Essays

by George Orwell

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.

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.

unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened. This brings me back to Henry Miller.

He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face towards the flames.

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?

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.

Why is it, then, that stories like ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The Tell-tale Heart’, ‘The Fall 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,

It seems therefore that for a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity.

The truth is that in 1917 there was nothing that a thinking and sensitive person could do, except to remain human, if possible.

It is for this reason that I think that the passive, non-co-operative 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.

The literature of liberalism is coming to an end and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely imaginable.

History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man.

The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but any 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.

Science is fighting on the side of superstition.

Wells is too sane to understand the modern world.

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.

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, battleships 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.

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.

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.

Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.

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.

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.

He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them

A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious.

One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of human origin.

A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.

To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.

In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever once heard the question, ‘What would have happened if Germany had won?’ even mentioned, let alone discussed.

These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened.

I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.

Here in Section IV, written in 1942, are surely the seeds of ‘1984’?

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.

The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past.

Time after time, in country after country, the organized working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and their comrades abroad, linked to them in theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that between white and coloured workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can believe in the class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or wherever it might be, seemed less interesting and less important than yesterday’s football match.

In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.

But at the same time he fails to see that the new authoritarian civilization, if it arrives, will not be aristocratic, or what he means by aristocratic. It will not be ruled by noblemen with Van Dyck faces, but by anonymous millionaires, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and murdering gangsters.

Those who dread the prospect of universal suffrage, popular education, freedom of thought, emancipation of women, will start off with a predilection towards secret cults. There is another link between Fascism and magic in the profound hostility of both to the Christian ethical code.

Of course, all praise of the past is partly sentimental, because we do not live in the past.

In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of one. Millions may be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually.

It is commonly said, even by the English themselves, that English cooking is the worst in the world.

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.

Dali is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight.

He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud.

Obscenity is a very difficult question to discuss honestly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 connexion 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.