96
RICHARD WOLLHEIM
ody of Orwell to say that for him a free society was a society
in
which no man touched his cap to another. Yet it is quite clear that
in such a society, a society of hard, proud, self-reliant, manly men,
there could be a terrible absence of liberty as we ordinarily
think
of it. What Orwell hated were things like bureaucracy and pomp
and Five Year Plans and restrictions and propaganda: these
things
he thought, and rightly thought, incompatible with liberty. But
what he seems also to have hated is crankiness, affectation, perver–
sion, "softness," aestheticism: and I don't think that he would have
regarded it as any great breach of liberty to crowd these things out
of society-not to suppress them, mind you, but to crowd them out,
to sweep them under the carpet. And there I'm sure he was wrong.
But I do not want to end on a note of criticism. The limita–
tions of
The Road to Wigan Pier
are very much the limitations of
the age. The book was written, we must remember, in an epoch
when it was held that all literature should aspire to the condition
of journalism. And it must be said in Orwell's favor that out of this
dusty program he managed to snatch a success well beyond the
reach of any of his English contemporaries. One has only to com–
pare
The Road to Wigan Pier
with another typical product of the
age with which it has marked affinities-Grierson's documentary
films-to be struck by the direct and humane and unpretentious
nature of Orwell's writing. And in one passage, at least, the book
transcends the limitations that the author imposed upon it: sincer–
ity, passion and observation suddenly combine to produce a frag–
ment of true literature. Orwell is leaving Wigan. He looks out of
the train, and as we listen to his description of the scene, we hear,
unexpectedly (but all the more moving for that), the note of true
poetry: the elegiac poetry of the modem city, the poetry created by
Baudelaire and the Goncourts, and transplanted and refashioned
by the young Joyce:
This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and
everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved
slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of
little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment.
At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the
