GEORGE ORWELL AND THE POLITICS OF TRUTH Portraitof the Intellectual as a Man of Virtue LIONEL TRILLING G'EORGE ORWELL'S Homage to also a demonstration on the part of its author Catalonia is one of the important of one of the right ways of confronting that documents of our time. It is a very life. Its importance is therefore of the present modest book-it seems to say the least that moment and for years to come. can be said on a subject of great magnitude. A politics which is presumed to be avail- But in saying the least it says the most. Its able to everyone is a relatively new thing in manifest subject is a period of the Spanish the world. We do not yet know very much Civil War, in which, for some months, until about it. Nor have most of us been especially he was almost mortally wounded, its author eager to learn. In a politics presumed to be fought as a soldier in the trenches. Everyone available to everyone, ideas and ideals play knows that the Spanish war was a decisive a great part. And those of us who set store event of our epoch, everyone said so when by ideas and ideals have never been quite it was being fought, and everyone was able to learn that just because they do have right. But the Spanish war lies a decade and power nowadays, there is a direct connection a half behind us, and nowadays our sense of between their power and another kind of history is being destroyed by the nature of power, the old, unabashed, cynical power of our history-our memory is short and it grows force. We are always being surprised by this. shorter under the rapidity of the assault of Communism's record of the use of unregen- events. What once occupied all our minds erate force was perfectly clear years ago, but and filled the musty meeting halls with the many of us found it impossible to admit this awareness of heroism and destiny has now because Communism spoke boldly to our become chiefly a matter for the historical love of ideas and ideals. We tried as hard as scholar. George Orwell's book would make we could to believe that politics might be an only a limited claim upon our attention if idyl, only to discover that what we took to it were nothing more than a record of per- be a political pastoral was really a grim mili- sonal experiences in the Spanish war. But tary campaign or a murderous betrayal of it is much more than this. It is a testimony political allies-or that what we insisted on to the nature of modem political life. It is calling agrarianism was in actuality a new imperialism. And in the personal life what Fw writers in the English-speaking world have was undertaken by many good people as a written more penetratingly than LIONEL TRILL- moral commitment of the most disinterested ING on the problems of culture, art, and morality kind turned out to be an engagement to an in our time. It is of the problem of virtue-how ultimate immorality. The evidence of this a man may be good in an age of intellectual is to be found in a whole literary genre with double-dealing and failure of conscience-that he writes here, taking as his point of departure which we have become familiar in the last the life and work of "a man of virtue": George decade, the personal confession of involve- Orwell. This essay was written as an introduc- ment and then of disillusionment with Com- tion to a new edition of Orwell's Homage to munism. Catalonia, to be brought out next month by Orwell's book, in one of its most signifi- Harcourt, Brace. Mr. Trilling's books include cant aspects, is about disillusionment with Matthew Arnold (939), E. M. Forster (x943), The Middle of the Journey, a novel Communism, but it is not a confession. I (1947), and The Liberal Imagination (950). say this because it is one of the important 218 GEORGE ORWELL AND THE POLITICS OF TRUTH 219 positive things to say about Homage to Cata- and indeed at the very moment that I was lonia, but my saying it does not imply that I reaching for the telephone to tell the pub- share the a priori antagonistic feelings of lisher that I would write it, a young man, many people toward those books which, on a graduate student of mine, came in to see the basis of experience, expose and denounce me, the purpose of his visit being to ask the Communist party. About such books what I thought about his doing an essay on people of liberal inclination often make un- George Orwell. My answer, naturally, was easy and rather vindictive jokes. The jokes ready, and when I had given it and we had seem to me unfair and in bad taste. There been amused and pleased by the coincidence, is nothing shameful in the nature of these he settled down for some chat about our books. There is a good chance that the com- common subject. But I asked him not to mitment to Communism was made in the talk about Orwell. I didn't want to dissipate first place for generous reasons, and it is cer- in talk what ideas I had, and also I didn't tain that the revulsion was brought by more want my ideas crossed with his, which were than sufficient causes. And clearly there is sure to be very good. So for a while we nothing wrong in wishing to record the pain- merely exchanged bibliographical informa- ful experience and to draw conclusions from tion, asking each other which of Orwell's it. Nevertheless, human nature being what books we had read and which we owned. it is-and in the uneasy readers of such But then, as if he could not resist making at books as well as in the unhappy writers of least one remark about Orwell himself, he them-it is a fact that public confession does said suddenly in a very simple and matter-of- often appear in an unfortunate light, that fact way, "He was a virtuous man." And we its moral tone is less simple and true than sat there, agreeing at length about this state- we might wish it to be. But the moral tone ment, finding pleasure in talking about it. of Orwell's book is uniquely simple and It was an odd statement for a young man true. Orwell's ascertaining of certain politi- to make nowadays, and I suppose that what cal facts was not the occasion for a change of we found so interesting about it was just heart, or for a crisis of the soul. What he this oddity-its point was in its being an learned from his experiences in Spain of old-fashioned thing to say. It was archaic in course pained him very much, and it led its bold commitment of sentiment, and it him to change his course of conduct. But used an archaic word in an archaic simplic- it did not destroy him, it did not, as people ity. Our pleasure was not merely literary, say, cut the ground from under him. It did not just a response to the remark's being not shatter his faith in what he had previous- so appropriate to Orwell, in whom there was ly believed, nor weaken his political impulse, indeed a quality of an earlier day. We were nor even change its direction. It produced glad to be able to say it about anybody. not a moment of guilt or self-recrimination. One doesn't have the opportunity very often. Perhaps this should not seem so very Not that there are not many men who are remarkable. Yet who can doubt that it good, but there are few men who, in ad- constitutes in our time a genuine moral tri- dition to being good, have the simplicity and umph? It suggests that Orwell was an un- sturdiness and activity which allow us to say usual kind of man, that he had a temper of it about them, for somehow to say that a mind and heart which is now rare, although man "is good," or even to speak of a man we still respond to it when we see it. About who "is virtuous," is not the same thing as this person and the temper of his mind and saying, "He is a virtuous man." By some heart a word ought to be said. quirk of the spirit of the language, the form of that sentence brings out the primitive T HAPPENED by a curious chance that on meaning of the word virtuous, which is not the day I agreed to write the introduction merely moral goodness, but fortitude and to the new edition of Homage to Catalonia, strength. 220 COMMENTARY Orwell, by reason of the quality that per- of the world. In different ways this was true mits us to say of him that he was a virtuous of Yeats, and of Shaw, and even of Wells. man, is a figure in our lives. He was not a It is true of T. S. Eliot, for all that he has genius, and this is one of the remarkable spoken against the claims of personality in things about him. His not being a genius is literature. Even E. M. Forster, who makes an element of the quality that makes him so much of privacy, acts out in public the what I am calling a figure.