However,
throughout
this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities.
Orwell
But in between these two classes
there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative
power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing
phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel
for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play
into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters,
on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed . Many of these are
used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance? ), and
incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not
interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted
out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of
the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line . Another
example is the hammer and the anvil , now always used with the implication
that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks
the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he
was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.
Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out
appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra
syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are
render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give
rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make
itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc. , etc . The
keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such
as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill , a verb becomes a phrase , made up of a noun
or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form,
play, render . In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in
preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by
examination o/instead of by examining ). The range of verbs is further cut
down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are
given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple
conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to,
having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the
hypothesis that ; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such
resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of
account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious
consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion , and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun),
objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute,
exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate , are used to dress up a simple
statement and give an aire of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.
Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-
old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable , are used to dignify the sordid process of
international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on
an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed
fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion . Foreign words
and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien r&eacutgime, deus ex machina,
mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung , are used to
give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i. e. , e. g.
, and etc. , there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now
current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political,
and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or
Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like
expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine,
subaqueous , and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-
Saxon numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing {hyena, hangman,
cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard
, etc. ) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French;
but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with
the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier
to make up words of this kind {deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital,
non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will
cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and
vagueness.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and
literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost
completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human,
dead, sentimental, natural, vitality , as used in art criticism, are strictly
meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable
object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic
writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while
another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its
peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If
words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and
living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.
Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no
meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable. " The words
democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them
several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the
case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the
attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that
when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the
defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that
they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one
meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.
That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his
hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal
Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The
Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent
to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less
dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary,
bourgeois, equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give
another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its
nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English
into modem English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from
Ecclesiastes'.
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle
to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of
understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to
them all.
Here it is in modem English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion
that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be
commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the
unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance,
contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have
not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow
the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations
— race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in
competitive activities. " This had to be so, because no modem writer of the kind
I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like "objective
considerations of contemporary phenomena" — would ever tabulate his
thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modem prose
is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more
closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its
words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of
ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from
Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time
and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh,
arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened
version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the
second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modem English. I do not
want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of
simplicity will occur here and there in the worst- written page. Still, if you or I
were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should
probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from
Ecclesiastes. As I have tried to show, modem writing at its worst does not
consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images
in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long
strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of
writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit —
to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say /
think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for
the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences
since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.
When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a
stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into
a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do
well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will
save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale
metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of
leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is
the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a
visual image. When these images clash - as in The Fascist octopus has sung
its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as
certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming;
in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at
the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three
words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and
in addition there is the slip — alien for akin — making further nonsense, and
several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness.
Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to
write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with ,
is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if
one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably
one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in
which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but
an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In
(5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this
manner usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and
want to express solidarity with another — but they are not interested in the
detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he
writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1 . What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1 . Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply
throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding
in. The will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for
you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of
partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the
special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes
clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not
true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing
his private opinions and not a "party line. " Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems
to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in
pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of
undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in
that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the
familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free
peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious
feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a
feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches
the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no
eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that
kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a
machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is
not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the
speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again,
he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters
the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not
indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian
purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed
be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to
face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties.
Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism. , question-begging
and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air,
the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the
huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of
peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no
more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of
frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of
the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called
elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to
name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance
some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He
cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get
good results by doing so. " Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which
the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a
certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable
concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian
people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the
sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls
upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the
details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap
between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to
long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age
there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics. " All issues are political issues,
and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to
find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the
German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or
fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad
usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and
do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some
ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much
to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should
do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins
always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will
find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting
against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with
conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I
open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have
an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's
social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in
Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative
and unified Europe. " You see, he "feels impelled" to write — feels, presumably,
that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses
answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary
pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases ( lay the
foundations, achieve a radical transformation ) can only be prevented if one is
constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion
of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who
deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language
merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its
development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the
general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in
detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any
evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two
recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned ,
which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of
flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would
interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not
un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the
average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and,
in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor
points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps
it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete
words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which
must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with
the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has
nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so
long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of
Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style. " On the other
hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written
English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon
word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words
that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning
choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one
can do with words is surrender to them. When yo think of a concrete object,
you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been
visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to
fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words
from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing
dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring
or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as
long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and
sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that
will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what
impressions one's words are likely to mak on another person. This last effort of
the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless
repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in
doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can
rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
1 . Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are
used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can
think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change
of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now
fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one
could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the
beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely
language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing
thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract
words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of
political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle
against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought
to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of
language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting
at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst
follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when
you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from
Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One
cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own
habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send
some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed,
melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into
the dustbin, where it belongs.
