GEORGE ORWELL AND THE POLITICS OF TRUTH Portraitof the Intellectual as a Man of Virtue LIONEL TRILLING
G'EORGE ORWELL'S Homage to
also a demonstration on the part of its author of one of the right ways of confronting that life. Its importance is therefore of the present moment and for years to come. A politics which is presumed to be available to everyone is a relatively new thing in the world. We do not yet know very much about it. Nor have most of us been especially eager to learn. In a politics presumed to be available to everyone, ideas and ideals play a great part. And those of us who set store by ideas and ideals have never been quite able to learn that just because they do have power nowadays, there is a direct connection between their power and another kind of power, the old, unabashed, cynical power of force. We are always being surprised by this. Communism's record of the use of unregenerate force was perfectly clear years ago, but many of us found it impossible to admit this because Communism spoke boldly to our love of ideas and ideals. We tried as hard as we could to believe that politics might be an idyl, only to discover that what we took to be a political pastoral was really a grim military campaign or a murderous betrayal of political allies-or that what we insisted on calling agrarianism was in actuality a new imperialism. And in the personal life what was undertaken by many good people as a moral commitment of the most disinterested kind turned out to be an engagement to an ultimate immorality. The evidence of this is to be found in a whole literary genre with which we have become familiar in the last decade, the personal confession of involvement and then of disillusionment with Communism. Orwell's book, in one of its most significant aspects, is about disillusionment with Communism, but it is not a confession. I say this because it is one of the important
Catalonia is one of the important documents of our time. It is a very modest book-it seems to say the least that can be said on a subject of great magnitude. But in saying the least it says the most. Its manifest subject is a period of the Spanish Civil War, in which, for some months, until he was almost mortally wounded, its author fought as a soldier in the trenches. Everyone knows that the Spanish war was a decisive event of our epoch, everyone said so when it was being fought, and everyone was right. But the Spanish war lies a decade and a half behind us, and nowadays our sense of history is being destroyed by the nature of our history-our memory is short and it grows shorter under the rapidity of the assault of events. What once occupied all our minds and filled the musty meeting halls with the awareness of heroism and destiny has now become chiefly a matter for the historical scholar. George Orwell's book would make only a limited claim upon our attention if it were nothing more than a record of personal experiences in the Spanish war. But it is much more than this. It is a testimony to the nature of modem political life. It is
Fw writers in the English-speaking world have written more penetratingly than LIONEL TRILLING on the problems of culture, art, and morality in our time. It is of the problem of virtue-how a man may be good in an age of intellectual double-dealing and failure of conscience-that he writes here, taking as his point of departure the life and work of "a man of virtue": George Orwell. This essay was written as an introduction to a new edition of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, to be brought out next month by Harcourt, Brace. Mr. Trilling's books include Matthew Arnold (939), E. M. Forster (x943), The Middle of the Journey, a novel (1947), and The Liberal Imagination (950). 218