanded, 

'"Now tell me what you want me to do with you! But tell me slowly, 
looking me in the eye, with the crudest, the most ferociously erotic words that can 
make both of us feel the greatest shame!' 

"...Then, Gala, transforming the last glimmer of her expression of pleasure 
into the hard light of her own tyranny, answered, 

'"I want you to kill me!"’ 

He is somewhat disappointed by this demand, since it is merely what he wanted to do 
already. He contemplates throwing her off the bell-tower of the Cathedral of Toledo, but refrains from 
doing so. 


During the Spanish civil war he astutely avoids taking sides and makes a trip to Italy. He 
feels himself more and more drawn towards the aristocracy, frequents smart salons, finds himself wealthy 
patrons, and is photographed with the plump Vicomte de Noailles, whom he describes as his "Maecenas." 
When the European war approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good 
cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near. He fixes on Bordeaux, and 
duly flees to Spain during the Battle of France. He stays in Spain long enough to pick up a few anti-red 
atrocity stories, then makes for America. The story ends in a blaze of respectability. Dali, at thirty-seven, 
has become a devoted husband, is cured of his aberrations, or some of them, and is completely reconciled 
to the Catholic Church. He is also, one gathers, making a good deal of money. 

However, he has by no means ceased to take pride in the pictures of his Surrealist period, 
with titles like The Great Masturbator, Sodomy of a Skull with a Grand Piano, etc. There are 
reproductions of these all the way through the book. Many of Dali's drawings are simply representational 
and have a characteristic to be noted later. But from his Surrealist paintings and photographs the two 
things that stand out are sexual perversity and necrophilia. Sexual objects and symbols—some of them 
well-known, like our old friend the high-heeled slipper, others, like the crutch and the cup of warm milk, 
patented by Dali himself—recur over and over again, and there is a fairly well-marked excretory motif as 


well. In his painting Le Jeu Lugubre, he says, "the drawers bespattered with excrement were painted with 
such minute and realistic complacency that the whole little surrealist group was anguished by the 
question: Is he coprophagic or not?" Dali adds firmly that he is not, and that he regards this aberration as 
"repulsive,” but it seems to be only at that point that his interest in excrement stops. Even when he 
recounts the experience of watching a woman urinate standing up, he has to add the detail that she misses 
her aim and dirties her shoes. It is not given to any one person to have all the vices, and Dali also boasts 
that he is not homosexual, but 214 george orwell otherwise he seems to have as good an outfit of 
perversions as anyone could wish for. 

However, his most notable characteristic is his necrophilia. He himself freely admits to this, 
and claims to have been cured of it. Dead faces, skulls, corpses of animals occur fairly frequendy in his 
pictures, and the ants which devoured the dying bat make coundess reappearances. One photograph shows 
an exhumed corpse, far gone in decomposition. Another shows the dead donkeys putrefying on top of 
grand pianos which formed part of the Surrealist film Lee Chien Andalou. Dali still looks back on these 
donkeys with great enthusiasm: 

"I 'made up' the putrefaction of the donkeys with great pots of sticky glue which I 
poured over them. Also I emptied their eye sockets and made them larger by hacking 
them out with scissors. In the same way I furiously cut their mouths open to make the 
white rows of their teeth show to better advantage, and I added several jaws to each 
mouth so that it would appear that although the donkeys were already rotting they 
were vomiting up a little more of their own death, above those other rows of teeth 
formed by the keys of the black pianos." 

And finally there is the picture—apparendy some kind of faked photograph—of "Mannequin 
rotting in a taxicab." Over the already somewhat bloated face and breast of the apparendy dead girl, huge 
snails are crawling. In the caption below the picture Dali notes that these are Burgundy snails—that is, the 
edible kind. 


Of course, in this long book of 400 quarto pages there is more than I have indicated, but I do 
not think that I have given an unfair account of its moral atmosphere and mental scenery. It is a book that 
stinks. If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would—a thought that 
might please Dali, who before wooing his future wife for the first time rubbed himself all over with an 
ointment made of goat's dung boiled up in fish glue. But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a 
draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his 
drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty 
times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings. And 
these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom 
gets a real discussion. 

The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency: and even 
—since some of Dali's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard—on 
life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his oudook, his character, the 
bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are 
undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it. 

Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes, to 
The Times leader-writers who exult over the "eclipse of the highbrow," in fact to any "sensible" art-hating 


English person, it is easy to imagine what kind of response you would get. They would flady refuse to see 
any merit in Dali whatever. Such people are not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be 
aesthetically right, but their real demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and tell them 
that thought is unneccessary. And they can be especially dangerous at a time like the present, when the 
Ministry of Information and the British Council put power into their hands. For their impulse is not only to 
crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well. Witness the renewed highbrow¬ 
baiting that is now going on in this country and America, with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust, 
and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot. 

But if you talk to the kind of person who can see Dali's merits, the response that you get is 
not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little 
scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don't like rotting corpses, and that people 
who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the aesthetic sense. Since 
"Mannequin rotting in a taxicab" is a good composition (as it undoubtedly is), it cannot be a disgusting, 
degrading picture: whereas Noyes, Elton, etc., would tell you that because it is disgusting it cannot be a 
good composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle position: or rather, there is a 
middle position, but we seldom hear much about it. On the one side, Kulturbolschevismus: on the other 
(though the phrase itself is out of fashion) "Art for Art's sake." Obscenity is a very difficult question to 
discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked, or of seeming not to be 
shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals. 

It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. 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 O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little 
girls on the head is O.K.; even a film like L'Age d'Or is O.K. It is also O.K. that Dali should batten on 
France for years and then scuttle off like a rat as soon as France is in danger. So long as you can paint 
well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you. 

One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime. In an age like our 
own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of 
irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be 
allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If 
Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping 
little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might 
write another King Lear. And after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By 
encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the 
races. One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good 
draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The 
first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up it is a good wall, and the 
question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world 
deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to 
say, "This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman." Unless one 
can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a 
citizen and a human being. 

Not, of course, that Dali's autobiography, or his pictures, ought to be suppressed. Short of the 
dirty postcards that used to be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful policy to suppress 


anything, and Dali's fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay of capitalist civilisation. But what he 
clearly needs is diagnosis. The question is not so much what he is as why he is like that. It ought not to be 
in doubt that he is a diseased intelligence, probably not much altered by his alleged conversion, since 
genuine penitents, or people who have returned to sanity, do not flaunt their past vices in that complacent 
way. He is a symptom of the world's illness. The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who 
ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out 
why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations. 

The answer is probably discoverable in his pictures, and those I myself am not competent to 
examine. But I can point to one clue which perhaps takes one part of the distance. This is the old- 
fashioned, over-ornate, Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to return when he is not being 
Surrealist. Some of Dali's drawings are reminiscent of Diirer, one (p. 113) seems to show the influence of 
Beardsley, another (p. 269) seems to borrow something from Blake. But the most persistent strain is the 
Edwardian one. When I opened this book for the first time and looked at its innumerable marginal 
illustrations, I was haunted by a resemblance which I could not immediately pin down. I fetched up at the 
ornamental candlestick at the beginning of Part I (p. 7). What did this thing remind me of? Finally I 
tracked it down. It reminded me of a large, vulgar, expensively got-up edition of Anatole France (in 
translation) which must have been published about 1913. That had ornamental chapter headings and 
tailpieces after this style. Dali's candlestick displays at one end a curly fish-like creature that looks 
curiously familiar (it seems to be based on the conventional dolphin), and at the other is the burning 
candle. This candle, which recurs in one picture after another, is a very old friend. You will find it, with 
the same picturesque gouts of wax arranged on its sides, in those phoney electric lights done up as 
candlesticks which are popular in sham-Tudor country hotels. This candle, and the design beneath it, 
convey at once an intense feeling of sentimentality. As though to counteract this Dali has spattered a quill¬ 
ful of ink all over the page, but without avail. The same impression keeps popping up on page after page. 
The design at the bottom of page 62, for instance, would nearly go into Peter Pan. The figure on page 
224, in spite of having her cranium elongated into an immense sausage-like shape, is the witch of the 
fairy-tale books. The horse on page 234 and the unicorn on page 218 might be illustrations to James 
Branch Cabell. The rather pansified drawings of youths on pages 97, 100, and elsewhere convey the same 
impression. Picturesqueness keeps breaking in. Take away the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones, and other 
paraphernalia, and every now and again you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany and 
Where the Rainbow Ends. 

Curiously enough, some of the naughty-naughty touches in Dali's autobiography tie up with 
the same period. When I read the passage I quoted at the beginning, about the kicking of the little sister's 
head, I was aware of another phantom resemblance. What was it? Of course! Ruthless Rhymes for 
Heartless Homes by Harry Graham Such rhymes were very popular round about 1912, and one that ran: 

Poor little Willy is crying so sore, 

Asad little boy is he, 

For he's broken his little sister's neck 

And he'll have no jam for tea. 

might almost have been founded on Dali's anecdote. Dali, of course, is aware of his Edwardian leanings, 
and makes capital out of them, more or less in a spirit of pastiche. He professes an especial affection for 
the year 1900, and claims that every ornamental object of 1900 is full of mystery, poetry, eroticism, 
madness, perversity, etc. Pastiche, however, usually implies a real affection for the thing parodied. It 


seems to be, if not the rule, at any rate distinctly common for an intellectual bent to be accompanied by a 
non-rational, even childish urge in the same direction. A sculptor, for instance, is interested in planes and 
curves, but he is also a person who enjoys the physical act of mucking about with clay or stone. An 
engineer is a person who enjoys the feel of tools, the noise of dynamos and the smell of oil. A psychiatrist 
usually has a leaning towards some sexual aberration himself. Darwin became a biologist pardy because 
he was a country gendeman and fond of animals. It may be, therefore, that Dali's seemingly perverse cult 
of Edwardian things (for example his "discovery of the 1900 subway entrances") is merely the symptom 
of a much deeper, less conscious affection. The innumerable, beautifully executed copies of textbook 
illustrations, solemnly labelled "le rossignol," "une montre" and so on, which he scatters all over his 
margins, may be meant pardy as a joke. The little boy in knickerbockers playing with a diabolo on page 
103 is a perfect period piece. But perhaps these things are also there because Dali can't help drawing that 
kind of thing, because it is to that period and that style of drawing that he really belongs. 

If so, his aberrations are pardy explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that he 
is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an 
atrocious egoism. "At seven,” he says in the first paragraph of his book, "I wanted to be Napoleon. And 
my ambition has been growing steadily ever since." This is worded in a deliberately starding way, but no 
doubt it is substantially true. Such feelings are common enough. "I knew I was a genius," somebody once 
said to me, "long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about.” And suppose that you have 
nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow: suppose that your 
real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real metier to be an illustrator 
of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon? 

There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound 
people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break 
his spectacles—or, at any rate, dream about doing such things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of 
dead donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after 
all, it pays! It is much less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the probable suppressions in 
Dali's autobiography, it is clear that he has not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would have done 
in an earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties, when sophistication was 
immensely widespread and every European capital swarmed with aristocrats and rentiers who had given 
up sport and politics and taken to patronising the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people they threw 
money back. A phobia for grasshoppers—which a few decades back would merely have provoked a 
snigger—was now an interesting "complex" which could be profitably exploited. And when that 
particular world collapsed before the German Army, America was waiting. You could even top it all up 
with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a shadow of repentance from the fashionable 
salons of Paris to Abraham's bosom. 

That, perhaps, is the essential outline of Dali's history. But why his aberrations should be the 
particular ones they were, and why it should be so easy to "sell" such horrors as rotting corpses to a 
sophisticated public—those are questions for the psychologist and the sociological critic. Marxist 
criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism. They are "bourgeois decadence" (much 
play is made with the phrases "corpse poisons" and "decaying rentier class"), and that is that. But though 
this probably states a fact, it does not establish a connection. One would still like to know why Dali's 
leaning was towards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexuality), and why the rentiers and the aristocrats 
should buy his pictures instead of hunting and making love like their grandfathers. Mere moral 
disapproval does not get one any further. But neither ought one to pretend, in the name of "detachment," 


that such pictures as "Mannequin rotting in a taxicab" are morally neutral. They are diseased and 
disgusting, and any investigation ought to start out from that fact. 


Propaganda and Demotic Speech 

Persuasion, Summer Quarter, 1944, 2, No. 2 

When I was leaving England for Morocco at the end of 1938, some of the people in my village (less than 
fifty miles from London)- wanted to know whether it would be necessary to cross the sea to get there. In 
1940, during General Wavell's African campaign, I discovered that the woman from whom I bought my 
rations thought Cyrenaica was in Italy. A year or two ago a friend of mine, who had been giving an 
A.B.C.A. lecture to some A.T.s,- tried the experiment of asking them a few general knowledge questions: 
among the answers he got were, (a) that there are only six Members of Parliament, and (b) that Singapore 
is the capital of India. If there were any point in doing so I could give many more instances of this kind of 
thing. I mention these three, simply as a preliminary reminder of the ignorance which any speech or piece 
of writing aimed at a large public has to take into account. 

However, when you examine Government leaflets and White Papers, or leading articles in 
the newspapers, or the speeches and broadcasts of politicians, or the pamphlets and manifestos of any 
political party whatever, the thing that nearly always strikes you is their remoteness from the average man. 
It is not merely that they assume non-existent knowledge: often it is right and necessary to do that. It is 
also that clear, popular, everyday language seems to be instinctively avoided. The bloodless dialect of 
Government spokesmen (characteristic phrases are: in due course, no stone unturned, take the earliest 
opportunity, the answer is in the affirmative) is too well known to be worth dwelling on. Newspaper 
leaders are written either in this same dialect or in an inflated bombastic style with a tendency to fall back 
on archaic words (peril, valour, might, foe, succour, vengeance, dastardly, rampart, bulwark, bastion) 
which no normal person would ever think of using. Left-wing political parties specialise in a bastard 
vocabulary made up of Russian and German phrases translated with the maximum of clumsiness. And 
even posters, leaflets and broadcasts which are intended to give instructions, to tell people what to do in 
certain circumstances, often fail in their effect. Lor example, during the first air raids on London, it was 
found that innumerable people did not know which siren meant the Alert and which the All Clear. This 
was after months or years of gazing at A.R.R posters. These posters had described the Alert as a 
"warbling note": a phrase which made no impression, since air-raid sirens don't warble, and few people 
attach any definite meaning to the word. 

When Sir Richard Acland, in the early months of the war, was drawing up a Manifesto to be 
presented to the Government, he engaged a squad of Mass Observers to find out what meaning, if any, the 
ordinary man attaches to the high-sounding abstract words which are flung to and fro in politics. The most 
fantastic misunderstandings came to light. It was found, for instance, that most people don't know that 
"immorality" means anything besides sexual immorality.- One man thought that "movement" had something 
to do with constipation. And it is a nightly experience in any pub to see broadcast speeches and news 
bulletins make no impression on the average listener, because they are uttered in stilted bookish language 
and, incidentally, in an upper-class accent. At the time of Dunkirk I watched a gang of navvies eating their 
bread and cheese in a pub while the one o'clock news came over. Nothing registered: they just went on 
stolidly eating. Then, just for an instant, reporting the words of some soldier who had been hauled aboard 
a boat, the announcer dropped into spoken English, with the phrase, "Well, I've learned to swim this trip, 
anyway!" Promptly you could see ears being pricked up: it was ordinary language, and so it got across. A 
few weeks later, the day after Italy entered the war, Duff-Cooper announced that Mussolini's rash act 
would "add to the ruins for which Italy has been famous." It was neat enough, and a true prophecy, but 


how much impression does that kind of language make on nine people out of ten? The colloquial version 
of it would have been: "Italy has always been famous for ruins. Well, there are going to be a damn' sight 
more of them now." But that is not how Cabinet Ministers speak, at any rate in public. 

Examples of futile slogans, obviously incapable of stirring strong feelings or being circulated 
by word of mouth, are: "Deserve Victory," "Freedom is in Peril. Defend it with all your Might," 
"Socialism the only Solution," "Expropriate the Expropriators," "Austerity," "Evolution not Revolution," 
"Peace is Indivisible." Examples of slogans phrased in spoken English are: "Hands off Russia," "Make 
Germany Pay," "Stop Hider," "No Stomach Taxes," "Buy a Spitfire," "\btes for Women." Examples about 
mid-way between these two classes are: "Go To It," "Dig for Victory," "It all depends on Me," and some 
of Churchill's phrases, such as "the end of the beginning," "soft underbelly," "blood, toil, tears and sweat," 
and "never was so much owed by so many to so few." (Significantly, in so far as this last saying has been 
repeated byword of mouth, the bookish phrase in the field of human conflict has dropped out of it.) One 
has to take into account the fact that nearly all English people dislike anything that sounds high-flown and 
boastful. Slogans like "They shall not pass," or "Better to die on your feet than live on your knees," which 
have thrilled continental nations, seem slightly embarrassing to an Englishman, especially a working man. 
But the main weakness of propagandists and popularisers is their failure to notice that spoken and written 
English are two different things. 

When recently I protested in print against the Marxist dialect which makes use of phrases like 
"objectively counter-revolutionary left-deviationism" or "drastic liquidation of petty-bourgeois 
elements," I received indignant letters from lifelong Socialists who told me that I was "insulting the 
language of the proletariat." In rather the same spirit, Professor Harold Laski devotes a long passage in 
his last book, Faith, Reason and Civilisation, to an attack on Mr. T. S. Eliot, whom he accuses of 
"writing only for a few." Now Eliot, as it happens, is one of the few writers of our time who have tried 
seriously to write English as it is spoken. Lines like— 

"And nobody came, and nobody went, 

But he took in the milk and he paid the rent"- 

are about as near to spoken English as print can come. On the other hand, here is an entirely typical 
sentence from Laski's own writing: 

"As a whole, our system was a compromise between democracy in the political 
realm—itself a very recent development in our history—and an economic power 
oligarchically organised which was in its turn related to a certain aristocratic vestigia 
still able to influence profoundly the habits of our society." 

This sentence, incidentally, comes from a reprinted lecture; so one must assume that 
Professor Laski actually stood up on a platform and spouted it forth, parenthesis and all. It is clear that 
people capable of speaking or writing in such a way have simply forgotten what everyday language is 
like. But this is nothing to some of the other passages I could dig out of Professor Laski's writings, or 
better still, from Communist literature, or best of all, from Trotskyist pamphlets. Indeed, from reading the 
Left-wing press you get the impression that the louder people yap about the proletariat, the more they 
despise its language. 

I have said already that spoken English and written English are two different things. This 
variation exists in all languages, but is probably greater in English than in most. Spoken English is full of 


slang, it is abbreviated wherever possible, and people of all social classes treat its grammar and syntax in 
a slovenly way. Extremely few English people ever button up a sentence if they are speaking extempore. 
Above all, the vast English vocabulary contains thousands of words which everyone uses when writing, 
but which have no real currency in speech: and it also contains thousands more which are really obsolete 
but which are dragged forth by anyone who wants to sound clever or uplifting. If one keeps this in mind, 
one can think of ways of ensuring that propaganda, spoken or written, shall reach the audience it is aimed 
at. 


So far as writing goes, all one can attempt is a process of simplification. The first step—and 
any social survey organisation could do this for a few hundreds or thousands of pounds—is to find out 
which of the abstract words habitually used by politicians are really understood by large numbers of 
people. If phrases tike "unprincipled violation of declared pledges" or "insidious threat to the basic 
principles of democracy" don't mean anything to the average man, then it is stupid to use them. Secondly, 
in writing one can keep the spoken word constandy in mind. To get genuine spoken English on to paper is 
a complicated matter, as I shall show in a moment. But if you habitually say to yourself, "Could I simplify 
this? Could I make it more like speech?," you are not likely to produce sentences tike the one quoted from 
Professor Laski above: nor are you likely to say "eliminate" when you mean kill, or "static water" when 
you mean fire tank. 

Spoken propaganda, however, offers greater possibilities of improvement. It is here that the 
problem of writing in spoken English really arises. 

Speeches, broadcasts, lectures and even sermons are normally written down beforehand. The 
most effective orators, like Hider or Lloyd George, usually speak extempore, but they are very great 
rarities. As a rule—you can test this by listening at Hyde Park Corner—the so-called extempore speaker 
only keeps going by endlessly tacking one cliche on to another. In any case, he is probably delivering a 
speech which he has delivered dozens of times before. Only a few exceptionally gifted speakers can 
achieve the simplicity and intelligibility which even the most tongue-tied person achieves in ordinary 
conversation. On the air extempore speaking is seldom even attempted. Except for a few programmes, 
tike the Brains Trust, which in any case are carefully rehearsed beforehand, every word that comes from 
the B.B.C. has been written down, and is delivered exactiy as written. This is not only for censorship 
reasons: it is also because many speakers are liable to dry up at the microphone if they have no script to 
follow. The result is the heavy, dull, bookish lingo which causes most radio-users to switch off as soon as 
a talk is announced. It might be thought that one could get nearer to colloquial speech by dictating than by 
writing; but actually, it is the other way about. Dictating, at any rate to a human being, is always slighdy 
embarrassing. One's impulse is to avoid long pauses, and one necessarily does so by clutching at the 
ready-made phrases and the dead and stinking metaphors (ring the changes on, ride rough-shod over, cross 
swords with, take up the cudgels for) with which the English language is tittered. A dictated script is 
usually less life-like than a written one. What is wanted, evidendy, is some way of getting ordinary, 
slipshod, colloquial English on to paper. 

But is this possible? I think it is, and by a quite simple method which so far as I know has 
never been tried. It is this: Set a fairly ready speaker down at the microphone and let him just talk, either 
continuously or intermittendy, on any subject he chooses. Do this with a dozen different speakers, 
recording it every time. Vary it with a few dialogues or conversations between three or four people. Then 
play your recordings back and let a stenographer reduce them to writing: not in the shortened, rationalised 
version that stenographers usually produce, but word for word, with such punctuation as seems 


appropriate. You would then—for the first time, I believe—have on paper some authentic specimens of 
spoken English. Probably they would not be readable as a book or a newspaper article is readable, but 
then spoken English is not meant to be read, it is meant to be listened to. From these specimens you could, 
I believe, formulate the rules of spoken English and find out how it differs from the written language. And 
when writing in spoken English had become practicable, the average speaker or lecturer who has to write 
his material down beforehand could bring it far closer to his natural diction, make it more essentially 
speakable, than he can at present. 

Of course, demotic speech is not solely a matter of being colloquial and avoiding ill- 
understood words. There is also the question of accent. It seems certain that in modern England the 
"educated" upper-class accent is deadly to any speaker who is aiming at a large audience. All effective 
speakers in recent times have had either cockney or provincial accents. The success of Priestley’s 
broadcasts in 1940 was largely due to his Yorkshire accent, which he probably broadened a little for the 
occasion. Churchill is only a seeming exception to this rule. Too old to have acquired the modern 
"educated" accent, he speaks with the Edwardian upper-class twang which to the average man's ear 
sounds like cockney. The "educated" accent, of which the accent of the B.B.C. announcers is a sort of 
parody, has no asset except its intelligibility to English-speaking foreigners. In England the minority to 
whom it is natural don't particularly like it, while in the other three-quarters of the population it arouses 
an immediate class antagonism. It is also noticeable that where there is doubt about the pronunciation of a 
name, successful speakers will stick to the working-class pronunciation even if they know it to be wrong. 
Churchill, for instance, mispronounced "Nazi" and "Gestapo" as long as the common people continued to 
do so. Lloyd George during the last war rendered "Kaiser" as "Kayser," which was the popular version of 
the word. 


In the early days of the war the Government had the greatest difficulty in inducing people to 
bother to collect their ration books. At parliamentary elections, even when there is an up-to-date register, 
it often happens that less than half of the electorate use their votes. Things like these are symptoms of the 
intellectual gulf between the rulers and the ruled. But the same gulf lies always between the intelligentsia 
and the common man. Journalists, as we can see by their election forecasts, never know what the public is 
thinking. Revolutionary propaganda is incredibly ineffective. Churches are empty all over the country. 
The whole idea of trying to find out what the average man thinks, instead of assuming that he thinks what 
he ought to think, is novel and unwelcome. Social surveys are viciously attacked from Left and Right 
alike. Yet some mechanism for testing public opinion is an obvious necessity of modern government, and 
more so in a democratic country than in a totalitarian one. Its complement is the ability to speak to the 
ordinary man in words that he will understand and respond to. 

