MARGINAL COMMENT
133. HAROLD NICOLSON
HAVE been reading with a sympathetic, but not with an I uncritical, eye the numerous tributes which during the last ten days have been paid to David Lloyd George. It is a decorous feature of our national life that, when a great public figure dies, voices from all parties and from every section of the Common- wealth should join together in praising famous men. Lloyd George was a very famous man. It was he who, during the first decade of this century, added a new and most dynamic impetus to our social legislation ; it was he who, in the very darkest hours of the last war, gave us both fortitude and light. The nation owes him a deep debt of gratitude, and it is fitting ;hat we should recognise this debt unanimously. Nor were the thanks we rendered merely the perfunctory tribute accorded to the obsequies of a great historic figure. They were warmer and more personal than that. The romance of his career, the energy with which he raised himself from obscurity to the very plenitude of power, attracted interest and compelled admiration. The moral courage which he displayed during his long struggle, the fierce force with which he defied unpopularity and vested interests, the amazing dynamism with which he. harnessed to his chariot the whole energy and intelli- gence of the State, impressed the men of my generation with astonished, and sometimes unwilling, respect. And the charm of his manner, the simplicity of his zest, the delight which one derived from his companionship and conversation, the dappled sunshine of his ways, aroused in us a mood of fascinated wonder which numbed criticism and soothed all animosity. We were' dazzled by such a phenomenon: we were entranced and disconcerted. * * * * I have been assured by more than one of those who were in his War Cabinet during the terrible German offensive of the spring of 1918 that nobody who had not witnessed the Courage aria the resilience which Lloyd George then displayed could have any real conception either of the strength of his character or of the debt which we owed. I myself, during the month of March, 1919, had occasion to watch and to admire the vivacity and speed with which he grasped the impending failure of the Peace Conference and the desperate efforts which he made, in face of bitter misrepre- sentation both at home and abroad, to render the Treaty of Ver- sailles a more sane and Workable document. It may be true that by rushing through the General Election of 1918 he was himself responsible for the condition of public opinion and representation . which impeded, and to some extent negatived, the efforts at ameliora- tion which he made so boldly in the spring that followed. But it has always appeared to me ;he grossest of historical injustices that Lloyd George should have been blamed for the discrepancies of the Versailles Treaty when it was his energy and vision which prevented it from becoming an instrument far more unworkable and indefensible than it in fact became. I was often puzzled by the problem why a man, who in some issues could display such lightning insight and such honourable rectitude of judgement, could in other matters fly off upon unexpected tangents or display an ingenuity of technique which was both unnecessary and misleading. There were moments when Lloyd George appeared as the almost inspired prophet of pure liberalism ; there were other moments when his intelligence seemed to lose itself in stratagems and when he ceased to be the British statesman of the high tradition and became a most ingenious attorney. A Frenchman, who had been associated with him in long and important negotiations once, sum- marised this problem in the following words: " It has been my experience," he said, " that one should draw a middle line between what is said of a public man by his admirers and his detractors. This does not apply to Lloyd George. What his fiercest enemies say about him is abundantly true ; but what his fervent admirers say of him is also abundantly true." * * * *
How is one to explain this dichotomy? It was, I suggest, due to the fact that the very fertility of his imagination, the flexibility of his mind, his immense powers of lucid and forceful persuasive- ness, blinded one to the idea that his intelligence was emotional rather than rational. If his emotions happened to coincide with some great cause or some high principle, then he could colour and enhance that cause with all the radiation of'genius ; but when his judgement became deflected by some chance prejudice or predilec- tion he would seek to rationalise his emotions by adopting specious arguments or avoiding inconvenient facts. This habit of his was particularly obnoxious to those civil servants who had, the privilege of acting as his technical advisers. As I read his obituaries I was struck again and again by the statement that Lloyd George was "a good listener." It is undeniable that he possessed a most persuasive, and astonishingly rapid, faculty for eliciting from others those facts which he desired to know. But if the information given him did not happen to accord with the particular impulse which at the moment had become his thesis he would brush it aside. "Yes, I know all about that," he would say, impatiently, " you' need not tell me aboin that." The civil servant expects to be treated as a work of reference ; but he feels outraged if the inconvenient pages are too obviously skipped. The impression which one derived from such hurried, and I admit entrancing, interviews was that one had been used rather than consulted.
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It may have been my misfortune that such official relations as I was privileged to have with Lloyd George during his years of power were connected with foreign affairs. When I agreed with what he was after I was fervent in my admiration for his persistence and resourcefulness ; when I disagreed with, or did not know, what he was after, I was terrified by the spectacle of this potent and extremely rapid engine skidding all over the road. Of course- he was generally right in his intuitions; and of course my dismay was generally unjustified. But the impression still remains with me that his conduct of foreign policy, inventive though it often was, was not based upon that calm continuity, that strict adherence to certain principles, by which alone international confidence can be created. He has often been assailed for his ignorance of the details of European politics and geography ; this seems to me a baseless criticism ; he had at hand, if he wished to consult them properly, all the works of reference which a statesman could desire. What was distressing 'was that he never seemed to appreciate that the principles of British foreign policy. as handed down to us through three 'centuries of trial and error, are perfectly ascertainable prin- ciples ; and that he never seemed able to disentangle himself from personal or momentary prejudices or affections, or to acquire that mood of detachment by which alone the interests of the British Commonwealth and Empire can be identified with the interests of Europe as a whole. The main criticism against Lloyd George and his " garden suburb" was that they were always picking and choos- ing bright ideas ; and he thereby destroyed the confidence which his vast authority and his great gifts should have given him in the counsels of the world.
* * * He was an important man, an immensely gifted man, a man who on certain great occasions achieved very great things. But was he a great man in the historical sense of that facile term? General Smuts, who was closely associated with him during his most trium- phant years, and who was often opposed to him on vital issues, placed him among "the greatest of the great" 'and compared him with Winston Churchill. Is such a comparison exaggerated? One recalls the definitions of Aristotle, which have not been bettered in these 2,300 years. He defined it as the combination of fourteen specific qualities: wisdom, justice, manliness, truth, a love of liberty, a sense of honour, magnanimity, resourcefulness, energy, intelli- gence, morality, magnificence, the capacity to arouse and keep affec- tion, and an integrated mind. Lloyd George possessed almost all these qualities, and some of them in a most vivid and noble form ; he emerges triumphantly from this exacting test ; but even his most fervent admirers would not contend that he demonstrated all these fourteen qualities always or to the same degree.
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