1946
Why I Write
1947
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should
be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this
idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that
sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I
barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat
lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular
throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding
conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary
ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that
I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this
created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in
everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious — i. e. seriously intended — writing
which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a
dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down
to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the
tiger had "chair-like teeth" — a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a
plagiarism of Blake's "Tiger, Tiger. " At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I
wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two
years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote
bad and usually unfinished "nature poems" in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short
story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I
actually set down on paper during all those years.
However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with
there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much
pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems
which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed — at fourteen I wrote a
whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week — and helped to edit a
school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful
burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now
would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or
more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making
up of a continuous "story" about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I
believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used
to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling
adventures, but quite soon my "story" ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and
became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For
minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: "He pushed the
door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin
curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot.
With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a
tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf," etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about
twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did
search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against
my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The "story" must, I suppose, have
reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I
remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.
When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i. e. the sounds
and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost —
So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and
the spelling "hee" for "he" was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I
knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I
could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic
novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also
full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound.
And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but
projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.
I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's
motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be
determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages
like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional
attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline
his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood;
but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to
write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for
writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and
in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the
atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
1 . Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after
death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood,
etc. , etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers
share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers,
successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The
great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty
they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for
others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of
gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and
writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more
vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money .
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other
hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound
on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to
share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The
aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer
of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-
utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins,
etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic
considerations.
3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and
store them up for the use of posterity.
4. Political purpose — using the word "political" in the widest possible sense.
Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the
kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free
from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is
itself a political attitude.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they
must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature — taking your
"nature" to be the state you have attained when you are first adult — I am a person in
whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have
written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of
my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.
First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma),
and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of
authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working
classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of
imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political
orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still
failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date,
expressing my dilemma:
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven.
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good.
We were so easy to please.
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girl's bellies and apricots.
Roach in a shaded stream.
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn.
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned.
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays.
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays .
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew
where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written,
directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I
understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can
avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is
simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more
one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically
without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing
into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of
art. " I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want
to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work
of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic
experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is
downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider
irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I
acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly
about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects
and scraps of useless information. It is no use dying to suppress that side of myself. The
job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-
individual activities that this age forces on all of us.
It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new
way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of
difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of
course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and
regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my
literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper
quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with
Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any
ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it.
"Why did you put in all that stuff? " he said. "You've turned what might have been a good
book into journalism. " What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I
happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that
innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should
never have written the book.
In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler
and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write
less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have
perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first
book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political
purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years,
but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure,
but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write. Looking back through
the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing
were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers
are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom
one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same
instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write
nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good
prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the
strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through
my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless
books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative
adjectives and humbug generally.
Notes on Nationalism
May, 1945
Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longeur, and remarks in
passing that though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in
considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so
widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been
given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word "nationalism",
but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only
because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a
nation — that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a
class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without
the need for any positive object of loyalty.
By "nationalism" I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be
classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can
be confidently labelled "good" or "bad. " But secondly — and this is much more important
— I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it
beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.
Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so
vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction
between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By "patriotism"
I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to
be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its
nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is
inseperable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to
secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in
which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist
movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough.
Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside,
nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat what I
said above, that I am only using the word "nationalism" for lack of a better. Nationalism,
in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movments and
tendencies as Communism, political Catholocism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism
and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less
to one's own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals
should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the
Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling:
but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of
them that would be universally accepted.
It is also worth emphasizing once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative.
There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the USSR
without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the
implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal
clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive
prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental
energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on
victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary
history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens
seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is
on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere
worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up
with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that
it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are
overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.
Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is
conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the
right.
