All Art Is Propaganda (48 page)

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because "friends react on one another" and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi—with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction—always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which—I think—most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one
is
sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that "non-attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "nonattachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is "higher." The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives," from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

However, Gandhi's pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other teachings. Its motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it was a definite technique, a method, capable of producing desired political results. Gandhi's attitude was not that of most Western pacifists.
Satyagraha,
first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred. It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like. Gandhi objected to "passive resistance" as a translation of
Satyagraha:
in Gujarati, it seems, the word means "firmness in the truth." In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914—18. Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not—indeed, since his whole political life centered round a struggle for national independence, he could not—take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: "What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?" I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the "you're another" type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer's
Gandhi and Stalin.
According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.

At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in "arousing the world," which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practice civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference. But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one's own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practice internationally? Gandhi's various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?

These and kindred questions need discussion, and need it urgently, in the few years left to us before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin to fly. It seems doubtful whether civilization can stand another major war, and it is at least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence. It is Gandhi's virtue that he would have been ready to give honest consideration to the kind of question that I have raised above; and, indeed, he probably did discuss most of these questions somewhere or other in his innumerable newspaper articles. One feels of him that there was much that he did not understand, but not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking. I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure. It is curious that when he was assassinated, many of his warmest admirers exclaimed sorrowfully that he had lived just long enough to see his life work in ruins, because India was engaged in a civil war which had always been foreseen as one of the by-products of the transfer of power. But it was not in trying to smoothe down Hindu-Moslem rivalry that Gandhi had spent his life. His main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after all been attained. As usual, the relevant facts cut across one another. On the one hand, the British did get out of India without fighting, an event which very few observers indeed would have predicted until about a year before it happened. On the other hand, this was done by a Labor government, and it is certain that a Conservative government, especially a government headed by Churchill, would have acted differently. But if, by 1945, there had grown up in Britain a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence, how far was this due to Gandhi's personal influence? And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air? That one even thinks of asking such questions indicates his stature. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi's basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

Charles Dickens

1. In
Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical
(1937).

2.
The Scarlet Pimpernel
was a romantic novel and play (1905), the first of several stories featuring the adventures during the French Revolution of the suave English aristocrat Sir Percy Blakeney, who rescued those destined for the guillotine. Their author, Baroness Orczy (Mrs. Montagu Barstow, 1865–1947), was born in Hungary.

3. Carmagnole was a worker's jacket originating in Carmagnola, Piedmont. It became fashionable among French revolutionaries and was then used to describe a song and a wild dance. The first verse of the song pilloried "Madame Veto"—Queen Marie Antoinette—who was accused of influencing Louis XVI to exercise this right.

4. Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) was the author of a number of works of self-improvement; the best known is
Self-Help: with Illustrations of Conduct & Perseverance
(1859). By far the most successful of many such books of its time, it and the attitudes it represented have been much castigated.

5. On his return from a visit to the Soviet Union, André Gide (1869–1951), prolific French author and editor, wrote a somewhat disillusioned account of his experiences there,
Retour de l'URSS
(1936).

6. Bartram wrote novels and folklore verses.
The People of Clopton: A Poaching Romance
was published in 1897.

7.
Orley Farm
(1862) by Anthony Trollope (1815–1882).

8. "Ye Mariners of England," by Thomas Campbell (1777–1844); "The Charge of the Light Brigade," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892).

9. Orwell probably had in mind Bransby Williams (1870–1961), the "Hamlet of the Halls," whose impersonations of Dickens's characters and incidents were popular in music halls and on records; they anticipated the one-man Dickens recitals by legitimate actors in the latter part of the twentieth century.

10.
Frank Fairleigh, or Scenes from the Life of a Private Pupil
(1850) was by Francis Edward Smedley (1818–1864).
Mr Verdant Green
is a trilogy by Cuthbert Bede (Edward Bradley, 1827–1889), made up of
The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman
(1853),
The
Further Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, an Oxford Undergraduate
(1854), and
Mr Verdant Green Married and Done For
(1857). The books were frequently reprinted, with illustrations by the author.
Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures
(1846; reprinted from
Punch)
was by Douglas Jerrold, a prolific dramatist (1803–185 7).

Boys' Weeklies

1.
Boy's Own Paper
(not
Boys',
as sometimes printed), founded in 1879 by the Religious Tract Society, was a weekly to 1912, then monthly. It outlived Orwell.
Chums,
founded in 1892, was published by Cassell as a rival to
Boy's Own Paper.

2. In fact, the stories were
not
all the work of "Frank Richards" (Charles Hamilton, 1876–1961). He is credited with 1,380 of the 1,683 stories in
Magnet;
there were some twenty-five substitute writers. Nevertheless, he wrote some 5,000 stories, "created" more than a hundred schools, used two dozen pen names (including Hilda Richards, for girls-school stories, and Martin Clifford). He probably published some 100 million words.

3. John Edward Gunby Hadath (c. 1880–1954), author of
Schoolboy Grit
(1913),
Carey of Cobhouse
(1928), and other school stories.

4. Desmond Francis Talbot Coke (1879–1931), author of
The House Prefect
(1908) and other books for children.

5. Officers' Training Corps, the army cadet force maintained in many public schools.

6. "Hilda Richards" is Frank Richards.

7. Mons, in Belgium, marked the limit of a British advance in August 1914. The German army under von Kluck was badly mauled, but success was short-lived. In what became a famous fighting retreat, the British II Corps held the Germans at the costly battle of Le Cateau.

8. Air Raid Precautions.