THE INFLUENCE OF PERSONALITY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3102, 27 August 1913, Page 75

THE INFLUENCE OF PERSONALITY.

HENRI ROCHEFORT. There axe in all our lives some striking public figures that somehow or other never cease to exercise an enormous influence over our inner selves. Either through their speeches or their writings, they never cease to hold a strange spell on our life of almost every day; being often more present and intimate, too, tvfth our thoughts than the people among whom we move, and whom we meet daily in the intimacy of private or public life. The winged words which the orator utters, almost in complete forgetfulness of every audience except that immediately before him, are carried, unknown to him, over hill and dale, over even continent and ocean and find their responsive chords in humble people living in their small towns or even remote villages, and become to them things which mark out one day from another by the ecstasy of intense emotion. In my youth the figures that played that largo part in my inner history were first Dickens and Thackeray, then Carlyle and George Eliot, and then Bright, Gladstone, Disraeli, Bismarck, Louis Napoleon. Thackeray I never saw; it was in my small native town that I heard from my father’s lips of his death, and I remember still the poignant pain that passed through my boy’s heart as I learned that this great light had gone out. Dickens also I never saw, though I might have done. He gave a reading in Dublin at a time when I was already a journalist, and I would have given much to have seen him ; but a senior reporter, who was very selfish and very dull, claimed the right to do the work of describing him, and Dickens died before I came to London. Again, I might have seen George Eliot—and how I would have enjoyed that interview! She had imagination enough, doubtless, to realise that her hooks reached millions of hearts among people that never were destined to see her in the flesh ; but even she would, perhaps, be surprised if she could have seen by some magic process the young boys and girls who spent hours over her pages, and for the moment felt themselves transported to spheres where there was the light that never was on land or sea. Such hours I can remember; hours so delicious that they blotted out for the time being present misery and prospcxds dread. Carlyle.— Carlyle played even a larger part in the inner lives of the young men of my generation. I never was an out-and-out Carlylean, thinking even when I was a boy that there was much fault to be found with his violences to our language ; but I had felt as everybody the profound influence of those glorious pages in “ Sartor Resartus ” which, amid all the contortions of language, stand out as the highest of prose poetry. I felt equally the glorious poetry of 1m “ Esays ” —in my opinion, next to “''Sartor Resartus” the greatest things he did. Anyhow, Carlyle was the foremost literary figure of his time, and when I found myself as a youth in lodgings in Upper Oheyne row, not more than a few yards from Carlyle’s house in Cheyne row, the first question I asked of my Landlady was whether she had seen Carlyle, to which she gave the characteristic" reply: “If I meant the queer old man that wrote books?” Standing at the door of my lodgings I had tie extraordinary good luck to catch just one glimpse of* him—just one glimpse; but what a mighty difference that makes in your estimate and realisation of any human being ! Give me one hour in company with a great man and I think I will know more about his realities than if I had read dozens of volumes of his memoirs. This glimpse of Carlyle, anyhow, remains with me—it is more than 40 years ago,—ineffaceable ; and I even go to the length of saying that it did much to form my whole opinion of the man’s character. He was with two other men; ho wore a peculiar dress—l especially remember a strangely-shaped straw hat. He looked at me as he passed with the self-absorp-tion of youth. I felt as if, at the moment, I represented to him something very important, as if that passing gaze of him at mo might mean something to him as

