Reflections on Peacemakers*
BY H. WILSON HARRIS.
President Wilson dominates the stage. And how inevitably every historian of the Peace Conference pounces on the President's Presbyterianism. Mr. Lloyd George is, I believe, a Baptist, but it has not been generally assumed that his policy regarding Upper Silesia was conditioned by his con- victions on total immersion. But ever since Mr. Keynes coined his now notorious phrase about " debamboozling the old Presbyterian " every author who has discussed Woodrow Wilson has thought it necessary to ascribe half the President's mistakes to the fact that he was a Presbyterian, and the other half to the fact that he was a professor. Mr. Harold Nicolson errs less frequently in this direction than most, but he errs too much. There is no real reason for disguising the fact that Woodrow Wilson was, among other things, a human being, animated from time to time by the unruly wills and affections common to most humans, or that it was compara- tively minor defects in his character—vanity, obstinacy, secretiveness—which produced such disproportionate consequences at Paris.
Most of the many Peace Conference historians—Mr. Nicolson, again, less than - the. majority, but still, I think, too much—have overlooked, or at any rate understressed, two fundamental facts—one, that an ideally just peace was impossible in 1919, and two, that President Wilson was only one of five main plenipotentiaries. He held strong cards, strong enough to enable him- to veto proposals by his col- leagues—at the cost of holding up indefinitely a peace of which the world stood in clamant need—but not strong enough to enable him to impose his will. For all this Mr. Harold NicoLson, in his constant references to the President's collapse, his betrayal of his principles, and so forth, makes too little allowance. When I say Mr. Harold Nicolson I mean one Mr. Harold Nicolson, for what makes this volume as instructive and entertaining as it is is the fact that it is in reality written by the Messrs. Harold Nicolson, a Mr. Nicolson who served on- the staff of- the British Delegation at .Paris
during those hectic six months in 1919 and, kept a diary, and a Mr- Nicolson, jam .rule donatus, who philosophizes valuably and suggestively on peacemaking from the tranquillity of
his study after an interval of a dozen years. -
It is worth while. 'pointing the distinction by one or two quotations in relation to this same, unfortunate President
Wilson. One of Mr. Wilson's characteristics, according to the Mr. Nicolson of 1933, was his sensitiveness to Press criticisms. " Mr. Lloyd George, and M. Clemenceau were, in this. respect, gloriously pachydermatous. Mr. Wilson retained his school- girl skin. On February 10th M. Capus wrote an article in the Figaro which ran as follows . . . President Wilson countered this abhorrent lucidity on the part of M. Capus by threatening to transfer the Conference to Geneva." To the Mr. Nicolson of 1933 the article was not unreasonable, and the President's resentment rather childish. But what did the Mr. Nicolson of 1919 write in his diary under date February 11th ?—" A dreadful attack on Wilson yesterday in the Figaro. I hear he is furious and threatens to transfer the Conference to Geneva. It would be a good thing if he did." Again, for the Mr. Nicolson of 1933, the failure of President Wilson to insist on the scrapping of the Treaty of London, by which France and Britain were bound to Italy and to which Italy relentlessly held them, was the final disillusionment. Of that this Mr. Nicolson writes: "He first (on April 14th) indicated to Signor Orlando that he was prepared to compromise on Fiume. And he then (on
*Peacemaking, 1919. By Harold Nicolson. (Constable. 18.s.)
Row invar:ably, in every book on the Peace Conference, April 23rd) issued to the Press a statement in which he appealed to the Italian people over the head of their elected Representative. He thus combined the secrecy of the old diplomacy with the most flagrant indiscretions of the new," The Mr. Nicolson of 1919 had written : " Wilson has issued to the Press a statement showing up the Italian claims. The Italians say they will leave Paris. Good riddance," and " The whole business in the end will increase the prestige of the Conference and of Wilson personally."
These contrasts, which could be further developed, start suggestive trains of reflection on the writing of history. Mr. Nicolson, whose candour in thus reproducing his unedited diary is altogether praiseworthy, would say—does, in fact say—that the latter represents the first reactions of enthusi- astic (though gradually disillusioned) youth, the earlier halt of the book the considered judgements of ruminative, or if you will, philosophic, middle age. In the historian's make-up there must be room for both, and it is never easy to decide how nicely a given historian of his own times, Mr. Nicolson or any other, has held the balance between the two. For myself, I find more common ground at many points with the Mr. Nicolson of 1919.
I have spoken of the Mr. Nicolson of today as a historian. That description needs qualification. He says plainly that he has not set out to tell the story of the Peace Conference. He does not, for instance, so much as mention the Polish Corridor or Danzig. His purpose is in the first half of his book to discuss the Conference methods (as a guide to peace- makers of a generation hence) and the reasons for its failures, and in the second to give a purely subjective view of the Conference as an active participant in its labours saw it. I doubt if the volume will be quite as useful to the next genera- tion as Mr. Nicolson hopes, for as no war is like the one before it no peace conference will very accurately mirror its pre- decessor. Already we have moved some way. Mr. Nicolson, for example, applies the mildly derisory epithet " engaging " to the Wilsonian doctrine that in future wars there would be no neutrality. Yet the doctrine has just been re-proclaimed on like authority and hailed by the world as epoch-making.
But to say this is not to disparage Mr. Nicolson's book for a moment. It is a brilliant, a discerning, a suggestive and 'consequently a permanently valuable study. And it must be criticised, if at all, for what it is, the second volume of a trilogy, in which the author's admirable life of his father, Lord. Carnock, as representing pre-War diplomacy, is supple- meMed by this examination of Peace Conference methods, and will be completed by a third book on post-War diplomacy as centred round the person of Lord Curzon. Mr. Nicolsoh has reproduced the feverish atmosphere of Paris in 1919, the falsetto chorus of rival claims, the incessant strife of purpose against futility, the recognition of the impossibility of doing justice here without creating injustice there, with vivid fidelity. His glimpses of personalities, the Big Four, of course, but as well, and particularly, Balfour (the sentence " A. J. B. makes the whole of Paris seem vulgar," is perhaps the best in the book) Crowe, Venizelos, are illuminating. His discussion of a Press-exploited public opinion as a handicap to., negotiators is sobering. And such veadicts as his unex- pected (but in my view quite just) appreciation of the American delegation (" The United States Delegation were the best informed ; the British Delegation came a good second") readjust values usefully. Mr. Nicolson, as he insists, has not written a history, but he has made a very real contribution to history, and those who may differ fairly sharply from some of his judgements will not appreciate his book the less for that
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