Good Talk
Marginal Comment. By Harold Nicolson. (Constable. is.)
THESE short commentaries, uttered weekly in this paper, cover January to early August of this year; the last months, all but one, of what Mr. Nicolson calls " the period of transition between the first and the second German Wars." A melan- choly and uneasy period of gathering darkness, of a world slumping with awful inevitability into the present Goner- diimmerung, blundering step after blundering step, through a dusk full of evil or foolish twitterings and sudden bursts of rapacity and rage. Looking back at it now, from the doom of night which we have not escaped, it seems a sad retrospect indeed. Mr. Nicolson's comments on it are among the few which today are tolerable, because they have urbanity with- out heartlessness, wit without frivolity, good writing without pretension, and, above all, knowledge of affairs and of people. This knowledge of Mr. Nicolson's is amazing ; no aspect of European politics seems unfamiliar to him ; scarcely a states- man or diplomatist, living or lately dead, whom he has not met or observed in action, with understanding not less sym- pathetic because amused. Stresemann, Dr. Schacht, Veni- zelos, Lord Balfour, hecklers at a meeting, the German character, the antics of the Conservative Party, the magni- loquent Lord Curzon, Herr Hitler—they all pass under this not ungentle quizzing-glass, which does not magnify or minify, which most certainly is not the colour of rose, nor dis- tortingly dark, but is wielded with a scrutiny always informed, always detached, always interested, usually also entertained.
Mr. Nicolson is neither idealist, sentimentalist, cynic, opti- mist, nor pessimist ; informed and clear-headed and trained
in affairs and their trend, he usually knows what is going t,- happen and is usually right ; he has observed enough impoi tant occasions to have learnt to draw from them the true deductions, analysed enough men to guess what they will be up to. His is good gossip, a nice blend of public affairs and private, world conferences and political prophecy sandwiched between chats on the meaning of " gentleman " (here strolls in Lord Balfour with a pleasant theory of his own), on southerners and northerners in each country, on English gardens (with polite Parisians), on the Danzig situation with two young Territorials, who would have none of Danzig, war for liberty or democracy or the Empire, who didn't want to fight for anything in particular, but who were mad keen to have a go at Hitler because " he's treated us like dirt "; and with critical foreign friends, who provide on occasion con- venient voices for comments and charges which Mr. Nicolson can thus obliquely utter while himself holding their truth or untruth in cautious balance. He "was outraged by such an insinuation " . . . but not really surprised, and not precisely sceptical. All this in the agreeable leisurely drawl to which his listeners on the air are accustomed, and which makes even " the fierce red eye of Mars " which beckons this world on to its barbaric crash and smash seem, though sinister, all in the day's work. " 'Tis shocking. Good-night," as Horace
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