ABSTRACT
In its virtues and in its defects, The Lion and the Unicorn is typical of English leftwing political writing. Its approach to politics is impressionistic rather than analytic, literary rather than technical, that of the amateur, not the professional. This has its advantages. Orwell’s consciousness embraces a good deal that our own Marxists have wrongly excluded from their data (though Marx himself most decidedly didn’t): such as that British army officers wear civilian clothes off duty, that the British are a nation of flower-lovers and stamp-collectors, the contrast between the goose-step of the German Army and the ‘formalized walk’ of the British. There is also a human quality to Orwell’s political writing; you feel it engages him as a moral and cultural whole, not merely as a specialist. For this reason it has a life, an ease and color which our own Marxist epigones seem to feel is somehow sinful; and its values are rarely inhuman, however muddled they seem at times.
