Oscar Wilde on Art

“The temperament to which Art appeals … is the temperament of receptivity.”

Oscar Wilde may have been the twentieth century’s first and most tragic pop celebrity, and a masterful writer of love letters, but he was also a poignant observer of culture and custodian of the creative spirit. His 1891 essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism (public library; free download), written mere months after The Picture of Dorian Gray was published, explores the social structures of art with equal parts libertarianism, anarchism, and genuine concern — but more than a political treatise, at the heart of it is a profound meditation on what it means to create, to live, and to be human.

He begins with a beautiful addition to history’s finest definitions of art:

The temperament to which Art appeals … is the temperament of receptivity. That is all.

If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.

In a sentiment that Frank Lloyd Wright would come to echo in asserting that “an expert is a man who has stopped thinking because ‘he knows,'” Wilde admonishes that education in the formal sense subtracts from, rather than adds to, our capacity to enjoy art — a subtle suggestion that true art, like true science, requires a degree of benevolent openness and innocent ignorance:

An educated person’s ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends. A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

He goes on to explore how the appreciation of art differs across creative disciplines:

True as this is in the case of the appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is still more true of the appreciation of such arts as the drama. For a picture and a statue are not at war with Time. They take no count of its succession. In one moment their unity may be apprehended. In the case of literature it is different. Time must be traversed before the unity of effect is realized. And so, in the drama, there may occur in the first act of the play something whose real artistic value may not be evident to the spectator till the third or fourth act is reached. Is the silly fellow to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy the artists? No. The honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions of wonder, curiosity, and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose a vulgar temper. He is to go to the play to realize an artistic temperament. He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament. He is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplation and the egotism that mars him – the egotism of his ignorance, or the egotism of his information.

[…]

No spectator of art needs a more perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play. The moment he seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers.

Like Hugh MacLeod, who famously asserted that “the best way to get approval is not to need it,” Wilde cautions that writing for acclaim — or even being overly aware of one’s ability to “biff” the audience — is a fatal flaw for literature:

With the novel it is the same thing. Popular authority and the recognition of popular authority are fatal. … A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist.

Wilde then considers the notion of authority not by the public but over the public, turning to the political regimes — or lack thereof — best suited for fostering art:

People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. It has been stated that under despotisms artists have produced lovely work. This is not quite so. Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannized over, but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to create. There is this to be said in favor of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

Wilde — who was imprisoned multiple times for his “crime” of homosexuality, then run into bankruptcy and exile, largely by the church and its tentacles of terror and the era’s mob mentality — goes on to construct a taxonomy of despots:

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People. The Prince may be cultivated. Many Princes have been. Yet in the Prince there is danger. One thinks of Dante at the bitter feast in Verona, of Tasso in Ferrara’s madman’s cell. It is better for the artist not to live with Princes. The Pope may be cultivated. Many Popes have been; the bad Popes have been. The bad Popes loved Beauty, almost as passionately, nay, with as much passion as the good Popes hated Thought. To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much. The goodness of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity. Yet, though the Vatican has kept the rhetoric of its thunders, and lost the rod of its lightning, it is better for the artist not to live with Popes.

[…]

There is danger in Popes. And as for the People, what of them and their authority? Perhaps of them and their authority one has spoken enough. Their authority is a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene. It is impossible for the artist to live with the People. All despots bribe. The people bribe and brutalize. Who told them to exercise authority? They were made to live, to listen, and to love. Someone has done them a great wrong. They have marred themselves by imitation of their inferiors. They have taken the scepter of the Prince. How should they use it? They have taken the triple tiara of the Pope. How should they carry its burden? They are as a clown whose heart is broken. They are as a priest whose soul is not yet born. Let all who love Beauty pity them. Though they themselves love not Beauty, yet let them pity themselves. Who taught them the trick of tyranny?

Instead, he proposes that individualism offers the most fertile ground for the seed of art:

Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation. In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens. And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop Individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing Individualism. To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism. Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.

[…]

What is true about Art is true about Life.

