Page 38 of Fifty Orwell Essays

have any genuine popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few

  people, the least tolerated of the arts. Perhaps that statement needs a

  certain amount of qualification. True poetry can sometimes be acceptable

  to the mass of the people when it disguises itself as something else. One

  can see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still

  possesses, certain nursery rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and

  the songs that soldiers make up, including the words that go to some of

  the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a civilization in which the very

  word 'poetry' evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen

  disgust that most people feel when they hear the word 'God'. If you are

  good at playing the concertina you could probably go into the nearest

  public bar and get yourself an appreciative audience within five minutes.

  But what would be the attitude of that same audience if you suggested

  reading them Shakespeare's sonnets, for instance? Good bad poetry,

  however, can get across to the most unpromising audiences if the right

  atmosphere has been worked up beforehand. Some months back Churchill

  produced a great effect by quoting Clough's 'Endeavour' in one of his

  broadcast speeches. I listened to this speech among people who could

  certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that

  the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them. But not

  even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much

  better than this.

  In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been and

  probably still is popular. In his own lifetime some of his poems

  travelled far beyond the bounds of the reading public, beyond the world

  of school prize-days, Boy Scout sing-songs, limp-leather editions,

  poker-work and calendars, and out into the yet vaster world of the music

  halls. Nevertheless, Mr. Eliot thinks it worth while to edit him, thus

  confessing to a taste which others share but are not always honest enough

  to mention. The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a

  sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary

  man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in

  certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But

  what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful

  monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form--for verse is a

  mnemonic device, among other things--some emotion which very nearly

  every human being can share. The merit of a poem like 'When all the world

  is young, lad' is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is

  'true' sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself

  thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you

  happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better

  than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a

  fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious. One

  example from Kipling will do:

  White hands cling to the bridle rein,

  Slipping the spur from the booted heel;

  Tenderest voices cry 'Turn again!'

  Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel:

  Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,

  He travels the fastest who travels alone.

  There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but

  at any rate it is a thought that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you

  will have occasion to feel that he travels the fastest who travels alone,

  and there the thought is, ready made and, as it were, waiting for you. So

  the chances are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it.

  One reason for Kipling's power as a good bad poet I have already

  suggested--his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him

  to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. Although

  he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a

  Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call

  themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices

  of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the

  opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even

  disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain

  grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, 'In

  such and such circumstances, what would you DO?', whereas the opposition

  is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where

  it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of

  its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out

  with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by

  events, for Utopia never arrives and 'the gods of the copybook headings',

  as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British

  governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his

  political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he

  imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he

  gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine

  what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his

  favour that he is not witty, not 'daring', has no wish to ?PATER LES

  BOURGEOIS. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world

  of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem

  less shallow and less irritating than the 'enlightened' utterances of the

  same period, such as Wilde's epigrams or the collection of

  cracker-mottoes at the end of MAN AND SUPERMAN.

  MARK TWAIN--THE LICENSED JESTER (1943)

  Mark Twain has crashed the lofty gates of the Everyman library, but only

  with TOM SAWYER and HUCKLEBERRY FINN, already fairly well known under the

  guise of 'children's books' (which they are not). His best and most

  characteristic books, ROUGHING IT, THE INNOCENTS AT HOME, and even LIFE

  ON THE MISSISSIPPI, are little remembered in this country, though no

  doubt in America the patriotism which is everywhere mixed up with

  literary judgement keeps them alive.

  Although Mark Twain produced a surprising variety of books, ranging from

  a namby-pamby 'life' of Joan of Arc to a pamphlet so obscene that it has

  never been publicly printed, all that is best in his work centres about

  the Mississippi river and the wild mining towns of the West. Born in 1835

  (he came of a Southern family, a family just rich enough to own one or

  perhaps two slaves), he had had his youth and early manhood in the golden

  age of America, the period when the great plains were opened up, when

  wealth and opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free,

  indeed were free, as they had never been before and may not be again for

  centuries. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and the two other books that I have

  mentioned are a ragbag of anecdotes, scenic descriptions and social

  history both serious and burlesque, but they have a central theme which

  could perhaps be put into these words: 'This is how human beings behave

  when they are not fri
ghtened of the sack.' In writing these books Mark

  Twain is not consciously writing a hymn to liberty. Primarily he is

  interested in 'character', in the fantastic, almost lunatic variations

  which human nature is capable of when economic pressure and tradition are

  both removed from it. The raftsmen, Mississippi pilots, miners and

  bandits whom he describes are probably not much exaggerated, but they are

  as different from modern men, and from one another, as the gargoyles of a

  medieval cathedral. They could develop their strange and sometimes

  sinister individuality because of the lack of any outside pressure. The

  State hardly existed, the churches were weak and spoke with many voices,

  and land was to be had for the taking. If you disliked your job you

  simply hit the boss in the eye and moved further west; and moreover,

  money was so plentiful that the smallest coin in circulation was worth a

  shilling. The American pioneers were not supermen, and they were not

  especially courageous. Whole towns of hardy gold miners let themselves be

  terrorized by bandits whom they lacked the public spirit to put down.

