7.
(2) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the
external world, or, on the other hand, in words and
their right arrangement. Pleasure in the
impact of one sound on another, in  the
firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good
story. Desire to share an experience which one feels
is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic
motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even
a pamphleteer or a writer of textbooks will have pet
words and phrases which appeal to him for nonutilitarian
reasons; or he may feel strongly about
typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level
of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic
considerations.
8.
(3) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they
are, to find out true facts and store them up for the
use of posterity.
9.
(4) Political purpose—using the word “political” in
the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world
in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea
of the kind of society that they should strive after.
Once again, no book is genuinely
free from political bias.
The opinion that art should have nothing to do with
politics is itself a political attitude.
10.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against
one another, and how they must
fluctuate from person to person and from time to
time. By
nature -- taking your "nature" to be the state
you have attained when you are first adult --
I am a person in whom the first three motives would
outweigh
the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate
or merely descriptive books, and might have remained
almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I
have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.
First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession
(the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent
poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my
natural hatred of authority and made me for the first
time fully aware of the existence of the working classes,
and the job in Burma had given me some understanding
of the nature of imperialism; but these experiences
were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation.
Then came Hitler, the Spanish civil war, etc. By the
end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.
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