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.