MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
BEING eupeptic by nature, and having a decided preference for sunshine in the place of rain, I seek always to observe in the revolutionary world around me those factors or innovations which provide pleasure and lessen pain. I am conscious of being more fortunate than many of my contemporaries in that, being one of Nature's bohemians, I do not happen to want most of the things which I can no longer get. I should simply hate to own a grouse moor, or an umbrella with a gold pencil in the handle, or a motor car in Londtm, or five different sorts of hat. I enjoy travelling by bus or tuidergound since it enables me to observe without incivility or intrusion the appearance and habits of my fellow human beings. So long as I can earn enough money to be able from time to time to go abroad and to limit the occasions when I have to wash up, I have but few regrets for past Edwardian lavishness. And so long as I am allowed, without overwhelming exertion, to cultivate my own garden I am glad indeed to pay large sums to the Inland Revenue in the hope that they may enable others to enjoy the four freedoms and to cultivate their own gardens as well. I regard with deep sympathy, and not in the least with contempt, those of my con- temporaries who are unable to adjust themselves to modern con- ditions and who view the present with discomfort and the future with gloom. Gratitude, rather than self-satisfaction, is the mood in which those who can make a sufficient living to mitigate the incon- veniences of life should survey this world around us ; and to become complacent about it is to ignore the unhappiness of those who temperamentally, as well as economically, live under the clouds ,-)f pessimism or want. Great spiritual and moral losses have, it is true, occurred in the last twenty years ; but materially there have come many improvements which minister either to our comfort or delight. To ignore or to dismiss these improvements is to surrender to the jejune conception of what, after all, is a most interesting experience, the experience of living in a violently transitional age.
* * * * Nor are these improvements wholly confined to the material world of science ; it is most agreeable of course to live in the epoch of penicillin and anaesthetics ; but it is also pleasurable to notice that many of the amenities of life have also been increased. To those of my compatriots who assert that progress always means that one is deprived of something, I recommend a day spent in the Paris Under- ground and the resultant comparison between those murky catacombs and the space and escalators provided by the L.P.T.B. To those who deplore the vulgarisation of all values, I recommend a compari- son between the Museums and Galleries of Victorian days and the intelligent showmanship which our curators now almost universally practise. How different, for instance, is the Victoria and Albert of today from the grim series of mortuary chapels which I recall from my younger days! How great is the improvement in the National Gallery, in the British Museum and in the National Portrait Gallery! I have not had occasion as yet to queue up at Hyde Park Corner in the hope of eventually reaching the "Britain Can Make It" Px- hibition. But to read the eulogies published upon that enlightened effort of showmanship in the British and the French press is to realise that our aediles are at last beginning to regard art and the improvement of public taste as not the least of their responsibilities. I have no doubt at all that the public interest in the plastic arts, in decoration, in literature and above all in music has increased a thousandfold iii the last fifty years. And that, surely,, is something that should tempt even the most dyspeptic to admit that a ray of sunshine does for a moment pierce through the clouds.
* * * * The raising of the standard of exhibitions, the enhanced taste and intelligence of curators, is even more marked in Paris than it is in London. No city in the world contains so many exhibition buildings, such infinite variety of scope, or, one might add, so gifted a Public., The exhibitions of tapestries at the ChaiRor pavilion,
of French painting at the Petit Palais, of the restored works of art looted by the Germans, have earned the due admiration of all foreign visitors. Yet even more striking perhaps, as a model of the ex- hibitioner's art, is the small but almost perfect exhibition of historical and diplomatic documents now being shown at the Archives Nationales. It is now some twenty years since the French Govern- ment acquired the superb house in the Rue Vielle-du-Temple which is known as the Hotel de Rohan-Strasbourg or the Palais-Cardinal. This splendid eighteenth-century building, situated between its court and its garden, has retained many of its original boiseries and paint- ings, and has been restored in such a manner as to form the perfect setting for small specialised exhibitions. M. Samaran, the director of the French archives, has been assisted in his selection by M. Fouques-Duparc, of the French Foreign Office. The exhibition contains such historical documents as the Treaty of Westphal:a and the Final Act of the Vienna Congress. Yet these parchments and papers, interesting though they be, are enhanced by the tapestries, the busts and the portraits which decorate the several rooms and which illustrate and enhance the meaning of the documents them- selves.
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One is confronted, for instance, immediately upon entering the vestibule, with Jean Warin's superb bust of Louis XIII, and can recognise the conflict of obstinacy and weakness which is reflected in his Hapsburg jaw and foolish uncertain eyes. On the ground floor is shown a letter on papyrus addressed by the Emperor of Byzantium to Charlemagne ; a roll inscribed with the most lovely Arab script in which Tamerlane begs Charles VI to send more Frankish merchants to the East ; and the document which is known as the " Serments de Strasbourg" on which one can read the strange words: "Quod cum Ludhuvicus explesset, Karolus teudesca lingua sic testatus est . . ." Clearly the language problem is no innova- tion in diplomacy. Upon the lovely staircase hang two magnificent Gobelins tapestries, the one representing the renewal of the Franco- Swiss Alliance in 1663 (in which the clothes of Louis XIV's courtiers contrast strangely with the rough homespun of the Swiss burghers) and the other showing the entry of the Turkish Ambassador into the Tuileries gardens. In the • rooms on the first floor many of the most important international treaties are exhibited ; the earlier treaties have seals hanging from them in clusters and attached by golden cords ; the later treaties the seals are more conveniently stamped in sealing-wax upon the parchment itself. There is a contemporary plcnire of the Congress of Rastadt, at which eight people in wigs and embroidered coats sit on each side of a narrow table, with a fox-terrier in the foreground ; there is a picture of the Congress of Munster in which the delegates are represented hunched round a blue table and raising their hands to take the oath. As the centuries "pass by, the texts of the treaties are less handsomely illu- minated and embossed ; the Concordat between Pius VII and Napoleon is a most scrubby affair ; the Treaty of Amiens is written out in two columns, in French and English, and in a somewhat boyish script. The seal of Lord Cornwallis is attached to the paper by a thin and faded tricolor ribbon. And confronting it is the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, signed by Metternich, Talky- rand and Clancarty, nine days before the battle of Waterloo.
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Strangest of all these exhibits is the brief-case which Talleyrand used at the Vienna Congress. It bears no resemblance to the fine red Treasury-box which Mr. Bevin employs. It is a scrubby, chubby satchel with plain brass corners and engraved with the simple initial D.C. It was not even Talleyrand's property It was lent him by his niece, the Duchess of Dino-Courlande. It is in curious contrast to the magnificent Regence writing-table which, they say, was used by all French Foreign Secretaries from Vergennes to Poincare. It is not used by M. Bidault today.
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