The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

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And with this goes something that is always written off by European observers as ‘decadence’ or hypocrisy, the English hatred of war and militarism. Knowing that socialism had often been dismissed by its opponents as an alien creed, Orwell set out to show that there was actually a perfect fit between the politics of the left and the English people’s most enduring characteristics. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. In peace time, even when there are two million unemployed, it is difficult to fill the ranks of the tiny standing army, which is officered by the country gentry and a specialized stratum of the middle class, and manned by farm labourers and slum proletarians. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England.

The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

After eight months of vaguely wondering what the war was about, the people suddenly knew what they had got to do: first, to get the army away from Dunkirk, and secondly to prevent invasion. Their response was to argue that English national traditions had far more in common with the politics of the socialist left than with those of the fascist right, not least because the real history of England had been marked a by a titanic succession of popular struggles for social justice and democracy. The mass of the people are without military knowledge or tradition, and their attitude towards war is invariably defensive. The Anglican Church never had a real hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed gentry, and the Nonconformist sects only influenced minorities.Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible. By extension, they are also used in the arms of Newfoundland since 1637, the arms of Hanover between 1837–1866, and the arms of Canada since 1921. And even Welsh and Scottish readers are likely to have been offended because I have used the word ‘England’ oftener than ‘Britain’, as though the whole population dwelt in London and the Home Counties and neither north nor west possessed a culture of its own. Therefore, Orwell argued, being a socialist and a patriot were no longer antithetical, but complementary.

The Lion and the Unicorn // George Orwell Work : Essays : The Lion and the Unicorn // George Orwell

It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine.This vein of political ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. Their old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life, are all mirrored there.

George Orwell: The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the

And of the last war, the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. His 1938 book Homage to Catalonia, an account of his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, together with numerous essays on politics, literature, language, and culture, have been widely acclaimed. But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well marked though not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. In 1993, British Prime Minister John Major famously alluded to the essay in a speech on Europe by stating, "Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – 'old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist'. These things are a sort of diary upon which the English people have unconsciously recorded themselves.It is the only great country in Europe that is not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its nationals into exile or the concentration camp. The spirit of this attempt to reclaim Englishness for the left was summed up in Lindsay’s ringing declaration that “Communism is English”. George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903 in Motihari in Bengal, India and later studied at Eton College for four years. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to. Drawing on all Orwell’s skills as an analyst of popular culture, it sought to relate its proposals for political action to an ambitious and highly suggestive interpretation of the English character.