PEOPLE AND THINGS
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE French, being insular by temperament, do not always realise that there can exist types of culture different from their own. One of the main causes of Anglo-French misunderstanding is that, whereas their culture is superbly urban, ours is shyly rural. The average Frenchman, having endured the, to him, tremendous adventure of a Channel crossing, having struggled in anxious anger through the impediments which at our ports of arrival we place in the way of foreign visitors, is saddened on reaching London by our lack of urban symmetry and by the privacy with which we conduct our lives. As he walks, on Sunday after- noon, past the chill frontages of Pall Mall, as he listens to the loneliness of his own footsteps echoing upon the deserted pavement from St. James's to Trafalgar Square, he is filled with sad distaste for these recondite northerners, and all that he has heard in childhood about our morgue and flegme adds old prejudices to present gloom.
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