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| George
Orwell As I Please Tribune, 7 July 1944 |
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When the Caliph Omar destroyed the
libraries of
Alexandria he is supposed to have kept the public baths warm for eighteen
days with burning manuscripts, and great numbers of tragedies by Euripides
and others are said to have perished, quite irrevocably. I remember that
when I read about this as a boy it simply filled me with enthusiastic
approval. It was so many less words to look up in the dictionary – that
was how I saw it. For, though I am only forty-one, I am old enough to have
been educated at a time when Latin and Greek were only escapable with great
difficulty, while ‘English’ was hardly regarded as a school subject at
all. Classical education is going down the drain at last, but even now there
must be far more adults who have been flogged through the entire extant
works of Aeschylus,
Sophocles,
Euripides, Aristophanes,
Vergil, Horace and various other Latin and Greek authors than have read the
English masterpieces of the eighteenth century. People pay lip service to Fielding
and the rest of them, of course, but they don’t read them, as you can
discover by making a few inquiries among your friends. How many people have
ever read Tom Jones, for instance? Not so many have even read the
later books of Gulliver’s Travels. Robinson Crusoe has a sort of
popularity in nursery versions, but the book as a whole is so little known
that few people are even aware that the second part (the journey through Tartary)
exists. Smollett,
I imagine, is the least read of all. The central plot of Shaw’s
play, Pygmalion, is lifted out of Peregrine Pickle, and I
believe that no one has ever pointed this out in print, which suggests that
few people can have read the book. But what is strangest of all is that
Smollett, so far as I know, has never been boosted by the Scottish
Nationalists, who are so careful to claim Byron
for their own. Yet Smollett, besides being one of the best novelists the
English-speaking races have produced, was a Scotsman, and proclaimed
it openly at a time when being so was anything but helpful to one’s career.
Life in the civilized world. I see that Lord Winterton, writing in the
Evening
Standard, speaks of the ‘remarkable reticence (by no means entirely
imposed by rule or regulation) which Parliament and press alike have
displayed in this war to avoid endangering national security’ and adds
that it has ‘earned the admiration of the civilized world’.
You
cannot hope to bribe or twist No bribes, no threats, no penalties – just a nod and
a wink and the thing is done. A well-known example was the business of the
Abdication. Weeks before the scandal officially broke, tens or hundreds of
thousands of people had heard all about Mrs
Simpson, and yet not a word got into the press, not even into the
Daily Worker, although the American and European papers were having the
time of their lives with the story. Yet I believe there was no definite
official ban: just an official ‘request’ and a general agreement that to
break the news prematurely ‘would not do’. And I can think of other
instances of good news stories failing to see the light although there would
have been no penalty for printing them. Here is a little problem sometimes used as an
intelligence test. |
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Copyright
The Estate of Eric Blair Reproduced here under educational Fair Use law |
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