Fifty Orwell Essays Read online

English life that I have spoken of, the deep sense of national

  solidarity, comes in--they could only do so by breaking up the Empire

  and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class

  would have done this without hesitation, as in France. But things had not

  gone that distance in England. Politicians who would make cringing

  speeches about 'the duty of loyalty to our conquerors' are hardly to be

  found in English public life. Tossed to and fro between their incomes and

  their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do

  anything but make the worst of both worlds.

  One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are MORALLY

  fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get

  themselves killed. Several dukes, earls and what nots were killed in the

  recent campaign in Flanders. That could not happen if these people were

  the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be. It is

  important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their

  actions. What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical

  cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct

  for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked;

  they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone

  will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living

  in.

  v.

  The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone

  in England, but it had an especially direct effect upon two important

  sub-sections of the middle class. One was the military and imperialist

  middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing

  intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic opposites--the half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a

  dinosaur, the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck--are

  mentally linked together and constantly interact upon one another; in any

  case they are born to a considerable extent into the same families.

  Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The

  middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow

  families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the

  waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling

  before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a

  narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every

  year less room for individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson,

  Nicholson, Gordon would find no place for themselves in the modern

  British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in

  the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits

  and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left

  forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and

  Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The one-time empire builders were reduced

  to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper

  and red tape. In the early twenties one could see, all over the Empire,

  the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing

  impotently under the changes that were happening. From that time onwards

  it has been next door to impossible to induce young men of spirit to take

  any part in imperial administration. And what was true of the official

  world was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly companies

  swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to trade

  adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay or

  Singapore. And life in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer

  than life in London. Imperialist sentiment remained strong in the middle

  class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the job of administering

  the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of Suez if there

  was any way of avoiding it.

  But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole

  British morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly

  the work of the left-wing intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that

  had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.

  It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in

  some sense 'left'. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E.

  Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an 'intellectual' has

  lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order.

  Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for

  him. In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor

  falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset

  was their stupidity, to be 'clever' was to be suspect. If you had the

  kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the

  theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept

  out of any important job. The intellectuals could find a function for

  themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political

  parties.

  The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in

  half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing

  about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude,

  their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is

  little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never

  been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked

  characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world

  of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many

  intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for

  war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off

  when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the

  people who were most 'anti-Fascist' during the Spanish Civil War are most

  defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so

  many of the English intelligentsia--their severance from the common

  culture of the country.

  In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized.

  They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the

  general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident

  thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals

  are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always

  felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman

  and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse

  racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably

  true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of

  standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a

  poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping

  away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes

  squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always

  anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it

  certainly had
some. If the English people suffered for several years a

  real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they

  were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual

  sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and

  the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they

  had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic

  Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than

  it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed

  forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class

  must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism

  hastened the process.

  It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during

  the past ten years, as purely NEGATIVE creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a

  by-product of ruling-class stupidity. Society could not use them, and

  they had not got it in them to see that devotion to one's country implies

  'for better, for worse'. Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as

  though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and

  intelligence. If you were a patriot you read BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE and

  publicly thanked God that you were 'not brainy'. If you were an

  intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical

  courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this preposterous convention

  cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is

  as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot afford

  either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together

  again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar

  kind of war, that may make this possible.

  vi.

  One of the most important developments in England during the past twenty

  years has been the upward and downward extension of the middle class. It

  has happened on such a scale as to make the old classification of society

  into capitalists, proletarians and petit bourgeois (small

  property-owners) almost obsolete.

  England is a country in which property and financial power are

  concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern England OWN anything

  at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house. The peasantry

  have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being

  destroyed, the small businessman is diminishing in numbers. But at the

  same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along

  without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and

  technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in

  turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers,

  artists, etc. etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been

  to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed

  likely to do.