At present propaganda only seems to succeed when it coincides with what people are 
inclined to do in any case. During the present war, for instance, the Government has done extraordinarily 
little to preserve morale: it has merely drawn on the existing reserves of good-will. And all political 
parties alike have failed to interest the public in vitally important questions—in the problem of India, to 
name only one. But some day we may have a genuinely democratic government, a government which will 
want to tell people what is happening, and what must be done next, and what sacrifices are necessary, and 
why. It will need the mechanisms for doing so, of which the first are the right words, the right tone of 
voice. The fact that when you suggest finding out what the common man is like, and approaching him 
accordingly, you are either accused of being an intellectual snob who wants to "talk down to" the masses, 
or else suspected of plotting to establish an English Gestapo, shows how sluggishly nineteenth-century our 
notion of democracy has remained. 


Raffles and Miss Blandish 

August 28, 1944; Horizon, October 1944; Politics, November 1944 

Nearly half a century after his first appearance, Raffles, "the amateur cracksman," is still one of the best- 
known characters in English fiction. Very few people would need telling that he played cricket for 
England, had bachelor chambers in the Albany and burgled the Mayfair houses which he also entered as a 
guest. Just for that reason he and his exploits make a suitable background against which to examine a more 
modern crime story such as No Orchids for Miss Blandish.- Any such choice is necessarily arbitrary—I 
might equally well have chosen Arsene Lupin, for instance—but at any rate No Orchids and the Raffles 
books- have the common quality of being crime stories which play the limelight on the criminal rather 
than the policeman. For sociological purposes they can be compared. No Orchids is the 1939 version of 
glamourised crime, Raffles the 1900 version. What I am concerned with here is the immense difference in 
moral atmosphere between the two books, and the change in the popular attitude that this probably 
implies. 


At this date, the charm of Raffles is pardy in the period atmosphere, and pardy in the 
technical excellence of the stories. Hornung was a very conscientious and, on his level, a very able 
writer. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his work. 

However, the truly dramatic thing about Raffles, the thing that makes him a sort of by-word 
even to this day (only a few weeks ago, in a burglary case, a magistrate referred to the prisoner as "a 
Raffles in real life"), is the fact that he is a gentleman. Raffles is presented to us—and this is rubbed 
home in coundess scraps of dialogue and casual remarks—not as an honest man who has gone astray, but 
as a public-school man who has gone astray. His remorse, when he feels any, is almost purely social: he 
has disgraced "the old school," he has lost his right to enter "decent society,” he has forfeited his amateur 
status and become a cad. Neither Raffles nor Bunny appears to feel at all strongly that stealing is wrong in 
itself, though Raffles does once justify himself by the casual remark that "the distribution of property is all 
wrong anyway." They think of themselves not as sinners but as renegades, or simply as outcasts. And the 
moral code of most of us is still so close to Raffles's own that we do feel his situation to be an especially 
ironical one. A West End clubman who is really a burglar! That is almost a story in itself, is it not? But 
how if it were a plumber or a greengrocer who was really a burglar? Would there be anything inherently 
dramatic in that? No—although the theme of the "double life," of respectability covering crime, is still 
there. Even Charles Peace 3 in his clergyman's dog-collar seems somewhat less of a hypocrite than Raffles 
in his Zingari 3 blazer. 

Raffles, of course, is good at all games, but it is peculiarly fitting that his chosen game should 
be cricket. This allows not only of endless analogies between his cunning as a slow bowler and his 
cunning as a burglar, but also helps to define the exact nature of his crime. Cricket is not in reality a very 
popular game in England—it is nowhere near so popular as football, for instance—but it gives expression 
to a well-marked trait in the English character, the tendency to value "form" or "style” more highly than 
success. In the eyes of any true cricket-lover it is possible for an innings of ten runs to be "better" (i.e. 
more elegant) than an innings of a hundred runs: cricket is also one of the very few games in which the 
amateur can excel the professional. It is a game full of forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of 
fortune, and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business. When 
Larwood, for instance, practised body-line bowling in Australia he was not actually breaking any rule: he 


was merely doing something that was "not cricket." Since cricket takes up a lot of time and is rather 
expensive to play, it is predominandy an upper-class game, but for the whole nation it is bound up with 
such concepts as "good form," "playing the game," etc., and it has declined in popularity just as the 
tradition of "don't hit a man when he's down” has declined. It is not a twentieth-century game, and nearly 
all modern-minded people dislike it. The Nazis, for instance, were at pains to discourage cricket, which 
had gained a certain footing in Germany before and after the last war. In making Raffles a cricketer as 
well as a burglar Hornung was not merely providing him with a plausible disguise; he was also drawing 
the sharpest moral contrast that he was able to imagine. 

Raffles, no less than Great Expectations or Le Rouge et le Noir, is a story of snobbery, and it 
gains a great deal from the precariousness of Raffles's social position. A cruder writer would have made 
the "gentleman burglar" a member of the peerage, or at least a baronet. Raffles, however, is of upper- 
middle-class origin and is only accepted by the aristocracy because of his personal charm. "We were in 
Society but not of it," he says to Bunny towards the end of the book; and "I was asked about for my 
cricket." Both he and Bunny accept the values of "Society" unquestioningly, and would settle down in it 
for good if only they could get away with a big enough haul. The ruin that constantly threatens them is all 
the blacker because they only doubtfully "belong.” A duke who has served a prison sentence is still a 
duke, whereas a mere man-about town if once disgraced, ceases to be "about town" for evermore. The 
closing chapters of the book, when Raffles has been exposed and is living under an assumed name, have a 
twilight-of-the-gods feeling, a mental atmosphere rather similar to that of Kipling's poem, Gentleman 
Rankers: 


A trooper of the forces— 

I, who kept my own six horses! etc. 

Raffles now belongs irrevocably to the "cohorts of the damned.”- He can still commit successful 
burglaries, but there is no way back into Paradise, which means Piccadilly and the M.C.C.- According to 
the public-school code there is only one means of rehabilitation: death in battle. Raffles dies fighting 
against the Boers (a practiced reader would foresee this from the start), and in the eyes of both Bunny and 
his creator this cancels his crimes. 

Both Raffles and Bunny, of course, are devoid of religious belief, and they have no real 
ethical code, merely certain rules of behaviour which they observe semi-instinctively. But it is just here 
that the deep moral difference between Raffles and No Orchids becomes apparent. Raffles and Bunny, 
after all, are gentlemen, and such standards as they do have are not to be violated. Certain things are "not 
done," and the idea of doing them hardly arises. Raffles will not, for example, abuse hospitality. He will 
commit a burglary in a house where he is staying as a guest, but the victim must be a fellow-guest and not 
the host. He will not commit murder, and he avoids violence wherever possible and prefers to carry out 
his robberies unarmed. He regards friendship as sacred, and is chivalrous though not moral in his 
relations with women. He will take extra risks in the name of "sportsmanship," and sometimes even for 
aesthetic reasons. And above all he is intensely patriotic. He celebrates the Diamond Jubilee ("For sixty 
years, Bunny, we've been ruled over by absolutely the finest sovereign the world has ever seen") by 
despatching to the Queen, through the post, an antique gold cup which he has stolen from the British 
Museum. He steals, from partly political motives, a pearl which the German Emperor is sending to one of 
the enemies of Britain, and when the Boer War begins to go badly his one thought is to find his way into 
the fighting line. At the front he unmasks a spy at the cost of revealing his own identity, and then dies 
gloriously by a Boer bullet. In this combination of crime and patriotism he resembles his near- 


contemporary Arsene Lupin, who also scores off the German Emperor and wipes out his very dirty past 
by enlisting in the Foreign Legion. 

It is important to note that by modern standards Raffles's crimes are very petty ones. Four 
hundred pounds' worth of jewelry seems to him an excellent haul. And though the stories are convincing in 
their physical detail, they contain very little sensationalism—very few corpses, hardly any blood, no sex 
crimes, no sadism, no perversions of any kind. It seems to be the case that the crime story, at any rate on 
its higher levels, has gready increased in bloodthirstiness during the past twenty years. Some of the early 
detective stories do not even contain a murder. The Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance, are not all 
murders, and some of them do not even deal with an indictable crime. So also with the John Thorndyke 
stories, while of the Max Carrados stories only a minority are murders. Since 1918, however, a detective 
story not containing a murder has been a great rarity, and the most disgusting details of dismemberment 
and exhumation are commonly exploited. Some of the Peter Wimsey stories, for instance, seem to point to 
definite necrophilia. The Raffles stories, written from the angle of the criminal, are much less anti-social 
than many modern stories written from the angle of the detective. The main impression that they leave 
behind is of boyishness. They belong to a time when people had standards, though they happened to be 
foolish standards. Their key phrase is "not done.” The line that they draw between good and evil is as 
senseless as a Polynesian taboo, but at least, like the taboo, it has the advantage that everyone accepts it. 

So much for Raffles. Now for a header into the cesspool. No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by 
James Hadley Chase, was published in 1939 but seems to have enjoyed its greatest popularity in 1940, 
during the Battle of Britain and the blitz. In its main outlines its story is this: 

Miss Blandish, the daughter of a millionaire, is kidnapped by some gangsters who are almost 
immediately surprised and killed off by a larger and better organised gang. They hold her to ransom and 
extract half a million dollars from her father. Their original plan had been to kill her as soon as the 
ransom-money was received, but a chance keeps her alive. One of the gang is a young man named Slim 
whose sole pleasure in life consists in driving knives into other people's bellies. In childhood he has 
graduated by cutting up living animals with a pair of rusty scissors. Slim is sexually impotent, but takes a 
kind of fancy to Miss Blandish. Slim's mother, who is the real brains of the gang, sees in this the chance of 
curing Slim's impotence, and decides to keep Miss Blandish in custody till Slim shall have succeeded in 
raping her. After many efforts and much persuasion, including the flogging of Miss Blandish with a length 
of rubber hosepipe, the rape is achieved. Meanwhile Miss Blandish's father has hired a private detective, 
and by means of bribery and torture the detective and the police manage to round up and exterminate the 
whole gang. Slim escapes with Miss Blandish and is killed after a final rape, and the detective prepares 
to restore Miss Blandish to her family. By this time, however, she has developed such a taste for Slim's 
caresses 1 that she feels unable to live without him, and she jumps out of the window of a skyscraper. 

Several other points need noticing before one can grasp the full implications of this book. To 
begin with its central story is an impudent plagiarism of William Faulkner's novel, Sanctuary. Secondly it 
is not, as one might expect, the product of an illiterate hack, but a brilliant piece of writing, with hardly a 
wasted word or a jarring note anywhere. Thirdly, the whole book, recit as well as dialogue, is written in 
the American language: the author, an Englishman who has (I believe) never been in the United States, 
seems to have made a complete mental transference to the American underworld. Fourthly, the book sold, 
according to its publishers, no less than half a million copies. 

I have already outlined the plot, but the subject-matter is much more sordid and brutal than 


this suggests. The book contains eight full-dress murders, an unassessable number of casual killings and 
woundings, an exhumation (with a careful reminder of the stench), the flogging of Miss Blandish, the 
torture of another woman with redhot cigarette ends, a strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of unheard-of 
cruelty, and much else of the same kind. It assumes great sexual sophistication in its readers (there is a 
scene, for instance, in which a gangster, presumably of masochistic tendency, has an orgasm in the moment 
of being knifed), and it takes for granted the most complete corruption and self-seeking as the norm of 
human behaviour. The detective, for instance, is almost as great a rogue as the gangsters, and actuated by 
nearly the same motives. 

Like them, he is in pursuit of "five hundred grand.” It is necessary to the machinery of the story that Mr. 
Blandish should be anxious to get his daughter back, but apart from this such things as affection, 
friendship, good-nature or even ordinary politeness simply do not enter. Nor, to any great extent, does 
normal sexuality. Ultimately only one motive is at work throughout the whole story: the pursuit of power. 

It should be noticed that the book is not in the ordinary sense pornography. Unlike most books 
that deal in sexual sadism, it lays the emphasis on the cruelty and not on the pleasure. Slim, the ravisher of 
Miss Blandish, has "wet, slobbering lips": this is disgusting, and it is meant to be disgusting. But the 
scenes describing cruelty to women are comparatively perfunctory. The real highspots of the book are 
cruelties committed by men upon other men: above all the third-degreeing of the gangster, Eddie Schultz, 
who is lashed into a chair and flogged on the windpipe with truncheons, his arms broken by fresh blows 
as he breaks loose. In another of Mr. Chase's books, He Won't Need It Now, the hero, who is intended to 
be a sympathetic and perhaps even noble character, is described as stamping on somebody's face, and 
then, having crushed the man's mouth in, grinding his heel round and round in it. Even when physical 
incidents of this kind are not occurring, the mental atmosphere of these books is always the same. Their 
whole theme is the struggle for power and the triumph of the strong over the weak. The big gangsters wipe 
out the little ones as mercilessly as a pike gobbling up the little fish in a pond; the police kill off the 
criminals as cruelly as the angler kills the pike. If ultimately one sides with the police against the 
gangsters it is merely because they are better organised and more powerful, because, in fact, the law is a 
bigger racket than crime. Might is right: vae victis. 

As I have mentioned already, No Orchids enjoyed its greatest vogue in 1940, though it was 
successfully running as a play till some time later. It was, in fact, one of the things that helped to console 
people for the boredom of being bombed. Early in the war the New Yorker had a picture of a little man 
approaching a news-stall littered with papers with such headlines as great tank battles in northern 
FRANCE, BIG NAVAL BATTLE IN THE NORTH SEA, HUGE AIR BATTLES OVER THE CHANNEL, etc. etc. The little man 
is saying, "Action Stories, please." That little man stood for all the drugged millions to whom the world 
of the gangsters and the prize-ring is more "real," more "tough” than such things as wars, revolutions, 
earthquakes, famines and pestilences. From the point of view of a reader of Action Stories, a description 
of the London blitz, or of the struggles of the European underground parties, would be "sissy stuff." On the 
other hand some puny gun-battle in Chicago, resulting in perhaps half a dozen deaths, would seem 
genuinely "tough." This habit of mind is now extremely widespread. A soldier sprawls in a muddy trench, 
with the machine-gun bullets crackling a foot or two overhead and whiles away his intolerable boredom 
by reading an American gangster story. And what is it that makes that story so exciting? Precisely the fact 
that people are shooting at each other with machine-guns! Neither the soldier nor anyone else sees 
anything curious in this. It is taken for granted that an imaginary bullet is more thrilling than a real one. 

The obvious explanation is that in real life one is usually a passive victim, whereas in the 


adventure story one can think of oneself as being at the centre of events. But there is more to it than that. 
Here it is necessary to refer again to the curious fact of No Orchids being written—with technical errors, 
perhaps, but certainly with considerable skill—in the American language. 

There exists in America an enormous literature of more or less the same stamp as No 
Orchids. Quite apart from books, there is the huge array of "pulp magazines,” graded so as to cater for 
different kinds of fantasy but nearly all having much the same mental atmosphere. A few of them go in for 
straight pornography but the great majority are quite plainly aimed at sadists and masochists. Sold at 
threepence a copy under the tide of Yank Mags, these things used to enjoy considerable popularity in 
England, but when the supply dried up owing to the war, no satisfactory substitute was forthcoming. 
English imitations of the "pulp magazine" do now exist, but they are poor things compared with the 
original. English crook films, again, never approach the American crook film in brutality. And yet the 
career of Mr. Chase shows how deep the American influence has already gone. Not only is he himself 
living a continuous fantasy-life in the Chicago underworld, but he can count on hundreds of thousands of 
readers who know what is meant by a "clipshop" or the "hotsquat," do not have to do mental arithmetic 
when confronted by "fifty grand,” and understand at sight a sentence like "Johnnie was a rummy and only 
two jumps ahead of the nut-factory." Evidently there are great numbers of English people who are partly 
Americanised in language and, one ought to add, in moral outlook. For there was no popular protest 
against No Orchids. In the end it was withdrawn, but only retrospectively, when a later work. Miss 
Callaghan comes to Grief brought Mr. Chase's books to the attention of the authorities. Judging by casual 
conversations at the time, ordinary readers got a mild thrill out of the obscenities in No Orchids, but saw 
nothing undesirable in the book as a whole. Many people, incidentally, were under the impression that it 
was an American book re-issued in England. 

The thing that the ordinary reader ought to have objected to—almost certainly would have 
objected to, a few decades earlier—was the equivocal attitude towards crime. It is implied throughout No 
Orchids that being a criminal is only reprehensible in the sense that it does not pay. Being a policeman 
pays better, but there is no moral difference, since the police use essentially criminal methods. In a book 
like He Won't Need It Now the distinction between crime and crime-prevention practically disappears. 
This is a new departure for English sensational fiction, in which till recently there has always been a 
sharp distinction between right and wrong and a general agreement that virtue must triumph in the last 
chapter. English books glorifying crime (modern crime, that is—pirates and highwaymen are different) 
are very rare. Even a book like Raffles, as I have pointed out, is governed by powerful taboos, and it is 
clearly understood that Raffles's crimes must be expiated sooner or later. In America, both in life and 
fiction, the tendency to tolerate crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is successful, is very 
much more marked. It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude that has made it possible for crime to flourish 
upon so huge a scale. Books have been written about A1 Capone that are hardly different in tone from the 
books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe and all the rest of the "log cabin to White 
House" brigade. And switching back eighty years, one finds Mark Twain adopting much the same attitude 
towards the disgusting bandit Slade, hero of twenty-eight murders, and towards the Western desperadoes 
generally. They were successful, they "made good," therefore he admired them 

In a book like No Orchids one is not, as in the old-style crime story, simply escaping from 
dull reality into an imaginary world of action. One's escape is essentially into cruelty and sexual 
perversion. No Orchids is aimed at the power-instinct which Raffles or the Sherlock Holmes stories are 
not. At the same time the English attitude towards crime is not so superior to the American as I may have 
seemed to imply. It too is mixed up with power-worship, and has become more noticeably so in the last 


twenty years. A writer who is worth examining is Edgar Wallace, especially in such typical books as The 
Orator and the Mr. J. G. Reeder stories. Wallace was one of the first crime-story writers to break away 
from the old tradition of the private detective and make his central figure a Scodand Yard official. 
Sherlock Holmes is an amateur, solving his problems without the help and even, in the earlier stories, 
against the opposition of the police. Moreover, like Dupin, he is essentially an intellectual, even a 
scientist. He reasons logically from observed fact, and his intellectuality is constandy contrasted with the 
routine methods of the police. Wallace objected strongly to this slur, as he considered it, on Scodand 
Yard, and in several newspaper articles he went out of his way to denounce Holmes by name. His own 
ideal was the detective-inspector who catches criminals not because he is intellectually brilliant but 
because he is part of an all-powerful organisation. Hence the curious fact that in Wallace's most 
characteristic stories the "clue" and the "deduction" play no part. The criminal is always defeated either 
by an incredible coincidence, or because in some unexplained manner the police know all about the crime 
beforehand. The tone of the stories makes it quite clear that Wallace's admiration for the police is pure 
bully-worship. A Scodand Yard detective is the most powerful kind of being that he can imagine, while 
the criminal figures in his mind as an oudaw against whom anything is permissible, like the condemned 
slaves in the Roman arena. His policemen behave much more brutally than British policemen do in real 
life—they hit people without provocation, fire revolvers past their ears to terrify them, and so on—and 
some of the stories exhibit a fearful intellectual sadism. (For instance, Wallace likes to arrange things so 
that the villain is hanged on the same day as the heroine is married.) But it is sadism after the English 
fashion: that is to say it is unconscious, there is not overdy any sex in it, and it keeps within the bounds of 
the law. The British public tolerates a harsh criminal law and gets a kick out of monstrously unfair murder 
trials: but still that is better, on any count, than tolerating or admiring crime. If one must worship a bully, it 
is better that he should be a policeman than a gangster. Wallace is still governed to some extent by the 
concept of "not done." In No Orchids anything is "done” so long as it leads on to power. All the barriers 
are down, all the motives are out in the open. Chase is a worse symptom than Wallace, to the extent that 
all-in wresding is worse than boxing, or Fascism is worse than capitalist democracy. 

In borrowing from William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Chase only took the plot; the mental 
atmosphere of the two books is not similar. Chase really derives from other sources, and this particular 
bit of borrowing is only symbolic. What it symbolises is the vulgarisation of ideas which is constandy 
happening, and which probably happens faster in an age of print. Chase has been described as "Faulkner 
for the masses," but it would be more accurate to describe him as Carlyle for the masses. He is a popular 
writer—there are many such in America, but they are still rarities in England—who has caught up with 
what it is now fashionable to call "realism," meaning the doctrine that might is right. The growth of 
"realism" has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age. Why this should be so is a 
complicated question. The interconnection between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power- 
worship, nationalism and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and 
even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate. To take merely the first example that comes to 
mind, I believe no one has ever pointed out the sadistic and masochistic element in Bernard Shaw's work, 
still less suggested that this probably has some connection with Shaw's admiration for dictators. 

Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing 
wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the coundess English intellectuals 
who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hider or 
Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts who preached "punch," "drive," "personality" and "learn to be 
a Tiger Man” in the nineteen-twenties, nor from the older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey and 
the rest of them, who bowed down before German militarism. All of them are worshipping power and 


successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of 
cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a 
bloodstained crook as well, and "the end justifies the means" often becomes, in effect, "the means justify 
themselves provided they are dirty enough." This idea colours the oudook of all sympathisers with 
totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive delight with which many English intellectuals 
greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact. It was a step only doubtfully useful to the USSR, but it was entirely unmoral, 
and for that reason to be admired: the explanations of it, which were numerous and self-contradictory, 
could come afterwards. 

Until recently the characteristic adventure stories of the English-speaking peoples have been 
stories in which the hero fights against odds. This is true all the way from Robin Hood to Popeye the 
Sailor. Perhaps the basic myth of the Western world is Jack the Giant Killer. But to be brought up to date 
this should be renamed Jack the Dwarf Killer, and there already exists a considerable literature which 
teaches, either overtly or implicitly, that one should side with the big man against the little man. Most of 
what is now written about foreign policy is simply an embroidery on this theme, and for several decades 
such phrases as "play the game," "don't hit a man when he's down" and "it's not cricket" have never failed 
to draw a snigger from anyone of intellectual pretensions. What is comparatively new is to find the 
accepted pattern according to which (a) right is right and wrong is wrong, whoever wins, and (b) 
weakness must be respected, disappearing from popular literature as well. When I first read D. H. 
Lawrence's novels, at the age of about twenty, I was puzzled by the fact that there did not seem to be any 
classification of the characters into "good" and "bad." Lawrence seemed to sympathise with all of them 
about equally, and this was so unusual as to give me the feeling of having lost my bearings. Today no one 
would think of looking for heroes and villains in a serious novel, but in lowbrow fiction one still expects 
to find a sharp distinction between right and wrong and between legality and illegality. The common 
people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals 
have long since escaped. But the popularity of No Orchids and the American books and magazines to 
which it is akin shows how rapidly the doctrine of "realism" is gaining ground. 

Several people, after reading No Orchids, have remarked to me, "It's pure Fascism" This is 
a correct description, although the book has not the smallest connection with politics and very little with 
social or economic problems. It has merely the same relation to Fascism as, say, Trollope's novels have 
to nineteenth-century capitalism It is a daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age. In his imagined world 
of gangsters Chase is presenting, as it were, a distilled version of the modern political scene, in which 
such things as mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages, torture to obtain confessions, secret prisons, 
execution without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification 
of records and statistics, treachery, bribery and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even 
admirable when they are done in a large and bold way. The average man is not directly interested in 
politics, and when he reads he wants the current struggles of the world to be translated into a simple story 
about individuals. He can take an interest in Slim and Fenner as he could not in the GPU and the Gestapo. 
People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old boy 
worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships A1 Capone. An aspiring pupil at a 
business college worships Lord Nuffield. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin. There is a difference 
in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook. Thirty years ago the heroes of popular fiction had 
nothing in common with Mr. Chase's gangsters and detectives, and the idols of the English liberal 
intelligentsia were also comparatively sympathetic figures. Between Holmes and Fenner on the one hand, 
and between Abraham Lincoln and Stalin on the other, there is a similar gulf. 


