ORWELL'S ESSAYS
Glick, Nathan
Orwell's Essays SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT and Other Essays, by George Orwell. Harcourt, Brace. 200 pp. $2.75. Reviewed by Nathan Glick COMPARED with Shaw, the "dancing philosopher," George Orwell,...
...He sees what is at hand and is never taken in by the dictator's new clothes...
...Reviewed by Nathan Glick COMPARED with Shaw, the "dancing philosopher," George Orwell, the other contemporary British puncturer of dogmas, stereotypes, and pompousness, is entirely earth-bound...
...The difference in tone between 1984 and The Brothers Karamazov is mainly one of national and personal temperament, not of moral passion...
...The second essay reports a hanging, also in Burma, in a sustained matter-of-fact way that conveys more powerfully than direct outrage the full horror (and ghoulish ironies) of this polite, ritualistic technique of destroying a life...
...But one has only to read the three short early essays that open this miscellaneous collection to see that the opposite is true...
...He is simply a man of steady prosaic intelligence, who prefers folk and nonsense verse to the bulk of English poetry—he is probably the most anti-poetic figure in modern English literature—and who can notice that in the spring "after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent" as well as "the most beautiful eye of any living creature...
...It is typical of Orwell that he celebrates the toad, rather than the skylark or the primrose...
...Winston Churchill became the symbol of Western democratic resistance to Nazism, but handed Yugoslavia over to Tito...
...A man of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details...
...Leon Trotsky devoted his life and biting pen to the cause of socialism, yet at the same time defended the Kron-stadt massacre and Stalin's attack on Finland...
...The essays, "Shooting An Elephant" and "A Hanging," almost demand the ethical and logical sequel of a statement for non-violence, and Orwell returns several times to this theme in writing of Tolstoi and Gandhi...
...The third essay, consisting of notes on Orwell's stay in a Paris public hospital, reminds us that the practice of medicine has a history of indifference to suffering which lingers on most conspicuously today in public health institutions...
...he simply communicates in the clearest, sparest prose possible...
...But while he doesn't, like Shaw, strike sparks in the mind, Orwell is by far the more reliable and humane political guide...
...He cannot stand moral impurity dressed up in the language of virtue...
...Shaw attacked the cruelty of slaughtering animals for food or experimenting on them for scientific knowledge, but shed no tear for the victims of Stalin and Mussolini...
...Orwell's concern with man's deeprooted inhumanity is not far from the ideal of saintly behavior that runs .through Dostoyevsky's novels...
...The final sentences of his "Reflections on Gandhi" reveal not only the impressiveness with which Orwell can use an olfactory metaphor, but his mixed feeling towards the ideal of sainthood, as well as his conversational and uninflated use of language: "And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air...
...Despite his skeptical air, Orwell's humane impulse is always in danger of* succumbing to the lure of sainthood...
...It is a style that may sometimes deceive the reader into regarding Orwell as a cold-blooded person whose responses are too indifferent to require the full register of language...
...His role is to report what everyone overlooks: the crucial commonplace phenomenon...
...Although he has a fund of dry incidental humor, his imagination does not make leaps—it moves step by step, however briskly...
...That one even thinks of asking such questions indicates his stature...
...He describes the occasion on which, as a policeman in Burma, he shot an elephant on the rampage, not because it was necessary but because the native crowd that had gathered expected him to do it and because he feared he would otherwise lose face...
...Thus in 1984 the smell of cabbage symbolizes the physical and cultural quality of totalitarian society...
...Orwell's strongest feelings about politics are expressed, curously, in terms of smell, as if only this simplest and most visceral sense could redeem the treachery of language...
...One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi's basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind...
...In our time, the most brilliant and monumental public personalities seem to be invariably afflicted with a capacity for callousness, even when they are men of undeniable idealism...
...Orwell's style is the perfect instrument for his attack on cant and pure rhetoric...
...He employs no organ tones, he neither suggests nor insinuates...
...What he objects to in Tolstoi is the Russian patriarch's egotism and authoritarian impulse, not his saintly ideal—though Orwell thinks these are related...
...In eloquence, power, and originality, Orwell is no match for these men...
Vol. 15 • February 1951 • No. 2