his gaze meant everything to me; a mistake, of course. But the mistake came from a cause which had its importance to me. For it revealed to me those wonderful eyes of his, large, blue, penetrating, but* above all, kindly; they seemed at once to catch everyone with the fidelity and enduringness of a photograph, and at the same time to look upon everybody with kindly indulgence and persistent good will —as did Carlyle, all his excesses of conversation and bitterness of tongue notwithstanding. Bismarck.— Louis Napoleon I saw only once, and then he was in his coffin. Bismarck I never saw at all. I might have seen him, and under the most favourable circumstances. An American journal asked me to go and interview him at his homo after bis fall. I told my friend that probably Bismarck would send out his big Danish dogs to greet me, so well known was his aversion .to journalists. I consulted Sir Charles Dime, who knew Bismarck well; he thought also that Bismarck would refuse to speak freely to me. This was the old Bismarck in office; we little realised the new that revealed himself after his fall. A few days afterwards I saw that Bismarck was glad to see and to pour forth his woes to every journalist, small or great, who came to see him ; and I cursed my hesitation. And twice 1 went to Kissengen, where Bismarck was to be seen for three weeks nearly every year. He had left just the day before 1 arrived one year; the next he did not, for some reason or other, come to Kissengen. And what made all this worse was that the place at that time was full of him ; you could never get away from his dominating personality. There was the quiet old farmhouse —for that was what it was—outside the town where he lived ; on one of the scale weighing machines, where visitors to Kissengen discover what effect the treatment is making on their too plentiful persons, you saw the record of Bismarck’s weight, from its terrible exaggeration to its considerably diminished proportions after Schwenniger bad come to rule him; in a specially prominent spot you saw a tablet in an hotel opposite the spot where an insane assassin tried to kill him; and in the most prominent spot you saw a splendid statue of him, so bold, so large, eo vital, that you felt almost as if he were bending down on you those terrible eyes before which all Europe trembled. Bright, Gladstone, ami Disraeli I did seen often; I have told too often already the circumstances. Rochefort.—

And now I come to another man who takes his place among the great names that seem to have haunted and pursued me almost my whole life. I can still live again in the terrible composing-room of my first newspaper, with its low ceiling, its crowded space, and the almost suffocating glare and smell of its innumerable gas jets; and there one evening I remember hearing the foreman read out extracts from “La Lanterne,” the paper which Henri Rochefort had established in Paris and was then sending from Belgium after he and it had been exiled there by Louis Napoleon. I confess the extract did not impress me; it was too violent, too egotistic, too brutal, and it succeeded iu transferring my sympathy from the assailant to the assailed. And I never did feel otherwise about the two protagonists in this struggle. Louis Napoleon, with all his faults, was always bon enfant, kind hearted, emotional, unscrupulous certainly, hut also full of sympathy with the poor and the oppressed—at least the oppressed outside his own dominions. This generation, too, will scarcely realise the extraordinary brutality of Rochefort’s attacks. He did not confine himself to the evils of the Imperial regime—you can learn more of the internal rottenness and incompetency which produced the war with Germany and the downfall of the empire in the pages of Zola’s “ Debacle ” than in anything Rochefort ever wrote. I can recall still some of the awful things Rochefort wrote; and they fill me with the same disgust now as they did then. One of the livelist controversies of the time was fho conjugal fidelity of Letitia, the mother of the First Napoleon; another was the legitimacy of Louis Napoleon himself, which, of course, involved disinterring the lames of poor Hortense and retelling the stories of her frailties. There were attacks

ns brutal on the Empress Eugenie; and poor Louis Napoleon himself, who was already a dying man, was dissected as rudely as though he were on an operation table and all his physical ailments were being exposed to the knife of the surgeon. The next thing 1 remember about Rochefort was when he was taken out of prison to give evidence in the trial of Pierre Napoleon, thqt scapegrace and hopeless Bonaparte who Jived on the purse of his good-natured cousin ; and, penniless, outlawed, and hopeless, still was strong enough by his folly to help in dragging down the Imperial Throne. Pierre Napoleon, it will be remembered, killed Victor Noir, who came to him as an emissary from Rochefort. Rochefort had been sent to gaol, and it was as a prisoner that he appeared in the court to give evidence. I remember still the descriptions in the Daily Telegraph (which then, as now, had a splendid service from Paris), of how the Radical journalists hailed Rochefort, presenting him with flowers, and in every other way signified their adhesion to his war on the Emperor and the empire. It was a singular manifestation of the essential differences between the journalism of Franco and that of England. Then came the war, the downfall of the empire on September 4, and Rochefort’s triumphant release from prison by the now triumphant population, and his elevation for the first and last time of his life to Cabinet position. And then

