George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 8 September 1944For a book of 32
pages, Sir Osbert Sitwells
A Letter to My Son contains a quite astonishing quantity of invective. I imagine that
it is the invective, or rather the eminence of the people it is directed against, that has
led Sir Osbert to change his publisher. But in among passages that are sometimes unfair
and occasionally frivolous, he manages to say some penetrating things about the position
of the artist in a modern centralized society. Here, for instance, are some excerpts:
The true artist has always had to fight, but it is, and will be, a more
ferocious struggle for you, and the artists of your generation, than ever before. The
working man, this time, will be better looked after, he will be flattered by the press and
bribed with Beveridge schemes, because he possesses a plurality of votes. But who will
care for you and your fate, who will trouble to defend the cause of the young writer,
painter, sculptor, musician? And what inspiration will you be offered when theatre,
ballet, concert-hall lie in ruins, and, owing to the break in training, there are no great
executant artists for several decades? Above all, do not underestimate the amount and
intensity of genuine ill-will that people will feel for you; not the working man, for
though not highly educated he has a mild respect for the arts and no preconceived notions,
not the few remaining patricians, but the vast army between, the fat middle classes
and the little men. And here I must make special mention of the civil servant as enemy . .
. . At the best, you will be ground down between the small but powerful authoritarian
minority of art directors, museum racketeers, the chic,
giggling modistes who write on art and literature, publishers, journalists and dons (who
will, to do them justice, try to help you, if you will write as they tell you) and
the enormous remainder who would not mind, who would indeed be pleased, if they saw you
starve. For we English are unique in that, albeit an art-producing nation, we are not an
art-loving one. In the past the arts depended on a small number of very rich patrons. The
enclave they formed has never been re-established. The very name art-lover
stinks . . . . The privileges you hold today, then, as an artist, are those of Ishmael,
the hand of every man is against you. Remember, therefore, that outcasts must never
be afraid.
These are not my views. They are the views of an intelligent Conservative who
underrates the virtues of democracy and attributes to feudalism certain advantages
which really belong to capitalism.
It is a mistake, for instance, to yearn after an aristocratic patron. The patron could be
just as hard a master as the B.B.C., and he did not pay your salary so regularly. François Villon had, I
suppose, as rough a time as any poet in our own day, and the literary man starving in a
garret was one of the characteristic figures of the eighteenth century. At best, in an age
of patronage you had to waste time and talent on revolting flatteries, as Shakespeare did. Indeed, if
one thinks of the artist as an Ishmael,
an autonomous individual who owes nothing to society, then the golden age of the artist
was the age of capitalism. He had then escaped from the patron and not yet been captured
by the bureaucrat. He could at any rate a writer, a musician, an actor, and perhaps
even a painter could make his living off the big public, who were uncertain of what
they wanted and would to a great extent take what they were given. Indeed, for about a
hundred years it was possible to make your livelihood by openly insulting the public, as
the careers of, say Flaubert,
Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence, and even Dickens, show.
But all the same there is much in what Sir Osbert Sitwell says. Laissez-faire
capitalism is passing away, and the independent status of the artist must necessarily
disappear with it. He must become either a spare-time amateur or an official. When you see
what has happened to the arts in the totalitarian countries, and
when you see the same thing happening here in a more veiled way through the M.O.I., the
B.B.C. and the film companies organizations which not only buy up promising young
writers and geld them and set them to work like cab-horses, but manage to rob literary
creation of its individual character and turn it into a sort of conveyor-belt process
the prospects are not encouraging. Yet it remains true that capitalism, which in
many ways was kind to the artist and the intellectual generally, is doomed and is not
worth saving anyway. So you arrive at these two antithetical facts: (1) Society cannot be
arranged for the benefit of artists; (2) without artists civilization perishes. I have
never yet seen this dilemma solved (there must be a solution), and it is not often that it
is honestly discussed.
I have before me an exceptionally disgusting photograph, from the Star of 29
August, of two partially undressed women, with shaven heads and
with swastikas painted on their faces, being led through the streets of Paris amid
grinning onlookers. The Star not that I am picking on the Star, for
most of the press has behaved likewise reproduces this photograph with seeming
approval.
I dont blame the French for doing this kind of thing. They
have had four years of suffering, and I can partially imagine how they feel towards the
collaborators. But it is a different matter when newspapers in this country try to
persuade their readers that shaving womens heads is a nice thing to do. As soon as I
saw this Star photograph. I thought, Where have
I seen something like this before? Then I remembered. Just about ten years ago,
when the Nazi régime was
beginning to get into its stride, very similar pictures of humiliated Jews being led
through the streets of German cities were exhibited in the British press but with
this difference, that on that occasion we were not expected to approve.
Recently another newspaper published photographs of the dangling
corpses of Germans hanged by the Russians in Kharkov, and carefully informed its readers
that these executions had been filmed and that the public would shortly be able to witness
them at the news theatres. (Were children admitted, I wonder?)
There is a saying of Nietzsche which I have
quoted before (not in this column, I think), but which is worth quoting again: He
who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself: and if thou gaze too long
into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee.
Too long, in this context, should perhaps be taken as
meaning after the dragon is beaten. |