Now that I have given this lengthy definition, I think it will be admitted that the habit of
mind I am talking about is widespread among the English intelligentsia, and more
widespread there than among the mass of the people. For those who feel deeply about
contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of
prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the
hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great
allies, the USSR, Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In
theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to
this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because
anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of
competitive prestige. He would therefore start by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or
America as the case might be, and only after this would begin searching for arguments
that seemd to support his case. And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which
you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject
involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the
remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect
that out of al the "experts" of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to
foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939. And when news of the Pact
broke, the most wildly divergent explanations were of it were given, and predictions were
made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a
study of probabilities but on a desire to make the USSR seem good or bad, strong or
weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any
mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the
facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties. And aesthetic judgements,
especially literary judgements, are often corrupted in the same way as political ones. It
would be difficult for an Indian Nationalist to enjoy reading Kipling or for a Conservative
to see merit in Mayakovsky, and there is always a temptation to claim that any book
whose tendency one disagrees with must be a bad book from a literary point of view.
People of strongly nationalistic outlook often perform this sleight of hand without being
conscious of dishonesty.
In England, if one simply considers the number of people involved, it is probable that the
dominant form of nationalism is old-fashioned British jingoism. It is certain that this is
still widespread, and much more so than most observers would have believed a dozen
years ago. However, in this essay I am concerned chiefly with the reactions of the
intelligentsia, among whom jingoism and even patriotism of the old kind are almost dead,
though they now seem to be reviving among a minority. Among the intelligentsia, it
hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism — using this
word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members, but "fellow
travellers" and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who
looks upon the USSR as his Fatherland and feels it his duty t justify Russian policy and
advance Russian interests at all costs. Obviously such people abound in England today,
and their direct and indirect influence is very great. But many other forms of nationalism
also flourish, and it is by noticing the points of resemblance between different and even
seemingly opposed currents of thought that one can best get the matter into perspective.
Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to
Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent — though he
was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one — was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton
was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his
intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty
years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same
thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as "Great is Diana of the
Ephesians. " Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate
beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestan or the
pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual
or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power,
which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France.
Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it — as a land of Catholic
peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine — had about as
much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with
this went not only an enormous overstimation of French military power (both before and
after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a
silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton's battle poems, such
as "Lepanto" or "The Ballad of Saint Barbara", make "The Charge of the Light Brigade"
read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in
our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually
wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain
and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little
Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true
friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could
forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical
belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini.
Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for
which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had
made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say
about imperialsm and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians
or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral
sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.
Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as
exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are between either of these and for
instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an
oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental
atmosphere, but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases. The following are the
principal characteristics of nationalist thought:
OBSESSION. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about
anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for
any nationalist to conceal his allegiance.
there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative
power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing
phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel
for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play
into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters,
on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed . Many of these are
used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance? ), and
incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not
interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted
out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of
the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line . Another
example is the hammer and the anvil , now always used with the implication
that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks
the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he
was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.
Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out
appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra
syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are
render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give
rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make
itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc. , etc . The
keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such
as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill , a verb becomes a phrase , made up of a noun
or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form,
play, render . In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in
preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by
examination o/instead of by examining ). The range of verbs is further cut
down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are
given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple
conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to,
having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the
hypothesis that ; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such
resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of
account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious
consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion , and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun),
objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute,
exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate , are used to dress up a simple
statement and give an aire of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.
Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-
old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable , are used to dignify the sordid process of
international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on
an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed
fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion . Foreign words
and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien r&eacutgime, deus ex machina,
mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung , are used to
give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i. e. , e. g.
, and etc. , there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now
current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political,
and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or
Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like
expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine,
subaqueous , and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-
Saxon numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing {hyena, hangman,
cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard
, etc. ) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French;
but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with
the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier
to make up words of this kind {deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital,
non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will
cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and
vagueness.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and
literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost
completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human,
dead, sentimental, natural, vitality , as used in art criticism, are strictly
meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable
object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic
writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while
another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its
peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If
words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and
living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.
Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no
meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable. " The words
democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them
several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the
case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the
attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that
when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the
defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that
they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one
meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.
That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his
hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal
Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The
Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent
to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less
dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary,
bourgeois, equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give
another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its
nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English
into modem English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from
Ecclesiastes'.
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle
to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of
understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to
them all.
Here it is in modem English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion
that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be
commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the
unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance,
contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have
not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow
the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations
— race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in
competitive activities. " This had to be so, because no modem writer of the kind
I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like "objective
considerations of contemporary phenomena" — would ever tabulate his
thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modem prose
is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more
closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its
words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of
ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from
Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time
and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh,
arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened
version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the
second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modem English. I do not
want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of
simplicity will occur here and there in the worst- written page. Still, if you or I
were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should
probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from
Ecclesiastes. As I have tried to show, modem writing at its worst does not
consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images
in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long
strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of
writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit —
to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say /
think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for
the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences
since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.