This Individualism, Wilde argues, ignites the most generous glow of the human spirit and cultivates the highest potential of the human soul:

What man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly.When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilized, more himself. Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.

Pair The Soul of Man Under Socialism with Henry Miller on art and the future of humanity.

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Pioneering 19th-Century Astronomer Maria Mitchell on Education and Women in Science

“No woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!’ But a woman! What more can you ask to be?”

“We are women studying together,” legendary astronomer and reconstructionist Maria Mitchell said to the senior class in astronomy when it entered upon its last year at Vassar College in 1876, where Mitchell had begun teaching after the Civil War as the only woman on the faculty. These seemingly simple and unremarkable words sprang from a remarkable determination that would come to pave the way for women in science. In fact, Mitchell’s strides towards equality in education are unparalleled by any other figure of the era. From Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters and Journals (public library; free download) — which also gave us the beloved astronomer’s timeless wisdom on science and life — comes a fascinating record of Mitchell’s witty, unrelenting spirit and the conviction with which she steered the wheel of science education.

Maria Mitchell. Portrait by Lisa Congdon for The Reconstructionists project.

To get an idea of just how radical the notion of women’s education was in the era’s cultural context, here is an anecdote, equal parts amusing and appalling, that Mitchell relays about one particularly anxious mother who placed her daughter in the astronomer’s care at Vassar:

One lady, who seemed to be a bright woman, got me by the button and held me a long time—she wanted this, that, and the other impracticable thing for the girl, and told me how honest her daughter was; then with a flood of tears she said, ‘But she is not a Christian. I know I put her into good hands when I put her here.’ (Then I was strongly tempted to avow my Unitarianism.) Miss W., who was standing by, said, ‘Miss Lyman will be an excellent spiritual adviser,’ and we both looked very serious; when the mother wiped her weeping eyes and said, ‘And, Miss Mitchell, will you ask Miss Lyman to insist that my daughter shall curl her hair? She looks very graceful when her hair is curled, and I want it insisted upon,’ I made a note of it with my pencil, and as I happened to glance at Miss W. the corners of her mouth were twitching, upon which I broke down and laughed. The mother bore it very good-naturedly, but went on. She wanted to know who would work some buttonholes in her daughter’s dress that was not quite finished, etc., and it all ended in her inviting me to make her a visit.

And yet Mitchell had extraordinary clarity of vision when it came to education in all its dimensions, one she eloquently — if sternly — articulated to her pupils:

You cannot study anything persistently for years without becoming learned, and although I would not hold reputation up to you as a very high object of ambition, it is a wayside flower which you are sure to have catch at your skirts.

Whatever apology other women may have for loose, ill-finished work, or work not finished at all, you will have none.

When you leave Vassar College, you leave it the best educated women in the world. Living a little outside of the college, beyond the reach of the little currents that go up and down the corridors, I think I am a fairer judge of your advantages than you can be yourselves; and when I say you will be the best educated women in the world, I do not mean the education of text-books, and class-rooms, and apparatus, only, but that broader education which you receive unconsciously, that higher teaching which comes to you, all unknown to the givers, from daily association with the noble-souled women who are around you.

Mitchell confronted the issue of women’s education head-on, writing in her diary on January 3, 1868:

Meeting Dr. Hill at a private party, I asked him if Harvard College would admit girls in fifty years. He said one of the most conservative members of the faculty had said, within sixteen days, that it would come about in twenty years.* I asked him if I could go into one of Professor Peirce’s recitations. He said there was nothing to keep me out, and that he would let me know when they came.

At eleven A.M., the next Friday, I stood at Professor Peirce’s door. As the professor came in I went towards him, and asked him if I might attend his lecture. He said ‘Yes.’ I said ‘Can you not say “I shall be happy to have you”?’ and he said ‘I shall be happy to have you,’ but he didn’t look happy!

[…]

The professor was polite enough to ask us into the senior class, but I had an engagement. I asked him if a young lady presented herself at the door he could keep her out, and he said ‘No, and I shouldn’t.’ I told him I would send some of my girls.