  They were not even free from class distinctions. The desperado who

  stalked through the streets of the mining settlement, with a Derringer

  pistol in his waistcoat pocket and twenty corpses to his credit, was

  dressed in a frock coat and shiny top-hat, described himself firmly as a

  'gentleman' and was meticulous about table manners. But at least it was

  NOT the case that a man's destiny was settled from his birth. The 'log

  cabin to White House' myth was true while the free land lasted. In a way,

  it was for this that the Paris mob had stormed the Bastille, and when one

  reads Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Whitman it is hard to feel that their

  effort was wasted.

  However, Mark Twain aimed at being something more than a chronicler of

  the Mississippi and the Gold Rush. In his own day he was famous all over

  the world as a humorist and comic lecturer. In New York, London, Berlin,

  Vienna, Melbourne and Calcutta vast audiences rocked with laughter over

  jokes which have now, almost without exception, ceased to be funny. (It

  is worth noticing that Mark Twain's lectures were only a success with

  Anglo-Saxon and German audiences. The relatively grown-up Latin

  races--whose own humour, he complained, always centred round sex and

  politics--never cared for them.) But in addition, Mark Twain had some

  pretensions to being a social critic, even a species of philosopher. He

  had in him an iconoclastic, even revolutionary vein which he obviously

  wanted to follow up and yet somehow never did follow up. He might have

  been a destroyer of humbugs and a prophet of democracy more valuable

  than Whitman, because healthier and more humorous. Instead he became

  that dubious thing a 'public figure', flattered by passport officials

  and entertained by royalty, and his career reflects the deterioration in

  American life that set in after the Civil War.

  Mark Twain has sometimes been compared with his contemporary, Anatole

  France. This comparison is not so pointless as it may sound. Both men

  were the spiritual children of Voltaire, both had an ironical, sceptical

  view of life, and a native pessimism overlaid by gaiety; both knew that

  the existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly

  delusions. Both were bigoted atheists and convinced (in Mark Twain's case

  this was Darwin's doing) of the unbearable cruelty of the universe. But

  there the resemblance ends. Not only is the Frenchman enormously more

  learned, more civilized, more alive aesthetically, but he is also more

  courageous. He does attack the things he disbelieves in; he does not,

  like Mark swain, always take refuge behind the amiable mask of the

  'public figure' and the licensed jester. He is ready to risk the anger of

  the Church and to take the unpopular side in a controversy--in the

  Dreyfus case, for example. Mark Twain, except perhaps in one short essay

  'What is Man?', never attacks established beliefs in a way that is likely

  to get him into trouble. Nor could he ever wean himself from the notion,

  which is perhaps especially an American notion, that success and virtue

  are the same thing.

  In LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI there is a queer little illustration of the

  central weakness of Mark Twain's character. In the earlier part of this

  mainly autobiographical book the dates have been altered. Mark Twain

  describes his adventures as a Mississippi pilot as though he had been a

  boy of about seventeen at the time, whereas in fact he was a young man of

  nearly thirty. There is a reason for this. The same part of the book

  describes his exploits in the Civil War, which were distinctly

  inglorious. Moreover, Mark Twain started by fighting, if he can be said

  to have fought, on the Southern side, and then changed his allegiance

  before the war was over. This kind of behaviour is more excusable in a

  boy than in a man, whence the adjustment of the dates. It is also clear

  enough, however, that he changed sides because he saw that the North was

  going to win; and this tendency to side with the stronger whenever

  possible, to believe that might must be right, is apparent throughout his

  career. In ROUGHING IT there is an interesting account of a bandit named

  Slade, who, among countless other outrages, had committed twenty-eight

  murders. It is perfectly clear that Mark Twain admires this disgusting

  scoundrel. Slade was successful; therefore he was admirable. This

  outlook, no less common today, is summed up in the significant American

  expression 'to MAKE GOOD'.

