The Times Great Lives

Dissatisfied with the facilities given to him in prison to work for the Harijans (his name for the depressed classes), he decided once more to fast, and after a week of abstinence from food he was released purely for medical reasons on August 23. The civil disobedience movement was waning, and in April, 1934, Congress adopted his advice to suspend it. But his personal contact, and that of Congress leaders generally, with the Viceroy and the Governors was not resumed until, in the summer of 1937, the Viceroy (Lord Linlithgow) took the initiative in bringing the long estrangement to an end by inviting Gandhi to meet him at Delhi.

In the first general election for the Provincial Parliaments under the Act of 1935 the widespread Congress organization scored striking successes, and its candidates obtained majorities in six of the 11 Provinces of British India. When provincial autonomy was introduced in April, 1937, and the question of acceptance or non-acceptance of office by the Congress Party was under constant discussion, Gandhi casually admitted to a distinguished and sympathetic British public man that he had not read the India Act of 1935, for his entourage and advisers had assured him that it gave nothing of real worth to India. Persuaded by his visitor to repair the omission, he admitted when they next met that he had been mistaken and that the Act marked a very substantial advance. Thereupon he threw his immense weight against Pandit Nehru’s policy of abstention and of course carried the day. Congress Ministries were formed, after a few months of the familiar attempts at bargaining with Government in which the Mahatma was such an adept. Gandhi then retired with his considerable entourage to a remote village near Wardha, in the Central Provinces, and it became known as Sevagram (the village of service). Gandhi showed an unexpected gift for realism by encouraging Ministers in paths of administrative orthodoxy, while pressing forward his ideals, such as a policy of prohibition by instalments, and what is known as the Wardha plan of primary education.

Though he had upheld for years a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that the Congress would not come between the Princes and their subjects, he did intervene early in March, 1939, in Rajkote, a small Kathiawar State, on the ground that the Thakore Saheb had gone back on his word as to constitutional advances. He issued a 24 hours’ ultimatum, and as it was not accepted he began a ‘fast unto death’, but the Viceroy (Lord Linlithgow) suggested a solution of the immediate question, and Gandhi abandoned his fast at the beginning of the fifth day. The Mahatma’s hold on Nationalist reverence was increased, rather than diminished, by his public apology and expression of contrition for having resorted to a coercive method not consistent with his non-violent principles. Yet he was to resort to it on future occasions. He was not free from ‘the last infirmity of noble minds’, and was skilful in exhibitionism.

When war broke out in September, 1939, it seemed for a short time that Gandhi would invite the Congress Party to give moral support to the nations seeking to prevent, though by armed force, the enslavement of the world by brutal aggressors. But he became convinced that only a ‘free India’ could give effective moral support to Britain; and his demand for ‘complete independence’ became more and more urgent. When Japan struck down Malaya and invaded Burma Gandhi became seriously perturbed at the defence measures which the Government of India initiated. In the spring of 1942, when the discussions between Sir Stafford Cripps (then Lord Privy Seal in Mr Churchill’s Government) and the party leaders had reached a hopeful stage, Gandhi advised against settlement and the negotiations with the Congress leaders broke down. The war situation was then unfavourable, and Gandhi was commonly alleged to have talked contemptuously of the draft Declaration whereby India was to secure complete self-government after the war as a ‘post-dated cheque on a crashing bank’. He demanded that the British should ‘quit India’ (a slogan which had wide currency), that the Indian Army should be disbanded, and that Japan should be free to come to the country and arrange terms with a non-resisting people.

In August, 1942, he concurred in the decision to strike the blow of mass obstruction against the war effort – ‘open rebellion’, as he calmly called it. This led to his arrest and that of other Congress leaders and to widespread disorder and bloodshed. Gandhi was interned in the Aga Khan’s palace at Poona and was barred from political contacts, though he was allowed the companionship of Mrs Gandhi, who died in February, 1944. Gandhi continued in detention until May 6, 1944, when he was released unconditionally on medical grounds. Later all the leaders were released to share in the prolonged discussions arising from attempts to bring an end to the increasing strife between Hindus and Muslims over the Pakistan issue.

