by Frank Harris
None of these people impressed me like Henri Rochefort of Paris. He was really an extraordinary person, full of wit and venom. When he heard that Queen Victoria intended to pass the winter in Nice for her health, he wrote in his paper, “L'Intransigeant,” that she had better stay at home. She was not wanted in France, he said, “that old stagecoach that persists in calling itself Victoria.” He came to see me and spent a month or so with me in London. I found him kindly to those he knew, but he held nine out of ten men in disdain.
For fifty-odd years he had fought as a journalist in Paris; “the noblest profession,” he said, “when not the lowest.”
In 1912, for the first time, he had to rest. “I'll soon be at work again,” he said. “My old teeth can still bite.” But a little later, in his eighty-third year, he passed on.
Was his influence good or bad? Distinctly bad, I should say, but Paris forgave him everything because of his wit, as London has forgiven Kipling everything because of his patriotism.
Very few people now remember the noble letter in which George Russell, “AE,” scourged Kipling for what he had written about Ireland. Of course, the trouncing was well deserved. Kipling had written against the Irish just as he had written a dastardly story against the Russians whom he regarded as dangerous to England. When France in 1906 pushed forward at Fashoda into what was regarded as British Africa, Kipling wrote against the French furiously, and in the World War, he coolly declared that no German should be allowed to survive. Why he fell foul of Ireland, I cannot recall, but Russell's letter will witness forever against him in literature. It begins:
“I speak to you, brother, because you have spoken to me, or rather, you have spoken for me. I am a native of Ulster. So far back as I can trace the faith of my forefathers, they held the faith for whose free observance you are afraid.
“You have Irish blood in you. I have heard, indeed, Ireland is your mother's land, and you may, perhaps, have some knowledge of the Irish sentiment. You have offended against one of your noblest literary traditions in the manner in which you have published your thoughts.
“I would not reason with you but that I know there is something truly great and noble in you and there have been hours when the immortal in you secured your immortality in literature, when you ceased to see life with that hard cinematograph eye of yours and saw with the eyes of the spirit, and power and tenderness and insight were mixed in magical tales.
“Surely you were far from the innermost when, for the first time, I think, you wrote of your mother's land and my countrymen.
“I have lived all my life in Ireland holding a different faith from that held by the majority. I know Ireland as few Irishmen know it, county by county, far I traveled all over Ireland for years and, Ulster man as I am, and proud of the Ulster people, I resent the crowning of Ulster with all the virtues and the dismissal of other Irishmen as 'thieves and robbers.' I resent the cruelty with which you, a stranger, speak of the most lovable and kindly people I know.
“You are not even accurate in your history when you speak of Ulster's traditions and the blood our forefathers spilt. Over a century ago, Ulster was the strong and fast place of rebellion, and it was in Ulster that the Volunteers stood beside their cannon and wrung the gift of political freedom for the Irish parliament. You are blundering in your blame. You speak of Irish greed in I know not what connection, unless you speak of the war waged over the land; and yet you ought to know that both parties in England have by act after act confessed the absolute justice and rightness of that agitation. Unionist no less than Liberal, and both boast of their share in answering the Irish appeal. They are both proud today of what they did. They made inquiry into wrong and redressed it.
“But you, it seems, can only feel angry that intolerable conditions imposed by your laws were not borne in patience and silence. For what party do you speak? When an Irishman has a grievance, you smite him. How differently you would have written of Runnymede and the valiant men of England who rebelled whenever they thought fit. You would have made heroes out of them.
“Have you no soul left, after admiring the rebels in your own history, to sympathize with other rebels suffering deeper wrongs? Can you not see deeper into the motive for rebellion that the hireling reporter who is sent to make up a case for the paper of a party?
“The best in Ulster, the best Unionists in Ireland, will not be grateful to you for libeling their countrymen in your verse. For, let the truth be known, the mass of Irish Unionists are much more in love with Ireland than with England. They think Irish Nationalists are mistaken, and they fight with them, and they use harsh words, and all the time they believe Irishmen of any party are better in the sight of God than Englishmen. They think Ireland is the best country in the world, and they hate to hear Irish people spoken of as 'murderers and greedy scoundrels.'
“Murderers! Why, there is more murder done in any four English shires in a year than in the whole of the four provinces of Ireland. Greedy! The nation never accepted a bribe, or took it as an equivalent or payment for an ideal, and what bribe would not have been offered to Ireland if it had been willing to foreswear its traditions?
“I am a person whose whole being goes into a blaze at the thought of oppression of faith, and yet I think my Catholic countrymen infinitely more tolerant than those who hold the faith I was born in. I am a heretic judged by their standards, a heretic who has written and made public his heresies, and I have never suffered in friendship or found by my heresies an obstacle in life.
“I set my knowledge, the knowledge of a lifetime, against your ignorance, and I say you have used your genius to do Ireland and its people a wrong. You have intervened in a quarrel of which you do not know the merits, like any brawling bully who passes and only takes sides to use his strength. If there was a high court of poetry, and those in power jealous of the noble name of poet and that none should use it save those who are truly knights of the Holy Ghost, they would hack the golden spurs from your heels and turn you out of court.
