Frank Harris - My Life And Loves, vol 5

“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, or 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?”