* Harvard founded Radcliffe College, its sister school for women, in 1879 — but female scholars remained segregated there until 1999, when the two schools finally merged and Harvard-Harvard began to “admit girls” more than a century after the professor’s prediction.

Upon visiting Glasgow during her European trip five years later, Mitchell notes the dismal state of women’s education there, emblematic of the era’s general disposition — even, most tragically, of the era’s women “in power” themselves:

‘The Glasgow College for Girls.’ Seeing a sign of this sort, I rang the door-bell of the house to which it was attached, entered, and was told the lady was at home. As I waited for her, I took up the ‘Prospectus,’ and it was enough, — ‘music, dancing, drawing, needlework, and English’ were the prominent features, and the pupils were children. All well enough, — but why call it a college?

When the lady superintendent came in, I told her that I had supposed it was for more advanced students, and she said, ‘Oh, it is for girls up to twenty; one supposes a girl is finished by twenty.’

I asked, as modestly as I could, ‘Have you any pupils in Latin and mathematics?’ and she said, ‘No, it’s for girls, you know. Dr. M. hopes we shall have some mathematics next year.’ ‘And,’ I asked, ‘some Latin?’ ‘Yes, Dr. M. hopes we shall have some Latin; but I confess I believe Latin and mathematics all bosh; give them modern languages and accomplishments. I suppose your school is for professional women.’

I told her no; that the daughters of our wealthiest people demand learning; that it would scarcely be considered ‘good society’ when the women had neither Latin nor mathematics.

‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘they get married here so soon.’

When I asked her if they had lady teachers, she said ‘Oh, no [as if that would ruin the institution]; nothing but first-class masters.’

It was clear that the women taught the needlework.

But the very faculties that suited women for needlework, Mitchell firmly believed, were also what primed them to be great scientists should they choose to pursue that. In another diary entry, she puts the issue in wonderfully poetic terms:

Nothing comes out more clearly in astronomical observations than the immense activity of the universe. ‘All change, no loss, ’tis revolution all.’

Observations of this kind are peculiarly adapted to women. Indeed, all astronomical observing seems to be so fitted. The training of a girl fits her for delicate work. The touch of her fingers upon the delicate screws of an astronomical instrument might become wonderfully accurate in results; a woman’s eyes are trained to nicety of color. The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer. Routine observations, too, dull as they are, are less dull than the endless repetition of the same pattern in crochet-work.

It comes as unsurprising testament to Mitchell’s character, then, that shortly thereafter, she makes a resolution that would guide the rest of her life and encapsulate her greatest legacy:

Resolved, in case of my outliving father and being in good health, to give my efforts to the intellectual culture of women, without regard to salary; if possible, connect myself with liberal Christian institutions, believing, as I do, that happiness and growth in this life are best promoted by them, and that what is good in this life is good in any life.

This undying faith in “the intellectual culture of women” comes most vibrantly ablaze in a diary entry from 1874:

For women there are, undoubtedly, great difficulties in the path, but so much the more to overcome. First, no woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!’ But a woman! What more can you ask to be?

Born a woman — born with the average brain of humanity — born with more than the average heart — if you are mortal, what higher destiny could you have? No matter where you are nor what you are, you are a power — your influence is incalculable; personal influence is always underrated by the person. We are all centers of spheres — we see the portions of the sphere above us, and we see how little we affect it. We forget the part of the sphere around and before us — it extends just as far every way.

The “great gain,” she writes, would be freedom of thought:

Women, more than men, are bound by tradition and authority. What the father, the brother, the doctor, and the minister have said has been received undoubtingly. Until women throw off this reverence for authority they will not develop. When they do this, when they come to truth through their investigations, when doubt leads them to discovery, the truth which they get will be theirs, and their minds will work on and on unfettered.

Mitchell bemoaned the disconnect between academic honors, which reward rote memorization, and actual learning — a challenge that remains unsolved even today.

The whole system is demoralizing and foolish. Girls study for prizes, and not for learning, when ‘honors’ are at the end. The unscholarly motive is wearing. If they studied for sound learning, the cheer which would come with every day’s gain would be health-preserving.

