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    Fifty Orwell Essays

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    grace before meals and prayers at bedtime: to amuse the children one

      tells them Bible stories, and if they ask for a song it is probably

      "Glory, glory Hallelujah". Perhaps it is also a sign of spiritual health

      in the light literature of this period that death is mentioned freely.

      "Baby Phil", the brother of Budge and Toddie, has died shortly before

      HELEN'S BABIES opens, and there are various tear-jerking references to

      his "tiny coffin". A modern writer attempting a story of this kind would

      have kept coffins out of it.

      English children are still Americanised by way of the films, but it would

      no longer be generally claimed that American books are the best ones for

      children. Who, without misgivings, would bring up a child on the coloured

      "comics" in which sinister professors manufacture atomic bombs in

      underground laboratories while Superman whizzes through the clouds, the

      machine-gun bullets bouncing off his chest like peas, and platinum

      blondes are raped, or very nearly, by steel robots and fifty-foot

      dinosaurs? It is a far cry from Superman to the Bible and the woodpile.

      The earlier children's books, or books readable by children, had not only

      innocence but a sort of native gaiety, a buoyant, carefree feeling, which

      was the product, presumably, of the unheard-of freedom and security which

      nineteenth-century America enjoyed. That is the connecting link between

      books so seemingly far apart as LITTLE WOMEN and LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

      The society described in the one is subdued, bookish and home-loving,

      while the other tells of a crazy world of bandits, gold mines, duels,

      drunkenness and gambling hells: but in both one can detect an underlying

      confidence in the future, a sense of freedom and opportunity.

      Nineteenth-century America was a rich, empty country which lay outside

      the main stream of world events, and in which the twin nightmares that

      beset nearly every modern man, the nightmare of unemployment and the

      nightmare of State interference, had hardly come into being. There were

      social distinctions, more marked than those of today, and there was

      poverty (in LITTLE WOMEN, it will be remembered, the family is at one

      time so hard up that one of the girls sells her hair to the barber), but

      there was not, as there is now, an all-prevailing sense of helplessness.

      There was room for everybody, and if you worked hard you could be certain

      of a living--could even be certain of growing rich: this was generally

      believed, and for the greater part of the population it was even broadly

      true. In other words, the civilisation of nineteenth-century America was

      capitalist civilisation at its best. Soon after the civil war the

      inevitable deterioration started. But for some decades, at least, life in

      America was much better fun than life in Europe--there was more happening,

      more colour, more variety, more opportunity--and the books and songs of

      that period had a sort of bloom, a childlike quality. Hence, I think, the

      popularity of HELEN'S BABIES and other "light" literature, which made it

      normal for the English child of thirty or forty years ago to grow up with

      a theoretical knowledge of raccoons, woodchucks, chipmunks, gophers,

      hickory trees, water-melons and other unfamiliar fragments of the

      American scene.

      SOME THOUGHTS ON THE COMMON TOAD

      Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the

      snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own

      fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain

      buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible

      towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something--some kind of

      shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the

      temperature--has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads

      appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to

      time--at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and

      apparently well, in the middle of the summer.

      At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look,

      like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are

      languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes

      look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at

      another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living

      creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured

      semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I

      think is called a chrysoberyl.

      For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on

      building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has

      swollen to his normal size again, and then he hoes through a phase of

      intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he

      wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or

      even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a

      long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes

      upon shapeless masses of ten or twenty toads rolling over and over in the

      water, one clinging to another without distinction of sex. By degrees,

      however, they sort themselves out into couples, with the male duly

      sitting on the female's back. You can now distinguish males from females,

      because the male is smaller, darker and sits on top, with his arms

      tightly clasped round the female's neck. After a day or two the spawn is

      laid in long strings which wind themselves in and out of the reeds and

      soon become invisible. A few more weeks, and the water is alive with

      masses of tiny tadpoles which rapidly grow larger, sprout hind-legs, then

      forelegs, then shed their tails: and finally, about the middle of the

      summer, the new generation of toads, smaller than one's thumb-nail but

      perfect in every particular, crawl out of the water to begin the game

      anew.

      I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of

      spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the

      skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets. But I

      am aware that many people do not like reptiles or amphibians, and I am

      not suggesting that in order to enjoy the spring you have to take an

      interest in toads. There are also the crocus, the missel-thrush, the

      cuckoo, the blackthorn, etc. The point is that the pleasures of spring

      are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid

      street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other,

      if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green

      of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how

      Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of

      London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I

      have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road.

      There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds

      living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought

      that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.

      As for spring, not
    even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of

      England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere,

      like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters. The

      spring is commonly referred to as "a miracle", and during the past five

      or six years this worn-out figure of speech has taken on a new lease of

      life. After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the

      spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and

      harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February

      since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to

      be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead

      at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle

      happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in

      the square the sooty privets have turned bright green, the leaves are

      thickening on the chestnut trees, the daffodils are out, the wallflowers

      are budding, the policeman's tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of

      blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the

      sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the balminess of the

      air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their first since last

      September.

      Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes? To

      put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all

      groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the

      capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living

      because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some

      other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what

      the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is not

      doubt that many people think so. I know by experience that a favourable

      reference to "Nature" in one of my articles is liable to bring me abusive

      letters, and though the key-word in these letters is usually

      "sentimental", two ideas seem to be mixed up in them. One is that any

      pleasure in the actual process of life encourages a sort of political

      quietism. People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it

      is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment

      of the things we have already. The other idea is that this is the age of

      machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its

      domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.

      This is often backed up by the statement that a love of Nature is a

      foible of urbanized people who have no notion what Nature is really like.

      Those who really have to deal with the soil, so it is argued, do not love

      the soil, and do not take the faintest interest in birds or flowers,

      except from a strictly utilitarian point of view. To love the country one

      must live in the town, merely taking an occasional week-end ramble at the

      warmer times of year.

      This last idea is demonstrably false. Medieval literature, for instance,

      including the popular ballads, is full of an almost Georgian enthusiasm

      for Nature, and the art of agricultural peoples such as the Chinese and

      Japanese centre always round trees, birds, flowers, rivers, mountains.

      The other idea seems to me to be wrong in a subtler way. Certainly we

      ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making

      the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual

      process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a

      man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a

      labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine

      will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political

      problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more

      complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first

      primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating

      an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one's

      childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and--to

      return to my first instance--toads, one makes a peaceful and decent

      future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that

      nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a

      little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus

      energy except in hatred and leader worship.

      At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can't stop you

      enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I

      stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match

      in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop

      me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can't. So long as you

      are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a

      holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the

      factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are

      streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the

      sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they

      disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

      THE PREVENTION OF LITERATURE

      About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion

      being the tercentenary of Milton's AEROPAGITICA--A pamphlet, it may be

      remembered, in defense 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

      defense 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 criticize and oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted

      from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was there

      any mention of the various books which have been "killed" in England and

      the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a

      demonstration in favor of censorship. [Note: 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 title 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 300 years ago--and this

      in spite of the fact Milton was writing in a period of civil war.

      (Author's footnote)]

      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. [Ministry of Information] 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 down 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's 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 thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments

      which are not worth bothering about. Anyone who has experience of

      lecturing and debating knows them off 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 of 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

      subtilized forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary to strip away the

     
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