Orwell: Prophet After the Fact

In his introduction to The Orwell Reader (Harcourt, Brace, $5.95), Richard Rovere says that the mark of George Orwell on his contemporaries was “large and clear and good.” It was all of this. But, as Christopher Hollis suggests in his Study of George Orwell (Regnery, $3.75), the Orwell influence was not quite good enough.

It was, for one thing, a little belated. Orwell was a man who could only learn from experience. He spent the forty-seven years of his life revising and rejecting what he had thought to be true the year before. Since he was endowed with the capacity to learn from experience, every new position he reached was an improvement on the last. But Orwell, the man of rectitude, was never really convinced that he had found anything of a truly lasting nature to be right about. He was, as the saying goes, a man of principle. But what to be principled about eluded him to the very end of his days.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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In his introduction to The Orwell Reader (Harcourt, Brace, $5.95), Richard Rovere says that the mark of George Orwell on his contemporaries was “large and clear and good.” It was all of this. But, as Christopher Hollis suggests in his Study of George Orwell (Regnery, $3.75), the Orwell influence was not quite good enough.

It was, for one thing, a little belated. Orwell was a man who could only learn from experience. He spent the forty-seven years of his life revising and rejecting what he had thought to be true the year before. Since he was endowed with the capacity to learn from experience, every new position he reached was an improvement on the last. But Orwell, the man of rectitude, was never really convinced that he had found anything of a truly lasting nature to be right about. He was, as the saying goes, a man of principle. But what to be principled about eluded him to the very end of his days.