O Tempora! O Mores!

DICKENS, DALI AND OTHERS (242 pp.)--George Orwell--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50)

"The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final." So says George Orwell in one of the ten essays that make up his book; he also says it between the lines of the other nine.

An agnostic who binds himself to the Ten Commandments, Essayist Orwell at 43 has attained an impressive position in British critical writing. A most skillful political pamphleteer (Animal Farm--TIME, Feb. 4),* he has won wide respect by not paying a cent of tribute to friends or foes of any party.

A leftist (he was wounded in the Spanish Civil War), he nonetheless includes all leftist creeds among "the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls." A vigorous anti-imperialist (as a youth, he served in the Burma police), he has the courage to affirm that an imperialist like Rudyard Kipling is likely to speak more sanely about imperial affairs than are his liberal critics. Finally, while remaining a skeptical iconoclast, Orwell can insist that "high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic."

None of the essays in this book is of much importance as literary criticism. Each is a shining reflection of Essayist Orwell's intelligent, often violent opinions on contemporary life in Europe and the U.S. All of the essays are openhearted, open-minded, and filled with hot distaste for both the tightness of orthodoxy and the looseness of hedonism. They express an unusual combination of strength and gentleness in an easy, fluent prose.

Freud in the Suburbs. Intellectuals, Orwell implies, may snigger if they will at Dickens' sentimentality and Kipling's imperialistic fervor, but they had much better spend their time getting wise to the far worse perversion of ethical values that is creeping up right under their disdainful noses. This perversion, says Orwell, is most clearly revealed in the obscene pulp fiction that is now, he fears, taking root in Britain as it has in the U.S.

In the good old ignorant days of Sherlock Holmes and Arsene Lupin, the thriller was a mild, usually non-murderous affair in which there was nothing more bestial than a hound with phosphorescent jowls. Today, when "emancipation is complete [and] Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs," the pulp thriller is "a daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age . . . a distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such things as mass bombings of civilians . . . torture to obtain confessions . . . execution without trial . . . drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics . . . bribery and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they are done in a large and bold way." Power, and its high priest, the bully, are becoming democratic idols.

Wealth & Worship. "The interconnection," says Orwell, "between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched."

The theme is repeated by people like the old Bolshevik in Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon (who confesses to crimes he has not committed chiefly because truth has long ceased to mean anything to him); in the sadistic hunting down of World War II's pettiest traitors and quislings by "Conservatives who were practicing appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940"; in Poet Yeats's vision of a brave new world ("hierarchical, masculine, harsh, surgical. . . great wealth everywhere in a few men's hands . . . inequality made law"); in the creed of "punch," "drive" and "personality" of efficiency experts; in the vast popular literature for boys involving physical shambles reminiscent of the Roman arena ("He walked in stolidly and smashed a clublike right to my face. Blood spattered and I went back on my heels, but surged in and ripped my right under the heart").

Jack the Dwarf Killer. Most of this unadulterated power-worship, Orwell points out, is not considered in any way abnormal by a world that takes pride in the fact that there are "no gentlemen and no taboos" any more.

It was instinctive for a "generously angry" 19th-Century liberal like Charles Dickens, who loathed both Catholics and aristocrats, to hurl them from their seats in the first half of a novel--and spring to their aid, as underdogs, in the second half. But now, the great traditional myth of the English-speaking peoples--the hero's fight against odds, which runs "all the way from Robin Hood to Popeye the Sailor"--is rapidly dying; Jack the Giant Killer is being recreated as Jack the Dwarf Killer, and used as a means of teaching that "one should side with the big men against the little man."

Even so popular a slogan as "the end justifies the means" is no longer in tune with the anti-ethics of the times. Today, says Orwell, we are learning to say: "The means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough."

* The Queen's literary adviser, Sir Osbert Sitwell, suggested that she read it. A Royal messenger was dispatched to the publishers (London's Seeker & Warburg) but the shelf was bare. He finally purchased a copy in an anarchist bookshop.

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