One ought not to infer too much from the success of Mr. Chase's books. It is possible that it is 
an isolated phenomenon, brought about by the mingled boredom and brutality of war. But if such books 
should definitely acclimatize themselves in England, instead of being merely a half-understood import 
from America, there would be good grounds for dismay. In choosing Raffles as a background for No 
Orchids, I deliberately chose a book which by the standards of its time was morally equivocal. Raffles, 
as I have pointed out, has no real moral code, no religion, certainly no social consciousness. All he has is 
a set of reflexes—the nervous system, as it were, of a gentleman. Give him a sharp tap on this reflex or 
that (they are called "sport," "pal," "woman," "king and country" and so forth), and you get a predictable 
reaction. In Mr. Chase's book there are no gentlemen, and no taboos. Emancipation is complete, Freud and 
Macchiavelli have reached the outer suburbs. Comparing the schoolboy atmosphere of the one book with 
the cruelty and corruption of the other, one is driven to feel that snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check 
upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated. 


Good Bad Books 

Tribune, November 2, 1945 


Not long ago a publisher commissioned me to write an introduction for a reprint of a novel by Leonard 
Merrick. This publishing house, it appears, is going to re-issue a long series of minor and pardy-forgotten 
novels of the twentieth century. It is a valuable service in these bookless days, and I rather envy the 
person whose job it will be to scout round the threepenny boxes, hunting down copies of his boyhood 
favourites. 


A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with 
great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the "good bad 
book": that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretentions but which remains readable when more 
serious productions have perished. Obviously outstanding books in this line are Raffles and the Sherlock 
Holmes stories, which have kept their place when innumerable "problem novels," "human documents" and 
"terrible indictments” of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion. (Who has worn better, Conan 
Doyle or Meredith?) Almost in the same class as these I put R. Austin Freeman's earlier stories— The 
Singing Bone, The Eye of Osiris and others—Ernest Bramah's Max Carrados, and, dropping the standard 
a bit, Guy Boothby's Tibetan thriller, Dr. Nikola, a sort of schoolboy version of Hue's Travels in Tartary, 
which would probably make a real visit to Central Asia seem a dismal anti-climax. 

But apart from thrillers, there were the minor humorous writers of the period. For example, 
Pett Ridge—but I admit his full-length books no longer seem readable—E. Nesbit (The Treasure 
Seekers), George Birmingham, who was good so long as he kept off politics, the pornographic Binstead 
("Pitcher" of the Pink ’Un), and, if American books can be included, Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories. A 
cut above most of these was Barry Pain. Some of Pain's humorous writings are, I suppose, still in print, 
but to anyone who comes across it I recommend what must now be a very rare book— The Octave of 
Claudius, a brilliant exercise in the macabre. Somewhat later in time there was Peter Blundell, who 
wrote in the W. W. Jacobs vein about Far Eastern seaport towns, and who seems to be rather 
unaccountably forgotten, in spite of having been praised in print by H. G. Wells. 

However, all the books I have been speaking of are frankly "escape" literature. They form 
pleasant patches in one's memory, quiet corners where the mind can browse at odd moments, but they 
hardly pretend to have anything to do with real life. There is another kind of good bad book which is more 
seriously intended, and which tells us, I think, something about the nature of the novel and the reasons for 
its present decadence. During the last fifty years there has been a whole series of writers—some of them 
are still writing—whom it is quite impossible to call "good" by any strictly literary standard, but who are 
natural novelists and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good taste. In 
this class I put Leonard Merrick himself, W. L. George, J. D. Beresford, Ernest Raymond, May Sinclair, 
and—at a lower level than the others but still essentially similar—A. S. M. Hutchinson. 

Most of these have been prolific writers, and their output has naturally varied in quality. I am 
thinking in each case of one or two outstanding books: for example, Merrick's Cynthia, J. D. Beresford's 
A Candidate for Truth, W L. George's Caliban, May Sinclair's The Combined Maze, and Ernest 
Raymond's We, the Accused. In each of these books the author has been able to identify himself with his 
imagined characters, to feel with them and invite sympathy on their behalf, with a kind of abandonment 


that cleverer people would find it difficult to achieve. They bring out the fact that intellectual refinement 
can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as it would be to a music-hall comedian. 

Take, for example, Ernest Raymond's We, the Accused —a peculiarly sordid and convincing 
murder story, probably based on the Crippen case. I think it gains a great deal from the fact that the author 
only pardy grasps the pathetic vulgarity of the people he is writing about, and therefore does not despise 
them. Perhaps it even—like Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy —gains something from the clumsy, 
long-winded manner in which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at selection, 
and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is slowly built up. So also with A Candidate for 
Truth. Here there is not the same clumsiness, but there is the same ability to take seriously the problems 
of commonplace people. So also with Cynthia and at any rate the earlier part of Caliban. The greater part 
of what W. L. George wrote was shoddy rubbish, but in this particular book, based on the career of 
Northcliffe, he achieved some memorable and truthful pictures of lower-middle class London life. Parts 
of this book are probably autobiographical, and one of the advantages of good bad writers is their lack of 
shame in writing autobiography. Exhibition and self-pity are the bane of the novelist, and yet if he is too 
frightened of them his creative gift may suffer. 

The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even 
moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the 
same thing as cerebration. I imagine that by any test that could be devised, Carlyle would be found to be a 
more intelligent man than Trollope. Yet Trollope has remained readable and Carlyle has not: with all his 
cleverness he had not even the wit to write in plain straightforward English. In novelists, almost as much 
as in poets, the connection between intelligence and creative power is hard to establish. A good novelist 
may be a prodigy of self-discipline like Flaubert, or he may be an intellectual sprawl like Dickens. 
Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into Wyndham Lewis's so-called 
novels, such as Tarr or Snooty Baronet. Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books 
right through. Some indefinable quality, a sort of literary vitamin, which exists even in a book like If 
Winter Comes, is absent from them. 

Perhaps the supreme example of the "good bad" book is Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is an 
unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and 
essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other. But Uncle Tom's Cabin, after all, is 
trying to be serious and to deal with the real world. How about the frankly escapist writers, the purveyors 
of thrills and "light" humour? How about Sherlock Holmes, Vice Versa, Dracula, Helen's Babies or King 
Solomon's Mines ? All of these are definitely absurd books, books which one is more inclined to laugh at 
than with, and which were hardly taken seriously even by their authors; yet they have survived, and will 
probably continue to do so. All one can say is that, while civilisation remains such that one needs 
distraction from time to time, "light" literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as 
sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or intellectual power. 
There are music-hall songs which are better poems than three-quarters of the stuff that gets into the 
anthologies: 


Come where the booze is cheaper, 
Come where the pots hold more, 

Come where the boss is a bit of a sport, 
Come to the pub next door! 


Or again: 


Two lovely black eyes— 

Oh, what a surprise! 

Only for calling another man wrong, 

Two lovely black eyes! 

I would far rather have written either of those than, say, The Blessed Damozel or Love in a Valley. And 
by the same token I would back Uncle Tom's Cabin to oudive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or 
George Moore, though I know of no stricdy literary test which would show where the superiority lies. 


The Prevention of Literature 

Polemic, January 1946 

About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion being the tercentenary of Milton's 
Areopagitica —a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defence of freedom of the Press. Milton's famous 
phrase about the sin of ''killing" a book was printed on the leaflets advertising the meeting which had been 
circulated beforehand. 

There were four speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech which did deal 
with the freedom of the Press, but only in relation to India; another said, hesitantly, and in very general 
terms, that liberty was a good thing; a third delivered an attack on the laws relating to obscenity in 
literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a defence of the Russian purges. Of the speeches from 
the body of the hall, some reverted to the question of obscenity and the laws that deal with it, others were 
simply eulogies of Soviet Russia. Moral liberty—the liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print— 
seemed to be generally approved, but political liberty was not mentioned. Out of this concourse of 
several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was 
not a single one who could point out that freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the 
freedom to criticise and oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly 
being commemorated. Nor was there any mention of the various books that have been "killed" in this 
country and the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favour of 
censorship. 1 


There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is 
under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of 
totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer 
or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather 
than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the 
Press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the 
public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by 
hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council, which help the 
writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere 
of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age 
conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on 
themes handed to [him] from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in 
struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side: that is, there is no large body of opinion 
which will assure him that he is in the right. In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the 
idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic—political, moral, 
religious, or aesthetic—was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up 
in the words of the Revivalist hymn: 

Dare to be a Daniel, 

Dare to stand alone; 

Dare to have a purpose firm, 

Dare to make it known. 


To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a "Don't" at the beginning of each line. For it is the 
peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and 
characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. "Daring to stand alone" is 
ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. The independence of the writer and the artist is 
eaten away by vague economic forces, and at the same time it is undermined by those who should be its 
defenders. It is with the second process that I am concerned here. 

Freedom of speech and of the Press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth 
bothering about. Anyone who has experience in lecturing and debating knows them backwards. Here I am 
not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more 
freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous 
proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. 
Although other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom of 
speech and of the Press is at bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What 
is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with 
the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers. In saying this I may 
seem to be saying that straightforward "reportage" is the only branch of literature that matters: but I will 
try to show later that at every literary level, and probably in every one of the arts, the same issue arises in 
more or less subtilised forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies in which this 
controversy is usually wrapped up. 

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline 
versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background. Although 
the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere 
egoist. He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an 
exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt 
to cling to unjustified privileges. The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent 
cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacidy claims that "the truth" has already been 
revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secredy aware of "the truth" and merely resists 
it out of selfish motives. In Communist literature the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked by 
oratory about "petty-bourgeois individualism," "the illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism," etc., and 
backed up by words of abuse such as "romantic" and "sentimental," which, since they do not have any 
agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. In this way the controversy is manoeuvred away from its real 
issue. One can accept, and most enlightened people would accept, the Communist thesis that pure freedom 
will only exist in a classless society, and that one is most nearly free when one is working to bring about 
such a society. But slipped in with this is the quite unfounded claim that the Communist party is itself 
aiming at the establishment of the classless society, and that in the U.S.S.R. this aim is actually on the way 
to being realised. 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. The familiar tirades against "escapism," 
"individualism," "romanticism" and so forth, are merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the 
perversion of history seem respectable. 

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 in England they were not of great 
importance—against Fascists. To-day 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. Because of it, 
known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of 
our times can ever be written. Let me give just one instance out of the hundreds that could be cited. When 
Germany collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of Soviet Russians—mostly, no doubt, from 
non-political motives—had changed sides and were fighting for the Germans. Also, a small but not 
negligible proportion of the Russian prisoners and Displaced Persons refused to go back to the U.S.S.R., 
and some of them, at least, were repatriated against their will. These facts, known to many journalists on 
the spot, went almost unmentioned in the British Press, while at the same time Russophile publicists in 
England continued to justify the purges and deportations of 1936—38 by claiming that the U.S.S.R. "had 
no quislings." The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the 
Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but 
any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.—sympathetic, that is, in the way the 
Russians themselves would want him to be—does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on 
important issues. I have before me what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 
and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high 
praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. What could be the attitude of even the most 
intellectually scrupulous Communist towards such a pamphlet? At best, he would take the obscurantist 
attitude that it is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it should be 
decided to issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and inserting references to Stalin, 
no Communist who remained faithful to his party could protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have 
been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen, but that even when they 
are known, they provoke no reaction from the Left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell 
the truth would be "inopportune" or would "play into the hands of" somebody or other is felt to be 
unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect that the lies which they condone will get out 
of the newspapers and into the history books. 

The organised lying practised by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a 
temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, 
something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be 
necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an underground legend to the effect that although the 
Russian government is obliged now to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is 
secretly recording the facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain 
that this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal historian who 
believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of 
course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A 
totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought 
of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past 
events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph 
actually happened. Then, again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of 
doctrine and a revaluation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but 
clearly it is likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at 
any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long 
run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in 
this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a 
little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that 
modern physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the 


evidence of one's senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in 
perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common 
sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, 
the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to 
falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying a historical fact. It is at the point 
where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The 
exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This difference partly 
accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind 
their respective governments. 

To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay: that 
in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the Press lords, the 
film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among 
the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all. It may seem that all this time I have been 
talking about the effects of censorship, not on literature as a whole, but merely on one department of 
political journalism. Granted that Soviet Russia constitutes a sort of forbidden area in the British Press, 
granted that issues like Poland, the Spanish civil war, the Russo-German pact, and so forth, are debarred 
from serious discussion, and that if you possess information that conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy 
you are expected either to distort it or to keep quiet about it—granted all this, why should literature in the 
wider sense be affected? Is every writer a politician, and is every book necessarily a work of 
straightforward "reportage"? Even under the tightest dictatorship, cannot the individual writer remain free 
inside his own mind and distil or disguise his unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will be 
too stupid to recognise them? And if the writer himself is in agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy, why 
should it have a cramping effect on him? Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to flourish in 
societies in which there are no major conflicts of opinion and no sharp distinctions between the artist and 
his audience? Does one have to assume that every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is an 
exceptional person? 

Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims of totalitarianism, one 
meets with these arguments in one form or another. They are based on a complete misunderstanding of 
what literature is, and how—one should perhaps rather say why —it comes into being. They assume that a 
writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal hack who can switch from one line of propaganda to 
another as easily as an organ grinder changes tunes. But after all, how is it that books ever come to be 
written? Above a quite low level, literature is an attempt to influence the views of one's contemporaries 
by recording experience. And so far as freedom of expression is concerned, there is not much difference 
between a mere journalist and the most "unpolitical" imaginative writer. The journalist is unfree, and is 
conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news: 
the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of 
view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot 
misrepresent the scenery of his own mind: he 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 the imaginative writer 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 tabu 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 possibly 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. 

Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed 
out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, 
their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing 
religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it 
is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free 
speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also 
unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand they are always liable to 
be altered at a moment's notice. 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 June 22, 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. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of 
prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result 
of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks 
fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an "age of faith," when the 
prevailing orthodoxy has been long established and is not taken too seriously. In that case it would be 
possible, or might be possible, for large areas of one's mind to remain unaffected by what one officially 
believed. Even so, it is worth noticing that prose literature almost disappeared during the only age of faith 
that Europe has ever enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative 
prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing: and the intellectual leaders of society 
expressed their most serious thoughts in a dead language which barely altered during a thousand years. 

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of 
schizophrenia. 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. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The 
mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a poison that makes one subject after another impossible for 
literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy—or even two orthodoxies, as often happens 
—good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals 
the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. 
There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, 
the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading. 

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its 


effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than 
for a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with, bureaucrats and other 
"practical" men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much interested in what he is saying. Secondly, 
what the poet is saying—that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose—is relatively unimportant 
even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of 
the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of a picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and 
associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brush-marks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain 
of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep 
away from dangerous subjects and avoid uttering heresies: and even when he does utter them, they may 
escape notice. But above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily an individual product. 
Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on the other hand, very artificial verse forms, can be 
composed co-operatively by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and Scottish ballads were 
originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is disputed; but at any rate they are non¬ 
individual in the sense that they constantly change in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two 
versions of a ballad are ever quite the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse communally. 
Someone begins to improvise, probably accompanying himself on a musical instrument, somebody else 
chips in with a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the process continues until there 
exists a whole song or ballad which has no identifiable author. 

In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible. Serious prose, in any case, 
has to be composed in solitude, whereas the excitement of being part of a group is actually an aid to 
certain kinds of versification. Verse—and perhaps good verse of its kind, though it would not be the 
highest kind—might survive under even the most inquisitorial regime. Even in a society where liberty and 
individuality had been extinguished, there would still be need either for patriotic songs and heroic ballads 
celebrating victories, or for elaborate exercises in flattery: and these are the kinds of poetry that can be 
written to order, or composed communally, without necessarily lacking artistic value. Prose is a different 
matter, since the prose writer cannot narrow the range of his thoughts without killing his inventiveness. 
But the history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, 
suggests that loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature almost disappeared 
during the Hitler regime, and the case was not much better in Italy. Russian literature, so far as one can 
judge by translations, has deteriorated markedly since the early days of the Revolution, though some of the 
verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any Russian novels that it is possible to take seriously 
have been translated for about fifteen years. In western Europe and America large sections of the literary 
intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist party or been warmly sympathetic to it, but this 
whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading. Orthodox Catholicism, 
again, seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms, especially the novel. During a period of 
three hundred years, how many people have been at once good novelists and good Catholics? 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. Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, 
such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice 
between silence and death. 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. In the future it is 
possible that a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may arise, 
but no such thing is at present imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal culture that we have 
lived in since the Renaissance actually comes to an end, the literary art will perish with it. 


Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of 
reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until 
television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether 
the great mass of people in the industrialised countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are 
unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other 
recreations. 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. 

It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of 
mechanising process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and 
in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a 
factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to 
subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the 
subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of 
raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and 
pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more machine-like is the production of short 
stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with 
advertisements of Literary Schools, all of them offering you readymade plots at a few shillings a time. 
Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you 
with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct your plots for yourself. Others 
offer packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in 
order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a 
totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination—even 
consciousness, so far as possible—would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be 
planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished 
they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes 
without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would 
endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be 
suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten. 

Meanwhile totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still, 
broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic 
pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You 
can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. 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. The public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in 
favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too 
sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency 
comes from the intellectuals themselves. 

It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed to that particular 
myth, would have succumbed to another of much the same kind. But at any rate the Russian myth is there, 
and the corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at 
oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their short¬ 
sightedness. Many scientists, for example, are uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think 
that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment 


unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has acute need of scientific workers 
and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as 
psychology, scientists are privileged persons. Writers, on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It is 
true that literary prostitutes like Ilya Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid huge sums of money, but the 
only thing which is of any value to the writer as such—his freedom of expression—is taken away from 
him. Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities enjoyed by 
scientists in Russia are capable of understanding this. But their reflection appears to be: "Writers are 
persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer." They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, 
and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought. 

For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in Nazi 
Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated, and the German scientific community, 
as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most autocratic ruler is forced 
to take account of physical reality, partly because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly 
because of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical reality cannot be altogether ignored, so long 
as two and two have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the 
scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening will come later, 
when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of 
science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with his literary colleagues and not regard it as a 
matter of indifference when writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically 
falsified. 


But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting, and architecture, 
it is—as I have tried to show—certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is 
it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian 
outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a 
writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against "individualism" and "the ivory tower," no pious 
platitudes to the effect that "true individuality is only attained through identification with the community," 
can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or 
another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes ossified. 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. 


Politics and the English Language 

1945; Horizon, April 1946 

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but 
it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is 
decadent, and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse. It 
follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles 
to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language 
is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes. 

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic 
causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become 
a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on 
indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more 
completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It 
becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes 
it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, 
especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if 
one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and 
to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad 
English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this 
presendy, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. 
Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written. 

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad—I could have 
quoted far worse if I had chosen—but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we 
now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so 
that I can refer back to them when necessary: 


"(1) I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not 
unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, 
more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate." 

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression). 

"(2) Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which 
prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss 
for bewilder." 


Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa). 

"(3) On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has 
neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional 
approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number 


and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other 
side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the 
definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of 
mirrors for either personality or fraternity?" 


Essay on psychology in Politics (New York). 

"(4) All the 'best people' from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, 
united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary 
movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned 
wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty- 
bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervour on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis." 

Communist pamphlet. 

"(5) If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious 
reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here 
will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for 
instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's 
Dream —as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in 
the eyes, or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as 
'standard English.' When the \bice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less 
ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish 
arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!" 


Letter in Tribune. 

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two 
qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery: the other is lack of precision. The 
writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost 
indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer 
incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of 
political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one 
seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen 
for the sake of their meaning, and more 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-construction is habitually dodged: 


Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, 
while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect 
reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between 
these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and 
are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: 
Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to 
shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, [rift 
within the lute],- on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used 


without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "riff," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are 
frequendy mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now 
current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of 
the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and 
the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always 
the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was 
saying would be aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase. 


Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs 
and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of 
symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make 
contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part 
(role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote 
is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a 
verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as 
prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to 
the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by 
examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal 
statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un-formation. Simple conjunctions 
and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint 
of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from 
anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a 
development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a 
satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth. 


Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, 
categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, 
liquidate, are used to dress up simple state mentis] and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased 
judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, 
inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while 
writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: 
realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign 
words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status 
quo, gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the 
useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases 
now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are 
nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and 
unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, 
subaqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers. 1 
The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, 
lacquey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words and phrases translated from 
Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root 
with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the —ize formation. It is often easier to make up words 
of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up 


the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and 
vagueness. 


Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary 
criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. 
Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art 
criticism, are stricdy meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, 
but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of 
Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's 
work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like 
black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that 
language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word 
Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words 
democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings 
which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no 
agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that 
when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequendy the defenders of every kind of regime 
claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to 
any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person 
who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite 
different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is the freest in the world, 
The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other 
words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonesdy, are: class, totalitarian, 
science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality. 


Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another 
example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am 
going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known 
verse from Ecclesiastes: 

"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the batde to the 
strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet 
favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." 

Here it is in modern English: 

"Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that 
success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate 
with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must 
invariably be taken into account." 

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3), above, for instance, contains several 
patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning 
and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete 
illustrations—race, batde, bread—dissolve into the vague phrase "success or failure in competitive 
activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing—no one capable of 


using phrases like "objective consideration of contemporary phenomena"—would ever tabulate his 
thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from 
concreteness. Now analyse these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 
60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 
18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, 
and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single 
fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning 
contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern 
English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity 
will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the 
uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the 
one from Ecclesiastes. 

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for 
the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in 
gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making 
the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier 
—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that 
than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for words; you 
also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged 
as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a 
stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized 
style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of 
us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale 
metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, 
not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a 
metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash—as in The Fascist octopus has sung its 
swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot —it can be taken as certain that the writer is not 
seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at 
the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. 
One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien 
for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general 
vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write 
prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious 
up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, [it] is 
simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article 
in which it occurs. In (4), 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. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted 
company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning—they dislike one 
thing and want to express solidarity with another—but they are not interested in the detail of what they are 
saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 
What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this 
image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more 
shordy? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You 
can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. 
They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at 
need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It 


is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear. 

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will 
generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party 
line.” Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to 
be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of under-secretaries 
do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, 
vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically 
repeating the familiar phrases— bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the 
world, stand shoulder to shoulder —one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human 
being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light 
catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. 
And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance 
towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain 
is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one 
that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as 
one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not 
indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity. 

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. Defenceless villages are 
bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts 
set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their 
farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of 
population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back 
of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable 
elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of 
them. 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 regime 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." 

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts 
like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is 
insincerity. 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, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no 
such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, 
evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I 
should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, 


Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of 
dictatorship. 


But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread 
by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that 
I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, 
leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to 
bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through 
this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am 
protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. 
The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first 
sentence that I see: "(The Allies) have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of 
Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany 
itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he 
"feels impelled" to write—feels, presumably, that he has something new to say—and yet his words, like 
cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This 
invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) 
can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a 
portion of one's brain. 

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this 
would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing, social conditions, 
and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far 
as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words 
and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious 
action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, 
which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which 
could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be 
possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, 1 to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the 
average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make 
pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies 
more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply. 

To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and 
turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the 
contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its 
usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as 
one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a 
"good prose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make 
written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin 
one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is 
above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst 
thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think 
wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about 
till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more 
inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing 
dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your 


meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as 
one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose—not simply accept —the phrases that 
will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one's words are likely to 
make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated 
phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about 
the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the 
following rules will cover most cases: 

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to 
seeing in print. 

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. 

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. 

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of 
an everyday English equivalent. 

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. These rules 
sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in 
anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep 
all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I 
quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article. 

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an 
instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase- and others have 
come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for 
advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle 
against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the 
present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about 
some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst 
follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark 
its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language—and with variations this is true of all 
political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder 
respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, 
but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly 
enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase—some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, 
acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse—into the dustbin where it belongs. 


