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archism, rather than Stalinism, are now gaining ground among the young.
These creeds have the advantage that they aim at the impossible and
therefore in effect demand very little.
If
you throw in a touch of Oriental
mysticism and Buchmanite raptures over Gandhi, you have everything
that a disaffected intellectual needs. The life of an English gentleman
and the moral attitude of a saint can be enjoyed simultaneously. By
merely transferring your allegiance from England to India (it used to
be Russia), you can indulge to the full in all the chauvinistic sentiments
which would be totally impossible if you recognized them for what they
were. In the name of pacifism you can compromise with Hitler, and in
the name of 'spirituality' you can keep your money. It is no accident
that those who wish for an inconclusive ending to the war tend to extol
the East as against the 'Vest. The actual facts don't matter very much.
The fact that the Eastem nations have shown themselves at least as war–
like and bloodthirsty as the Westem ones, that so far from rejecting
industrialism, the East is adopting it as swiftly as it can-this is irrelevant,
since what is wanted is the mythos of the peaceful, religious and patri–
archal East to set against the greedy and materialistic West. As soon as
you have 'rejected' industrialism, and hence Socialism, you are in that
strange no man's land where the Fascist and the pacifist join forces. There
is indeed a sort of apocalyptic truth in the statement of the German
radio that the teachings of Hitler and Gandhi are the same. One realizes
7
this when one sees Middleton Murry praising the Japanese invasion of
China and Gerald Heard proposing to institute the Hindu caste system
in Europe at the same time as the Hindus themselves are abandoning it.
We shall be hearing a lot about the superiority of Eastern civilization in
the next few years. Meanwhile this is a michievous book, which will be
acclaimed in the Left-wing Press and welcomed for quite different reasons
by the more intelligent Right.
GEORGE ORWELL
EMPTY NET
THE WIDE NET AND OTHER STORIES.
By Eudora Welty. Har–
court, Brace.
$2.50.
The stories in Miss Welty's first volume,
The Curtain of Green,
were not consciously profound, but implicit in them was an astute com–
mentary on human behaviour. The agencies for her implications were
humor, a contrived but clever architecture, taste, and arresting, if oc–
casionally deformed, prose. But in her new book,
The Wide Net,
the
author, warily picking her way through meanings and the amorphous
produce of the soul, or rocketing out of sight in a burst of fantasy, loses
her humor, leaves fissures in her masonry, forgets her breeding, and
writes eight stories in a language so vague that not only actual words
but syntax itself have the improbable inexactitude of a verbal dream.
Nor is the landscape any more precise, nor have the characters more
