MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IHAVE been reading this week, and for the third or fourth time, Lord Grey of Fallodon's Twenty-Five Years. I find this noble book both a sedative and a tonic. A sedative, since, unlike most autobiographies, it was not composed for self- justification or self-display. It is a soothing experience, amid the fever-thoughts that gibber at us during this long twilight, to listen to the quiet tones of a great man communing with his own memory and conscience A tonic, since the book communicates the convic- tion that there exist certain absolutes of right and wrong ; that the battle between light and darkess admits of no cowardice or escape. To the very depths of his soul Grey was a man of peace ; for him war was the most squalid of all human calamities, offering no glory, honour, excitement or reward. Yet upon him fell the necessity, in those distracted summer days of 1914, of leading his country into what he well knew would mean the destruction of many of the acquired values and standards of civilised life. My father would often tell me of that evening of August 3rd, 1914, when Grey returned to his room at the Foreign Office after delivering his tremendous speech in the House of Commons. Darkness was already settling slowly over the trees in the park and the faint mist rising from the lake. Solitary and austere, Grey was standing by the high window looking out on the dusk ; there was no sign of the intoxication that enlivens even the sternest man after a parliamentary triumph : he seemed broken, shattered, crushed. My father congratulated Grey upon the effect he had produced upon the House of Commons. Wearily and in silence Grey left the window and walked to the centre of the room. For a moment he leant as if in physical pain upon the standing-desk under the great wall-maps. He raised his hands above his head and brought his fists down with a trash upon the desk. " I hate war," he groaned, " I hate war."
* * * * Grey was often regarded by his contemporaries, and is some- times condemned by history, as a man too simple and innocent to cope with the subtleties of international affairs. Such a criticism is based upon a misunderstanding, both of his rigorous intelligence and of the true functions of diplomacy. When I was a young man and had just passed my examination for the Diplomatic Service, I happened to meet the Foreign Secretary in the house of one of his colleagues. I regarded him with awe. My hostess, to my acute embarrassment, thrust me forward into the immediate presence of that formidable figure. " Now Sir Edward," she chirped foolishly, " here is a future ambassador. Give him a maxim which will guide him in his career." Grey turned upon me the level beam of his falcon eyes : —Cesare armato con gli occhi grilagni. He was not a man of rapid responsive epigram: he paused to think. He did not say, as he might have said, "Pune Izomme, surtout pas de zele." He said, " Remember that gullibility is always better than suspicion." It took me-many years before I appreciated the deep philosophy of that remark. I find it again embedded, in somewhat different form, in the pages of Twenty-Five Years. "In Foreign Affairs generally," he writes, " more mischief and loss has been incurred owing to incredulity than credulity." I do not regard that as a simple or innocent apophthegm: I regard it as intricate, penetrating and wise. Since if, as I believe, diplomacy is the art of creating and expanding confidence, then suspiciousness and the habit of attributing false motives are enemies to be destroyed. The classic examples of diplomatic error—the mistakes for instance of Billow, Holstein, Tirpitz, William II, Ribbentrop and Stalin—can be attributed, less to stupidity or malice, than to a fatal propensity to suppose that perfectly sincere people are seeking to deceive.
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It was not that Grey was simple-minded ; it was rather that he believed that the fundamental principles governing human affairs are extremely simple principles. He held the theory that the clash of national interests, the intricacies of manoeuvre and intrigue, were incidental obstructions ; and that international concord could best be achieved by assuming the existence of common instincts for right and harmony. It may well be that these ethical assumptions led him to underestimate the part played in politics by ambition, vanity and hatred ; it may be that in taking for granted a common level of international good conduct he ignored the passions and the turpitudes of lesser men ; yet the austerity of his outlook rendered him a most potent personage in world affairs ; and in history unassailable. Lady Violet Bonham-Carter once told me a story illustrative of Grey's habit of reducing political and psychological problems to their simplest essence. She had asked him on one occasion whether, in his function as Foreign Secretary, he ever found it difficult to reconcile public with private morality. Here again he paused for a few moments before replying, fixing her with his steady gaze. " Well," he said eventually, " I think it really comes to this. I have found that to do the right thing is generally the right thing to do." Is this also an over-simplification of a problem ? I do not think so. Again and again, as for instance during the bewildered days of the Munich crisis, I have found myself repeating those words as an incantation. For me they possess a magical property.
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The passages in Twenty-Five Years dealing with the Conference of Ambassadors at the time of the Balkan wars of 1912-1913 throw much light upon Grey's -conception of diplomatic method. Repeatedly he insists upon the fact that, whereas policy should never be secret, negotiation must always be confidential. He scorns the conception of international intercourse as war by another name, marked by resounding triumphs or defeats. He had grave doubts regarding the success of "open diplomacy," a method even at that distant date advocated by some enthusiasts. " An atmosphere of reticence," he writes, " even to the point of dullness, is favourable, provided there be at work good faith and a living desire to keep the peace. Sensation and éclat produce the atmosphere that is favourable to storms. To avoid creating that atmosphere will be the great difficulty of ' open' diplomacy, if by that phrase is meant daily publicity." He knew that by his handling of the Ambassadors Conference at the time of the Near Eastern crisis he had preserved the peace of the world. He recognised that the Ambassadors who were his colleagues at that Conference—Cambon, Mensdorff, Metternich, Benckendorff and Imperiali—felt themselves to be representative, not merely of their own national interests, but. of the Concert of Europe. " Everything," he writes, " that passed through their hands was dealt with on a high and sagacious plane." They were not there, he records, to score points against each other ; they were there to preserve the peace of Europe. Until his dying day Grey regretted that he was not able to summon a similar Conference at the end of July, 1914. Had Germany not refused that Conference it might again have been possible to establish the Concert of Europe and to maintain " the ideals of right and wrong, and good faith in treaties, and other things that make for humanity and civilisation."
* * * * It is strange and sad to compare these simple principles with the noise at Lake Success. Public exchanges of insult are not a means of conciliation ; nor can even the most imperturbable negotiator retain his sanity when faced with the microphone and the glare of television lights. The iron nerves of Sir Gladwyn Jebb enable him to confront these batteries with dignity and to assume the aes triplex of Etonian scorn. Mr. Malik for his part is intent only on turning the proceedings of the Council into a harlequinade. Will it be possible ever to recover the " high and sagacious plane " of the old diplomacy ? Not, I think, so long as negotiators address themselves, not to each other, but to mobs outside.
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