“You had the ear of the world and you poisoned it with prejudice and ignorance. You had the power of song, and you have always used it on behalf of the strong against the weak. You have smitten with all your might at creatures who are frail on earth but mighty in the heavens, at generosity, at truth, at justice, and Heavens have withheld vision and power and beauty from you, for this your verse is only a shallow newspaper article made to rhyme.”
It was one of the noblest letters ever written, but it did not hinder Kipling from getting the Nobel Prize, though he had done more to stir up hate between the nations than any other living man. I met him casually, many years ago now, when he first returned from India, but this letter of “AE” is the final judgment on him.
I cannot resist the temptation to write of an even greater man, a noble Frenchman, Marcelin Berthelot, who, I think, touched the zenith of humanity. His father was described by Renan as an accomplished physician, and a man of admirable charity and devotion. “Living in a populous district, he treated most of his patients gratuitously, and lived and died poor.” At the close of a brilliant college career, Marcelin chose science. He soon became friends with Renan, and the friendship seems to have been ideal. His great contributions to human progress lay in chemical synthesis, thermo-chemistry and agricultural chemistry. His synthetic chemistry created acetylene and a whole series of hydrocarbons.
He never would consent to derive the slightest personal benefit from any of his discoveries, but always relinquished the profit to the community at large.
He was, nevertheless, constantly urged to fill his pockets. Owing to his first researches on carburette d'hydrogen, he discovered an improvement in the manufacture of gas for lighting purposes, which constituted for Paris alone a saving of several hundred millions of francs to the Gas Company. He immediately made his discovery public without deriving any personal advantage from it.
Important manufacturers, such as the millionaire Menier, often came to him with proposals of partnership, o
r tried to buy some of his processes for the synthetic manufacture of organic compounds. The brewers of northern France once offered him two million francs if he would give them the monopoly on one of his discoveries. Enormous fortunes have been made out of one single item of his scientific treatises. His researches on explosives led to smokeless powder and would have accumulated riches for him equal to those of Nobel.
Germany owes the greater part of her wonderful modern industrial development to the introduction to science of Berthelot's revolutionary synthetic method.
In the course of his long career, he never took out a single patent, and always relinquished to humanity the benefit of his discoveries. “The scientist,” he said, “ought to make the possession of truth his only riches.”
He wrote in 1895: “It is not half a century since I attained the age of manhood, and I have faithfully lived up to the ideal dream of justice and truth which dazzled my youthI have always had the will to achieve what I thought morally the best for myself, my country, and humanity.”
While perpetually engaged in his chemical researches, he still took part in public life. He became a Senator, a Minister of Public Instruction, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a pioneer to the “entente cordiale.”
His private life was just as beautiful. His wife was thus described at the time of her wedding by the brothers de Goncourt:
“A singular beauty, never to be forgotten; a beauty, intelligent, profound, magnetic, a beauty of soul and thought resembling one of Edgar Poe's creations of the other world. The hair parted, and standing away from the head, gave the appearance of a halo; a prominent calm foreheadlarge eyes full of light, encircled by a dark ring, and the musical voice of an ephebe.”
For forty-five years, husband and wife lived side by side. They were not separated for a day. In the closest union of heart and thought, their affection was never veiled by the slightest cloud.
The loss of her grandson in a railway accident was Madame Berthelot's death-blow. The first attack of heart disease she got over, but at the close of 1906, her husband saw that nothing could stop it. Then this old man of eighty was to be seen watching night and day at the bedside of his dear patient, measuring hour by hour the diminution of her vital forces, at the same time as he noted the deep inroads made in his own organism by the keen anguish which he suffered. The patient retained her admirable serenity until the last hour, and her ultimate words were said to her daughter: “What will become of him when I am gone?”
A few minutes later, one of his sons, who had followed him into the room, heard him heave a deep and harrowing sigh. He took his hand to say a few tender words of consolation to him, but the arm dropped inactive.
Through the sad blow, that great heart was broken.
Madame Berthelot was buried with her husband in the Pantheon, the first time that this supreme honor was rendered to a woman.
Had his life been spared, Berthelot would, a friend says, probably have astonished the world by his observations on trees as regulators of electricity, and as possible media of electrical communications, and on the worldwide disasters which the clearing off of forests to make paper is likely to occasion. His walks in the forests of Meudon opened to him new and original views on the harmonies of creation.
Berthelot was a charming lecturer, charming from every point of viewartistic expression, voice enunciation, and appearance.
There was often a rhythm in his sentences which caught the ear and helped the memory to retain them. His knowledge of Greek and Latin was deep, and he thought the classics an invaluable mental discipline.
