fifteenth fast in the effort to bring harmony between India and Pakistan. He had shown himself acutely conscious that in the lust for communal reprisals his word did not carry the weight of former years. The fast began as the Security Council at Lake Success was considering the controversy on Kashmir and related problems between the two Dominions. One effect of the fast and leading to its cessation on the fifth day was the decision pressed on the Cabinet at New Delhi by the Mahatma no longer to withhold from the Karachi Government payment of the whole of the £41m, due from the undivided cash balances at the time of the British withdrawal.
George Orwell
Criticism and allegory
21 January 1950
Mr George Orwell, a writer of acute and penetrating temper and of conspicuous honesty of mind, died on Friday in hospital in London at the age of 46. He had been a sick man for a considerable time.
Though he made his widest appeal in the form of fiction, Orwell had a critical rather than imaginative endowment of mind and he has left a large number of finely executed essays. In a less troubled, less revolutionary period of history he might perhaps have discovered within himself a richer and more creative power of imagination, a deeper philosophy of acceptance. As it was he was essentially the analyst, by turns indignant, satirical, and prophetic, of an order of life and society in rapid dissolution. The analysis is presented, to a large extent, in autobiographical terms; Orwell, it might fairly be said, lived his convictions. Much of his early work is a direct transcription of personal experience, while the later volumes record, in expository or allegorical form, the progressive phases of his disenchantment with current social and political ideals. The death of so searching and sincere a writer is a very real loss.
George Orwell, which was the name adopted by Eric Arthur Blair, was born in India in 1903 of a Scottish family, the son of Mr R. W. Blair, who served in the opium department of the Government of Bengal. He was a King’s Scholar at Eton, which he left in 1921, and then, at the persuasion of his father, entered the Imperial Police in Burma, where he remained for five years. After that he was, by turns, dish-washer, schoolmaster, and book-seller’s assistant. The name he adopted comes from the river Orwell – his parents were settled at Southwold, in Suffolk, at the time he decided upon it. Orwell preferred to suppress his earlier novels. Down and Out in Paris and London, his first book, published in 1933, is a plain, observant and, for the most part, dispassionate piece of reporting, which achieves without faltering precisely what it sets out to do. Orwell had strived in a Paris slum and in England had tramped from one casual ward to another, and the lessons of this first-hand acquaintance with poverty and destitution were never afterwards lost on him. Although in time he grew fearful of a theoretical egalitarianism, he made no bones about the primary need of securing social justice. In The Road to Wigan Pier, which appeared in 1937, he described the lives of those on unemployment pay or public assistance and made his own contribution to Socialist propaganda.
Next year he brought out his Homage to Catalonia, an outspoken and at times impassioned account of his experience and observation as a volunteer on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. He had joined not the International Brigade but the militia organized by the small Catalan party predominantly syndicalist or anarcho-syndicalist in temper – known as poum. He was wounded during the fighting round Huesca. With deepening anxiety and embitterment he had noted the fanaticism and ruthlessness of Communist attempts to secure at all costs – even at the cost of probable defeat – political ascendancy over the Republican forces. It was from this point that his left-wing convictions underwent the transformation that was eventually to be projected in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
First, however, a few months before the outbreak of war in 1939, he published Coming up for Air, the book which is his nearest approach to a novel proper. It was not his first published essay in fiction. In Burmese Days, published five years earlier, he had written with notable insight and justice of the administrative problems of the British in Burma and of the conflict of the white and native peoples, though the personal story tacked onto this treatment of his subject was weak and rather lifeless. The book suggested clearly enough, indeed, that Orwell was something other than a novelist. Yet in Coming up for Air, for all that it sought to present, in a picture of the world before 1914, a warning of the totalitarian shape of things to come, he recaptures the atmosphere of childhood with a degree of truth and tenderness that is deeply affecting. Here was the creative touch one sought in vain in the later books.
Rejected for the Army on medical grounds, Orwell in 1940 became a sergeant in the Home Guard. He wrote spasmodically rather than steadily during the war years. His picture of Britain at war, published in 1941 under the title The Lion and the Unicorn, was a brave attempt to determine the relationship between Socialism and the English genius. A volume consisting of three long essays, Inside the Whale, one of which was the entertaining, if occasionally somewhat wrongheaded, study of boys’ popular weeklies, preceded the appearance in 1945 of Animal Farm. In the guise of a fairy-tale Orwell here produced a blistering and most amusing satire on the totalitarian tyranny, as he saw it, that in Soviet Russia masqueraded as the classless society. The book won wide and deservedly admiring notice. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, published early last year, the premonition of the totalitarian wrath to come had developed into a sense of fatalistic horror. In Orwell’s vision of a not too remote future in Airstrip One, the new name for Britain in a wholly totalitarian world, men had been conditioned to deny the possibility of human freedom and to will their subservience to an omnipotent ruling hierarchy. The book was a brave enough performance, though it fell a good way short of the highest achievement in its kind.
Orwell married in 1933 Miss Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She died in 1945 after an operation, and last year he married Miss Sonia Brownell, assistant editor of Horizon.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy of language
29 April 1951
Dr Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in his sixty-second year on Sunday at Cambridge, was a philosopher with a reputation as an intellectual innovator on the highest level. His earlier and later work formed the points of origin of two schools of philosophy, both of which he himself disowned.
He came from a well-known Austrian family (his ancestors included the Prince Wittgenstein who fought against Napoleon), and he was brought up in Vienna. After studying engineering at Manchester he went to Cambridge in 1912 as an ‘advanced student’ to study under Bertrand (now Lord) Russell. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he returned to Austria to serve with the Austrian Army until he was taken prisoner in 1918 in the Italian campaign. While thus serving he completed a manuscript, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which, appearing in 1921 in German in the last number of Ostwald’s Annalen der Naturphilosophie and in English in book form in 1922, at once made for its author an international reputation.
Throughout his life Wittgenstein showed the characteristics of a religious contemplative of the hermit type. Thus he alternated between periods of great prominence in academic life and periods of extreme abnegation and retirement, and in 1922 he renounced his fortune and took a post as a schoolmaster in a mountain village near Wiener Neustadt. Here he stayed until 1928. He maintained, however, contacts with Vienna, where he went in the school holidays and where, through his acquaintance with the Professor of Philosophy, Moritz Schlick, he originated a school of philosophy – the famous Vienna Circle, later known as the logical positivists.
Quite apart from the intrinsic merit of his ideas, Wittgenstein’s historical importance in this period consists in the fact that through him the work of a long series of formal logicians, culminating in Russell, became known to the inheritors of an equally long tradition of philosophy of science, culminating in Mach (Schlick’s predecessor in his chair). The intellectual results of this fusion were such that, a decade later, they spread all over the philosophic world. By this time, however, Wittgenstein was reinstalled in Cambridge, having arrived there for a short visit in 1929. Trinity College elected him to a five-year research fellowship in 1930, and he also started lecturing. Apart from one paper in 1929, he published nothing in this period; but two sets of notes, dictated to groups of pupils and known respectively