92
RICHARD WOLLHEIM
deserve no mercy from anyone; and
it
is one of the great merits of
a modern Thoreau like Orwell that he shows these
things
up for
what they are.
It
is,
then, impossible not to admire Orwell for
his
attempt
to
detach himself from bourgeois life and to effect a total immersion
in the life of the working-classes. As an act of renunciation and
penance it has a heroic quality; it sets him aside as one kind of
superior person, the kind that does
things
that others can't get
themselves to do. But there comes a point in Orwell's writing when
the act ceases to have a purely personal or even penitential char–
acter, and the life of the working-classes is presented not just as a
life we should all know about nor as the only life a free man can
lead, but as a definitely superior condition, as a form of existence
that, quite apart from considerations of curiosity or conscience, it
would be reasonable to prefer to anything else that modern life has
to offer:
Curiously enough it is
not
the triumphs of modern engineering,
nor the radio, nor the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels
which are published yearly, nor the crowds at Ascot and the Eton and
Harrow match, but the memory of working-class interion--especially
as I saw them in my childhood before the war, when England was still
prosperous--that reminds me that our age has not been altogether
a
bad
one to
live
in.
The passage taken as a whole seems to me to be as good an
example as one could find of the sort of slovenly emotive writing
that in other quarters Orwell thought it his duty to scourge. Why,
for instance, does he suppose that the aspects of life he opposes to
working-class life are the only other candidates for excellence? Or
why does he suggest that those who support middle-class culture do
so on account of any of these things? Still, Orwell's championship
of proletarian culture, stripped of its false rhetoric,
is
of consider–
able interest; not least because of its parallelism with a cultural
movement in English thought today.
The most notable feature of Orwell's case is that he produces
no coherent evidence in its favor.
On
the contrary everything he
says
in the ordinary course of description about working-class life
