MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IWAS reading this week one of the short articles which M. Georges Duhamel from time to time contributes to the Figaro. I always enjoy reading M. DiThamel, since he is an urbane and observant man. He approaches the intricacies and dangers of our modern life with affable displeasure, with courteous repugnance. He wishes that he lived in the leisurely days of the Goncourts, but since fate has denied him that special form of lethargy, he adapts himself to the more strenuous exactions of the epoch with grunts of indignant resignation. Moreover, M. Duhamel, unlike most Academicians, is aware that French is a living, rather than a dead, language: he writes sentences of such length that he has to catch himself up and repeat the beginning ; even as a broadcaster, when he has put too great a strain upon the attention of his audience, has to recapitulate his opening words in order to render his syntax audible and clear. Then M. Duhamel, much to the delight of his admirers, employs new or forgotten words, so that one is driven to consult Larousse, and often discovers that M. Duhamel has, with perfect correctness, manufactured a word all on his own. Such is the way that lan- guage ought to be treated by those whose business it is to handle, massage, refurbish and rejuvenate the thing. I have often used words that do not occur in the Oxford English Dictionary even under the designation " arch," and I feel refreshed when I have done so. I do not mind very much if during the ensuing week I receive letters from doriphores asking me what " hypoulic " means. It may happen that one of the words I invent may fifty years from now be adopted by some distinguished writer and will figure in the 2051 edition of the O.E.D. as " hypoulic : rare." In any case, as I was saying, having been diverted from the main path of my argument by the charm of M. Duhamel's winding sentences, I relish his wisdom as much as his style and disagree delightedly with almost everything he writes.
* * * * In the article I am considering, M. Duhamel begins, as so many French writers begin, by quoting DesCartes. He recalls how that true begetter of the Latin mind stated that he would have been unable to make any contribution to human philosophy had it not been that he had contracted the habit of indulging in long sessions of internal thought, or in what the French call (since we have ourselves no name for the process) recueillement. Had Descartes lived in 1951 he would not have been able to achieve solitude.-and therefore all the essential precepts according to which the French think, speak and write wotitcl never have been divulged or inculcated. M. Duhamel contends that the crisis of civilisation in which we have lived since 1914. with its incessant social, political and economic turmoil, has profoundly affected the moral, intellectual and emotional habits of mankind. We pass our days in what Paul Valery called " the contemporary uproar." There is no time allowed us for sessions of solitary thought, no time for " serene conversation with our friends," no time even for sleep, no time to detach ourselves from the turmoil around us. As a result, according to M. Duhamel (and I dis- believe him), the statistics demonstrate that people die younger than formerly and the figures for nervous illnesses and break- downs show, a sharp upward curve. What we require, says M. Duhamel, is some miraculous narcotic, some "drogue mirifique," that will send us harmlessly to sleep for a period of six months. Yet such is the rush of modern existence, the Sleeper, on awaken- ing from this void repose, would be wholly unable to understand anything of the changed new world that opened to his eyes.
* * * I suppose it is true that we of 1951 are not allowed any time for the " colloque inflate" from which Descartes and his suc- cessors derived such benefits. I suppose it is correct to say that those of us who do not possess phenomenal powers of concentra- tion. or whose attention is_readily distracted by-the charm of the life around us, are exposed to more varied and frequent inter- ruptions than were our grandfathers of a hundred years ago. People are always repeating complaints regarding the strain of contemporary life, and I imagine that there must be some truth in what they assert. Yet my own experience is that the young man of twenty years old is in 1951 less exposed to interruption than was his predecessor who attained the age of twenty in the year 1906. M. Duhamel would not agree with me, and would instance afternoons spent in lilac-scented gardens at Auteuil or Passy, with no sound to worry one beyond the hum of bumble- bees and the distant murmurs of victorias circulating in the Avenue des Acacias. I admit that in France, where the frequent explosion of the horn is regarded as a sign of careful driving, the gardens of Neuilly are today less silent than they were before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Yet this is not true of the 'placid streets of London, which, I contend, are quieter in 1951 than they were in the distant days of 1906. Before the first war it was customary, if one desired a cab, to open the front door and to blow long strident blasts upon a little whistle that spent long, dusty hours hanging on a nail in the hall. These blasts would echo from ten doorsteps at the same time in a single London square. They sufficed to wake the dead.
• * * My recollection also is that, before the first war, the hour of tea-time (surely the hour designed by British householders as of all others the best adapted for the colloque intime or the " serene conversation ") was rendered hideous by the lopd urban cries of newsvendors. These urchins would run down the pavements yelling the virtues of their wares: what they shouted was as cacophonous and incomprehentible as the Delphic cantations that boom out to us from the loud-speakers of our larger railway stations: but none the less one strained the ear to catch the headlines that they bawled. The strain of so doing was incessant and concentrated. How calm in comparison do the London streets of today seem to us as the shadows gather and only the distant footsteps of a pedestrian echo across the twilight square! How comforting to be able to turn a knob and to hear the educated accents of the announcer giving us, in a tone at once restrained and confiding, the headlines of the six o'clock news! Nor do I believe M. Duhamel when he suggests that the lilac- scented urdens of Neuilly were cloisters of recueillement. My own impression is that primitive societies are always noisier than civilised societies. A Buganda village in the heart of Africa is noisier at sundown than the whole of Kensington. People shout and beat drums ; children yell as only African children can yell : and all the dogs of the primaeval forest start barking to each other as the moon rises above the crocodiles. Never, in Onslow Square, does such an orchestra of uproar arise at sunset. Our urban civilisation has at least given us the habit of speaking in undertones.
* * * * The telephone, so poets grumble, is of all modern devices the greatest threat to solitude: they ignore the fact that it is possible. with but little effort, to leave the receiver off. No modern noise, not even the automatic drill, can compare with the thunder of brewers' drays on cobble-stones. I can recall the epoch when, in Continental cities, the roar and rattle of wheels and hoofs upon the pave were utterly destructive of any serene conversation. And what, I ask M. Duhamel, about the horrible amount of time that our forefathers wasted? Off they would ride or drive across the Park to leave a note, or even a visiting-card, in Gloucester Place: the same operation can today be performed by two minutes on the telephone. It may be true that our ancestors had a comforting sense of security, and felt safe enough provided they possessed twenty thousand in, the three per cents. Yet how wretched to lie awake at night brooding on the Thirty-nine Articles! I prefer the ease of 1951.
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