A long prepared and carefully staged series of discussions between the Mahatma and Mr Jinnah, at the house of the latter in Bombay, yielded no tangible result, for Mr Gandhi stated that he spoke only for himself and had no commission from the working committee of the Congress. Indeed, for many years he had withdrawn from actual membership of the party, only to dominate it from without. The explosive possibilities of the situation developed with the end of the war. The historic Cabinet Mission, headed by Lord Pethick-Lawrence, went out in the spring of 1946 and spent three anxious months of incessant conference and negotiation in the heat at Delhi. The Mahatma took a large share in the negotiations chiefly behind the scenes, and in his inscrutable way was at times helpful and at times the reverse. When at long last and amid most serious outbreaks of communal violence the short-term and long-term plans of the Cabinet Mission led to the formation at Delhi of an interim National Government, with Mr Nehru as Vice-President of the Council, Gandhi remained outside the Cabinet, much to the relief of its members. But no major decision could be taken either at the Centre or in the Provincial Congress Governments without full consideration of the views and wishes of the Mahatma, the idol of the Hindu masses.

The announcement made by Mr Attlee in February, 1947, that complete British withdrawal would not be later than June, 1948, had the effect of accentuating the conflict between the two main parties, and the subsequent antedating of the time limit and decision to set up two Dominions, India and Pakistan, quickened savage outbreaks in the Punjab between Hindu and Sikh on the one side and Muslims on the other. Moreover, when Independence Day came the sanguinary unrest in Calcutta led to fears that the division of Bengal would have untoward consequences. ‘Bapu’, who had been travelling from place to place in Eastern Bengal and in Bihar preaching brotherhood, went to Calcutta, and at the beginning of September undertook another fast not to be ended until normal conditions were restored. The party leaders exerted themselves in exhortations to the people, and on the fourth day the Mahatma was able to end his ordeal. Thus he succeeded where armed force had failed. The miracle encouraged him to stage in Delhi early this month his 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 as The Blue Book and The Brown Book, were widely circulated, contrary to Wittgenstein’s wishes. Again, it is not too much to say that he inaugurated a new ‘school’, or perhaps rather a new method in philosophy - namely, that of which John Wisdom and Gilbert Ryle are the best known exponents, and which is often referred to as ‘the philosophy of ordinary language’. The point of view put forward in these notes diverges widely from that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, though it is not difficult to see how the second grew out of the first. The way had been prepared for this new philosophical departure by the emphasis placed by G. E. Moore, who was at Cambridge, on ‘the language of common sense’.

In 1936 Wittgenstein left Cambridge and went to Norway, where it is said that he lived in a mountain hut, and from which he returned in 1938, after the fall of Vienna. In 1939 he succeeded G. E. Moore in the Cambridge Chair of Philosophy, and was also naturalized as a British citizen. He continued lecturing for a time, but in 1943 he went to work, first as a porter in a London hospital and afterwards as a research assistant. In 1945 he returned, but found that his teaching duties prevented him from doing creative writing, and in 1947 he resigned from his chair. The second book, however, which he had sacrificed so much to complete and publish (in order, as he said, to show how very wrong the Tractatus was), was not destined to appear. In 1949 he became seriously ill, of a disease from which he knew there could be no great hope of recovery, and retired from active life. He formed round him a small group of philosophers who were also his friends, with whom he worked and discussed to the last.

We are still too close to Wittgenstein to form a just estimate of his work. His Tractatus is a logical poem, consisting as it does of the development of a gigantic metaphor, constructed round two senses of ‘language’. It is thus an exceptionally difficult book to interpret with any reliability. His sets of notes, and his incomplete manuscript, also show, in the opinion of all who have read them, signs of indubitable genius; but Wittgenstein himself took all the steps in his power to prevent their being circulated on the ground that, if they were, they would be bound to be misunderstood. What is beyond doubt is that, like Descartes in one way, like Locke in another, he started a worldwide philosophical trend. In so far as this can be described in one sentence, it consists in following up the idea that thinking consists in using a language. Thus thought, which it had been easy to conceive of as a private, indefinable, amorphous entity, becomes the manipulation of some symbolism; something public, something which can be ‘nailed down’ and to which the techniques of formal logic can be applied.

Arnold Schoenberg

Beyond chromaticism

13 July 1951

Professor Arnold Schoenberg, who died on Friday at his home at Los Angeles at the age of 76, was probably the most discussed musician of the twentieth century.

His system of atonality, or, as he preferred to call it, twelve-tone music, though reached by process of evolution from chromaticism, was the most revolutionary movement in musical history since Monteverde in the seventeenth century. It is so subversive of established ways of thought that its general adoption is improbable in the extreme, but it has provided a ferment of far-reaching influence on modern music. In this respect, as in some others, Schoenberg is like Stravinsky; between 1910 and 1930 these two men were the outstanding figures in the history of modern music. Curiously enough, both suffered the same fate. At the height of his fame each was forced to leave his country and to adjust himself to new conditions.