Confessions of a Book Reviewer 

Tribune, May 3, 1946 

In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a 
moth-eaten dressing gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of 
dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers away because the wastepaper basket is already 
overflowing, and besides, somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills it is possible that 
there is a cheque for two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay into the bank. There are also 
letters with addresses which ought to be entered in his address book. He has lost his address book, and 
the thought of looking for it, or indeed of looking for anything, afflicts him with acute suicidal impulses. 

He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or 
would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him he will be 
suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover. 
At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work 
two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the 
almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in 
the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up and down the stairs. The most recent 
interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax 
demand printed in red. 

Needless to say this person is a writer. He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film 
scripts or radio features, for all literary people are very much alike, but let us say that he is a book 
reviewer. Half hidden among the pile of papers is a bulky parcel containing five volumes which his editor 
has sent with a note suggesting that they "ought to go well together." They arrived four days ago, but for 48 
hours the reviewer was prevented by moral paralysis from opening the parcel. Yesterday in a resolute 
moment he ripped the string off it and found the five volumes to be Palestine at the Cross Roads, 
Scientific Dairy Farming, A Short History of European Democracy (this one is 680 pages and weighs 
four pounds), Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa, and a novel, It's Nicer Lying Down, probably 
included by mistake. His review—800 words, say—has got to be "in" by mid-day tomorrow. 

Three of these books deal with subjects of which he is so ignorant that he will have to read at 
least 50 pages if he is to avoid making some howler which will betray him not merely to the author (who 
of course knows all about the habits of book reviewers), but even to the general reader. By four in the 
afternoon he will have taken the books out of their wrapping paper but will still be suffering from a 
nervous inability to open them. The prospect of having to read them, and even the smell of the paper, 
affects him like the prospect of eating cold ground-rice pudding flavoured with castor oil. And yet 
curiously enough his copy will get to the office in time. Somehow it always does get there in time. At 
about nine p.m. his mind will grow relatively clear, and until the small hours he will sit in a room which 
grows colder and colder, while the cigarette smoke grows thicker and thicker, skipping expertly through 
one book after another and laying each down with the final comment, "God, what tripe!" In the morning, 
blear-eyed, surly and unshaven, he will gaze for an hour or two at a blank sheet of paper until the 
menacing finger of the clock frightens him into action. Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old 
phrases—"a book that no one should miss," "something memorable on every page," "of special value are 
the chapters dealing with, etc., etc."—will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and 


the review will end up at exacdy the right length and with just about three minutes to go. Meanwhile 
another wad of ill-assorted, unappetising books will have arrived by post. So it goes on. And yet with 
what high hopes this down-trodden, nerve-racked creature started his career, only a few years ago. 

Do I seem to exaggerate? I ask any regular reviewer—anyone who reviews, say, a minimum 
of 100 books a year—whether he can deny in honesty that his habits and character are such as I have 
described. Every writer, in any case, is rather that kind of person, but the prolonged, indiscriminate 
reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves 
praising trash—though it does involve that, as I will show in a moment—but constantly inventing 
reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever. The reviewer, jaded 
though he may be, is professionally interested in books, and out of the thousands that appear annually, 
there are probably fifty or a hundred that he would enjoy writing about. If he is a top-notcher in his 
profession he may get hold of ten or twenty of them: more probably he gets hold of two or three. The rest 
of his work, however conscientious he may be in praising or damning, is in essence humbug. He is 
pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time. 

The great majority of reviewers give an inadequate or misleading account of the book that is 
dealt with. Since the war publishers have been less able than before to twist the tails of literary editors 
and evoke a paean of praise for every book that they produce, but on the other hand the standard of 
reviewing has gone down owing to lack of space and other inconveniences. Seeing the results, people 
sometimes suggest that the solution lies in getting book-reviewing out of the hands of hacks. Books on 
specialized subjects ought to be dealt with by experts, and on the other hand a good deal of reviewing, 
especially of novels, might well be done by amateurs. Nearly every book is capable of arousing 
passionate feeling, if it is only a passionate dislike, in some or other reader, whose ideas about it would 
surely be worth more than those of a bored professional. But, unfortunately, as every editor knows, that 
kind of thing is very difficult to organize. In practice the editor always finds himself reverting to his team 
of hacks—his "regulars," as he calls them. 

None of this is remediable so long as it is taken for granted that every book deserves to be 
reviewed. It is almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly over-praising the great 
majority of them. Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover 
how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful 
criticism would be, "This book is worthless," while the truth about the reviewer's own reaction would 
probably be: "This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were 
paid to.” But the public will not pay to read that kind of thing. Why should they? They want some kind of 
guide to the books they are asked to read, and they want some kind of evaluation. But as soon as values 
are mentioned, standards collapse. For if one says—and nearly every reviewer says this kind of thing at 
least once a week—that "King Lear" is a good play and The Four Just Men is a good thriller, what 
meaning is there in the word "good"? 

The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority 
of books and to give very long reviews—1,000 words is a bare minimum—to the few that seem to matter. 
Short notes of a line or two on forthcoming books can be useful, but the usual middle-length review of 
about 600 words is bound to be worthless even if the reviewer genuinely wants to write it. Normally he 
doesn't want to write it, and the week-in, week-out production of snippets soon reduces him to the crushed 
figure in a dressing gown whom I described at the beginning of this article. However, everyone in this 
world has someone else whom he can look down on, and I must say, from experience of both trades, that 


the book reviewer is better off than the film critic, who cannot even do his work at home, but has to attend 
trade shows at eleven in the morning and, with one or two notable exceptions, is expected to sell his 
honour for a glass of inferior sherry. 


Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels 

Polemic, 5, September—October 1946 

In Gulliver's Travels humanity is attacked, or criticised, from at least three different angles, and the 
implied character of Gulliver himself necessarily changes somewhat in the process. In Part I he is the 
typical eighteenth-century voyager, bold, practical and unromantic, his homely outlook skilfully impressed 
on the reader by the biographical details at the beginning, by his age (he is a man of forty, with two 
children, when his adventures start), and by the inventory of the things in his pockets, especially his 
spectacles, which make several appearances. In Part II he has in general the same character, but at 
moments when the story demands it he has a tendency to develop into an imbecile who is capable of 
boasting of "our noble Country, the Mistress of Arts and Arms, the Scourge of France," etc., etc., and at 
the same time of betraying every available scandalous fact about the country which he professes to love. 

In Part III he is much as he was in Part I, though, as he is consorting chiefly with courtiers and men of 
learning, one has the impression that he has risen in the social scale. In Part IV he conceives a horror of 
the human race which is not apparent, or only intermittently apparent, in the earlier books, and changes 
into a sort of unreligious anchorite whose one desire is to live in some desolate spot where he can devote 
himself to meditating on the goodness of the Houyhnhnms. However, these inconsistencies are forced upon 
Swift by the fact that Gulliver is there chiefly to provide a contrast. It is necessary, for instance, that he 
should appear sensible in Part I and at least intermittently silly in Part n, because in both books the 
essential manoeuvre is the same, i.e. to make the human being look ridiculous by imagining him as a 
creature six inches high. Whenever Gulliver is not acting as a stooge there is a sort of continuity in his 
character, which comes out especially in his resourcefulness and his observation of physical detail. He is 
much the same kind of person, with the same prose style, when he bears off the warships of Blefuscu, 
when he rips open the belly of the monstrous rat, and when he sails away upon the ocean in his frail 
coracle made from the skins of Yahoos. Moreover, it is difficult not to feel that in his shrewder moments 
Gulliver is simply Swift himself, and there is at least one incident in which Swift seems to be venting his 
private grievance against contemporary Society. It will be remembered that when the Emperor of 
Lilliput's palace catches fire, Gulliver puts it out by urinating on it. Instead of being congratulated on his 
presence of mind, he finds that he has committed a capital offence by making water in the precincts of the 
palace, and 


I was privately assured, that the Empress, conceiving the greatest Abhorrence of what 
I had done, removed to the most distant Side of the Court, firmly resolved that those 
buildings should never be repaired for her Use; and, in the Presence of her chief 
Confidents, could not forbear vowing Revenge. 

According to Professor G. M. Trevelyan {England under Queen Anne), part of the reason for Swift's 
failure to get preferment was that the Queen was scandalised by the Tale of a Tub —a pamphlet in which 
Swift probably felt that he had done a great service to the English Crown, since it scarifies the Dissenters 
and still more the Catholics while leaving the Established Church alone. In any case no one would deny 
that Gulliver's Travels is a rancorous as well as a pessimistic book, and that especially in Parts I and in 
it often descends into political partisanship of a narrow kind. Pettiness and magnanimity, republicanism 
and authoritarianism, love of reason and lack of curiosity, are all mixed up in it. The hatred of the human 
body with which Swift is especially associated is only dominant in Part iy but somehow this new 
preoccupation does not come as a surprise. One feels that all these adventures, and all these changes of 


mood, could have happened to the same person, and the inter-connection between Swift's political 
loyalties and his ultimate despair is one of the most interesting features of the book. 

Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by 
the follies of the progressive party of the moment. Part I of Gulliver's Travels, ostensibly a satire on 
human greatness, can be seen, if one looks a little deeper, to be simply an attack on England, on the 
dominant Whig party, and on the war with France, which—however bad the motives of the Allies may 
have been—did save Europe from being tyrannised over by a single reactionary power. Swift was not a 
Jacobite nor strictly speaking a Tory, and his declared aim in the war was merely a moderate peace treaty 
and not the outright defeat of England. Nevertheless there is a tinge of quislingism in his attitude, which 
comes out in the ending of Part I and slightly interferes with the allegory. When Gulliver flees from 
Lilliput (England) to Blefuscu (France) the assumption that a human being six inches high is inherently 
contemptible seems to be dropped. Whereas the people of Lilliput have behaved towards Gulliver with 
the utmost treachery and meanness, those of Blefuscu behave generously and straightforwardly, and 
indeed this section of the book ends on a different note from the all-round disillusionment of the earlier 
chapters. Evidently Swift's animus is, in the first place, against England. It is "your Natives" (i.e. 
Gulliver's fellow-countrymen) whom the King of Brobdingnag considers to be "the most pernicious Race 
of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth," and the long 
passage at the end, denouncing colonisation and foreign conquest, is plainly aimed at England, although 
the contrary is elaborately stated. The Dutch, England's allies and target of one of Swift's most famous 
pamphlets, are also more or less wantonly attacked in Part in. There is even what sounds like a personal 
note in the passage in which Gulliver records his satisfaction that the various countries he has discovered 
cannot be made colonies of the British Crown: 

The Houyhnhnms, indeed, appear not to be so well prepared for War, a Science to 
which they are perfect Strangers, and especially against missive Weapons. However, 
supposing myself to be a Minister of State, I could never give my advice for invading 
them.... Imagine twenty thousand of them breaking into the midst of an European 
army, confounding the Ranks, overturning the Carriages, battering the Warriors' Faces 
into Mummy, by terrible Yerks from their hinder Hoofs... 

Considering that Swift does not waste words, that phrase, "battering the warriors' faces into mummy," 
probably indicates a secret wish to see the invincible armies of the Duke of Marlborough treated in a like 
manner. There are similar touches elsewhere. Even the country mentioned in Part III, where "the Bulk of 
the People consist, in a Manner, wholly of Discoverers, Witnesses, Informers, Accusers, Prosecutors, 
Evidences, Swearers, together with their several subservient and subaltern Instruments, all under the 
Colours, the Conduct, and Pay of Ministers of State," is called Langdon, which is within one letter of 
being an anagram of England. (As the early editions of the book contain misprints, it may perhaps have 
been intended as a complete anagram.) Swift's physical repulsion from humanity is certainly real enough, 
but one has the feeling that his debunking of human grandeur, his diatribes against lords, politicians, court 
favourites, etc., has mainly a local application and springs from the fact that he belonged to the 
unsuccessful party. He denounces injustice and oppression, but he gives no evidence of liking democracy. 
In spite of his enormously greater powers, his implied position is very similar to that of the innumerable 
silly-clever Conservatives of our own day—people like Sir Alan Herbert, Professor G. M. Young, Lord 
Elton,- the Tory Reform Committee or the long line of Catholic apologists from W H. Mallock- onwards: 
people who specialise in cracking neat jokes at the expense of whatever is "modern” and "progressive," 
and whose opinions are often all the more extreme because they know that they cannot influence the actual 


drift of events. After all, such a pamphlet as An Argument to prove that the Abolishing of Christianity, 
etc. is very like "Timothy Shy” having a bit of clean fun with the Brains Trust,- or Father Ronald Knox 
exposing the errors of Bertrand Russell.- And the ease with which Swift has been forgiven—and 
forgiven, sometimes, by devout believers—for the blasphemies of A Tale of a Tub demonstrates clearly 
enough the feebleness of religious sentiments as compared with political ones. 

However, the reactionary cast of Swift's mind does not show itself chiefly in his political 
affiliations. The important thing is his attitude towards Science, and, more broadly, towards intellectual 
curiosity. The famous Academy of Lagado, described in Part III of Gulliver's Travels, is no doubt a 
justified satire on most of the so-called scientists of Swift's own day. Significandy, the people at work in 
it are described as "Projectors," that is, people not engaged in disinterested research but merely on the 
look-out for gadgets which will save labour and bring in money. But there is no sign—indeed, all through 
the book there are many signs to the contrary—that "pure" science would have struck Swift as a worth¬ 
while activity. The more serious kind of scientist has already had a kick in the pants in Part II, when the 
"Scholars" patronised by the King of Brobdingnag try to account for Gulliver's small stature: 

After much Debate, they concluded unanimously that I was only Relplum Scalcath, 
which is interpreted literally, Lusus Naturae; a Determination exacdy agreeable to 
the modern philosophy of Europe, whose Professors, disdaining the old Evasion of 
occult Causes, whereby the followers of Aristotle endeavoured in vain to disguise 
their Ignorance, have invented this wonderful Solution of all Difficulties, to the 
unspeakable Advancement of human Knowledge. 

If this stood by itself one might assume that Swift is merely the enemy of sham science. In a number of 
places, however, he goes out of his way to proclaim the uselessness of all learning or speculation not 
directed towards some practical end: 

The Learning of (the Brobdingnagians) is very defective, consisting only in Morality, 
History, Poetry, and Mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But, the 
last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in Life, to the Improvement of 
Agriculture, and all mechanical Arts; so that among us it would be little esteemed. 
And as to Ideas, Entities, Abstractions, and Transcendentals, I could never drive the 
least Conception into their Heads. 

The Houyhnhnms, Swift's ideal beings, are backward even in a mechanical sense. They are unacquainted 
with metals, have never heard of boats, do not, properly speaking, practise agriculture (we are told that 
the oats which they live upon "grow naturally"), and appear not to have invented wheels. They have no 
alphabet, and evidently have not much curiosity about the physical world. They do not believe that any 
inhabited country exists beside their own, and though they understand the motions of the sun and moon, 
and the nature of eclipses, "this is the utmost Progress of their Astronomy." By contrast, the philosophers 
of the flying island of Laputa are so continuously absorbed in mathematical speculations that before 
speaking to them one has to attract their attention by flapping them on the ear with a bladder. They have 
catalogued ten thousand fixed stars, have setded the periods of ninety-three comets, and have discovered, 
in advance of the astronomers of Europe, that Mars has two moons—all of which information Swift 
evidendy regards as ridiculous, useless and uninteresting. As one might expect, he believes that the 
scientist's place, if he has a place, is in the laboratory and that scientific knowledge has no bearing on 
political matters: 


What I... thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong Disposition I observed in 
them towards News and Politics, perpetually enquiring into Public Affairs, giving 
their judgments in Matters of State, and passionately disputing every Inch of a Party 
Opinion. I have, indeed, observed the same Disposition among most of the 
Mathematicians I have known in Europe, though I could never discover the least 
Analogy between the two Sciences; unless those People suppose, that, because the 
smallest Circle hath as many Degrees as the largest, therefore the Regulation and 
Management of the World require no more Abilities, than the Handling and Turning of 
a Globe. 

Is there not something familiar in that phrase "I could never discover the least analogy between the two 
sciences"? It has precisely the note of the popular Catholic apologists who profess to be astonished when 
a scientist utters an opinion on such questions as the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. The 
scientist, we are told, is an expert only in one restricted field: why should his opinions be of value in any 
other? The implication is that theology is just as much an exact science as, for instance, chemistry, and that 
the priest is also an expert whose conclusions on certain subjects must be accepted. Swift in effect makes 
the same claim for the politician, but he goes one better in that he will not allow the scientist—either the 
"pure" scientist or the ad-hoc investigator—to be a useful person in his own line. Even if he had not 
written Part in of Gulliver's Travels, one could infer from the rest of the book that, like Tolstoy and like 
Blake, he hates the very idea of studying the processes of Nature. The "Reason" which he so admires in 
the Houyhnhnms does not primarily mean the power of drawing logical inferences from observed facts. 
Although he never defines it, it appears in most contexts to mean either common sense—i.e. acceptance of 
the obvious and contempt for quibbles and abstractions—or absence of passion and superstition. In 
general he assumes that we know all that we need to know already, and merely use our knowledge 
incorrectly. Medicine, for instance, is a useless science, because if we lived in a more natural way, there 
would be no diseases. Swift, however, is not a simple-lifer or an admirer of the Noble Savage. He is in 
favour of civilisation and the arts of civilisation. Not only does he see the value of good manners, good 
conversation, and even learning of a literary and historical kind, he also sees that agriculture, navigation 
and architecture need to be studied and could with advantage be improved. But his implied aim is a static, 
incurious civilisation—the world of his own day, a little cleaner, a little saner, with no radical change and 
no poking into the unknowable. More than one would expect in anyone so free from accepted fallacies, he 
reveres the past, especially classical antiquity, and believes that modern man has degenerated sharply 
during the past hundred years. 1 In the island of sorcerers, where the spirits of the dead can be called up at 
will: 


I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large Chamber, and a 
modern Representative in Counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an 
Assembly of Heroes and Demy-Gods, the other a Knot of Pedlars, Pickpockets, 
Highwaymen, and Bullies. 

Although Swift uses this section of Part in to attack the truthfulness of recorded history, his critical spirit 
deserts him as soon as he is dealing with Greeks and Romans. He remarks, of course, upon the corruption 
of imperial Rome, but he has an almost unreasoning admiration for some of the leading figures of the 
ancient world: 


I was struck with profound Veneration at the Sight of Brutus, and could easily 
discover the most consummate Virtue, the greatest Intrepidity and Firmness of Mind, 


the truest Love of his Country, and general Benevolence for mankind, in every 
Lineament of his Countenance.... I had the Honour to have much Conversation with 
Brutus, and was told, that his Ancestor Junius, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the 
younger, Sir Thomas More, and himself, were perpetually together: a Sextumvirate, 
to which all the Ages of the World cannot add a seventh. 

It will be noticed that of these six people, only one is a Christian. This is an important point. If one adds 
together Swift's pessimism, his reverence for the past, his incuriosity and his horror of the human body, 
one arrives at an attitude common among religious reactionaries—that is, people who defend an unjust 
order of Society by claiming that this world cannot be substantially improved and only the "next world" 
matters. However, Swift shows no sign of having any religious beliefs, at least in any ordinary sense of 
the words. He does not appear to believe seriously in life after death, and his idea of goodness is bound 
up with republicanism, love of liberty, courage, "benevolence" (meaning in effect public spirit), "reason" 
and other pagan qualities. This reminds one that there is another strain in Swift, not quite congruous with 
his disbelief in progress and his general hatred of humanity. 

To begin with, he has moments when he is "constructive" and even "advanced." To be 
occasionally inconsistent is almost a mark of vitality in Utopia books, and Swiff sometimes inserts a word 
of praise into a passage that ought to be purely satirical. Thus, his ideas about the education of the young 
are fathered on to the Lilliputians, who have much the same views on this subject as the Houyhnhnms. The 
Lilliputians also have various social and legal institutions (for instance, there are old age pensions, and 
people are rewarded for keeping the law as well as punished for breaking it) which Swift would have 
liked to see prevailing in his own country. In the middle of this passage Swift remembers his satirical 
intention and adds, "In relating these and the following Laws, I would only be understood to mean the 
original Institutions, and not the most scandalous Corruptions into which these people are fallen by the 
degenerate Nature of Man": but as Lilliput is supposed to represent England, and the laws he is speaking 
of have never had their parallel in England, it is clear that the impulse to make constructive suggestions 
has been too much for him. But Swift's greatest contribution to political thought, in the narrower sense of 
the words, is his attack, especially in Part III, on what would now be called totalitarianism. He has an 
extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted "police State," with its endless heresy-hunts and 
treason trials, all really designed to neutralise popular discontent by changing it into war hysteria. And 
one must remember that Swift is here inferring the whole from a quite small part, for the feeble 
governments of his own day did not give him illustrations ready-made. For example, there is the professor 
at the School of Political Projectors who "shewed me a large Paper of Instructions for discovering Plots 
and Conspiracies," and who claimed that one can find people's secret thoughts by examining their 
excrement: 


Because Men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at Stool, 
which he found by frequent Experiment: for in such Conjunctures, when he used 
meerly as a Trial to consider what was the best Way of murdering the King, his 
Ordure would have a Tincture of Green; but quite different when he thought only of 
raising an Insurrection, or burning the Metropolis. 

The professor and his theory are said to have been suggested to Swift by the—from our point of view— 
not particularly astonishing or disgusting fact that in a recent State trial some letters found in somebody's 
privy had been put in evidence. Later in the same chapter we seem to be positively in the middle of the 
Russian purges: 


In the Kingdom of Tribnia, by the Natives called Langdon ... the Bulk of the People 
consist, in a Manner, wholly of Discoverers, Witnesses, Informers, Accusers, 
Prosecutors, Evidences, Swearers....It is first agreed, and setded among them, what 
suspected Persons shall be accused of a Plot: Then, effectual Care is taken to secure 
all their Letters and Papers, and put the Owners in Chains. These papers are 
delivered to a Sett of Artists, very dexterous in finding out the mysterious Meanings 
of Words, Syllables, and Letters.... Where this Method fails, they have two others 
more effectual, which the Learned among them call Acrostics and Anagrams. First, 
they can decypher all initial Letters into political Meanings: Thus, N shall signify a 
Plot, B a Regiment of Horse, L a Lleet at Sea: Or, Secondly, by transposing the 
Letters of the Alphabet in any suspected Paper, they can lay open the deepest Designs 
of a discontented Party. So, for Example, if I should say in a Letter to a Lriend, Our 
Brother Tom has just got the Piles, a skilful Decypherer would discover that the 
same Letters, which compose that Sentence, maybe analysed in the following Words: 
Resist—a Plot is brought Home—The Tour. And this is the anagrammatic Method. 

