BRITAIN AND CULTURE
wonder whether after all there is anything in the familiar contention, now supported by Mr. Charles Morgan and Mr. Henry W. Nevinson, that " culture " of the brand they have in mind, is, or ever has been, more widely diffused in France than in England. Paris for Mr. Morgan was (alas, that the past tense should be required) a delight because no one considered it a waste of time to discuss for a couple of hours certain technicalities of literature. There are, it seems to me, reasons for believing that on any given day as many people in London as in Paris could have been found employed in literary backchat, and that those in Paris would probably not all have been Frenchmen.
Mr. Nevinson asks, "-Cars-one imagine two wounded Tommies ' arguing for a couple of hours on the comparative merits, say, of Walter Scott and Dickens?" If by " Tommies " he means men of the regular army the answer is "N-n&' The regulars were recruited— this is the point--almost exclusively from the " uncultured ": the French conscript army included all degrees of "culture." But if " Tomrnies " can be taken to embrace the civilian soldiers of 1914-191.8 or of 1939-? the answer is "Yes. Why on earth not?"
May I be allowed a reminiscence? In 1916 the enemy near Lesboeufs might have overheard a quarrel among a British Lewis Gun team. In a voice that certainly carried the fifty yards which separated the two posts a corporal was exclaiming: "Which she sits! WHICH SHE SITS! The rocks among which she sits! A fool with half an ear would have avoided making his prose sound like a ricochet. Walter Pater wrote like pussy. Give me Swift." To which No. I of the gun replied in a scornful shout: "Swift! The permanent latrine wallah!
I cannot- swear that the discussion occupied the regulation "couple of hours," and the " Torrunies " had not yet been wounded. I should add, too, that among the " uncultured ' of No. 13 platoon- of that battalion the phrase which she sits became a catchword of infinite applicability, while Walter Pater struck them as so absurd a name that for months it provided the answer, sometimes necessarily sotto voce, to all questions beginning with Who.
Laurel Cottage, • Mill Hill. DANTEL GEORGE.
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