bent before him on the table in a way we had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a lobster's antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a walnut shell into smaller and smaller fragments. “Remington,” he said, “has given us the data for a movement, a really possible movement. It's not only possible, but necessary—urgently necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on.”
“We're working altogether too much at the social basement in education and training,” said Gane. “Remington is right about our neglect of the higher levels.”
Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called the spirit of a country and what made it. “The modern community needs its serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken seriously,” I remember his saying. “The day has gone by for either dull responsibility or merely witty art.”
I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown out of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate these conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.
“It would have to be done amazingly well,” said Britten, and my mind went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and how Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers nowadays to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some defensive devices.
“But this thing has to be linked to some political party,” said Crupp, with his eye on me. “You can't get away from that. The Liberals,” he added, “have never done anything for research or literature.”
“They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship,” said Thorns, with a note of minute fairness. “It shows what they were made of,” he