Other professors at the same school invent simplified languages, write books by machinery, educate their 
pupils by inscribing the lesson on a wafer and causing them to swallow it, or propose to abolish 
individuality altogether by cutting off part of the brain of one man and grafting it on to the head of another. 
There is something queerly familiar in the atmosphere of these chapters, because, mixed up with much 
fooling, there is a perception that one of the aims of totalitarianism is not merely to make sure that people 
will think the right thoughts, but actually to make them less conscious. Then, again, Swift's account of the 
Leader who is usually to be found ruling over a tribe of Yahoos, and of the "favourite" who acts first as a 
dirty-worker and later as a scapegoat, fits remarkably well into the pattern of our own times. But are we 
to infer from all this that Swift was first and foremost an enemy of tyranny and a champion of the free 
intelligence? No: his own views, so far as one can discern them, are not markedly liberal. No doubt he 
hates lords, kings, bishops, generals, ladies of fashion, orders, tides and flummery generally, but he does 
not seem to think better of the common people than of their rulers, or to be in favour of increased social 
equality, or to be enthusiastic about representative institutions. The Houyhnhnms are organised upon a sort 
of caste system which is racial in character, the horses which do the menial work being of different 
colours from their masters and not interbreeding with them. The educational system which Swift admires 
in the Lilliputians takes hereditary class distinctions for granted, and the children of the poorest class do 
not go to school, because "their Business being only to till and cultivate the Earth ... therefore their 
Education is of little Consequence to the Public." Nor does he seem to have been strongly in favour of 
freedom of speech and the Press, in spite of the toleration which his own writings enjoyed. The King of 
Brobdingnag is astonished at the multiplicity of religious and political sects in England, and considers 
that those who hold "opinions prejudicial to the public" (in the context this seems to mean simply 
heretical opinions), though they need not be obliged to change them, ought to be obliged to conceal them: 
for "as it was Tyranny in any Government to require the first, so it was Weakness not to enforce the 
second." There is a subtler indication of Swift's own attitude in the manner in which Gulliver leaves the 
land of the Houyhnhnms. Intermittently, at least, Swift was a kind of anarchist, and Part IV of Gulliver's 
Travels is a picture of an anarchistic Society, not governed by law in the ordinary sense, but by the 
dictates of "Reason," which are voluntarily accepted by everyone. The General Assembly of the 
Houyhnhnms "exhorts" Gulliver's master to get rid of him, and his neighbours put pressure on him to make 
him comply. Two reasons are given. One is that the presence of this unusual Yahoo may unsettle the rest of 
the tribe, and the other is that a friendly relationship between a Houyhnhnm and a Yahoo is "not agreeable 
to Reason or Nature, or a Thing ever heard of before among them." Gulliver's master is somewhat 


unwilling to obey, but the "exhortation" (a Houyhnhnm, we are told, is never compelled to do anything, he 
is merely "exhorted" or "advised”) cannot be disregarded. This illustrates very well the totalitarian 
tendency which is implicit in the anarchist or pacifist vision of Society. In a Society in which there is no 
law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, 
because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of 
law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not,” the individual can practise a certain amount of 
eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason," he is under continuous pressure to 
make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else. The Houyhnhnms, we are told, were 
unanimous on almost all subjects. The only question they ever discussed was how to deal with the 
Yahoos. Otherwise there was no room for disagreement among them, because the truth is always either 
self-evident, or else it is undiscoverable and unimportant. They had apparently no word for "opinion" in 
their language, and in their conversations there was no "difference of sentiments." They had reached, in 
fact, the highest stage of totalitarian organisation, the stage when conformity has become so general that 
there is no need for a police force. Swift approves of this kind of thing because among his many gifts 
neither curiosity nor good-nature was included. Disagreement would always seem to him sheer 
perversity. "Reason," among the Houyhnhnms, he says, "is not a Point Problematical, as with us, where 
men can argue with Plausibility on both Sides of a Question; but strikes you with immediate Conviction; 
as it must needs do, where it is not mingled, obscured, or discoloured by Passion and Interest." In other 
words, we know everything already, so why should dissident opinions be tolerated? The totalitarian 
Society of the Houyhnhnms, where there can be no freedom and no development, follows naturally from 
this. 


We are right to think of Swift as a rebel and iconoclast, but except in certain secondary 
matters, such as his insistence that women should receive the same education as men, he cannot be 
labelled "Left." He is a Tory anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty, and preserving 
the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible. 
When Swift utters one of his characteristic diatribes against the rich and powerful, one must probably, as I 
said earlier, write off something for the fact that he himself belonged to the less successful party, and was 
personally disappointed. The "outs," for obvious reasons, are always more radical than the "ins." ; But the 
most essential thing in Swift is his inability to believe that life—ordinary life on the solid earth, and not 
some rationalised, deodorised version of it—could be made worth living. Of course, no honest person 
claims that happiness is now a normal condition among adult human beings; but perhaps it could be made 
normal, and it is upon this question that all serious political controversy really turns. Swift has much in 
common—more, I believe, than has been noticed—with Tolstoy, another disbeliever in the possibility of 
happiness. In both men you have the same anarchistic outlook covering an authoritarian cast of mind; in 
both a similar hostility to Science, the same impatience with opponents, the same inability to see the 
importance of any question not interesting to themselves; and in both cases a sort of horror of the actual 
process of life, though in Tolstoy's case it was arrived at later and in a different way. The sexual 
unhappiness of the two men was not of the same kind, but there was this in common, that in both of them a 
sincere loathing was mixed up with a morbid fascination. Tolstoy was a reformed rake who ended by 
preaching complete celibacy, while continuing to practise the opposite into extreme old age. Swift was 
presumably impotent, and had an exaggerated horror of human dung: he also thought about it incessantly, 
as is evident throughout his works. Such people are not likely to enjoy even the small amount of happiness 
that falls to most human beings, and, from obvious motives, are not likely to admit that earthly life is 
capable of much improvement. Their incuriosity, and hence their intolerance, spring from the same root. 

Swift's disgust, rancour and pessimism would make sense against the background of a "next 


world" to which this one is the prelude. As he does not appear to believe seriously in any such thing, it 
becomes necessary to construct a paradise supposedly existing on the surface of the earth, but something 
quite different from anything we know, with all that he disapproves of—lies, folly, change, enthusiasm, 
pleasure, love and dirt—eliminated from it. As his ideal being he chooses the horse, an animal whose 
excrement is not offensive. The Houyhnhnms are dreary beasts—this is so generally admitted that the 
point is not worth labouring. Swift's genius can make them credible, but there can have been very few 
readers in whom they have excited any feeling beyond dislike. And this is not from wounded vanity at 
seeing animals preferred to men; for, of the two, the Houyhnhnms are much liker to human beings than are 
the Yahoos, and Gulliver's horror of the Yahoos, together with his recognition that they are the same kind 
of creature as himself, contains a logical absurdity. This horror comes upon him at his very first sight of 
them. "I never beheld," he says, "in all my Travels, so disagreeable an Animal, nor one against which I 
naturally conceived so strong an Antipathy." But in comparison with what are the Yahoos disgusting? Not 
with the Houyhnhnms, because at this time Gulliver has not seen a Houyhnhnm It can only be in 
comparison with himself, i.e. with a human being. Later, however, we are to be told that the Yahoos are 
human beings, and human society becomes insupportable to Gulliver because all men are Yahoos. In that 
case why did he not conceive his disgust of humanity earlier? In effect we are told that the Yahoos are 
fantastically different from men, and yet are the same. Swift has over-reached himself in his fury, and is 
shouting at his fellow-creatures; "You are filthier than you are!" However, it is impossible to feel much 
sympathy with the Yahoos, and it is not because they oppress the Yahoos that the Houyhnhnms are 
unattractive. They are unattractive because the "Reason" by which they are governed is really a desire for 
death. They are exempt from love, friendship, curiosity, fear, sorrow and—except in their feelings 
towards the Yahoos, who occupy rather the same place in their community as the Jews in Nazi Germany— 
anger and hatred. "They have no Fondness for their Colts or Foies, but the Care they take, in educating 
them, proceeds entirely from the Dictates of Reason." They lay store by "Friendship" and "Benevolence," 
but "these are not confined to particular Objects, but universal to the whole Race." They also value 
conversation, but in their conversations there are no differences of opinion, and "nothing passed but what 
was useful, expressed in the fewest and most significant Words." They practise strict birth control, each 
couple producing two offspring and thereafter abstaining from sexual intercourse. Their marriages are 
arranged for them by their elders, on eugenic principles, and their language contains no word for "love," 
in the sexual sense. When somebody dies they carry on exactly as before, without feeling any grief. It will 
be seen that their aim is to be as like a corpse as is possible while retaining physical life. One or two of 
their characteristics, it is true, do not seem to be strictly "reasonable" in their own usage of the word. 
Thus, they place a great value not only on physical hardihood but on athleticism, and they are devoted to 
poetry. But these exceptions may be less arbitrary than they seem Swift probably emphasises the physical 
strength of the Houyhnhnms in order to make clear that they could never be conquered by the hated human 
race, while a taste for poetry may figure among their qualities because poetry appeared to Swift as the 
antithesis of Science, from his point of view the most useless of all pursuits. In Part in he names 
"Imagination, Fancy, and Invention" as desirable faculties in which the Laputan mathematicians (in spite 
of their love of music) were wholly lacking. One must remember that although Swift was an admirable 
writer of comic verse, the kind of poetry he thought valuable would probably be didactic poetry. The 
poetry of the Houyhnhnms, he says— 

must be allowed to excel (that of) all other Mortals; wherein the Justness of their 
Similes, and the Minuteness, as well as exactness, of their Descriptions, are, indeed, 
inimitable. Their Verses abound very much in both of these; and usually contain either 
some exalted Notions of Friendship and Benevolence, or the Praises of those who 
were Victors in Races, and other bodily Exercises. 


Alas, not even the genius of Swift was equal to producing a specimen by which we could judge the poetry 
of the Houyhnhnms. But it sounds as though it were chilly stuff (in heroic couplets, presumably), and not 
seriously in conflict with the principles of "Reason." 

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. Swift advocates a simple refusal of 
life, justifying this by the claim that "Reason" consists in thwarting your instincts. The Houyhnhnms, 
creatures without a history, continue for generation after generation to live prudently, maintaining their 
population at exactly the same level, avoiding all passion, suffering from no diseases, meeting death 
indifferently, training up their young in the same principles—and all for what? In order that the same 
process may continue indefinitely. The notions that life here and now is worth living, or that it could be 
made worth living, or that it must be sacrificed for some future good, are all absent. The dreary world of 
the Houyhnhnms was about as good a Utopia as Swift could construct, granting that he neither believed in 
a "next world" nor could get any pleasure out of certain normal activities. But it is not really set up as 
something desirable in itself, but as the justification for another attack on humanity. The aim, as usual, is 
to humiliate Man by reminding him that he is weak and ridiculous, and above all that he stinks; and the 
ultimate motive, probably, is a kind of envy, the envy of the ghost for the living, of the man who knows he 
cannot be happy for the others who—so he fears—may be a little happier than himself. The political 
expression of such an outlook must be either reactionary or nihilistic, because the person who holds it 
will want to prevent Society from developing in some direction in which his pessimism may be cheated. 
One can do this either by blowing everything to pieces, or by averting social change. Swift ultimately 
blew everything to pieces in the only way that was feasible before the atomic bomb—that is, he went mad 
—but, as I have tried to show, his political aims were on the whole reactionary ones. 

From what I have written it may have seemed that I am against Swift, and that my object is to 
refute him and even to belittle him. In a political and moral sense I am against him, so far as I understand 
him. Yet curiously enough he is one of the writers I admire with least reserve, and Gulliver's Travels, in 
particular, is a book which it seems impossible for me to grow tired of. I read it first when I was eight— 
one day short of eight, to be exact, for I stole and furtively read the copy which was to be given me next 
day on my eighth birthday—and I have certainly not read it less than half a dozen times since. Its 
fascination seems inexhaustible. If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all 
others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them. This raises the question: 
what is the relationship between agreement with a writer's opinions, and enjoyment of his work? 

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 sea-sickness, King Lear is no better from 
your point of view than Peter Pan. You may know in an intellectual sense that it is better, but that is 
simply a fact which you remember: you will not feel the merit of King Lear until you are normal again. 
And aesthetic judgment can be upset just as disastrously—more disastrously, because the cause is less 


readily recognised—by political or moral disagreement. If a book angers, wounds or alarms you, then you 
will not enjoy it, whatever its merits may be. If it seems to you a really pernicious book, likely to 
influence other people in some undesirable way, then you will probably construct an aesthetic theory to 
show that it has no merits. Current literary criticism consists quite largely of this kind of dodging to and 
fro between two sets of standards. And yet the opposite process can also happen: enjoyment can 
overwhelm disapproval, even though one clearly recognises that one is enjoying something inimical. 
Swift, whose world-view is so peculiarly unacceptable, but who is nevertheless an extremely popular 
writer, is a good instance of this. Why is it that we don't mind being called Yahoos, although firmly 
convinced that we are not Yahoos? 

It is not enough to make the usual answer that of course Swift was wrong, in fact he was 
insane, but he was "a good writer." It is true that the literary quality of a book is to some small extent 
separable from its subject-matter. 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. As an example near at hand, look back at the passage I quoted earlier, starting "In the 
Kingdom of Tribnia, by the Natives called Langdon." It derives much of its force from the final sentence: 
"And this is the anagrammatic Method." Stricdy speaking this sentence is unnecessary, for we have 
already seen the anagram deciphered, but the mock-solemn repetition, in which one seems to hear Swift's 
own voice uttering the words, drives home the idiocy of the activities described, like a final tap to a nail. 
But not all the power and simplicity of Swift's prose, nor the imaginative effort that has been able to make 
not one but a whole series of impossible worlds more credible than the majority of history books—none 
of this would enable us to enjoy Swift if his world-view were truly wounding or shocking. Millions of 
people, in many countries, must have enjoyed Gulliver's Travels while more or less seeing its anti-human 
implications: and even the child who accepts Parts I and II as a simple story gets a sense of absurdity 
from thinking of human beings six inches high. The explanation must be that Swift's world-view is felt to 
be not altogether false—or it would probably be more accurate to say, not false all the time. Swift is a 
diseased writer. He remains permanendy in a depressed mood which in most people is only intermittent, 
rather as though someone suffering from jaundice or the after-effects of influenza should have the energy 
to write books. But we all know that mood, and something in us responds to the expression of it. Take, for 
instance, one of his most characteristic works, The Lady's Dressing Room: one might add the kindred 
poem. Upon a Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed. Which is truer, the viewpoint expressed in these 
poems, or the viewpoint implied in Blake's phrase, "The naked female human form divine"? No doubt 
Blake is nearer the truth, and yet who can fail to feel a sort of pleasure in seeing that fraud, feminine 
delicacy, exploded for once? Swift falsifies his picture of the world by refusing to see anything in human 
life except dirt, folly and wickedness, but the part which he abstracts from the whole does exist, and it is 
something which we all know about while shrinking from mentioning it. Part of our minds—in any normal 
person it is the dominant part—believes that man is a noble animal and life is worth living: but there is 
also a sort of inner self which at least intermittendy stands aghast at the horror of existence. In the 
queerest way, pleasure and disgust are linked together. The human body is beautiful: it is also repulsive 
and ridiculous, a fact which can be verified at any swimming pool. The sexual organs are objects of 
desire and also of loathing, so much so that in many languages, if not in all languages, their names are 
used as words of abuse. Meat is delicious, but a butcher's shop makes one feel sick: and indeed all our 
food springs ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things which of all others seem to us the most 
horrible. A child, when it is past the infantile stage but still looking at the world with fresh eyes, is moved 
by horror almost as often as by wonder—horror of snot and spitde, of the dogs' excrement on the 
pavement, the dying toad full of maggots, the sweaty smell of grown-ups, the hideousness of old men, with 
their bald heads and bulbous noses. In his endless harping on disease, dirt and deformity, Swift is not 


actually inventing anything, he is merely leaving something out. Human behaviour, too, especially in 
politics, is as he describes it, although it contains other more important factors which he refuses to admit. 
So far as we can see, both horror and pain are necessary to the continuance of life on this planet, and it is 
therefore open to pessimists like Swift to say: "If horror and pain must always be with us, how can life be 
significandy improved?" His attitude is in effect the Christian attitude, minus the bribe of a "next 
world"—which, however, probably has less hold upon the minds of believers than the conviction that this 
world is a vale of tears and the grave is a place of rest. It is, I am certain, a wrong attitude, and one which 
could have harmful effects upon behaviour; but something in us responds to it, as it responds to the 
gloomy words of the burial service and the sweetish smell of corpses in a country church. 

It is often argued, at least by people who admit the importance of subject-matter, that a book 
cannot be "good" if it expresses a palpably false view of life. We are told that in our own age, for 
instance, any book that has genuine literary merit will also be more or less "progressive" in tendency. 
This ignores the fact that throughout history a similar struggle between progress and reaction has been 
raging, and that the best books of any one age have always been written from several different viewpoints, 
some of them palpably more false than others. In so far as a writer is a propagandist, the most one can ask 
of him is that he shall genuinely believe in what he is saying, and that it shall not be something blazingly 
silly. Today, for example, one can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a 
Fascist, a pacifist, an anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative: one cannot 
imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. 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. Swift did not possess ordinary wisdom, but he did possess a terrible intensity of vision, 
capable of picking out a single hidden truth and then magnifying it and distorting it. The durability of 
Gulliver's Travels goes to show that, if the force of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just 
passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art. 


Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool 

Polemic, 7, March 1947 

Tolstoy's pamphlets are the least-known part of his work, and his attack on Shakespeare 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. 

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 rereading 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 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 Elazlitt, 
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 words 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 head, 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 exacdy 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, his 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 judgment 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 craftsmanship. 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 over 
Holland,- and so on and so forth. As a contemporary instance he cites, rather significantly, the Dreyfus 
case, over which the whole world grew violently excited for no sufficient reason. There are also sudden 
shortlived 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 immoral 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 oudook. 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 Deeping is "bad.'- 
Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself merely 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 anyway 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 indicated in the 
first scene. It will be seen that even in the passage which I quoted earlier, Tolstoy has wilfully 
misunderstood one phrase and slightly changed the meaning of another, making nonsense of a remark 
which is reasonable enough in its context. None of these misreadings is very gross in itself, but their 
cumulative effect is to exaggerate the psychological incoherence of the play. Again, Tolstoy is not able to 
explain why Shakespeare's plays were still in print, and still on the stage, two hundred years after his 
death (before the "epidemic suggestion" started, that is); and his whole account of Shakespeare's rise to 
fame is guesswork punctuated by outright misstatements. And again, various of his accusations contradict 
one another: for example, Shakespeare is a mere entertainer and "not in earnest,” but on the other hand he 
is constantly putting his own thoughts into the mouths of his characters. On the whole it is difficult to feel 
that Tolstoy's criticisms are uttered in good faith. In any case it is impossible that he should fully have 
believed in his main thesis—believed, that is to say, that for a century or more the entire civilized world 
had been taken in by a huge and palpable lie which he alone was able to see through. Certainly his dislike 
of Shakespeare is real enough, but the reasons for it may be different, or partly different, from what he 
avows; and therein lies the interest of his pamphlet. 

At this point one is obliged to start guessing. However, there is one possible clue, or at least 
there is a question which may point the way to a clue. It is: why did Tolstoy, with thirty or more plays to 
choose from, pick out King Lear as his especial target? True, Lear is so well known and has been so 


much praised that it could jusdy be taken as representative of Shakespeare's best work; still, for the 
purpose of a hostile analysis Tolstoy would probably choose the play he disliked most. Is it not possible 
that he bore an especial enmity towards this particular play because he was aware, consciously or 
unconsciously, of the resemblance between Lear's story and his own? But it is better to approach this clue 
from the opposite direction—that is, by examining Lear itself, and the qualities in it that Tolstoy fails to 
mention. 


One of the first things an English reader would notice in Tolstoy's pamphlet is that it hardly 
deals with Shakespeare as a poet. Shakespeare is treated as a dramatist, and in so far as his popularity is 
not spurious, it is held to be due to tricks of stagecraft which give good opportunities to clever actors. 
Now, so far as the English-speaking countries go, this is not true. Several of the plays which are most 
valued by lovers of Shakespeare (for instance, Timon of Athens) are seldom or never acted, while some 
of the most actable, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, are the least admired. Those who care most for 
Shakespeare value him in the first place for his use of language, the "verbal music" which even Bernard 
Shaw, another hostile critic, admits to be "irresistible." Tolstoy ignores this, and does not seem to realize 
that a poem may have a special value for those who speak the language in which it was written. However, 
even if one puts oneself in Tolstoy's place and tries to think of Shakespeare as a foreign poet it is still 
clear that there is something that Tolstoy has left out. Poetry, it seems, is not solely a matter of sound and 
association, and valueless outside its own language-group: otherwise, how is it that some poems, 
including poems written in dead languages, succeed in crossing frontiers? Clearly a lyric like "Tomorrow 
is Saint Valentine's Day" could not be satisfactorily translated, but in Shakespeare's major work there is 
something describable as poetry that can be separated from the words. Tolstoy is right in saying that Lear 
is not a very good play, as a play. It is too drawn-out and has too many characters and sub-plots. One 
wicked daughter would have been quite enough, and Edgar is a superfluous character: indeed it would 
probably be a better play if Gloucester and both his sons were eliminated. Nevertheless, something, a 
kind of pattern, or perhaps only an atmosphere, survives the complications and the longueurs. Lear can 
be imagined as a puppet show, a mime, a ballet, a series of pictures. Part of its poetry, perhaps the most 
essential part, is inherent in the story and is dependent neither on any particular set of words, nor on flesh- 
and-blood presentation. 

Shut your eyes and think of King Lear, if possible without calling to mind any of the dialogue. 
What do you see? Here at any rate is what I see: a majestic old man in a long black robe, with flowing 
white hair and beard, a figure out of Blake's drawings (but also, curiously enough, rather like Tolstoy), 
wandering through a storm and cursing the heavens, in company with a Fool and a lunatic. Presently the 
scene shifts, and the old man, still cursing, still understanding nothing, is holding a dead girl in his arms 
while the Fool dangles on a gallows somewhere in the background. This is the bare skeleton of the play, 
and even here Tolstoy wants to cut out most of what is essential. He objects to the storm, as being 
unnecessary, to the Fool, who in his eyes is simply a tedious nuisance and an excuse for making bad jokes, 
and to the death of Cordelia, which, as he sees it, robs the play of its moral. According to Tolstoy, the 
earlier play, King Leir, which Shakespeare adapted 

terminates more naturally and more in accordance with the moral demands of the 
spectator than does Shakespeare's: namely, by the King of the Gauls conquering the 
husbands of the elder sisters, and by Cordelia, instead of being killed, restoring Leir 
to his former position. 

In other words the tragedy ought to have been a comedy, or perhaps a melodrama. It is doubtful whether 


the sense of tragedy is compatible with belief in God: at any rate, it is not compatible with disbelief in 
human dignity and with the kind of "moral demand" which feels cheated when virtue fails to triumph. A 
tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler 
than the forces which destroy him It is perhaps more significant that Tolstoy sees no justification for the 
presence of the Fool. The Fool is integral to the play. He acts not only as a sort of chorus, making the 
central situation clearer by commenting on it more intelligently than the other characters, but as a foil to 
Lear's frenzies. His jokes, riddles and scraps of rhyme, and his endless digs at Lear's high-minded folly, 
ranging from mere derision to a sort of melancholy poetry ("All thy other tides thou hast given away; that 
thou wast born with"), are like a trickle of sanity running through the play, a reminder that somewhere or 
other, in spite of the injustices, cruelties, intrigues, deceptions and misunderstandings that are being 
enacted here, life is going on much as usual. In Tolstoy’s impatience with the Fool one gets a glimpse of 
his deeper quarrel with Shakespeare. He objects, with some justification, to the raggedness of 
Shakespeare's plays, the irrelevancies, the incredible plots, the exaggerated language: but what at bottom 
he probably most dislikes is a sort of exuberance, a tendency to take—not so much a pleasure, as simply 
an interest in the actual process of life. It is a mistake to write Tolstoy off as a moralist attacking an artist. 
He never said that art, as such, is wicked or meaningless, nor did he even say that technical virtuosity is 
unimportant. But his main aim, in his later years, was to narrow the range of human consciousness. One's 
interests, one's points of attachment to the physical world and the day-to-day struggle, must be as few and 
not as many as possible. Literature must consist of parables, stripped of detail and almost independent of 
language. The parables—this is where Tolstoy differs from the average vulgar puritan—must themselves 
be works of art, but pleasure and curiosity must be excluded from them. Science, also, must be divorced 
from curiosity. The business of science, he says, is not to discover what happens, but to teach men how 
they ought to live. So also with history and politics. Many problems (for example, the Dreyfus case) are 
simply not worth solving, and he is willing to leave them as loose ends. Indeed his whole theory of 
"crazes" or "epidemic suggestions," in which he lumps together such things as the Crusades and the Dutch 
passion of tulip-growing, shows a willingness to regard many human activities as mere ant-like rushings 
to and fro, inexplicable and uninteresting. Clearly he could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, 
discursive writer like Shakespeare. His reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a 
noisy child. "Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can't you sit still like I do?" In a way 
the old man is in the right, but the trouble is that the child has a feeling in its limbs which the old man has 
lost. And if the old man knows of the existence of this feeling, the effect is merely to increase his 
irritation: he would make children senile, if he could. Tolstoy does not know, perhaps, just what he 
misses in Shakespeare, but he is aware that he misses something, and he is determined that others shall be 
deprived of it as well. By nature he was imperious as well as egotistical. Well after he was grown up he 
would still occasionally strike his servant in moments of anger, and somewhat later, according to his 
English biographer, Derrick Leon, he felt "a frequent desire upon the slenderest provocation to slap the 
faces of those with whom he disagreed." One does not necessarily get rid of that kind of temperament by 
undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may 
allow one's native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler forms. Tolstoy was 
capable of abjuring physical violence and of seeing what this implies, but he was not capable of tolerance 
or humility, and even if one knew nothing of his other writings, one could deduce his tendency towards 
spiritual bullying from this single pamphlet. 