  In the money-grubbing period that followed the Civil War it was hard for

  anyone of Mark Twain's temperament to refuse to be a success. The old,

  simple, stump-whittling, tobacco-chewing democracy which Abraham Lincoln

  typified was perishing: it was now the age of cheap immigrant labour and

  the growth of Big Business. Mark Twain mildly satirized his

  contemporaries in The GILDED AGE, but he also gave himself up to the

  prevailing fever, and made and lost vast sums of money. He even for a

  period of years deserted writing for business; and he squandered his time

  on buffooneries, not merely lecture tours and public banquets, but, for

  instance, the writing of a book like A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING

  ARTHUR'S COURT, which is a deliberate flattery of all that is worst and

  most vulgar in American life. The man who might have been a kind of

  rustic Voltaire became the world's leading after-dinner speaker, charming

  alike for his anecdotes and his power to make businessmen feel themselves

  public benefactors.

  It is usual to blame Mark Twain's wife for his failure to write the books

  he ought to have written, and it is evident that she did tyrannize over

  him pretty thoroughly. Each morning, Mark Twain would show her what he

  had written the day before, and Mrs. Clemens (Mark Twain's real name was

  Samuel Clemens) would go over it with the blue pencil, cutting out

  everything that she thought unsuitable. She seems to have been a drastic

  blue-penciller even by nineteenth-century standards. There is an accou
nt

  in W.D. Howells's book MY MARK TWAIN of the fuss that occurred over a

  terrible expletive that had crept into HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Mark Twain

  appealed to Howells, who admitted that it was 'just what Huck would have

  said', but agreed with Mrs. Clemens that the word could not possibly be

  printed. The word was 'hell'. Nevertheless, no writer is really the

  intellectual slave of his wife. Mrs. Clemens could not have stopped Mark

  Twain writing any book he really wanted to write. She may have made his

  surrender to society easier, but the surrender happened because of that

  flaw in his own nature, his inability to despise success.

  Several of Mark Twain's books are bound to survive, because they contain

  invaluable social history. His life covered the great period of American

  expansion. When he was a child it was a normal day's outing to go with a

  picnic lunch and watch the hanging of an Abolitionist, and when he died

  the aeroplane was ceasing to be a novelty. This period in America

  produced relatively little literature, and but for Mark Twain our picture

  of a Mississippi paddle-steamer, or a stage-coach crossing the plains,

  would be much dimmer than it is. But most people who have studied his

  work have come away with a feeling that he might have done something

  more. He gives all the while a strange impression of being about to say

  something and then funking it, so that LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and the

  rest of them seem to be haunted by the ghost of a greater and much more

  coherent book. Significantly, he starts his autobiography by remarking

  that a man's inner life is indescribable. We do not know what he would

  have said--it is just possible that the unprocurable pamphlet, 1601,

  would supply a clue but we may guess that it would have wrecked his

  reputation and reduced his income to reasonable proportions.

  POETRY AND THE MICROPHONE (1943)

  About a year ago I and a number of others were engaged in broadcasting

  literary programmes to India, and among other things we broadcast a good

  deal of verse by contemporary and near-contemporary English writers--for

  example, Eliot, Herbert Read, Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas, Henry

  Treece, Alex Comfort, Robert Bridges, Edmund Blunden, D.H. Lawrence.

  Whenever it was possible we had poems broadcast by the people who wrote

  them. Just why these particular programmes (a small and remote

  out-flanking movement in the radio war) were instituted there is no need

  to explain here, but I should add that the fact that we were

  broadcasting to an Indian audience dictated our technique to some

  extent. The essential point was that our literary broadcasts were aimed

  at the Indian university students, a small and hostile audience,

  unapproachable by anything that could be described as British

  propaganda. It was known in advance that we could not hope for more than

  a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave us an excuse to be

  more "highbrow" than is generally possible on the air.

  If you are broadcasting poetry to people who know your language but

  don't share your cultural background, a certain amount of comment and

  explanation is unavoidable, and the formula we usually followed was to

  broadcast what purported to be a monthly literary magazine. The

  editorial staff were supposedly sitting in their office, discussing what

  to put into the next number. Somebody suggested one poem, someone else

  suggested another, there was a short discussion and then came the poem

  itself, read in a different voice, preferably the author's own. This

  poem naturally called up another, and so the programme continued,

  usually with at least half a minute of discussion between any two items.

  For a half-hour programme, six voices seemed to be the best number. A

  programme of this sort was necessarily somewhat shapeless, but it could

  be given a certain appearance of unity by making it revolve round a