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PORTRAIT OF A DIPLOMATIST-Harold Nicolson-Houghton Mifflin...
...dear dead days before the present millennium had set in, diplomacy was secret, diplomats secretive and suave. The late Sir Arthur Nicolson (1849-1928), onetime English Ambassador to the Sublime Porte (Constantinople), to Madrid, to St. Petersburg, onetime Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, is the subject of his son Harold Nicolson's excellent biography. Son Harold, approving the manners but not the machinations of pre-War diplomats, considers his father "an admirable example for the study of the old diplomacy at its best. . . . Arthur Nicolson was neither imaginative nor intellectual: he was merely intelligent, honest, sensible, high-minded...
...Arthur Nicolson entered the Foreign Office in 1870, left it in 1910. Between those two dates he held increasingly important posts in Berlin, Peking, Constantinople, Athens, Persia, Budapest, Morocco, Madrid, St. Petersburg. Friendly at first to Germany and fearing Russia's encroachments in the Near East, Nicolson came gradually to reverse this feeling, and ended by doing everything he could to strengthen the Anglo-Russian-French entente. He foresaw Germany's menace to England, but even during the War, "he was incensed by the theory . . . that Germany had provoked the War. . . . He was appalled by the Treaty...
...grandees of Spain, listened to the King's reply, bowed himself backwards toward the door, "stumbled over a stool, and fell flat on the carpet. Not a muscle moved on the face of King Alfonso. It was only when the great doors had closed behind him that Nicolson heard from the throne-room peal upon peal of schoolboy laughter...
Biographer Harold Nicolson has much to say of the origins of the War, comes to the conclusion that "the war was caused by an unhealthy state of mind in Europe; that state of mind had been created by the amassed unintelligence of international thought from 1878 onwards." As for the British share: "British statesmen are usually blind to their own tendencies, but vividly aware of their own disinclinations. While not knowing what they are doing or what they want to do, they realize quite clearly what they do not want to do, and they are apt to grasp at this...