However, Tolstoy is not simply trying to rob others of a pleasure he does not share. He is 
doing that, but his quarrel with Shakespeare goes further. It is the quarrel between the religious and the 
humanist attitudes towards life. Here one comes back to the central theme of King Lear, which Tolstoy 
does not mention, although he sets forth the plot in some detail. 


Lear is one of the minority of Shakespeare's plays that are unmistakably about something. As 
Tolstoy justly complains, much rubbish has been written about Shakespeare as a philosopher, as a 
psychologist, as a "great moral teacher," and what-not. Shakespeare was not a systematic thinker, his most 
serious thoughts are uttered irrelevandy or indirectly, and we do not know to what extent he wrote with a 
"purpose" or even how much of the work attributed to him was actually written by him. In the Sonnets he 
never even refers to the plays as part of his achievement, though he does make what seems to be a half- 
ashamed allusion to his career as an actor. It is perfecdy possible that he looked on at least half of his 
plays as mere pot-boilers and hardly bothered about purpose or probability so long as he could patch up 
something, usually from stolen material, which would more or less hang together on the stage. However, 
that is not the whole story. To begin with, as Tolstoy himself points out, Shakespeare has a habit of 
thrusting uncalled-for general reflections into the mouths of his characters. This is a serious fault in a 
dramatist, but it does not fit in with Tolstoy’s picture of Shakespeare as a vulgar hack who has no opinions 
of his own and merely wishes to produce the greatest effect with the least trouble. And more than this, 
about a dozen of his plays, written for the most part later than 1600 , do unquestionably have a meaning 
and even a moral. They revolve round a central subject which in some cases can be reduced to a single 
word. For example, Macbeth is about ambition, Othello is about jealousy, and Timon of Athens is about 
money. The subject of Lear is renunciation, and it is only by being wilfully blind that one can fail to 
understand what Shakespeare is saying. 

Lear renounces his throne but expects everyone to continue treating him as a king. He does 
not see that if he surrenders power, other people will take advantage of his weakness: also that those who 
flatter him the most grossly, i.e. Regan and Goneril, are exactly the ones who will turn against him. The 
moment he finds that he can no longer make people obey him as he did before, he falls into a rage which 
Tolstoy describes as "strange and unnatural,” but which in fact is perfectly in character. In his madness 
and despair, he passes through two moods which again are natural enough in his circumstances, though in 
one of them it is probable that he is being used partly as a mouthpiece for Shakespeare's own opinions. 
One is the mood of disgust in which Lear repents, as it were, for having been a king, and grasps for the 
first time the rottenness of formal justice and vulgar morality. The other is a mood of impotent fury in 
which he wreaks imaginary revenges upon those who have wronged him. "To have a thousand with red 
burning spits Come hissing in upon 'em!," and: 

"It were a delicate stratagem to shoe 
A troop of horse with felt: I'll put't in proof; 

And when I have stol'n upon these sons-in-law, 

Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!" 

Only at the end does he realize, as a sane man, that power, revenge and victory are not worth while: 

"No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison... 

.and we'll wear out 

In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones 
That ebb and flow by the moon." 

But by the time he makes this discovery it is too late, for his death and Cordelia's are already decided on. 
That is the story, and, allowing for some clumsiness in the telling, it is a very good story. 

But is it not also curiously similar to the history of Tolstoy himself? There is a general 
resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because the most impressive event in Tolstoy’s life, as in 



Lear's, was a huge gratuitous act of renunciation. In his old age he renounced his estate, his tide and his 
copyrights, and made an attempt—a sincere attempt, though it was not successful—to escape from his 
privileged position and live the life of a peasant. But the deeper resemblance lies in the fact that Tolstoy, 
like Lear, acted on mistaken motives and failed to get the results he had hoped for. According to Tolstoy, 
the aim of every human being is happiness, and happiness can only be attained by doing the will of God. 
But doing the will of God means casting off all earthly pleasures and ambitions, and living only for 
others. Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him 
happier. But if there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was not happy. On the contrary, 
he was driven almost to the edge of madness by the behaviour of the people about him, who persecuted 
him precisely because of his renunciation. Like Lear, Tolstoy was not humble and not a good judge of 
character. He was inclined at moments to revert to the attitudes of an aristocrat, in spite of his peasant's 
blouse, and he even had two children whom he had believed in and who ultimately turned against him— 
though, of course, in a less sensational manner than Regan and Goneril. His exaggerated revulsion from 
sexuality was also distinctly similar to Lear's. Tolstoy's remark that marriage is "slavery, satiety, 
repulsion" and means putting up with the proximity of "ugliness, dirtiness, smell, sores," is matched by 
Lear's well-known outburst: 

"But to the girdle do the gods inherit, 

Beneath is all the fiends'; 

There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit, 

Burning, scalding, stench, consumption," etc., etc. 

And though Tolstoy could not foresee it when he wrote his essay on Shakespeare, even the ending of his 
life—the sudden unplanned flight across country, accompanied only by a faithful daughter, the death in a 
cottage in a strange village—seems to have in it a sort of phantom reminiscence of Lear. 

Of course, one cannot assume that Tolstoy was aware of this resemblance, or would have 
admitted it if it had been pointed out to him. But his attitude towards the play must have been influenced 
by its theme. Renouncing power, giving away your lands, was a subject on which he had reason to feel 
deeply. Probably, therefore, he would be more angered and disturbed by the moral that Shakespeare 
draws than he would be in the case of some other play— Macbeth, for example—which did not touch so 
closely on his own life. But what exactly is the moral of Lear ? Evidently there are two morals, one 
explicit, the other implied in the story. 

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, commonsense 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." 


Obviously neither of these conclusions could have been pleasing to Tolstoy. The first of them 
expresses the ordinary, belly-to-earth selfishness from which he was genuinely trying to escape. The other 
conflicts with his desire to eat his cake and have it—that is, to destroy his own egoism and by so doing to 
gain eternal life. Of course, Lear is not a sermon in favour of altruism. It merely points out the results of 
practising self-denial for selfish reasons. Shakespeare had a considerable streak of worldliness in him, 
and if he had been forced to take sides in his own play, his sympathies would probably have lain with the 
Fool. But at least he could see the whole issue and treat it at the level of tragedy. Vice is punished, but 
virtue is not rewarded. The morality of Shakespeare's later tragedies is not religious in the ordinary 
sense, and certainly is not Christian. Only two of them, Hamlet and Othello, are supposedly occurring 
inside the Christian era, and even in those, apart from the antics of the ghost in Hamlet, there is no 
indication of a "next world" where everything is to be put right. All of these tragedies start out with the 
humanist assumption that life, although full of sorrow, is worth living, and that Man is a noble animal—a 
belief which Tolstoy in his old age did not share. 

Tolstoy was not a saint, but he tried very hard to make himself into a saint, and the standards 
he applied to literature were other-worldly ones. It is important to realize that the difference between a 
saint and an ordinary human being is a difference of kind and not of degree. That is, the one is not to be 
regarded as an imperfect form of the other. The saint, at any rate Tolstoy's kind of saint, is not trying to 
work an improvement in earthly life: he is trying to bring it to an end and put something different in its 
place. One obvious expression of this is the claim that celibacy is "higher" than marriage. If only, Tolstoy 
says in effect, we would stop breeding, fighting, struggling and enjoying, if we could get rid not only of 
our sins but of everything else that binds us to the surface of the earth—including love, in the ordinary 
sense of caring more for one human being than another—then the whole painful process would be over 
and the Kingdom of Heaven would arrive. 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. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which 
is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly 
life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle 
must continue and that death is the price of life. "Men must endure. Their going hence, even as their 
coming hither: Ripeness is all"—which is an un-Christian sentiment. Often there is a seeming truce 
between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must 
choose between this world and the next. And the enormous majority of human beings, if they understood 
the issue, would choose this world. They do make that choice when they continue working, breeding and 
dying instead of crippling their faculties in the hope of obtaining a new lease of existence elsewhere. 

We do not know a great deal about Shakespeare's religious beliefs, and from the evidence of 
his writings it would be difficult to prove that he had any. But at any rate he was not a saint or a would-be 
saint: he was a human being, and in some ways not a very good one. It is clear, for instance, that he liked 
to stand well with the rich and powerful, and was capable of flattering them in the most servile way. He is 
also noticeably cautious, not to say cowardly, in his manner of uttering unpopular opinions. Almost never 
does he put a subversive or sceptical remark into the mouth of a character likely to be identified with 
himself. Throughout his plays the acute social critics, the people who are not taken in by accepted 
fallacies, are buffoons, villains, lunatics or persons who are shamming insanity or are in a state of violent 
hysteria. Lear is a play in which this tendency is particularly well-marked. It contains a great deal of 
veiled social criticism—a point Tolstoy misses—but it is all uttered either by the Fool, by Edgar when he 
is pretending to be mad, or by Lear during his bouts of madness. In his sane moments Lear hardly ever 


makes an intelligent remark. And yet the very fact that Shakespeare had to use these subterfuges shows 
how widely his thoughts ranged. He could not restrain himself from commenting on almost everything, 
although he put on a series of masks in order to do so. If one has once read Shakespeare with attention, it 
is not easy to go a day without quoting him, because there are not many subjects of major importance that 
he does not discuss or at least mention somewhere or other, in his unsystematic but illuminating way. Even 
the irrelevancies that litter every one of his plays—the puns and riddles, the lists of names, the scraps of 
reportage like the conversation of the carriers in Henry IV, the bawdy jokes, the rescued fragments of 
forgotten ballads—are merely the products of excessive vitality. Shakespeare was not a philosopher or a 
scientist, but he did have curiosity: he loved the surface of the earth and the process of life—which, it 
should be repeated, is not the same thing as wanting to have a good time and stay alive as long as 
possible. Of course, it is not because of the quality of his thought that Shakespeare has survived, and he 
might not even be remembered as a dramatist if he had not also been a poet. His main hold on us is 
through language. How deeply Shakespeare himself was fascinated by the music of words can probably 
be inferred from the speeches of Pistol. What Pistol says is largely meaningless, but if one considers his 
lines singly they are magnificent rhetorical verse. Evidently, pieces of resounding nonsense ("Let floods 
o'erswell, and fiends for food howl on," etc.) were constandy appearing in Shakespeare's mind of their 
own accord, and a half-lunatic character had to be invented to use them up. Tolstoy's native tongue was 
not English, and one cannot blame him for being unmoved by Shakespeare's verse, nor even, perhaps, for 
refusing to believe that Shakespeare's skill with words was something out of the ordinary. But he would 
also have rejected the whole notion of valuing poetry for its texture—valuing it, that is to say, as a kind of 
music. If it could somehow have been proved to him that his whole explanation of Shakespeare's rise to 
fame is mistaken, that inside the English-speaking world, at any rate, Shakespeare's popularity is genuine, 
that his mere skill in placing one syllable beside another has given acute pleasure to generation after 
generation of English-speaking people—all this would not have been counted as a merit to Shakespeare, 
but rather the contrary. It would simply have been one more proof of the irreligious, earthbound nature of 
Shakespeare and his admirers. Tolstoy would have said that poetry is to be judged by its meaning, and 
that seductive sounds merely cause false meanings to go unnoticed. At every level it is the same issue— 
this world against the next: and certainly the music of words is something that belongs to this world. 

A sort of doubt has always hung round the character of Tolstoy, as round the character of 
Gandhi. He was not a vulgar hypocrite, as some people declared him to be, and he would probably have 
imposed even greater sacrifices on himself than he did, if he had not been interfered with at every step by 
the people surrounding him, especially his wife. But on the other hand it is dangerous to take such men as 
Tolstoy at their disciples' valuation. There is always the possibility—the probability, indeed—that they 
have done no more than exchange one form of egoism for another. Tolstoy renounced wealth, fame and 
privilege; he abjured violence in all its forms and was ready to suffer for doing so; but it is not so easy to 
believe that he abjured the principle 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 murmur 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 both 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 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. 

If we are to believe what he says in his pamphlet, Tolstoy had never been able to see any 
merit in Shakespeare, and was always astonished to find that his fellow-writers, Turgenev, Fet and others, 
thought differently. We may be sure that in his unregenerate days Tolstoy's conclusion would have been: 
"You like Shakespeare—I don't. Let's leave it at that." Later, when his perception that it takes all sorts to 
make a world had deserted him, he came to think of Shakespeare's writings as something dangerous to 
himself. The more pleasure people took in Shakespeare, the less they would listen to Tolstoy. Therefore 
nobody must be allowed to enjoy Shakespeare, just as nobody must be allowed to drink alcohol or smoke 
tobacco. True, Tolstoy would not prevent them by force. He is not demanding that the police shall 
impound every copy of Shakespeare's works. But he will do dirt on Shakespeare, if he can. He will try to 
get inside the mind of every lover of Shakespeare and kill his enjoyment by every trick he can think of, 
including—as I have shown in my summary of his pamphlet—arguments which are self-contradictory or 
even doubtfully honest. 

But finally the most striking thing is how little difference it all makes. As I said earlier, one 
cannot answer Tolstoy's pamphlet, at least on its main counts. There is no argument by which one can 
defend a poem. It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible. And if this test is valid, I think the 
verdict in Shakespeare's case must be "not guilty." Like every other writer, Shakespeare will be forgotten 
sooner or later, but it is unlikely that a heavier indictment will ever be brought against him Tolstoy was 
perhaps the most admired literary man of his age, and he was certainly not its least able pamphleteer. He 
turned all his powers of denunciation against Shakespeare, like all the guns of a battleship roaring 
simultaneously. And with what result? Forty years later, Shakespeare is still there, completely unaffected, 
and of the attempt to demolish him nothing remains except the yellowing pages of a pamphlet which 
hardly anyone has read, and which would be forgotten altogether if Tolstoy had not also been the author of 
War and Peace and Anna Karenina. 


Writers and Leviathan 

Politics and Letters, Summer 1948 

The position of the writer in an age of State control is a subject that has already been fairly largely 
discussed, although most of the evidence that might be relevant is not yet available. In this place I do not 
want to express an opinion either for or against State patronage of the arts, but merely to point out that 
what kind of State rules over us must depend pardy on the prevailing intellectual atmosphere: meaning, in 
this context, pardy on the attitude of writers and artists themselves, and on their willingness or otherwise 
to keep the spirit of Liberalism alive. If we find ourselves in ten years' time cringing before somebody 
like Zdhanov, it will probably be because that is what we have deserved. Obviously there are strong 
tendencies towards totalitarianism at work within the English literary intelligentsia already. But here I am 
not concerned with any organised and conscious movement such as Communism, but merely with the 
effect, on people of good will, of political thinking and the need to take sides politically. 

This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, 
etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do 
not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about 
sinking ships. But not only is our subject-matter narrowed, but our whole attitude towards literature is 
coloured by loyalties which we at least intermittently realise to be non-literary. I often have the feeling 
that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted 
standards whatever—any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a 
book is "good" or "bad"—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 rationalisation. 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—books for or against 
Soviet Russia, for or against Zionism, for or against the Catholic Church, etc.—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. 

Of course, the invasion of literature by politics was bound to happen. It must have happened, 
even if the special problem of totalitarianism had never arisen, because we have developed a sort of 
compunction which our grandparents did not have, an awareness of the enormous injustice and misery of 
the world, and a guilt-stricken feeling that one ought to be doing something about it, which makes a purely 
aesthetic attitude towards life impossible. No one, now, could devote himself to literature as single- 
mindedly as Joyce or Henry James. But unfortunately, to accept political responsibility now means 
yielding oneself over to orthodoxies and "party lines," with all the timidity and dishonesty that that 
implies. As against the Victorian writers, we have the disadvantage of living among clear-cut political 
ideologies and of usually knowing at a glance what thoughts are heretical. 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 needs 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 words 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 anti-semitism. 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 which prevailed twenty years ago, when the Criterion and (on a lower level) the London 
Mercury were the dominant literary magazines. For at the least its implied objective is a viable form of 
society which large numbers of people actually want. But it also has its own falsities which, because they 
cannot be admitted, make it impossible for certain questions to be seriously discussed. 

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. This perfectionist ideology has persisted in nearly all of us, and 
it is in the name of it that we protest when (for instance) a Labour government votes huge incomes to the 
King's daughters or shows hesitation about nationalising steel. But we have also accumulated in our minds 
a whole series of unadmitted contradictions, as a result of successive bumps against reality. 

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 regime as "Socialist," while silently 
recognising 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 words 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. 

Left governments almost invariably disappoint their supporters because, even when the 
prosperity which they have promised is achievable, there is always need of an uncomfortable transition 
period about which little has been said beforehand. At this moment we see our own government, in its 


desperate economic straits, fighting in effect against its own past propaganda. The crisis that we are now 
in is not a sudden unexpected calamity, like an earthquake, and it was not caused by the war, but merely 
hastened by it. Decades ago it could be foreseen that something of this kind was going to happen. Ever 
since the nineteenth century our national income, dependent pardy on interest from foreign investments, 
and on assured markets and cheap raw materials in colonial countries, had been extremely precarious. It 
was certain that, sooner or later, something would go wrong and we should be forced to make our exports 
balance our imports: and when that happened the British standard of living, including the working-class 
standard, was bound to fall, at least temporarily. Yet the left-wing parties, even when they were 
vociferously anti-imperialist, never made these facts clear. On occasion they were ready to admit that the 
British workers had benefited, to some extent, by the looting of Asia and Africa, but they always allowed 
it to appear that we could give up our loot and yet in some way contrive to remain prosperous. Quite 
largely, indeed, the workers were won over to Socialism by being told that they were exploited, whereas 
the brute truth was that, in world terms, they were exploiters. Now, to all appearances, the point has been 
reached when the working-class living-standard cannot be maintained, let alone raised. Even if we 
squeeze the rich out of existence, the mass of the people must either consume less or produce more. Or am 
I exaggerating the mess we are in? I may be, and I should be glad to find myself mistaken. But the point I 
wish to make is that this question, among people who are faithful to the left ideology, cannot be genuinely 
discussed. The lowering of wages and raising of working hours are felt to be inherendy 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 national income. 

To accept an orthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions. Take for instance the 
fact, which came out in Mr. Winkler's essay in this series, 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 industrialisation, 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 perfecdy 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 corner 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. 

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. This applies equally to movements like Pacifism and 
Personalism, which claim to be outside the ordinary political struggle. Indeed, the mere sound of words 
ending in -ism seems to bring with it the smell of propaganda. 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, as I have said already, 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 recognise 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. I do not think that he has the right, merely on the score of his sensibilities, to 
shirk the ordinary dirty work of politics. Just as much as anyone else, he should be prepared to deliver 
lectures in draughty halls, to chalk pavements, to canvass voters, to distribute leaflets, even to fight in 
civil wars if it seems necessary. 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 ideology. 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 to-day, just as it was a bad sign if he was not suspected of Communist 
sympathies twenty years ago. 

But does all this mean that a writer should not only refuse to be dictated to by political 
bosses, but also that he should refrain from writing about politics? Once again, certainly not! There is no 
reason why he should not write in the most crudely political way, if he wishes to. Only he should do so as 
an individual, an outsider, at the most an unwelcome guerrilla on the flank of a regular army. This attitude 
is quite compatible with ordinary political usefulness. It is reasonable, for example, to be willing to fight 
in a war because one thinks the war ought to be won, and at the same time to refuse to write war 
propaganda. 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 then the remedy is not to 
falsify one's impulses, but to remain silent. 

To suggest that a creative writer, in a time of conflict, must split his life into two 
compartments, may seem defeatist or frivolous: yet in practice I do not see what else he can do. To lock 
yourself up in the ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party 
machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as writer. We feel this dilemma to be a 
painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading 
business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that every choice, even every political choice, is 
between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this 
belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is 
the less, 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. Even a general election is not 
exactly a pleasant or edifying spectacle. If you have to take part in such things—and I think you do have 
to, unless you are armoured by old age or stupidity or hypocrisy—then you also have to keep part of 
yourself inviolate. 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 connection 
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 that politicians ever ask of him. If he refuses, that does not mean that he is condemned 
to inactivity. One half of him, which in a sense is the whole of him, can act as resolutely, even as violently 
if need be, as anyone else. But his writings, in so far as they have any value, will always be the product of 
the saner self that stands aside, records the things that are done and admits their necessity, but refuses to 
be deceived as to their true nature. 


Review of The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene 

The New Yorker, July 17, 1948 

A fairly large proportion of the distinguished novels of the last few decades have been written by 
Catholics and have even been describable as Catholic novels. One reason for this is that the conflict not 
only between this world and the next world but between sanctity and goodness is a fruitful theme of which 
the ordinary, unbelieving writer cannot make use. Graham Greene used it once successfully, in "The 
Power and the Glory,” and once, with very much more doubtful success, in "Brighton Rock." His latest 
book, "The Heart of the Matter" (Viking), is, to put it as politely as possible, not one of his best, and gives 
the impression of having been mechanically constructed, the familiar conflict being set out like an 
algebraic equation, with no attempt at psychological probability. 

Here is the outline of the story: The time is 1942 and the place is a West African British 
colony, unnamed but probably the Gold Coast. A certain Major Scobie, Deputy Commissioner of Police 
and a Catholic convert, finds a letter bearing a German address hidden in the cabin of the captain of a 
Portuguese ship. The letter turns out to be a private one and completely harmless, but it is, of course, 
Scobie's duty to hand it over to higher authority. However, the pity he feels for the Portuguese captain is 
too much for him, and he destroys the letter and says nothing about it. Scobie, it is explained to us, is a 
man of almost excessive conscientiousness. He does not drink, take bribes, keep Negro mistresses, or 
indulge in bureaucratic intrigue, and he is, in fact, disliked on all sides because of his uprightness, like 
Aristides the Just. His leniency toward the Portuguese captain is his first lapse. After it, his life becomes 
a sort of fable on the theme of "Oh, what a tangled web we weave," and in every single instance it is the 
goodness of his heart that leads him astray. Actuated at the start by pity, he has a love affair with a girl 
who has been rescued from a torpedoed ship. He continues with the affair largely out of a sense of duty, 
since the girl will go to pieces morally if abandoned; he also lies about her to his wife, so as to spare her 
the pangs of jealousy. Since he intends to persist in his adultery, he does not go to confession, and in order 
to lull his wife's suspicions he tells her that he has gone. This involves him in the truly fearful act of taking 
the Sacrament while in a state of mortal sin. By this time, there are other complications, all caused in the 
same manner, and Scobie finally decides that the only way out is through the unforgivable sin of suicide. 
Nobody else must be allowed to suffer through his death; it will be so arranged as to look like an 
accident. As it happens, he bungles one detail, and the fact that he has committed suicide becomes known. 
The book ends with a Catholic priest's hinting, with doubtful orthodoxy, that Scobie is perhaps not 
damned. Scobie, however, had not entertained any such hope. White all through, with a stiff upper lip, he 
had gone to what he believed to be certain damnation out of pure gentlemanliness. 

I have not parodied the plot of the book. Even when dressed up in realistic details, it is just 
as ridiculous as I have indicated. The thing most obviously wrong with it is that Scobie's motives, 
assuming one could believe in them, do not adequately explain his actions. Another question that comes 
up is: Why should this novel have its setting in West Africa? Except that one of the characters is a Syrian 
trader, the whole thing might as well be happening in a London suburb. The Africans exist only as an 
occasionally mentioned background, and the thing that would actually be in Scobie's mind the whole time 
—the hostility between black and white, and the struggle against the local nationalist movement—is not 
mentioned at all. Indeed, although we are shown his thoughts in considerable detail, he seldom appears to 
think about his work, and then only of trivial aspects of it, and never about the war, although the date is 
1942. All he is interested in is his own progress toward damnation. The improbability of this shows up 


against the colonial setting, but it is an improbability that is present in "Brighton Rock" as well, and that is 
bound to result from foisting theological preoccupations upon simple people anywhere. 