  But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas and

  habits among the working class. The British working class are now better

  off in almost all ways than they were thirty years ago. This is partly

  due to the efforts of the trade unions, but partly to the mere advance of

  physical science. It is not always realized that within rather narrow

  limits the standard of life of a country can rise without a corresponding

  rise in real wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift itself up by its

  boot-tags. However unjustly society is organized, certain technical

  advances are bound to benefit the whole community, because certain kinds

  of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for

  example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for other

  people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of

  good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and

  probably free education of a kind. Public education in England has been

  meanly starved of money, but it has nevertheless improved, largely owing

  to the devoted efforts of the teachers, and the habit of reading has

  become enormously more widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and

  the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen

  to the same radio programmes. And the differences in their way of life

  have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and

  improvements in housing. So far as outward appearance goes, the clothes

  of rich and poor, especially in the case of women, differ far less than

  they did thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to housing, England still

  has slums which are a blot on civilization, but much building has been

  done during the past ten years, largely by the local authorities. The

  modern council house, with its bathroom and electric light, is smaller

  than the stockbroker's villa, but it is recognizably the same kind of

  house, which the farm labourer's cottage is not. A person who has grown

  up in a council housing estate is likely to be--indeed, visibly is--more

  middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum.

  The effect of all this is a general softening of manners. It is enhanced

  by the fact that modern industrial methods tend always to demand less

  muscular effort and therefore to leave people with more energy when their

  day's work is done. Many workers in the light industries are less truly

  manual labourers than is a doctor or a grocer. In tastes, habits, manners

  and outlook the working class and the middle class are drawing together.

  The unjust distinctions remain, but the real differences diminish. The

  old-style 'proletarian'--collarless, unshaven and with muscles warped by

  heavy labour--still exists, but he is constantly decreasing in numbers;

  he only predominates in the heavy-industry areas of the north of England.

  After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in

  England before: people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every human

  being in these islands could be 'placed' in an instant by his clothes,

  manners and accent. That is no longer the case. Above all, it is not the

  case in the new townships that have developed as a result of cheap motor

  cars and the southward shift of industry. The place to look for the germs

  of the future England is in light-industry areas and along the arterial

  roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes--everywhere,

  indeed, on the outskirts of great towns--the old pattern is gradually

  changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and

  brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums

  and mansions, or of the country, with its manor-houses and squalid

  cottages, no longer exist. There are wide gradations of income, but it is

  the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, in

  labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads and in

  the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless,

  cultureless life, centring round tinned food, PICTURE POST, the radio and

  the internal combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children

  grow up with an intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance

&
nbsp; of the Bible. To that civilization belong the people who are most at home

  in and most definitely OF the modern world, the technicians and the

  higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio

  experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists.

  They are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions

  are beginning to break down.

  This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing

  class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to

  continue. Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England

  will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of Greater London are

  crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a

  change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply

  tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The

  intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be

  disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the

  reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the

  suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster,

  such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national

  culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will

  give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into

  children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten,

  but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into

  the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to

  change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

  Part II

  Shopkeepers at War

  i.

  I began this book to the tune of German bombs, and I begin this second

  chapter in the added racket of the barrage. The yellow gun flashes are

  lighting the sky, the splinters are rattling on the housetops, and London

  Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. Anyone able to read a

  map knows that we are in deadly danger. I do not mean that we are beaten

  or need be beaten. Almost certainly the outcome depends on our own will.

  But at this moment we are in the soup, full fathom five, and we have been

  brought there by follies which we are still committing and which will

  drown us altogether if we do not mend our ways quickly.

  What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism that is, an

  economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned

  privately and operated solely for profit--DOES NOT WORK. It cannot deliver

  the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past,

  but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to

  alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be

  impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one

  nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed

  that all was for the best. Hitler's conquest of Europe, however, was a

  PHYSICAL debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate

  an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great

  strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.

  When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that

  lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were

  better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their

  champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a

  distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddle steamer of equal

  horse-power stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled

  the question once and for all. And it was something similar that happened

  on the fields of Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved

  that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one. But it is

  necessary here to give some kind of definition to those much-abused