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PARTISAN REVIEW
music-hall level of British culture to-day but throw a straight, direct,
unblinking light on its frightening significance, for the "American"
violence which the newer French writers so much admire has had its
influence, or at least its parallels, on a low stratum of English popular
literature. Orwell is admirable on this whole question, and his particular
gifts make it possible for him to write sensibly and spiritedly about figures
like Dickens, Kipling, and Wells; indeed, his long essay on Dickens brings
out most of his best qualities. I don't know that anyone has shown quite
so fully or so knowingly just what effect Dickens's urban-middle-class
derivation had on his mentality, his imagination, and his sense of values.
The claim that Dickens was a "revolutionary" writer in any well-defined,
positive, or intellectually instructed sense is pretty well exploded in this
piece.
One would look in it in vain, however, for the kind of insights one
finds in Edmund Wilson's essay; and, in general, Orwell's talents are for
the heftier jobs of criticism-jobs which need to be done-rather than
for its more painful, prolonged, and patient tasks of discrimination. The
old English impatience with "putting too fine a point upon it," the old
English distrust of half-tones, of ambiguities, of personal and intellectual
deviations, these are very strong in Orwell, and they not only incapacitate
him for writing very well about a person like Yeats, but they inject an un–
pleasant note of anti-intellectualism and even philistinism into his better
pieces.
There are uncomfortably too many jibes here at " 'enlightened'
people," at what Orwell not very urbanely calls "pansy-left circles,"
at whipping-boy Marxists and liberals. There are too many dicta such as
this: "The nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name the least sym–
pathetic of his [Kipling's] idols, were at any rate people who did
things"-as they could not have been if their outlook had resembled E.
M. Forster's. Or this: "It is a great thing in his [Kipling's] favour that
he is not witty, not 'daring,' has no wish to
epater le bourgeois.
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Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the
'enlightened' utterances of the same period, such as Wilde's epigrams
or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of
Man and Superman."
Well, here is one reviewer who prefers Oscar Wilde's epigrams, if it
comes
to
that, to the "very beautiful lines" from Kipling which Orwell
quotes admiringly:
Oh, hark to the big drum calling,
Follow me-follow me home!
Heaven knows what sort of epithet one may draw down on one's
head for saying this, but Orwell might well remember, for example, Dr.
Johnson's famous and unfortunate remark (in 1776) : "Nothing odd will