Though Mitchell opposed standardized testing and believed in more dimensional conceptions of intelligence long before it was fashionable to do so — “You cannot mark a human mind, because there is no intellectual unit,” she remarked — she was a fierce champion of the value of reading, particularly of the meticulous “mastication” of intellectual food:

My students used to say that my way of teaching was like that of the man who said to his son, ‘There are the letters of the English alphabet — go into that corner and learn them.’

It is not exactly my way, but I do think, as a general rule, that teachers talk too much! A book is a very good institution! To read a book, to think it over, and to write out notes is a useful exercise; a book which will not repay some hard thought is not worth publishing. The fashion of lecturing is becoming a rage; the teacher shows herself off, and she does not try enough to develop her pupils.

The greatest object in educating is to give a right habit of study….

She was also a proponent of intellectual and creative well-roundedness, the very wide interests that mark most successful scientists:

Health of body is not only an accompaniment of health of mind, but is the cause; the converse may be true,—that health of mind causes health of body; but we all know that intellectual cheer and vivacity act upon the mind. If the gymnastic exercise helps the mind, the concert or the theatre improves the health of the body.

Mitchell was an enormous champion of endowment, both financial and intellectual, and noted the brokenness of education funding more than a century before today’s student debt crisis:

A genius should wait some years to prove her genius.

Endow the already established institution with money. Endow the woman who shows genius with time.

[…]

When you aid a teacher, you improve the education of your children. It is a wonder that teachers work as well as they do. I never look at a group of them without using, mentally, the expression, ‘The noble army of martyrs’!

The chemist should have had a laboratory, and the observatory should have had an astronomer; but we are too apt to bestow money where there is no man, and to find a man where there is no money.

When she visits Russia, Mitchell remarks upon the divergent cultural attitudes towards supporting education:

St. Petersburg is about the size of Philadelphia [but] there are thousands of women studying science in St. Petersburg. How many thousand women do you suppose are studying science in the whole State of New York? I doubt if there are five hundred.

Then again, as to language. It is rare, even among the common people, to meet one who speaks one language only. If you can speak no Russian, try your poor French, your poor German, or your good English. You may be sure that the shopkeeper will answer in one or another, and even the drosky-driver picks up a little of some one of them.

Of late, the Russian government has founded a medical school for women, giving them advantages which are given to men, and the same rank when they graduate; the czar himself contributed largely to the fund.

One wonders, in a country so rich as ours, that so few men and women gratify their tastes by founding scholarships and aids for the tuition of girls — it must be such a pleasant way of spending money.

Her impression is further confirmed when she shares a train ride with a Russian mother and her daughters on a trip across the country. Mitchell’s conversation with the young girls is profoundly telling, at once tragic and hopeful:

‘Are you interested in questions of government?’ They replied, ‘All Russian women are interested in questions of that sort.’ How many American women are interested in questions concerning government?

These young girls knew exactly what questions to ask about Vassar College, — the course of study, the diploma, the number of graduates, etc. The eldest said: ‘We are at once excited when we hear of women studying; we have longed for opportunities to study all our lives. Our father was the engineer of the first Russian railroad, and he spent two years in America.’

I confess to a feeling of mortification when one of these girls asked me, ‘Did you ever read the translation of a Russian book?’ and I was obliged to answer ‘No.’ This girl had read American books in the original. They were talking Russian, French, German, and English, and yet mourning over their need of education; and in general education, especially in that of women, I think we must be in advance of them.

One of these sisters, forgetting my ignorance, said something to me in Russian. The other laughed. ‘What did she say?’ I asked. The eldest replied, ‘She asked you to take her back with you, and educate her.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘you read and speak your languages — the learning of the world is open to you — found your own college!’ And the young girl leaned back on the cushions, drew her mantle around her, and said, ‘We have not the energy of the American girl!’

The energy of the American girl! The rich inheritance which has come down to her from men and women who sought, in the New World, a better and higher life.