Schoenberg was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874. At the age of eight he learnt to play the violin and composed short violin duets for his lessons. Later on he taught himself the cello and composed a string quartet. For several years he worked without any outside help or supervision. Alexander von Zemlinsky (whose daughter he married in 1901), a composer of whom Brahms had a very high opinion, recognized his outstanding talent, gave him his first instruction in composition and brought him into the musical circles of Vienna. Schoenberg’s earliest works were written in the style of Brahms, whose technique he admired, and later set as a model to his pupils when he was teaching composition himself.

The first work which Schoenberg made known to the musical world was a string sextet, Verklärte Nacht. It was an attempt to apply the symphonic form of a tone poem to chamber music. To the same period belong the Gurrelieder, a cantata for solo voices, chorus and orchestra written in 1900, a tone poem, Pelleas and Melisande, and a string quartet in D minor. A new development began with the Chamber-Symphony in E, opus 9, in 1906. Schoenberg’s style became concise, his harmonies more daring. It was these works which first roused the opposition of conservative musicians and the admiration of a younger generation who were trying to find new ways of expression. This aim was achieved in the three piano pieces, opus 11, 1909, written in the so-called ‘atonal style’ which aroused much discussion among musicians all over the world. At this time Schoenberg left Vienna and settled in Berlin. Here he wrote Pierrot Lunaire, a cycle of poems recited in a kind of song-speech accompanied by instruments. This work established Schoenberg’s fame as one of the leading modern composers. In 1913 he returned to Vienna to teach composition, and, after the end of the 1914–18 war, he founded a society for the performance of modern music. He embodied his technical principles in the Treatise on Harmony, begun in the early years of the century and since revised, but it is only recently in a volume of essays, Style and Idea, that he has discussed their aesthetic basis.

The years between 1920 and 1925 were the most prosperous in Schoenberg’s life. His works were performed regularly at the festivals of the International Music Society; his principal choral work, the Gurrelieder, aroused general admiration at a performance in his honour at the Vienna State Opera, and most conductors included his works in their programmes. He had now gained an international reputation. When Busoni died in 1924 in Berlin, Schoenberg succeeded him as a member of the Academy of the Arts, a position which should have given him financial independence for the rest of his life. After Hitler came to power, however, in 1933, he lost his position and accepted an offer from the Malkin Conservatory, Boston. He felt the change as a great shock. His health suffered from the eastern winter and he soon moved to Los Angeles, where he was appointed professor of music in the University of Southern California. Here he wrote a suite for string orchestra (1934), the fourth string quartet (1938), a violin concerto, a piano concerto, and the Ode to Napoleon. Schoenberg retired from his university post in 1944 at the age of 70, to spend the rest of his life in composing and teaching. He completed the opera Moses and Aaron, on which he had been working for many years, not long before he died. He had the satisfaction of seeing a revival of his works after the defeat of the Nazi regime and the re-establishment of his fame as one of the most inspiring innovators of contemporary music. His wife died in 1923 and he is survived by a son and a daughter.

Joseph Stalin

Dictator of Russia for 29 years

5 March 1953

The death of Stalin, like the death of Lenin 29 years ago, marks an epoch in Russian history. Rarely have two successive rulers of a great country responded so absolutely to its changing needs and piloted it so successfully through periods of crisis. Lenin was at the helm through five years of revolution, civil war, and precarious recovery. Stalin, coming to power in the aftermath of revolution, took up the task of organizing and disciplining the revolutionary state, and putting into execution the revolutionary programmes of planned industry and collectivized agriculture. He thus equipped the country to meet the gravest external peril which had threatened it since Napoleon, and brought it triumphantly through a four years’ ordeal of invasion and devastation. The characters of the two men present a contrast which corresponds to the different tasks confronting them. Lenin was an original thinker, an idealist, a superb revolutionary agitator. Stalin neither possessed, nor required, these qualities. He was essentially an administrator, an organizer and a politician. Both were ruthless in the pursuit of policies which they regarded as vital to the cause they had at heart. But Stalin appeared to lack a certain element of humanity which Lenin generally maintained in personal relations, though allied statesmen who dealt with him during the war were unanimous in finding him approachable, sympathetic, and readily disposed to moderate the intransigence of his subordinates. As the war drew to its close Stalin, whether for reasons of health or for reasons of policy, became less and less accessible to representatives of the western Powers and so the rift began which was to widen in the counsels of the United Nations and in the policies towards the west of Russia’s satellites, until the open warfare broke out in Korea which still festers and poisons the whole international scene.