MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
MY friends often ask me (in sorrow rather than in anger) what it was that induced me two years ago to become a member of the Labour Party. To those of them who regard politics as a concealed battle between the rich and the poor, and who assume on insufficient evidence that I belong to the former category, my action was condemned as treachery. No person, they argued, who had received the privileges of a luxury education, who had for years enjoyed and evidently appreciated the benefits of capitalist society, could sincerely ally himself with the enemies of that society without proclaiming himself a traitor to his class. If politics were, in fact, no more than an organised class struggle, then these critics would be justified in their reproofs ; but to those who regard human society as an organism, constantly subject to renewal and change, such stratified conceptions have, or ought to have, no meaning. It is quite possible for someone who is not a member of the working classes to desire with ardent sincerity that the comfort, the security, the intelligence and the responsibility of those classes should be increased. It is quite possible for someone who takes delight in the ease and elegance of the eighteenth century to realise that in the twentieth century such privileged conditions can no longer apply. Nor does there seem to my mind to be anything treacherous or insincere in believing that it should be feasible, without- utterly destroying our general levels of culture, to accord to the masses some at least of the privi- leges which they have hitherto been denied. It would be argued, I know, that such beliefs and aspirations are not in any sense the monopoly of the Labour Party, and that formally to align oneself with that party, must imply, either a sad lack of political temperance and judgement, or an ambition to join a winning side with an ardent expectation of benefits to come. It would be foolish of me were I to be disturbed, at my age, by such attributions of false motive.
This is not the place or time to compose an apologia. I am utterly convinced that this country, alone of European Powers, can set that example of ordered social democracy which in our present age represents the only effective antidote to Communism. If one believes this, one must attribute to the word " democracy " all that was most enlightened in the precepts of nineteenth-century Liberals ; and to the word " social " all that our awakened conscience is now teaching regarding the responsibility of the community as a whole towards those who have hitherto been denied security and oppor- tunity. This faith does not imply the necessity of levelling down ; it implies only the urgent necessity of levelling up. I am not egali- tarian, in the sense that I do not believe that every baby born in this island is from the outset possessed of similar faculties. But I am certainly egalitarian in the sense that I firmly believe that every child, whatever may be the status of his parents, should from the outset be accorded equal ,pportunity to develop the faculties with which by nature he has been endowed. The intellectual Socialist, in these days of .popular sovereignty, is, I admit, encom- passed by disadvantages which, unless he be very frank with himself and others, may degenerate into inhibitions. There are fgw things more unconvincing than the class-conscious intellectual who apes the comradely manners of the born Labour leader. He should not attempt such travesties. His function, if he possesses any function (and there are those who doubt it), should be to analyse, define and criticise false lines of development. He should not be intimidated by being accused of being " high-brow ": he should, if he is to retain his sincerity, keep his brow high. He will receive no rewards for such a stance ; but at least he will not sacrifice respect.
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If the Social Democrat is to avoid degenerating into the social demagogue, he must refrain from flattering the masses (who dislike being flattered) and must remain alert to tendencies which, if they develop, may mar utterly the fair garden we might win. Among these tendencies is one which I recognise and deplore. In their animosity towards the previous aristocratic system—an animosity which was perhaps invented, and is certainly exploited, by political propagandists—the masses are tending to deride, not merely what was valueless in the system, but what was valuable. They are tending even to deride knowledge. The popular Press and the cinema industry, wishing to please the public, are inclined to pander to this disgraceful indifference to learning, to this disgraceful adulation of ignorance. There spreads an increasing and abominable laxity in the handling of facts. We all make mistakes sometimes, but we do not make deliberate mistakes, and when detected in inaccuracy we feel pain and shame. What is so distressing as a modern ten- dency is that people who minister to public entertainment • make mistakes deliberately, and indulge in distortions of fact, in the belief that such lapses from veracity will render their themes more com- prehensible to the public or more attractive. People throughout the ages have indulged in the practice of telling lies ; what is so disturb- ing is that many quite responsible people are today prepared to write books or to produce films which they themselves know to be inaccurate and untruthful ; and that, when detected in their falsity, they dismiss their critics as old-fashioned and feel no sense of shame.
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The othei night I went to a film entitled The Bad Lord Byron. I blush to confess that this film was not of Hollywood manufacture but a British production. It is not my business upon this page to indulge in film criticism ; that task is admirably accomplished by Virginia Graham. But this particular film is so striking an example of the tendency to flout knowledge without shame that I cannot refrain from imparting to others the distress and anger which I felt. It is questionable in any case whether the intricacies of Byron's love affairs lend themselves to the cruder forms of statement ; the difficulty is not surmounted by the abominable device of representing Augusta Leigh as an old friend of the family, as some country neigh- bour. Yet even if one were to tolerate this intolerable distortion, one is left with the impression that the producers of this film, who have spent much time and money on the elaboration of unimportant aspects of the story, have taken no real trouble to verify or conform to the facts. The main characters—such as Augusta, Caroline Lamb, Teresa Guiccioli and John Cam Hobhouse—bear but slight relation to the originals ; they are little more than dressed-up dolls exhibited one by one upon a counter. The mass of information which is available regarding Byron and his circle appears to have been ignored by the producers. Byron did not limp in the way that is here represented, he slithered ; he did not talk with the voice of a B.B.C. announcer, he talked with the Devonshire House drawl with an undertone of Scotch ; in no circumstances would he ever have dreamt of bringing a walking stick into a drawing room or calling Hobhouse " John." Fletcher was not the meek attorney herein represented ; he was a tall man with a tough beard and a strong Nottinghamshire accent. The house of the primate Capsali at Missolonghi was not an adaptation of an old English tea room, but a Turkish konak. Byron never fought an engagement with the Austrian soldiery ; they did not dance minuets at fashionable balls in 1813 ; Pietro Gamba was fair, not dark ; and no known gondolier ever dressed up as a Neapolitan fisherman.
A little more professional self-respect on the part of the producers could have spared us these howlers and distortions. Let them cross the square and visit The Queen of Spades, in which the superb acting of Edith Evans is enhanced by the scholarly brilliance of Oliver Messel's designs. But would they care ? To them, it would seem, true representation is an old-fashioned fad. In feeling thus they are in line with this dread tendency which, in that it appeases ignorance and derides knowledge, may bring with it a slovenly atti- tude towards truth itself. If that happens, then Social Democracy will not defeat totalitarianism.
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