His son, Philippe Berthelot, is now in the Foreign Office in Paris and many of us foreigners who live in France have reason to be grateful to him. He, too, lives quite simply, but is naturally proud of his father's extraordinary character and noble achievements. I often think of Marcelin Berthelot as an ideal. He is the first man of whom I have said this. We are apt to think of Frenchmen as resembling Rochefort; it is well to be reminded sometimes that there are Frenchmen such as Marcelin Berthelot.
CHAPTER VII
I have been asked frequently why, on my African travels, I was so cold in regard to native women. This will perhaps be my last opportunity briefly to outline all that befell me in the Dark Continent. In the first place, it would not be true to assert that I was always cold. On the contrary, some of my most passionate encounters took place on the same continent on which Rhodes and Kruger struggled and upon which the irresponsible German Kaiser cast an envious eye. Of the ludicrous braggadocio of the Emperor of Germany I shall have occasion to speak in the chapter which follows. For the momentAfrica.
Much has been said of this continent in many places. All I can add is that kind of personal reminiscence which sometimes throws a new and penetrating light on what is sometimes considered to be a problem incapable of solution. I refer to my knowledge of the African people, and in particular to my knowledge of African women. If I did not spend more time among them, it was not, as has sometimes been imputed, that I was the victim of color prejudice, but that there is an archaic quality in the tribeswomen of Africa which must eternally set them at a distance from a European. This is not true, as we shall see, of Egyptians and other Arab peoples, whose cultural development was on a par with that of the early Christians and who have lent to the West, in the shape of a workable mathematical symbolism, the basis of modern science. Let anyone who doubts this attempt a complex problem of multiplication and division using only the old Roman numerals and then let him judge in what measure the Arab culture has contributed towards our own.
But I shall speak first of the dark races. I have seen Zulu girls and Swahili girls with superb figures. Statues in ebony appeal to me as keenly as statues in ivory. How then could I live among these people on the most familiar terms without yielding occasionally to passion?
I had stayed for a number of days as the guest of the headsman of the village. At first the people in the village were curious about me, but after a while they became used to my presence at their dances and at the other few social functions of the group. One night the chief, who spoke English very well, began to talk to me about women. He asked me if white women were passionate. I said that some of them were and some of them weren't.
“It is the same here in my country,” he said. “There are some who like to make love all the time and there are others who always appear to do so reluctantly.”
He, himself, had five wives, three of whom were very passionate. The other two, he said, seemed to care for nothing but their children. He asked me if I had been attracted by any of the women of the village. I smiled and said that I had had little opportunity to be close enough to any of them to feel passion for them. He laughed and said that on that very evening there was going to be a dancea kind of frenzied religious ceremonyin the public place in the village. It would take place according to tradition after sunset and it would be a fine opportunity for me to look over the unattached women. If I wished to have sexual intercourse with a girl, however, I should have to make the normal gesture to the parentsthat is, I should have to present them with a yoke of oxen. When I had done so, the girl would automatically become my spouse.
“But I cannot remain here for the rest of my life!” I laughed.
He nodded his head, smiling. That, too, could be arranged, he said. In the meantime it would be better to say nothing of my intention to leave, since many of the parents, who could accept my departure in the normal course of events would, if warned of it prior to my nuptials with their daughter, perhaps be unwilling to surrender their daughter to me. But afterwards, who could be forewarned of the will of God? Like the practical people they were, they would accept.
At sunset, I sat next to the chief and watched the males with their hideous tribal masks raising dust from the earth by the beat of their hard heels. The dance was confessedly sexualthere is no line of demarcation between religion and sexuality amongst most of the tribesmen of Africa. Religion, or rather religious experience and sexua
lity, are contained and expressed within a composite series of actions, gestures and genuflections, incapable of analysis into their component elements. It is not clear even to these people themselves where the frenzy of religion ends and the ecstasy of sexual passion begins. The men, feathered and masked, seemed almost to be involved in a kind of orgasm as they danced. The women, as they approached with their breasts bare and a little tail of colored cloth between their glistening black thighs, moved inwards in a loose circle about the men, obviously in the grip of some kind of lust which caused them to wish to mingle with the men. Then, suddenly, the women were in the center, huddled together and quivering, like a flock of Sabine women waiting to be taken, while the men, making obscene gestures with their plumed hips, seemed to threaten them in a way that was half ritual and half stark physical lust.
The circle was not closed. A segment had been cut out, as it were, to allow the headsman and those, among whom I was numbered, who sat about him to see deep into the center where the women quivered frenziedly in half-simulated passion.
Before the dance had gone far, I found myself looking directly into the eyes of one of those women, whose black body rippled and writhed in the torchlight. My friend, the chief, followed my glance and laid his hand on my forearm.
“You are attracted?” he whispered. “You wish to fuck her?”
I nodded without replying.
“It is easily arranged,” he said. “I am a good friend of her parents. I myself will provide the oxen and in return you can send me a gift when you return to your own country.”
I agreed immediately. The girl, her round, firm breasts smeared with some kind of oil that glistened in the light of the fire, was still undulating her hips and gazing in my direction. I desired her at once.