The central idea of the book is that it is better, spiritually higher, to be an erring Catholic than 
a virtuous pagan. Graham Greene would probably subscribe to the statement of Maritain, made apropos 
of Leon Bloy, that "there is but one sadness—not to be a saint.” A saying of Pegu^s is quoted on the tide 
page of the book to the effect that the sinner is "at the very heart of Christianity" and knows more of 
Christianity than anyone else does, except the saint. All such sayings contain or can be made to contain, 
the fairly sinister suggestion that ordinary human decency is of no value and that any one sin is no worse 
than any other sin. In addition, it is impossible not to feel a sort of snobbishness in Mr. Greene's attitude, 
both here and in his other books written from an explicitly Catholic standpoint. He appears to share the 
idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingue in 
being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only, since 
the others, the non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty, like the beasts that perish. We are 
carefully informed that Catholics are no better than anybody else; they even, perhaps, have a tendency to 
be worse, since their temptations are greater. In modern Catholic novels, in both France and England, it 
is, indeed, the fashion to include bad priests, or at least inadequate priests, as a change from Father 
Brown. (I imagine that one major objective of young English Catholic writers is not to resemble 
Chesterton.) But all the while—drunken, lecherous, criminal, or damned outright—the Catholics retain 
their superiority, since they alone know the meaning of good and evil. Incidentally, it is assumed in "The 
Heart of the Matter,” and in most of Mr. Greene's other books, that no one outside the Catholic Church has 
the most elementary knowledge of Christian doctrine. 

This cult of the sanctified sinner seems to me to be frivolous, and underneath it there 
probably lies a weakening of belief, for when people really believed in Hell, they were not so fond of 
striking graceful attitudes on its brink. More to the point, by trying to clothe theological speculations in 
flesh and blood, it produces psychological absurdities. In "The Power and the Glory," the struggle 
between this-worldly and other-worldly values is convincing because it is not occurring inside one 
person. On the one side, there is the priest, a poor creature in some ways but made heroic by his belief in 
his own thaumaturgic powers; on the other side, there is the lieutenant, representing human justice and 
material progress, and also a heroic figure after his fashion. They can respect each other, perhaps, but not 
understand each other. The priest, at any rate, is not credited with any very complex thoughts. In "Brighton 
Rock," on the other hand, the central situation is incredible, since it presupposes that the most brutishly 
stupid person can, merely by having been brought up a Catholic, be capable of great intellectual subtlety. 
Pinkie, the racecourse gangster, is a species of satanist, while his still more limited girl friend 
understands and even states the difference between the categories "right and wrong" and "good and evil." 
In, for example, Mauriac's "Therese" sequence, the spiritual conflict does not outrage probability, because 
it is not pretended that Therese is a normal person. She is a chosen spirit, pursuing her salvation over a 
long period and by a difficult route, like a patient stretched out on the psychiatrist's sofa. To take an 
opposite instance, Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," in spite of improbabilities, which are 
traceable partly to the book's being written in the first person, succeeds because the situation is itself a 
normal one. The Catholic characters bump up against problems they would meet with in real life; they do 
not suddenly move onto a different intellectual plane as soon as their religious beliefs are involved. 
Scobie is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into 
the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is 
mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed 
in Hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women. And 


one might add that if he were the kind of man we are told he is—that is, a man whose chief characteristic 
is a horror of causing pain—he would not be an officer in a colonial police force. 

There are other improbabilities, some of which arise out of Mr. Greene's method of handling 
a love affair. Every novelist has his own conventions, and, just as in an E. M. Forster novel there is a 
strong tendency for the characters to die suddenly without sufficient cause, so in a Graham Greene novel 
there is a tendency for people to go to bed together almost at sight and with no apparent pleasure to either 
party. Often this is credible enough, but in "The Heart of the Matter" its effect is to weaken a motive that, 
for the purposes of the story, ought to be a very strong one. Again, there is the usual, perhaps unavoidable, 
mistake of making everyone too highbrow. It is not only that Major Scobie is a theologian. His wife, who 
is represented as an almost complete fool, reads poetry, while the detective who is sent by the Field 
Security Corps to spy on Scobie even writes poetry. Here one is up against the fact that it is not easy for 
most modern writers to imagine the mental processes of anyone who is not a writer. 

It seems a pity, when one remembers how admirably he has written of Africa elsewhere, that 
Mr. Greene should have made just this book out of his wartime African experiences. The fact that the 
book is set in Africa while the action takes place almost entirely inside a tiny white community gives it an 
air of triviality. However, one must not carp too much. It is pleasant to see Mr. Greene starting up again 
after so long a silence, and in postwar England it is a remarkable feat for a novelist to write a novel at all. 
At any rate, Mr. Greene has not been permanently demoralized by the habits acquired during the war, like 
so many others. But one may hope that his next book will have a different theme, or, if not, that he will at 
least remember that a perception of the vanity of earthly things, though it may be enough to get one into 
Heaven, is not sufficient equipment for the writing of a novel. 


Reflections on Gandhi 

Partisan Review, January 1949 

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied 
to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi's case the questions one feels inclined to ask 
are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity—by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old 
man, sitting on a praying-mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power—and to what extent did he 
compromise his own principles by entering into politics, which of their nature are inseparable from 
coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi's acts and writings in 
immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant. But this 
partial autobiography,- which ends in the nineteen-twenties, is strong evidence in his favor, all the more 
because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his life and reminds one that inside 
the saint, or near-saint, there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a 
brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a business man. 

At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening 
chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which 
Gandhi himself, at that time, did not. The things that one associated with him—homespun cloth, "soul 
forces” and vegetarianism—were unappealing, and his medievalist program was obviously not viable in 
a backward, starving, over-populated country. It was also apparent that the British were making use of 
him, or thought they were making use of him. Stricdy speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but 
since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence—which, from the British point of view, 
meant preventing any effective action whatever—he could be regarded as "our man." In private this was 
sometimes cynically admitted. The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon 
them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, 
would actually have taken their money away. How reliable such calculations are in the long run is 
doubtful; as Gandhi himself says, "in the end deceivers deceive only themselves"; but at any rate the 
gendeness with which he was nearly always handled was due pardy to the feeling that he was useful. The 
British Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in effect turning his 
non-violence against a different conqueror. 

But I could see even then that the British officials who spoke of him with a mixture of 
amusement and disapproval also genuinely liked and admired him, after a fashion. Nobody ever suggested 
that he was corrupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated by fear or 
malice. In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to apply high standards, so that some of his 
virtues have passed almost unnoticed. For instance, it is clear even from the autobiography that his natural 
physical courage was quite outstanding: the manner of his death was a later illustration of this, for a 
public man who attached any value to his own skin would have been more adequately guarded. Again, he 
seems to have been quite free from that maniacal suspiciousness which, as E. M. Forster rightly says in A 
Passage to India, is the besetting Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice. Although no doubt he was 
shrewd enough in detecting dishonesty, he seems wherever possible to have believed that other people 
were acting in good faith and had a better nature through which they could be approached. And though he 
came of a poor middle-class family, started life rather unfavorably, and was probably of unimpressive 
physical appearance, he was not afflicted by envy or by the feeling of inferiority. Color feeling, when he 
first met it in its worst form in South Africa, seems rather to have astonished him. Even when he was 


fighting what was in effect a color war, he did not think of people in terms of race or status. The governor 
of a province, a cotton millionaire, a half-starved Dravidian cooly, a British private soldier, were all 
equally human beings, to be approached in much the same way. It is noticeable that even in the worst 
possible circumstances, as in South Africa when he was making himself unpopular as the champion of the 
Indian community, he did not lack European friends. 

Written in short lengths for newspaper serialization, the autobiography is not a literary 
masterpiece, but it is the more impressive because of the commonplaceness of much of its material. It is 
well to be reminded that Gandhi started out with the normal ambitions of a young Indian student and only 
adopted his extremist opinions by degrees and, in some cases, rather unwillingly. There was a time, it is 
interesting to learn, when he wore a top hat, took dancing lessons, studied French and Latin, went up the 
Eiffel Tower and even tried to learn the violin—all this with the idea of assimilating European 
civilization as thoroughly as possible. He was not one of those saints who are marked out by their 
phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after 
sensational debaucheries. He makes full confession of the misdeeds of his youth, but in fact there is not 
much to confess. As a frontispiece to the book there is a photograph of Gandhi's possessions at the time of 
his death. The whole outfit could be purchased for about £5, and Gandhi's sins, at least his fleshly sins, 
would make the same sort of appearance if placed all in one heap. A few cigarettes, a few mouthfuls of 
meat, a few annas pilfered in childhood from the maidservant, two visits to a brothel (on each occasion he 
got away without "doing anything"), one narrowly escaped lapse with his landlady in Plymouth, one 
outburst of temper—that is about the whole collection. Almost from childhood onwards he had a deep 
earnestness, an attitude ethical rather than religious, but, until he was about thirty, no very definite sense 
of direction. His first entry into anything describable as public life was made by way of vegetarianism. 
Underneath his less ordinary qualities one feels all the time the solid middle-class business men who 
were his ancestors. One feels that even after he had abandoned personal ambition he must have been a 
resourceful, energetic lawyer and a hardheaded political organizer, careful in keeping down expenses, an 
adroit handler of committees and an indefatigable chaser of subscriptions. His character was an 
extraordinarily mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad, 
and I believe that even Gandhi's worst enemies would admit that he was an interesting and unusual man 
who enriched the world simply by being alive. Whether he was also a lovable man, and whether his 
teachings can have much value for those who do not accept the religious beliefs on which they are 
founded, I have never felt fully certain. 

Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only 
sympathetic to the Western leftwing movement, but were even integrally part of it. Anarchists and 
pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism 
and State violence and ignoring the otherworldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, 
I think, realize that Gandhi's teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all 
things, and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They 
make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be 
escaped from. It is worth considering the disciplines which Gandhi imposed on himself and which— 
though he might not insist on every one of his followers observing every detail—he considered 
indispensable if one wanted to serve either God or humanity. First of all, no meat-eating, and if possible 
no animal food in any form. (Gandhi himself, for the sake of his health, had to compromise on milk, but 
seems to have felt this to be a backsliding.) No alcohol or tobacco, and no spices or condiments, even of 
a vegetable kind, since food should be taken not for its own sake but solely in order to preserve one's 
strength. Secondly, if possible, no sexual intercourse. If sexual intercourse must happen, then it should be 


for the sole purpose of begetting children and presumably at long intervals. Gandhi himself, in his middle 
thirties, took the vow of bramahcharya, which means not only complete chastity but the elimination of 
sexual desire. This condition, it seems, is difficult to attain without a special diet and frequent fasting. 
One of the dangers of milk-drinking is that it is apt to arouse sexual desire. And finally—this is the 
cardinal point—for the seeker after goodness there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves 
whatever. 


Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because "friends react on one another" and 
through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one 
is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual person. 
This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be 
reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people 
more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way 
to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his 
wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the 
threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi—with, one gathers, a good deal of moral 
pressure in the opposite direction—always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of 
committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, 
whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain 
alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the 
sense which—I think—most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is 
that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that 
one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is 
prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's 
love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must 
avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but 
one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that "non¬ 
attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it 
because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful 
whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who 
achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it 
to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "nonattachment" is a desire 
to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But 
it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is "higher." The point is 
that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and 
"progressives," from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man. 

However, Gandhi's pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other teachings. Its 
motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it was a definite technique, a method, capable of 
producing desired political results. Gandhi's attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, 
first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without 
hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred. It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, 
lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting 
back, and the like. Gandhi objected to "passive resistance" as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it 
seems, the word means "firmness in the truth." In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the 
British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914—18. Even 
after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to 


take sides. He did not—indeed, since his whole political life centered round a struggle for national 
independence, he could not—take the sterile and dishonest tine of pretending that in every war both sides 
are exacdy the same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, tike most Western pacifists, 
specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had 
a clear obligation to answer was: "What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If 
not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?" I must say that I have never heard, from 
any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of 
the "you're another" type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 
and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer's Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, 
Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused 
the world and the people of Germany to Hider's violence." After the war he justified himself: the Jews 
had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significandy. One has the impression that this 
attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you 
are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 
1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost 
several million deaths. 

At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not 
understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British 
government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he 
was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in 
"arousing the world," which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is 
difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime 
disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of 
assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into 
being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this 
moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practice civil 
disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by 
the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference. But let it be granted that non-violent 
resistance can be effective against one's own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how 
does one put it into practice internationally? Gandhi's various conflicting statements on the late war seem 
to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist 
or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with 
individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, 
needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with 
lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hider sane? And is it not possible for one whole 
culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole 
nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a 
factor in international politics? 

These and kindred questions need discussion, and need it urgendy, in the few years left to us 
before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin to fly. It seems doubtful whether civilization can 
stand another major war, and it is at least thinkable that the way out ties through non-violence. It is 
Gandhi's virtue that he would have been ready to give honest consideration to the kind of question that I 
have raised above; and, indeed, he probably did discuss most of these questions somewhere or other in 
his innumerable newspaper articles. One feels of him that there was much that he did not understand, but 
not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking. I have never been able to feel 


much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I 
believe that his life was a failure. It is curious that when he was assassinated, many of his warmest 
admirers exclaimed sorrowfully that he had lived just long enough to see his life work in ruins, because 
India was engaged in a civil war which had always been foreseen as one of the by-products of the transfer 
of power. But it was not in trying to smoothe down Hindu-Moslem rivalry that Gandhi had spent his life. 
His main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after all been attained. As usual, the 
relevant facts cut across one another. On the one hand, the British did get out of India without fighting, an 
event which very few observers indeed would have predicted until about a year before it happened. On 
the other hand, this was done by a Labor government, and it is certain that a Conservative government, 
especially a government headed by Churchill, would have acted differently. But if, by 1945, there had 
grown up in Britain a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence, how far was this due to 
Gandhi's personal influence? And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent 
and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and 
without hatred, disinfected the political air? That one even thinks of asking such questions indicates his 
stature. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of 
sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject 
sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi's basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but 
regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how 
clean a smell he has managed to leave behind! 


NOTES 


Charles Dickens 

1. In Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical (1937). 

2. The Scarlet Pimpernel was a romantic novel and play (1905), the first of several stories 
featuring the adventures during the French Revolution of the suave English aristocrat Sir Percy Blakeney, 
who rescued those destined for the guillotine. Their author, Baroness Orczy (Mrs. Montagu Barstow, 
1865-1947), was born in Hungary. 

3. Carmagnole was a worker's jacket originating in Carmagnola, Piedmont. It became 
fashionable among French revolutionaries and was then used to describe a song and a wild dance. The 
first verse of the song pilloried "Madame Veto"—Queen Marie Antoinette—who was accused of 
influencing Louis XVI to exercise this right. 

4. Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) was the author of a number of works of self-improvement; the 
best known is Self-Help: with Illustrations of Conduct & Perseverance (1859). By far the most 
successful of many such books of its time, it and the attitudes it represented have been much castigated. 

5. On his return from a visit to the Soviet Union, Andre Gide (1869-1951), prolific French 
author and editor, wrote a somewhat disillusioned account of his experiences there, Retour de I'URSS 
(1936). 


6. Bartram wrote novels and folklore verses. The People of Clopton: A Poaching Romance 
was published in 1897. 

7. Orley Farm (1862) by Anthony Trollope (1815-1882). 

8. "Ye Mariners of England," by Thomas Campbell (1777-1844); "The Charge of the Light 
Brigade," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). 

9. Orwell probably had in mind Bransby Williams (1870-1961), the "Hamlet of the Halls," 
whose impersonations of Dickens's characters and incidents were popular in music halls and on records; 
they anticipated the one-man Dickens recitals by legitimate actors in the latter part of the twentieth 
century. 


10. Frank Fairleigh, or Scenes from the Life of a Private Pupil (1850) was by Francis 
Edward Smedley (1818-1864). Mr Verdant Green is a trilogy by Cuthbert Bede (Edward Bradley, 1827- 
1889), made up of The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman (1853), The Further 
Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, an Oxford Undergraduate (1854), and Mr Verdant Green Married and 
Done For (1857). The books were frequently reprinted, with illustrations by the author. Mrs Caudle's 
Curtain Lectures (1846; reprinted from Punch) was by Douglas Jerrold, a prolific dramatist (1803-185 

7). 


Boys' Weeklies 




1. Boy's Own Paper (not Boys', as sometimes printed), founded in 1879 by the Religious 
Tract Society, was a weekly to 1912, then monthly. It oudived Orwell. Chums, founded in 1892, was 
published by Cassell as a rival to Boy's Own Paper. 

2. In fact, the stories were not all the work of "Frank Richards" (Charles Hamilton, 1876- 
1961). He is credited with 1,380 of the 1,683 stories in Magnet; there were some twenty-five substitute 
writers. Nevertheless, he wrote some 5,000 stories, "created” more than a hundred schools, used two 
dozen pen names (including Hilda Richards, for girls-school stories, and Martin Clifford). He probably 
published some 100 million words. 

3. John Edward Gunby Hadath (c. 1880-1954), author of Schoolboy Grit (1913), Carey of 
Cobhouse (1928), and other school stories. 

4. Desmond Francis Talbot Coke (1879-1931), author of The House Prefect (1908) and 
other books for children. 

5. Officers' Training Corps, the army cadet force maintained in many public schools. 

6. "Hilda Richards" is Frank Richards. 

7. Mons, in Belgium, marked the limit of a British advance in August 1914. The German 
army under von Kluck was badly mauled, but success was short-lived. In what became a famous fighting 
retreat, the British II Corps held the Germans at the costly battle of Le Cateau. 

8. Air Raid Precautions. 

9. Ruby M. Ayres (1883-1955) was a prolific and popular romantic novelist and short-story 
writer, many of whose novels were made into films. Despite writing in this vein, she gave down-to-earth 
advice in her column in Oracle, the more convincing, perhaps, because her stories were so widely read. 

10. The Navy League was founded in 1895 to foster national interest in the Royal Navy. 
Orwell was a member when he was seven years old. 

11. Sapper was Herman Cyril McNeile (1888-1937), adventure-story writer and creator of 
the popular hero Bulldog Drummond. Ian Hay (John Hay Beith) (1876-1952) was a Scottish author and 
dramatist. His The First Hundred Thousand (see "Inside the Whale," 367, n. 35) gave a propagandist 
account of Kitchener's First Army in France at the beginning of World War I and was widely read. 

12. William Ewart Berry (1879-1954; Baron Camrose, 1929; Viscount, 1941) began his 
working life as a reporter and rose to control (with his brother, Lord Kemsley) a newspaper and 
periodical empire that included the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, twenty-two 
provincial newspapers, and some seventy periodicals, including Women's Journal and Boxing. He was 
controller of press relations at the Ministry of Information for a short time in 1939. 

13. Chapaiev (1935) was directed by the Vassiliev Brothers. 

Inside the Whale 

1. Tarr, by Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), was first serialized in the Egoist, April 


1916—November 1917. It was expanded and published as a book in 1918. 

2. A series of books by Ernest William Hornung (1866-1921), novelist and journalist, 
featured Raffles, an elegant, socially acceptable "amateur cracksman," as Orwell described him in his 
essay "Raffles and Miss Blandish," Horizon, October 1944; see 232. 

3. The House with the Green Shutters (1901) was the only novel of George Douglas (1869- 
1902), pen name of George Douglas Brown. 

4. Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (1932), by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (Louis-Ferdinand 
Destouches; 1894-1961), was published in English as Journey to the End of the Night (1934). 

5. Little Women (1868-69) was by Fouisa M. Alcott (1832-1888); Helen's Babies (1876), 
by John Habberton (1842-1921). "Riding Down from Bangor" (Bangor, Maine) is an American folk song. 

6. Charles Bedaux (1887-1944), U.S. efficiency engineer, devised the "Bedaux unit" or point 
system to assess the amount of work an individual should do in a specific time. The resultant speed-up of 
industry in the 1930s on both sides of the Atlantic was opposed by the unions. In Fondon, it led to a major 
bus strike in 1937. Bedaux, who had been born in France, returned there in 1937, collaborated with the 
Nazis, was arrested by U.S. troops, and charged with treason. He committed suicide. 

7. Max and the White Phagocytes, by Henry Miller (1891-1980), was published in 1938. 
Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934; Black Spring, in 1936; and Tropic of Capricorn, in 1939. 

8. All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), by Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970). Le Feu: 
journal d'une escouade (1916), by Henri Barbusse (1873-1935), was published in English as Under 
Fire: Story of a Squad (1917). It won the Prix Goncourt. A Farewell to Arms (1929) was by Ernest 
Hemingway (1899-1961); Death of a Hero (1929, expurgated; 1965, unexpurgated), by Richard 
Aldington (1892-1962); Good-bye to All That, an Autobiography (1929), by Robert Graves (1895- 
1985); Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), by Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967); A Subaltern on the 
Somme in 1916 (1927), by Mark VII (Max Plowman). Plowman was among those who encouraged 
Orwell in his early days as a writer. 

9. The Booster, a monthly magazine in French and English, was edited by, among others, 
Alfred Perles, Fawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, and William Saroyan, September 1937— Easter 1939 (as 
Delta from April 1938). One of those who assisted was Ana'is Nin; see n. 29 below. Orwell had 
reviewed The Booster in New English Weekly in 1937. 

10. A. E. Housman (1859-1936), classical scholar and poet. A Shropshire Lad was 
published in 1896. The text printed in this essay is that of The Collected Poems (1939). 

11. Richard Jefferies (1848-1887), a naturalist and writer, drew his inspiration from rural 
England. William Henry Hudson (1841-1922), travel and fiction writer. 

12. "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,” by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), was published twice 
in 1912, in Basileon and in Poetry Review. 

13. Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887-1955) wrote novels associated with rural England, especially 


Sussex. 


14. John Masefield (1878-1967), poet and dramatist, also wrote about the war. The 
Everlasting Mercy (1911) tells how a Quaker, Miss Bourne, saves the soul of the debauched Saul Kane, 
to whom Orwell refers a few lines below. 

15. Orwell quotes this stanza from Last Poems (1922) by A. E. Housman; see n. 10. 

16. George Norman Douglas(s) (1868-1952), novelist and travel writer. In fact, much of his 
small output of fiction was published after the outbreak of war in 1914, notably South Wind (1917), 
considered shocking in its day. 

17. John Squire (1884-1958), literary editor of The New Statesman, 1913-1919, founded 
the monthly London Mercury (1919-1939), which he edited from 1919 to 1934. Philip Gibbs (1877- 
1967), prolific novelist and journalist, also wrote much on national issues, including the war, and was a 
war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle. Hugh Walpole (1884-1941), 
popular novelist, was the author of Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1911) and The Herries Chronicle, in five 
volumes (1930-1940). 

18. The reference to "eagles and of crumpets" is obscure. Possibly Orwell had in mind Psalm 
103, 5, in the version in The Book of Common Prayer: "Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things: 
making thee young and lusty like an eagle." 

19. Told by an Idiot (1923), by (Dame Emilie) Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), a prolific 

novelist. 


20. Of Human Bondage (1915), by W Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). 

21. Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), a poet, dramatist, and critic. 

22. See The Road to Wigan Pier. 

23. The first line of "Poem No. 10" in The Magnetic Mountain (1933), by Cecil Day Lewis 
(IC)04-1972). 

24. Stephen Spender (1909-1995, Kt. 1983), poet, novelist, critic, and translator. 

25. Edward Falaise Upward (1903—), a novelist. 

26. Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was with Orwell at St. Cyprian's and Eton. They met again 
in 1935, and were associated with a number of literary activities, particularly Horizon, which Connolly 
edited. 


27. By Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), published in 1853. 

28. James M. Barrie (1860-1937), a popular Scottish novelist and dramatist. George 
Warwick Deeping (1877-1950), a popular novelist, is, with Ethel M. Dell (1881-1939), the object of 
Gordon Comstock's contempt in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, chapter I. (See also n. 2, 374) 


29. Ana'is Nin (1903-1977), novelist and diarist, with a special interest in psychology, was 
born in Paris, where she assisted in editing The Booster (see n. 9 above). Her diary was published 1966- 


1974. 


30. This essay, "Meditation on El Greco," by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963 ), appeared in his 
Music at Night (1931). 