When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a
stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into
a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do
well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will
save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale
metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of
leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is
the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a
visual image. When these images clash - as in The Fascist octopus has sung
its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as
certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming;
in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at
the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three
words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and
in addition there is the slip — alien for akin — making further nonsense, and
several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness.
Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to
write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with ,
is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if
one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably
one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in
which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but
an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In
(5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this
manner usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and
want to express solidarity with another — but they are not interested in the
detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he
writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1 . What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1 . Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply
throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding
in. The will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for
you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of
partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the
special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes
clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not
true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing
his private opinions and not a "party line. " Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems
to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in
pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of
undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in
that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the
familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free
peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious
feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a
feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches
the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no
eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that
kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a
machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is
not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the
speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again,
he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters
the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not
indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian
purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed
be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to
face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties.
Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism. , question-begging
and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air,
the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the
huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of
peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no
more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of
frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of
the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called
elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to
name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance
some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He
cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get
good results by doing so. " Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which
the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a
certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable
concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian
people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the
sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls
upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the
details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap
between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to
long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age
there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics. " All issues are political issues,
and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to
find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the
German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or
fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad
usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and
do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some
ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much
to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should
do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins
always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will
find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting
against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with
conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I
open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have
an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's
social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in
Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative
and unified Europe. " You see, he "feels impelled" to write — feels, presumably,
that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses
answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary
pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases ( lay the
foundations, achieve a radical transformation ) can only be prevented if one is
constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion
of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who
deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language
merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its
development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the
general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in
detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any
evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two
recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned ,
which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of
flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would
interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not
un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the
average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and,
in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor
points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps
it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete
words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which
must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with
the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has
nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so
long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of
Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style. " On the other
hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written
English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon
word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words
that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning
choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one
can do with words is surrender to them. When yo think of a concrete object,
you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been
visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to
fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words
from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing
dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring
or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as
long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and
sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that
will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what
impressions one's words are likely to mak on another person. This last effort of
the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless
repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in
doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can
rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
1 . Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are
used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can
think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change
of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now
fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one
could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the
beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely
language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing
thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract
words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of
political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle
against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought
to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of
language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting
at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst
follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when
you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from
Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One
cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own
habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send
some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed,
melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into
the dustbin, where it belongs.
1946
Why I Write
1947
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should
be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this
idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that
sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I
barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat
lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular
throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding
conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary
ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that
I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this
created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in
everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious — i. e. seriously intended — writing
which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a
dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down
to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the
tiger had "chair-like teeth" — a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a
plagiarism of Blake's "Tiger, Tiger. " At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I
wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two
years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote
bad and usually unfinished "nature poems" in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short
story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I
actually set down on paper during all those years.
However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with
there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much
pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems
which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed — at fourteen I wrote a
whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week — and helped to edit a
school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful
burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now
would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or
more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making
up of a continuous "story" about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I
believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used
to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling
adventures, but quite soon my "story" ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and
became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For
minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: "He pushed the
door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin
curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot.
With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a
tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf," etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about
twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did
search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against
my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The "story" must, I suppose, have
reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I
remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.
When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i. e. the sounds
and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost —
So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and
the spelling "hee" for "he" was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I
knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I
could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic
novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also
full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound.
And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but
projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.
I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's
motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be
determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages
like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional
attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline
his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood;
but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to
write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for
writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and
in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the
atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
1 . Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after
death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood,
etc. , etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers
share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers,
successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The
great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty
they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for
others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of
gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and
writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more
vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money .
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other
hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound
on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to
share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The
aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer
of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-
utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins,
etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic
considerations.
3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and
store them up for the use of posterity.
4. Political purpose — using the word "political" in the widest possible sense.
Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the
kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free
from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is
itself a political attitude.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they
must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature — taking your
"nature" to be the state you have attained when you are first adult — I am a person in
whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have
written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of
my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.
First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma),
and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of
authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working
classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of
imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political
orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still
failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date,
expressing my dilemma:
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven.
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good.
We were so easy to please.
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girl's bellies and apricots.
Roach in a shaded stream.
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn.
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned.
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays.
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays .
