MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD N1COLSON IHAVE been reading this week Sir Arthur Salter's new book entitled Personality in Politics (Faber and Faber, I2S. 6d.). It is a study of how far statesmen govern, or are governed by, con- temporary events. Sir Arthur Salter has had too wide and intimate an experience of public affairs not to know that the historian often gets things wrong. If he belong to the determinist school of history, he is apt to ignore the part played in human affairs by personality and chance. If, on the other hand, he belong to the dramatic or romantic school, he is apt to attribute to individuals a greater influence than they in fact possessed. Every historian, moreover, is bound to rely on documents, which are generally written after the event ; this leads him to judge by results ; and he is tempted thereby to attribute to the protagonists in any historical drama a greater degree of intention, foresight cr.. even awareness than that which actuated them at the time. Nobody who has had occasion to watch the chain of circumstance being forged before his eyes can thereafter attribute to intention or " policy " that importance which the his- torians tend to deduce, or to under-estimate the enormous part played in human aff&rs by inadvertence, weariness, chance or the strange quirks of personal character. Sir Arthur Salter is not a determinist, in that he does not believe that events are caused only by the mass movement of impersonal forces. Nor is he a romantic historian, since he well knows that the actions of even the most compelling statesman are conditioned by contemporary circumstances. But he does believe, and has good cause to believe, that "in the total pattern of causation a trivial accident, or trait of character, may have a trans- forming effect upon the whole." "This," he adds, "does not amount to saying that all history turns either upon accident or the personality of men in great positions. No man can reverse the main stream of human development. But as a river furrows its channel from its distant watershed to the sea it winds and turns as it finds yielding soil or hard granite in its path, and, though its ultimate destination is the ocean, its direction, for hundreds of miles, may be changed by a single rock at a decisive point. Such is the place of the great man in history."
* * * * That is a striking, as well as a clumsy, metaphor. I believe it to be true. If in 1940 the full spite Of Nazi victory had not come splash against a huge Gibraltar in the shape of Winston Churchill its waters might well have deluged our green and pleasant land ; we might well have found our Petain and our Monthoire. Sir Arthur Salter knows, however, that it is not only the strength and virtue of great men that can divert the stream of history, but also their weakness and their faults. I do not really believe that the course of history would have been altered if Cleopatra had possessed a longer nose, but I do believe that the period between the two wars would have been more fortunate if M: Pomcare had been a little less cross. I do not believe that there would have been no Russian Revolution if Lenin had not arrived at a crucial moment at the Finland Station, but I do believe that it would have taken a different and less protracted form. I do not believe that, in the absence both of Russia and the United States, the League of Nations could have prevented a second war, but I do believe that if at the time of the Corfu incident Mr. Baldwin had not been at Aix and Lord Curzon at Orleans the League would not have lost its credit mite so soon. I do not believe that Mr. Churchill would have wan the 1945 election if he had spoken less badly on the wireless, but I do believe that a more temperate address would have lost fewer votes. Thus I agree with Sir Arthur Salter that a fortuitous circumstance, or a peculiarity of temperament, can delay, divert or accelerate the stream of human development.
• * * * In order to illustrate his theme, Sir Arthur Salter has drawn some twenty-two portraits of the statesmen or thinkers whom in the course of his active life he has encountered. He is an excellent portrait- painter ; he does not either flatter or caricature. It might be said by some that his manner is a shade too Theophrastian, in that he is apt to take a single virtue or defect as typifying the whole man. The truth is rather that the virtues which have raised a man to eminence tend to become blunted by the pernicious effects of absolute power: whereas the faults, which during the phase of full activity were merely incidental, become more apparent and more harmful according as the energies of mind and body wilt under the accumulated weight of overwork. Mussolini, for instance, possessed many virtues but these were envenomed by the poisons of power. Castlereagh had always been a suspicious man, but he only developed persecution mania when the ordeals of a long parliamentary session had destroyed the balance of his nerves. Ramsay MacDonald may have been a vain man, but his vanity only came to interfere with his judgement when the inner energies of mind and body had been sapped. Lloyd George's dynamic imagination, which proved such a tremendous asset during the first war, became vaporous with the advance of old age. Clemenceau, who, as Lloyd George once said to me, was "a rude but reasonable man," became no less rude and far more unreasonable after he received a bullet in his lung. Only very tough men, such as James Bryce, or very humanistic men, such as Maynard Keynes, appear able to retain to the end the perfect balance of their character.
* * * * Sir Arthur Salter sees in A. J. Balfour the perfect type of the "aristocrat in politics" and he tells a delightful story in which the imperturbable magnanimity (or was it indifference?) of Balfour's nature is admirably conveyed. Yet Balfour's aloofness was inter- mittent rather than permanent ; I have seen him actually tremble with rage when he heard of Lloyd George's plan for the partition of Asia Minor, and his devotion to the Zionist cause had about it a passionate intensity. One can always see incompleteness in any portrait, and Sir Arthur Salter is to be congratulated upon the con- sistency with which he adheres to his main theme. "The truth is," he writes, "that what happens in a given crisis is the combined result of the personality of the protagonists and of the environment of forces external to themselves in which they have to act." The most forceful illustration of the interplay of personality and politics is that provided in the tragic portrait of President Wilson. Sir Arthur Salter generously defines Woodrow Wilson's one-track mind as "the inflexible will." But he does bring out that strain of conceit which ran like a harsh wire through all Wilson's idealism. It was this which aroused those unworthy feelings of personal pique which led the President to deny his confidence to Edward Grey, to separate himself from Colonel House, to ignore the advice of his experts, and, most disastrous of all, to reject any conciliation with Senator Lodge. This strain of intractability had always been present in Wilson even from the Princeton days ; after his illness in Paris it became a pathological obsession. And as such, assuredly, it brought the League to naught.
* * Sir Arthur Salter conducts us round his glittering gallery with a smile of pity, but never a sneer, upon his lips. He has a lesson to give. He believes that self-fulfilment is the most constant of human instincts and that, since absolute power corrupts absolutely, all autocracies have within them the cancer of their own decay. "In the long run," he writes, "if there is a long run—the prospects of freedom are good." But he knows also that . never in history has the apparatus of tyranny possessed such insidious force. "More than ever," he warns us, "is 'eternal vigilance the price of liberty' and it is a central need of our time to find a prophylactic against the inner rot of democracies which gives the native dictator, or the external foe, his temptation and his chance." The great exhaustion which in our difficult and angry world must descend upon all statesmen tends to blur their vigilance ; the reality is so painful that they wince away from it with half-closed eyes. This book should help them not to wince.
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