31. Job, xxiii, 15, though it continues, "but I will continue my own ways before him." 

32. "Sketch of a Marxist Interpretation of Literature," in The Mind in Chains (1937), edited 
by C. Day Lewis. 

33. Minuit (Midnight in English) (1936) by Julian Green (1900-1999). Green was born in 
Paris of American parents and became a prolific Lrench novelist. Orwell reviewed his Personal Record 
1928-1939. 


34. E. M. Forster (1879-1970) broadcast for Orwell on a number of occasions in the BBC's 
service to India. Among his novels were Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905 ; New York, 1920), A Room 
with a View (1908; New York, 1911), and Howards End (1910). His critical works include Aspects of 
the Novel (1927), Abinger Harvest (1936), and Two Cheers for Democracy^ 1951). After the war, 
Forster supported the Freedom Defence Committee, of which Orwell was vice chairman. 

35. The First Hundred Thousand, Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of "K(I)" 
(Kitchener's First Army, 1915) by Ian Hay; see "Boys' Weeklies," 364, n. 11. Horatio Bottomley (1860- 
1933), politician, entrepreneur, and swindler, founded the Financial Times in 1888 and the popular 
weekly John Bull (1906-1958), and was its first editor. He was a Liberal MP, 1906-1912 and 1918- 
1922. He recruited vigorously and unscrupulously for the services during the war and raised money, 
ostensibly to further the conduct of the war and to provide for those who suffered in its cause, through War 
Savings Certificates. These certificates proved fraudulent. He was tried and sentenced to seven years' 
penal servitude in 1922. 

36. Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), poet, novelist, and critic. Michael Fraenkel (1896- 
1957) was a novelist. 

37. Jack Kahane (1887-1939), author and publisher, lived in Paris between the wars and 
founded Obelisk Press there. He fostered the work of authors regarded as commercially risky either for 
fear of censorship or because of limited appeal. Among those he published were Henry Miller, Cyril 
Connolly, James Joyce (poetry and excerpts from Finnegans Wake), and Lawrence Durrell. Many of his 
choices became classics. 

Film Review: The Great Dictator 

1. Alain (735-804), theologian, adviser to Charlemagne: "The voice of the people is the 
voice of God." 

Wells, Hitler and the World State 

1. Viscount Sankey (1866-1948) was a judge of the King's Bench, 1914-1928; Lord 


Chancellor, 1929-1935. In 1919 he had chaired a Parliamentary Commission into the state of the coal 
industry that recommended its nationalization. H. G. Wells, in his Guide to the New World: A Handbook 
of Constructive World Revolution (1941), wrote: "There has been a worldwide need for some formula 
upon which mankind can unite against Air Terrorism and the present frantic waste of the world's 
resources. Such a Declaration was drawn up last year [1940] after a world debate, by a committee of 
responsible British people under the presidency of that great lawyer, Lord Sankey. It stands available 
today. It could be adopted as a universal fundamental law so soon as war conditions cease" (chapter 12, 
"Declaration of Rights," 48). He then outlined the propositions of the Sankey Declaration: 1. Right to 
Live; 2. Protection of Minors; 3. Duty to the Community; 4. Right to Knowledge; 5. Freedom of Thought 
and Worship; 6. Right to Work; 7. Right in Personal Property; 8. Freedom of Movement; 9. Personal 
Liberty; 10. Freedom from Violence; 11. Right of Law-Making. 

2. Hermann Rauschning (1887-1982) was author of The Revolution of Nihilism (1939) and 
Hitler Speaks (1939). Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) provided Hitler with a quasi-philosophical basis 
for his racist practices in Der Mythus des 20 Jahrhunderts (1930). He was hanged following the 
Nuremberg war crimes trial. Ignazio Silone (1900-1978) was an Italian novelist. Dr. Franz Borkenauwas 
an Austrian sociologist whom Orwell held in high esteem Arthur Koestier (1905-1983) was a novelist 
and essayist. 

The Art of Donald McGill 

1. Horizon reproduced two of McGill's cards, but these have not been reprinted since. In 
one, a soap-box orator advocating temperance is concluding his oration with "Now I have just one tract 
left. What shall I do with it?" A wife is depicted with her hand over a fat man's mouth, stopping his 
answering, and the caption is: "Don't say it George!" In the other, a vastly overweight man who might be a 
bookie, accompanied by a shapely young lady, is seen telling a hotel receptionist, "I and my daughter 
would like adjoining bedrooms!" 

2. Donald McGill (1875-1962) was a real person; compare Orwell's doubts about the 
existence of a Frank Richards in his essay "Boys' Weeklies." He began his career in 1904 when he 
sketched a drawing on the back of a postcard to cheer up a nephew in the hospital. By December 1905, 
Picture Postcard Magazine "picked him out as a designer whose cards would become "widely popular."’ 
One card, no. 1772, designed in 1916, sold over three million copies. It was not of the kind described by 
Orwell, but showed a little girl in a nightdress at which a puppy was tugging; the caption read: "Please, 
Lord, excuse me a minute while I kick Fido!!" He fairly claimed that his cards were not obscene but 
depicted situations with honest vulgarity, and he was depressed by the way his art form was allowed to 
degenerate. See Tonie and Valmai Holt, Picture Postcards of the Golden Age (1971), 91-93, Arthur 
Calder Marshall, Wish You Were Here (1966). Orwell, in commenting that McGill was "a clever 
draughtsman," could not have known that, from 1897 to 1907, McGill worked as an engineering 
draughtsman. 

3. Air Raid Precautions. 

4. An air-raid shelter built in the gardens of individual houses, capable of holding four to six 
people in modest discomfort. It was designed by Sir William Paterson (1874-1956) at the instigation of 
Sir John Anderson (1882-1958; Viscount, 1952) in 1938. More than three million Andersons were built, 
and they are credited with saving many lives. A few have survived as makeshift garden sheds. 


5. Winston Churchill, in addressing the House of Commons, May 13,1940, said, "I would say 
to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, 
tears, and sweat.'" 

6. Ecclesiastes VII: 15-17. 

No, Not One 

1. Ernst vom Rath (as "\bm" in the original) was Third Secretary at the German Embassy in 
Paris. A Jewish youth, Herschel Grynszpan, shot him there on November 7, 1938, and he died of wounds 
on November 9. Violent attacks on Jews and Jewish property—"Kristallnacht"—followed. 

2. The Arandora Star was sunk in the Adantic by a U-boat on July 2, 1940. It was carrying 
1,500 German and Italian internees from Britain to Canada; 613 were drowned. 

3. Matthew XV1II:7 and Romans III: 10. 

Rudyard Kipling 

1. This essay took as its starting point the publication of A Choice of Kipling's Verse, made 
and introduced by T. S. Eliot (December 1941). 

Orwell here, as elsewhere, does not always quote exactly. He doubtless relied on memory, having a good 
knowledge of what he was quoting. These errors are treated in two ways. The original is corrected if the 
error does not seem significant, however slightly, to Orwell's argument or to the impression the words 
might have made upon him. Thus "Hosts" is given its initial capital, as in Kipling. If the form Orwell uses 
might have been important to him, the quote is left uncorrected; the proper reading is in the notes. 

The sources and page references of Kipling's poems quoted by Orwell are from Rudyard Kipling's Verse: 
Definitive Edition (1940; abbreviated to RKV). Dates of poems are provided where given in RKV. 
Reference is also made to Kipling's posthumous autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), and to 
Charles Carrington's Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (1955; Penguin, 1970, to which edition 
reference is made as "Carrington"). 

2. "Recessional," RKV, 328-29, was written after Queen Victoria's Jubilee and published in 
The Times, July 17, 1897. 

3. London and Philadelphia, 1891. The U.S. edition has a happy ending. Kipling maintained 
in his preface that the English edition is "as it was originally conceived and written." 

4. Although Singapore did not surrender until February 15,1942, most of Malaya had already 
been overrun. 

5. Strictly, a peddler, but in the context applied derogatively to those working in commerce in 

India. 

6. "Tommy," RKV, 398-99. 

7. "The Islanders" (1902), RKV, 301-4; Orwell has "and” for "or" and "goal" for "goals." 

8. RKV, 477-78, which has this note: "The more notoriously incompetent commanders used 


to be sent to the town of Stellenbosch, which name presently became a verb." Kipling tells how the 
General "got 'is decorations thick" and "The Staff 'ad D.S.O.'s till we was sick / An' the soldier—'ad the 
work to do again!" 

9. ’"Follow Me 'Ome,'" RKV, 446-47. 

10. "The Sergeant’s Weddin',” RKV, 447-49. 

11. From "For England's Sake" by W E. Henley (1849-1903), who has "you" for Orwell's 
"thee." Kipling had "the greatest admiration for Henley’s verse and prose" ( Something of Myself—SoM 
hereafter—82), and it was Henley who encouraged Kipling by publishing his verse in The Scots 
Observer, beginning with "Danny Deever," February 22, 1890. 

12. "Drums of the Fore and Aft" in Wee Willie Wnkie (Centenary Edition, 1969, 331). It 
occurs in a story that is a parallel to the poem "That Day" (see n. 15 below) and concerns an occasion 
when, contrary to popular belief, British soldiers fled in terror. Kipling teases out why soldiers don't 
follow "their officers into battle" and why they refuse to respond to orders from "those who had no right 
to give them" (330). The context of these words, which may be significant, is: "Armed with imperfect 
knowledge, cursed with the rudiments of an imagination, hampered by the intense selfishness of the lower 
classes, and unsupported by any regimental associations..." It is not surprising, argues Kipling, that such 
soldiers falter before a native attack if surrounded only by similarly raw soldiers and if poorly and 
uncertainly led. 

13. SoM, 56. Kipling continued by saying he endured "on account of Christian doctrine which 
lays down that 'the wages of sin is death."' 

14. He was, however, a close observer. See SoM, chapter VI, "South Africa," and his 
account of the (slightly ironically titled?) "Battle of Kari Siding" (157-61). 

15. "That Day," RKV, 437-38. 

16. "The ’Eathen," RKV, 451-53. "They" are the NCOs—"the backbone of the Army is the 
Non-commissioned Man." 

17. Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade." 

18. Orwell probably refers to Karel Capek (1890-1938), novelist and dramatist, whose play 
R.U.R. (1920) features Rossum's Universal Robots and is usually thought to have introduced the word 
"robot" into general use. However, according to William Harkins's Karel Capek (1962), it was Karel's 
brother Josef (1887-1945) who introduced the word, in a story published in 1917. OED gives Czech 
robota —statute labor; robotnik —serf. Possibly forced labor aptly conveys the sense. 

19. "East is East, and West is West": "The Ballad of East and West" (1899), RKV, 234-38. 
"The white man's burden": from the poem of that tide (1899), RKV, 323-24, significantly subtitled "The 
United States and the Philippine Islands." The poem was first published in the United States, in McClure's 
Magazine. The appeal was initially to Americans, to take responsibility for the less fortunate, to assume a 
colonial burden. "What do they know of England who only England know?": "The English Flag" (1891), 
RKV, 221-24; Kipling has "What should they know...." "The female of the species is more deadly than the 


male": from a poem of that title (1911), RKV, 367-69. "Somewhere East of Suez": "Mandalay," RKV, 
418-20; Kipling has "somewheres." "Paying the Dane-geld": "Dane-geld,” RKV, 712-13. 

20. "The Absent-Minded Beggar," RKV, 459-60. Published October 31,1899 in the Daily 
Mail; with music composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan, it raised some £250,000 for servicemen and their 
dependents. Kipling refused to admit the poem to his collected verse for many years. See som, 150; 
Carrington, 363-64. 

21. Tennyson, "The May-Queen." 

22. The poem concludes, in italic: "No doubt but ye are the People.../ On your own heads, 
in your own hands, the sin and the saving lies!" ( RKV, 304). Kipling records in SoM that "after a few 
days' newspaper correspondence" these verses "were dismissed as violent, untimely and untrue" (222). 

23. RKV, 406-8 and 397-98. 

24. "Mandalay,” RKV, 418-20, hyphenation and punctuation corrected. 

25. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), ardent abolitionist, was the author of Uncle Tom's 
Cabin (1852), which brought her fame and aided the antislavery cause. She later started another storm, at 
home and in England, with her article "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life." 

26. The authors of these poems are: Thomas Hood ("The Bridge of Sighs"); Charles Kingsley 
("When all the world is young, lad" from "Young and Old"); Alfred, Lord Tennyson ("The Charge of the 
Light Brigade"); Charles Wolfe ("The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna"); Leigh Hunt ("Jenny 
kissed me" from "Rondeau"); Sidney Dobell ("Keith of Ravelston" from "A Nuptial Eve"); and Lelicia 
Hemans ("Casabianca," which includes the line, "The boy stood on the burning deck”). 

27. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) wrote no poem entided "Endeavour." Churchill quoted 
the last two stanzas of his lyric "Say not the struggle naught availeth" in his broadcast of May 3, 1941. The 
last line quoted was obviously directed at the United States, then providing much aid but still seven 
months away from becoming a combatant: "But westward, look, the land is bright”; see Churchill, The 
Second World War, HI, 209-10; U.S.: The Grand Alliance, 237. It is possible that the tide "Endeavour" 
comes from a reprint of the poem in an anthology. 

28. "The God of the Copybook Headings" (1919), RKV, 793-95. In the last line Kipling has 
them "with terror and slaughter return!" 

T. S. Eliot 


1. The quotation from "The Dry Salvages,” Poetry (London) omitted the comma after "us" in 
line 3. In the second and fourth stanzas from "Whispers of Immortality" (written about 1918), "his eyes" 
was printed for "the eyes"; "how thought" for "that thought"; a semicolon appeared for a full stop after 
"luxuries," and a colon for a semicolon after "skeleton." 

2. Sir J. C. Squire (1884-1958), journalist, essayist, and poet. 

3. Alan Patiick Herbert (1890-1971; Kt., 1945; Order of the Companions Honour, 1970), 
humorist, novelist, dramatist, and author of much light poetry. 


4. Poetry (London) did not hyphenate "sea-girls"; it added a comma after "brown." 

Can Socialists Be Happy? 

1. Orwell wrote this essay under the pseudonym "John Freeman." 

2. Henry Fitz Gerald Heard (1889-1971), author, broadcaster, and lecturer. Orwell maybe 
referring to Heard's Pain, Sex and Time (1939). 

Propaganda and Demotic Speech 

1. Wallington, near Baldock, Hertfordshire. 

2. Army Bureau of Current Affairs and (Women's) Auxiliary Territorial Service, 1938-1948. 

3. From "Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon." Orwell is probably quoting from 
memory and the quotation is not quite accurate. Eliot's text reads: 

This went on for a couple of months 
Nobody came 
And nobody went 

But he took in the milk and he paid the rent. 

Raffles and Miss Blandish 

1. No Orchids for Miss Blandish was James Hadley Chase's first book and was 
when he was working for a book wholesaler. It was published in May 1939, and by the time 
wrote his essay had sold over a million copies. Chase's real name was Rene Brabazon Raymond 
1985); he wrote some eighty books, using various pseudonyms. 

2. Charles Peace (1832-1879), petty criminal and murderer. In 1876 he killed 
Constable Cook, but another man was charged and found guilty of murder. In 1878 he murdered Alfred 
Dyson. Arrested in the act of burglary, he was tried for Dyson's murder and found guilty. He confessed to 
having killed Cook, and the man originally charged, William Habron, was given a free pardon. Peace was 
executed in 1879. His exploits entered popular myth and he was the subject of an early silent film. 

3. Zingari ] properly, I Zingari (Italian, the Gypsies); an exclusive English cricket club 
founded in 1845 that has no home ground and so travels away to all its matches. 

4. The two lines, from Barrack-room Ballads (1892 or 1893), should be printed as a single 
line as "Yes, a trooper of the forces who has run his own six horses,"—no exclamation point. "[Cjohorts 
of the damned" is quoted from Gentleman Rankers. 

5. M.C.C.] Marylebone Cricket Club, then the ruling body of English and international 
cricket, responsible for the rules of the game and situated at Lord's Cricket Ground, the "headquarters of 
cricket." Membership is restricted. 

Politics and the English Language 


written 

Orwell 

(1906- 


Police 


1. "rift within the lute” is given after "fishing in troubled waters" in Orwell's list of 
metaphors in his notes. Not all the metaphors in this list are in the essay, but in his next sentence Orwell 
asks "what is a 'rift,' for instance?" He must have intended to include this metaphor, since his question 
does not make sense without it; it has therefore been added here in square brackets. The line comes from 
Tennyson's Idylls of the King, "Merlin and Vivien." Vivien sings to Merlin a song she heard Sir Launcelot 
once sing. It includes these two stanzas, which make the meaning plain: 

It [want of faith] is the little rift within the lute, 

That by and by will make the music mute, 

And ever widening slowly silence all. 

The little rift within the lover's lute, 

Or little pitted speck in garner'd fruit, 

That rotting inward slowly moulders all. [Lines 388-93] 

2. Smart Chase (1888-1985), economist who investigated the U.S. meat-packing industry and 
served with the Labor Bureau Inc. Orwell probably refers to his The Tyranny of Words (1938). 

Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels 

1. Sir Alan P. Herbert (1890-1971; Knight, 1945), humorist, novelist, dramatist, represented 
Oxford University as an Independent MP, 1935-1950. G. M. Young (1882-1959), civil servant until his 
resignation after World War I; then author, historian, and editor. Godfrey Elton, 1st Baron Elton (1892- 
1977), author and broadcaster. 

2. W H. Mallock (1849-1923), author of The New Republic (1877) and The New Paul and 
Virginia (1878). 

3. "Timothy Shy" was D. B. Wyndham Lewis, who wrote this column in the News Chronicle; 
"The Brains Trust" was a popular BBC program in which a panel discussed questions submitted by 
listeners. 


4. Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1957), Roman Catholic priest and, for many people, an 
unofficial spokesman for that church. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970; 3rd Earl Russell, 1931), philosopher 
and mathematician, joint author, with A. N. Whitehead, of Principia Mathematica (1910-1913). A 
pacifist during World War I (he was imprisoned for six months), he renounced pacifism in 1939 because 
of the growth of Fascism He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. 

Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool 

1. Tulips seem to have originated in Turkey. A mania for them struck Holland in the 
seventeenth century with devastating financial results. In Alkmaar, in 1639, 120 tulip bulbs were sold for 
90,000 florins; a single bulb, the Viceroy, fetched 4,203 guilders. In the eighteenth century, such was the 
economic damage being caused, the government stopped the tulip traffic. Orwell may have known the 
novel, La Tulipe Noire (1850) by Alexandre Dumas. An abridged version was often set for schoolboys to 
read (in French). 

2. George Warwick Deeping (see n. 28,367.), prolific and popular novelist. Perhaps his 
best-known work is Sorrell and Son (1925; New York, 1926). In Keep the Aspidistra Flying it looks as 
if Orwell originally intended to have Gordon Comstock call the novels of Warwick Deeping and of Ethel 


M. Dell "garbage." This was, however, suppressed on legal advice. 


*Hard Times was published as a serial in Household Words and Great Expectations and A 
Tale of Two Cities in All the Year Round. Forster says that the shortness of the weekly instalments made it 
"much more difficult to get sufficient interest into each." Dickens himself complained of the lack of 
"elbow-room." In other works, he had to stick more closely to the story [Orwell's footnote]. 


fbacki 




*Dickens turned Miss Mowcher into a sort of heroine because the real woman whom he had 
caricatured had read the earlier chapters and was bitterly hurt. He had previously meant her to play a 
villainous part. But any action by such a character would seem incongruous [Orwell's footnote]. 


[backi 




*From a letter to his youngest son (in 1868): "You will remember that you have never at 
home been harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities. I have always been anxious not to 
weary my children with such things, before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them. You 
will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the 
Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you 
humbly but heartily respect it ... Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private 
prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it" [Orwell's 
footnote]. 


[backi 




*There are several corresponding girls' papers. The Schoolgirl is a companion-paper to the 
Magnet and has stories by "Hilda Richards." The characters are interchangeable to some extent. Bessie 
Bunter, Billy Bunter's sister, figures in the Schoolgirl [Orwell's footnote]. 6 


[backi 




*This was written some months before the outbreak of war. Up to the end of September 1939 
no mention of the war has appeared in either paper [Orwell's footnote]. 


[backi 




*Published in 1932 [Orwell's footnote]. Edited by Michael (William Edward) Roberts 









(1902-1948). 


Tbackl 




*The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (the Dial Press, New York) [Orwell's footnote]. 


Tbackl 




*Dali mentions L'Age d’Or and adds that its first public showing was broken up by 
hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about. According to Henry Miller's account of it, it 
showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman defaecating [Orwell's footnote]. 


[backl 




*In spite of this, Common Wealth has adopted the astonishingly feeble slogan: "What is 
morally wrong cannot be politically right" [Orwell's footnote]. 


[backl 




*Raffles, A Thief in the Night and Mr. Justice Raffles, by E. W Hornung. The third of these 
is definitely a failure, and only the first has the true Raffles atmosphere. Hornung wrote a number of crime 
stories, usually with a tendency to take the side of the criminal. A successful book in rather the same vein 
as Raffles is Stingaree [Orwell's footnote]. 


[backl 




*1945. Actually Raffles does kill one man and is more or less consciously responsible for 
the death of two others. But all three of them are foreigners and have behaved in a very reprehensible 
manner. He also, on one occasion, contemplates murdering a blackmailer. It is, however, a fairly well- 
established convention in crime stories that murdering a blackmailer "doesn't count" [Orwell's footnote], 

Tbackl 




*1945. Another reading of the final episode is possible. It may mean merely that Miss 
Blandish is pregnant. But the interpretation I have given above seems more in keeping with the general 
brutality of the book [Orwell's footnote]. 








Tbackl 




*They are said to have been imported into this country as ballast, which accounted for their 
low price and crumpled appearance. Since the war the ships have been ballasted with something more 
useful, probably gravel [Orwell's footnote]. 


fbackl 




*It is fair to say that the P.E.N. Club celebrations, which lasted a week or more, did not 
always stick at quite the same level. I happened to strike a bad day. But an examination of the speeches 
(printed under the tide Freedom of Expression) shows that almost nobody in our own day is able to speak 
out as roundly in favour of intellectual liberty as Milton could do 30c years ago—and this in spite of the 
fact Milton was writing in a period of civil war [Orwell's footnote]. 


[backl 




*An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were 
in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me- 
not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably 
due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is 
scientific [Orwell's footnote]. 


Tbackl 




*Example: "Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, 
almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric 
accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness.... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at 
simple bullseyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs 
more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation" (Poetry Quarterly) [Orwell's footnote]. 


[backl 




*One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack 
dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field [Orwell's footnote]. 


fbackl 










*Houyhnhnms too old to walk are described as being carried in "sledges" or in "a kind of 
vehicle, drawn like a sledge." Presumably these had no wheels [Orwell's footnote]. 


fbackl 




*The physical decadence which Swift claims to have observed may have been a reality at 
that date. He attributes it to syphilis, which was a new disease in Europe and may have been more 
virulent than it is now. Distilled liquors, also, were a novelty in the seventeenth century and must have led 
at first to a great increase in drunkenness [Orwell's footnote]. 


[backl 




Tower [Orwell's footnote]. 


[backl 




*At the end of the book, as typical specimens of human folly and viciousness, Swift names "a 
Lawyer, a Pickpocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a Politician, a Whore-master, a Physician, 
an Evidence, a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traitor, or the like." One sees here the irresponsible violence of 
the powerless. The list lumps together those who break the conventional code, and those who keep it. For 
instance, if you automatically condemn a colonel, as such, on what grounds do you condemn a traitor? Or 
again, if you want to suppress pickpockets, you must have laws, which means that you must have lawyers. 
But the whole closing passage, in which the hatred is so authentic, and the reason given for it so 
inadequate, is somehow unconvincing. One has the feeling that personal animosity is at work [Orwell's 
footnote]. 


[backl 




*Shakespeare and the Drama. Written about 1903 as an introduction to another pamphlet, 
Shakespeare and the Working Classes, by Ernest Crosby [Orwell's footnote]. 


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*The Story of my Experiments with Truth, byM. K. Gandhi. Translated from the Gujarati by 
Mahadev Desai. Public Affairs Press, $5.00 [Orwell's footnote]. 


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