单项选择题

In fact Orwell was a deep lover of words who never consciously misused them. If he said he had written a fairy-story (Animal Farm) with a political purpose, we cannot lightly suppose he spoke lightly. A political purpose suggests some kind of moral...There is perhaps a moral for farmers, don’t take to drink and let your animals get out of hand; but even so the villains will be comforted to find that everything comes out all right for them in the end. For the downtrodden animals there is nothing but misery, cruelty, and injustice; and in place of a moral there is only the tragic chorus of the donkey Benjamin... This is not like the kind of moral that tells us to look before we leap or not to count our boobies before they are hatched.
It is just this sense of purposeless cruelty, though, that gives the clue to Orwell’s purpose, as well as to his deadly serious reason for calling Animal Farm a fairy-story. The point about fairy-stories is that they are written not merely without a moral but without a morality. They take place in a world beyond good and evil, where people (or animals) suffer or prosper for reasons unconnected with ethical merit--for being ugly or beautiful respectively, for instance, or for even more unsatisfactory reasons. A little girl sets out to do a good deed for her grandmother and gets gobbled up by a wolf; a young rogue escapes the gallows (and gets an old Jew hanged instead) by his talent on the fiddle; dozens of young princes die horrible deaths trying to get through the thorn-hedge that surrounds the Sleeping Beauty, just because they had the bad luck to be born before her hundred-year curse expired; and one young prince, no better or worse, no handsomer or uglier than the rest, gets through merely because he has the good luck to arrive just as the hundred years are up; and so on and so on. Even when the Grimms’s stepmothers are called "wicked", it is well to remember that in German their Bosheit is viciousness and bad temper, not moral guilt. For all this is related by the fairy-story tellers without approval or disapproval, without a glimmer of subjective felling, as though their pens were dipped in surgical spirit to sterilize the microbes of emotion. They never criticize or moralize, to protest or plead or persuade; and if they have an emotional impact on the reader, as the greatest of them do, that is not intrinsic to the stories. They would indeed only weaken that impact in direct proportion as soon as they set out to achieve it. They move by not seeking to move; almost, it seems, by seeking not to move.
According to the first paragraph, the author believes that ______.