Fifty Orwell Essays

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, 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 repealed, 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

  constantly 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 around 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 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 car 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 has 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.

  SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS (1947)

  Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but after a week or

  two, just when I seemed to be settling into routine of school life) I

  began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion

  to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier.

  Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for

  granted. It is a normal reaction in children who have been removed from

  their homes to a strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on

  as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which

  the proper cure was a beating. For my part I did not need to be told it

  was a crime. Night after night I prayed, with a fervor never previously

  attained in my prayers, 'Please God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please

  God, do not let me wet my bed!' but it made remarkably little difference.

  Some nights the thing happened, others not. There was no volition about

  it, no consciousness. You did not properly speaking do the deed: you were

  merely woke up in the morning and found that the sheets were wringing

  wet.

  After the second or third offense I was warned that I should be beaten

  next time, but I received the warning in a curiously roundabout way. One

  afternoon, as we were filing out from tea, Mrs. Simpson, the headmaster's

  wife, was sitting at the head of one of the tables, chatting with a lady

  of whom I know nothing, except that she was on an afternoon's visit to

  the school. She was an intimidating, masculine-looking person wearing a

  riding habit, or something that I took to be a riding habit. I was just

  leaving the room when Mrs. Simpson called me back, as though to introduce

  me to the visitor.

  Mrs. Simpson was nicknamed Bingo, and I shall call her by that name for I

  seldom think of her by any other. (Officially, however, she was addressed

  as Mum, probably a corruption of the 'Ma'am' used by public school boys

  to their housemasters' wives.) She was a stocky square-built woman with

  hard red chee
ks, a flat top to her head, prominent brows and deepset,

  suspicious eyes. Although a great deal of the time she was full of false

  heartiness, jollying one along with mannish slang ('Buck up, old chap!'

  and so forth), and even using one's Christian name, her eyes never lost

  their anxious, accusing look. It was very difficult to look her in the

  face without feeling guilty, even at moments when one was not guilty of

  anything in particular.

  'Here is a little boy,' said Bingo, indicating me to the strange lady,

  'who wets his bed every night. Do you know what I am going to do if you

  wet your bed again?' she added, turning to me. 'I am going to get the

  Sixth Form to beat you.'

  The strange lady put on an air of being inexpressibly shocked, and

  exclaimed 'I-should-think-so!' And here occurred one of those wild,

  almost lunatic misunderstandings which are part of the daily experience

  of childhood. The Sixth Form was a group of older boys who were selected

  as having 'character' and were empowered to beat smaller boys. I had not

  yet learned of their existence, and I misheard the phrase 'the Sixth

  Form' as 'Mrs. Form.' I took it as referring to the strange lady--I

  thought, that is, that her name was Mrs. Form. It was an improbable name,

  but a child has no judgment in such matters. I imagined, therefore, that

  it was she who was to be deputed to beat me. It did not strike me as

  strange that this job should be turned over to a casual visitor in no way

  connected with the school. I merely assumed that 'Mrs. Form' was a stern

  disciplinarian who enjoyed beating people (somehow her appearance seemed

  to bear this out) and I had an immediate terrifying vision of her

  arriving for the occasion in full riding kit and armed with a hunting

  whip. To this day I can feel myself almost swooning with shame as I

  stood, a very small, round-faced boy in short corduroy knickers, before

  the two women. I could not speak. I felt that I should die if 'Mrs. Form'

  were to beat me. But my dominant feeling was not fear or even resentment:

  it was simply shame because one more person, and that a woman, had been

  told of my disgusting offense.

  A little later, I forget how, I learned that it was not after all 'Mrs.

  Form' who would do the beating. I cannot remember whether it was that

  very night that I wetted my bed again, but at any rate I did wet it again

  quite soon. Oh, the despair, the feeling of cruel injustice, after all my

  prayers and resolutions, at once again waking between the clammy sheets!

  There was no chance of hiding what I had done. The grim statuesque

  matron, Daphne by name, arrived in the dormitory specially to inspect my

  bed. She pulled back the clothes, then drew herself up, and the dreaded

  words seemed to come rolling out of her like a peal of thunder:

  'REPORT YOURSELF to the headmaster after breakfast!'

  I do not know how many times I heard that phrase during my early years at

  Crossgates. It was only very rarely that it did not mean a beating. The

  words always had a portentous sound in my ears, like muffled drums or the

  words of the death sentence.

  When I arrived to report myself, Bingo was doing something or other at

  the long shiny table in the ante-room to the study. Her uneasy eyes

  searched me as I went past. In the study Mr. Simpson, nicknamed Sim, was

  waiting. Sim was a round-shouldered curiously oafish-looking man, not

  large but shambling in gait, with a chubby face which was like that of an

  overgrown baby, and which was capable of good humor. He knew, of course,

  why I had been sent to him, and had already taken a bone-handled riding

  crop out of the cupboard, but it was part of the punishment of reporting

  yourself that you had to proclaim your offense with your own lips. When I

  had said my say, he read me a short but pompous lecture, then seized me

  by the scruff of the neck, twisted me over and began beating me with the