When the American girl carries her energy into the great questions of humanity, into the practical problems of life; when she takes home to her heart the interests of education, of government, and of religion, what may we not hope for our country!

Above all, however, Mitchell championed the idea of challenging convention and never ceasing to question:

There is this great danger in student life. Now, we rest all upon what Socrates said, or what Copernicus taught; how can we dispute authority which has come down to us, all established, for ages?

We must at least question it; we cannot accept anything as granted, beyond the first mathematical formulae. Question everything else.

But perhaps most telling of all was her students’ heartfelt gratitude. In May of 1889, shortly after Mitchell announced her reluctant retirement from Vassar as her health was rapidly declining, one student wrote to her, speaking for all whose lives the great astronomer and educator had touched, both directly and through her landmark cultural legacy:

In all the great wonder of life, you have given me more of what I have wanted than any other creature ever gave me. I hoped I should amount to something for your sake.

Complement Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters and Journals with pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin’s Berkeley commencement address on science and stereotypes a century after Mitchell’s heyday, when both so much and so little has changed, then revisit Mitchell’s Reconstructionists profile.

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France Is Free: Anaïs Nin and Ernest Hemingway on the Liberation of Paris, August 19, 1944

“One is stunned before catastrophe, one is stunned by happiness, by peace, by the knowledge of millions of people free from pain and death.”

On August 19, 1944, the Liberation of Paris commenced, marking the beginning of the end of World War II in France. Six days later, on August 25, the occupying German garrison surrendered. That week, in a journal entry found in The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (public library) — which also gave us Nin on the meaning of life, why emotional excess is essential to creativity, how our objects define us, and how inviting the unknown helps us live more richly — the beloved diarist and reconstructionist breaks out of her usual contemplative lyricism and explodes with gorgeous, unfiltered human exuberance over the end of one of history’s greatest inhumanities:

Liberation of France!

JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY. JOY.

Such joy, such happiness at the hope of war ending. Happiness in unison with the world. Delirious happiness.

At such times we are overwhelmed by a collective joy. We feel like shouting, demonstrating in the street. A joy you share with the whole world is almost too great for one human being. One is stunned before catastrophe, one is stunned by happiness, by peace, by the knowledge of millions of people free from pain and death.

August, 1944: American soldiers watch as the Tricolor flies from the Eiffel Tower again. (Image: National Archives)

That same day, Ernest Hemingway — who had been living in Paris as one of the Lost Generation’s famous expats, among whom were Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald — waged a different kind of liberation effort. The Ritz hotel and its famed bar, which Hemingway had come to love as a home and an idyllic drinking spot during his pre-war reign in Paris, had been co-opted as the quarters of German generals in 1940. So, on this fateful August day, Hemingway — arguably the world’s best-known living writer at the time — donned a steel helmet, mounted an army jeep in the dirt roads of the French countryside, and led his small private army as they set out to “liberate” the Ritz.

From Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 (public library) comes this missive Papa sent to his soon-to-be fourth wife, Mary Welsh, offering a much grittier but no less emotionally charged account than Nin’s:

On nineteenth [of August, 1944], made contact with group of Maquis who placed themselves under my command. Because so old and ugly looking I guess. Clothed them with clothing of cavalry recon outfit which had been killed at entrance to Rambouillet. Armed them from Div. Took and held Rambouillet after our recon withdrawn. Ran patrols and furnished gen [intelligence] to French when they advanced. They operated on our gen with much success. Entered Paris by Etoile and Concorde. Fought outfit several times. They did very well. Now very tired. Fortunately in phase of advance Rambouillet Paris had official war historian with us. Otherwise everyone would think was damned lie. Most operation chickenshit as to fighting. But could been bad. Now have rejoined division but have to try to write piece tomorrow. Then will put my people under div orders. Very fine peoples. But temperamental. . . .

I was very scared twice when we were holding (sic) screening, or simply furnishing contact is word, that town with 15 kraut tanks, and 52 cyclists as opposition. Some of the patrols we made would scare you worse than Grimm’s Fairy Tales even if there had been no Krauts [ed: What Hemingway called the Germans]. We checked on tanks with bicycles. Would like to drag down but guess will have to let things ride.