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew
where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written,
directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I
understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can
avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is
simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more
one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically
without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing
into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of
art. " I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want
to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work
of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic
experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is
downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider
irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I
acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly
about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects
and scraps of useless information. It is no use dying to suppress that side of myself. The
job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-
individual activities that this age forces on all of us.
It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new
way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of
difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of
course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and
regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my
literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper
quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with
Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any
ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it.
"Why did you put in all that stuff? " he said. "You've turned what might have been a good
book into journalism. " What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I
happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that
innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should
never have written the book.
In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler
and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write
less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have
perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first
book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political
purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years,
but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure,
but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write. Looking back through
the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing
were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers
are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom
one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same
instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write
nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good
prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the
strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through
my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless
books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative
adjectives and humbug generally.
Notes on Nationalism
May, 1945
Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longeur, and remarks in
passing that though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in
considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so
widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been
given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word "nationalism",
but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only
because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a
nation — that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a
class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without
the need for any positive object of loyalty.
By "nationalism" I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be
classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can
be confidently labelled "good" or "bad. " But secondly — and this is much more important
— I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it
beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.
Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so
vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction
between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By "patriotism"
I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to
be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its
nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is
inseperable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to
secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in
which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist
movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough.
Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside,
nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat what I
said above, that I am only using the word "nationalism" for lack of a better. Nationalism,
in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movments and
tendencies as Communism, political Catholocism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism
and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less
to one's own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals
should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the
Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling:
but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of
them that would be universally accepted.
It is also worth emphasizing once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative.
There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the USSR
without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the
implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal
clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive
prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental
energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on
victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary
history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens
seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is
on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere
worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up
with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that
it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are
overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.
Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is
conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the
right.
Now that I have given this lengthy definition, I think it will be admitted that the habit of
mind I am talking about is widespread among the English intelligentsia, and more
widespread there than among the mass of the people. For those who feel deeply about
contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of
prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the
hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great
allies, the USSR, Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In
theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to
this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because
anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of
competitive prestige. He would therefore start by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or
America as the case might be, and only after this would begin searching for arguments
that seemd to support his case. And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which
you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject
involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the
remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect
that out of al the "experts" of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to
foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939. And when news of the Pact
broke, the most wildly divergent explanations were of it were given, and predictions were
made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a
study of probabilities but on a desire to make the USSR seem good or bad, strong or
weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any
mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the
facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties. And aesthetic judgements,
especially literary judgements, are often corrupted in the same way as political ones. It
would be difficult for an Indian Nationalist to enjoy reading Kipling or for a Conservative
to see merit in Mayakovsky, and there is always a temptation to claim that any book
whose tendency one disagrees with must be a bad book from a literary point of view.
People of strongly nationalistic outlook often perform this sleight of hand without being
conscious of dishonesty.
In England, if one simply considers the number of people involved, it is probable that the
dominant form of nationalism is old-fashioned British jingoism. It is certain that this is
still widespread, and much more so than most observers would have believed a dozen
years ago. However, in this essay I am concerned chiefly with the reactions of the
intelligentsia, among whom jingoism and even patriotism of the old kind are almost dead,
though they now seem to be reviving among a minority. Among the intelligentsia, it
hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism — using this
word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members, but "fellow
travellers" and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who
looks upon the USSR as his Fatherland and feels it his duty t justify Russian policy and
advance Russian interests at all costs. Obviously such people abound in England today,
and their direct and indirect influence is very great. But many other forms of nationalism
also flourish, and it is by noticing the points of resemblance between different and even
seemingly opposed currents of thought that one can best get the matter into perspective.
Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to
Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent — though he
was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one — was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton
was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his
intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty
years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same
thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as "Great is Diana of the
Ephesians. " Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate
beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestan or the
pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual
or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power,
which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France.
Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it — as a land of Catholic
peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine — had about as
much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with
this went not only an enormous overstimation of French military power (both before and
after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a
silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton's battle poems, such
as "Lepanto" or "The Ballad of Saint Barbara", make "The Charge of the Light Brigade"
read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in
our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually
wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain
and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little
Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true
friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could
forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical
belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini.
Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for
which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had
made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say
about imperialsm and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians
or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral
sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.
Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as
exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are between either of these and for
instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an
oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental
atmosphere, but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases. The following are the
principal characteristics of nationalist thought:
OBSESSION. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about
anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for
any nationalist to conceal his allegiance.