August, 1944: Ernest Hemingway in France with Col. David Bruce at the far left and unidentified companions. (Image: Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, JFK Library, Boston)

After a few lines of almost incongruously placed romantic flirtations, Hemingway returns to the war and adds:

Have strong feeling my luck has about run out but am going to try to pass a couple of more times with dice. Have been to all the old places I ever lived in Paris and everything is fine. But it is all so improbable that you feel like you have died and it is all a dream.

(As charmingly deranged as all of this may be, of course, it comes as wholly unsurprising given Hemingway’s penchant for sorting out his emotional vulnerabilities with shotguns.)

Complement with Henry Miller, Nin’s longtime lover and literary confidante, on war and the future of humanity.

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The Freedom of the Press: George Orwell on the Media’s Toxic Self-Censorship

“The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.”

In 1937, George Orwell got the idea for his now-classic dystopian allegory exploring the ferocious dictatorship of Soviet Russia in a satirical tale eviscerating Stalin’s regime. In his 1946 essay Why I Write, Orwell remarked that this was his first conscious effort “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.” But by the time he finished it six years later, in the middle of World War II and shortly before the start of the Cold War, the book’s decidedly anti-Soviet message presented an obvious challenge in politically cautious Britain. The manuscript was rejected by four major houses, including Orwell’s publisher of record, Gollancz, and T. S. Eliot himself at Faber and Faber.

Perhaps even more interesting than the story of the book, however, is the prescient essay titled “The Freedom of the Press,” which Orwell intended as a preface to the book. Included in Penguin’s 2000 edition of Animal Farm (public library) as “Orwell’s Proposed Preface to Animal Farm,” the essay — penned more than seven decades after Mark Twain bewailed that “there are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press” — tackles issues all the more timely today in the midst of global media scandals, vicious censorship, and near-ubiquitous government-level political surveillance.

Orwell begins by excerpting a letter from a publisher who had originally agreed to publish the book but later, under the Ministry of Information’s admonition, recanted:

I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think … I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offense to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.

Noting the general menace of such governmental meddling in the private sector of publishing and the resulting censorship, Orwell bemoans the broader peril at play:

The chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of … any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face. … The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.

(Exactly thirty years later, E. B. White would come to redirect this critique at commercial rather than governmental pressures.)

The picture he paints of the press and its relationship with dissent and public opinion is ominously similar to what Galileo faced with the Catholic church nearly half a millennium earlier:

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn’t do” to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Orwell critiques the groupthink of the intelligentsia and the odd flip-flopping of moral absolutism and moral relativism they employ when confronted with the question of whether Animal Farm should be published:

The reaction towards it of most English intellectuals will be quite simple: “It oughtn’t to have been published.” Naturally, those reviewers who understand the art of denigration will not attack it on political grounds but on literary ones. They will say that it is a dull, silly book and a disgraceful waste of paper. This may well be true, but it is obviously not the whole of the story. One does not say that a book “ought not to have been published” merely because it is a bad book. After all, acres of rubbish are printed daily and no one bothers. The English intelligentsia, or most of them, will object to this book because it traduces their Leader and (as they see it) does harm to the cause of progress. If it did the opposite they would have nothing to say against it, even if its literary faults were ten times as glaring as they are.

At the heart of the question is an ethical dilemma manifest all the more viscerally today, when opinions can be — and are, prolifically — expressed on more platforms than Orwell could have possibly imagined:

The issue involved here is quite a simple one: Is every opinion, however unpopular — however foolish, even — entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say “Yes.” But give it a concrete shape, and ask, “How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?” and the answer more often than not will be “No.” In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.

But his most prescient point is his concluding one:

To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

On August 17, 1945, Animal Farm was at last published. It went on to sell millions of copies and has been translated into more than seventy languages.

Complement Orwell’s essay with E. B. White on the free press, cultural icons on censorship and Rudyard Kipling’s satirical poem poking fun at the press.

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