The Commune ! Again this strange being took the centre of the stage, and all Europe held Its breath to know whether he also vu to end his career, like so many other of the Communards, with hia back to the wall and a dozen bullets in his bodv. He was

caught when trying to escape from Paris after the troops of the Government had drowned the insurrection in blood, and the Communards had replied by an attempt to reduce the most beautiful city in the world to ashes. What his share in the Commune was I cannot say; I believe he always insisted that he had disapproved of its policy and of its crimes, and it may have been that he was compelled to remain in Paris by the mere necessity of hie life as a journalist and to keep his paper going. But it was not a moment when people were disposed to be indulgent; Rochefort was hooted as he passed under arrest, and but for the intervention of Gambetta and Thiers, it is said, might have ended in one of the shooting executions which were then so rife. Then came exile to Noumea; then the dramatic escape, and the equally dramatic passage over several countries until he reached safety and England. On his \vay he landed in Ireland, and the population £here, outraged at his supposed share in the execution of the innocent Archbishop of Paris and other hostages, gave him a very hostile reception, an event which he bitterly resented. Boulanger.—

His part in the Boulanger agitation appealed to me just little as his supposed share in the Commune. I never believed in Boulangism, and I believed less than ever when I saw Boulanger. That poor, weak, irresolute adventurer had an Irish secretary, and this gentleman, among other things, made an attempt to capture some members of the Irish party-—Parnell and myself included, —and we got an invitation to dine with Boulanger. Parnell, I was delighted to find, took the same view a« I did—that it was not our business to give countenance to anybody who was trying to upset the Government of France; and we both refused. But I did get one glimpse of Boulanger. It was at a reception where he was ono of the notable figures. I studied him closely as he was talking to the hostess; at once I was struck with the strangely yellow complexion, and at once—l don’t know why— I rushed to the conclusion that he had taken to drugs; I saw opium written all over his face. Curiously enough my impression was right. A book published some years after his death by La Belle Meunierc —the lady who kept the inn at Clermont-Ferrand, where Boulanger and Madame de Bonnemain used to have their meetings—revealed the fact that at the very moment when I saw hini Boulanger was finding some relief from sleeplessness by taking opium pills. This was not the man to be made Dictator of a nation and to have all her destinies in his feeble hands. It was strangely topsy-turvy that Rochefort, who had so mercilessly assailed one Dictator, should have spent so much energy in trying to create another, and a much less competent one. A Contrast.— Rochefort’s final appearance as a supporter of the unscrupulous Dreyfus campaign Was even more distasteful; and from that time forward even those who had believed in him so long ceased to believe in him any more. I was luckier with him than with Bismarck and Louis Napoleon, for I did see him in the flesh and had a good opportunity of observing him. It was at a racecourse. Attached to his arm was the beautiful young woman whom he had married in his old age, and never was there a more striking contrast between husband and wife. She was a perfect specimen of opulent and bountiful womanhood, with a large figure, fine eyes, and a certain suggestion of perfect consciousness of her own great attractions. He at her side was an extraordinarylooking man. The body did not seem to have an ounce of flesh upon it, and its mcagrencss was brought into greater relief by the strange face and head in which it ended. The face was long, hatchetshaped ; the cheek bones were high and prominent; it looked almost like a death’s head, with just enough skin upon it to cover the protruding hones, and it all ended in a mass of white hair rising to a. top-knot almost like a macaw’s. And the complexion, a sort of pale blue, seemed to be in harmony with the death's head and the mountain of white hair. Later on I saw him alone. There had been an ugly scene on the course; a Jewish officer who was among the jockeys had been insulted, and there was excitement in the air. Rochefort was then alone, standing away from everybody, apparently waiting for a vehicle. It was a strange figure, made the stranger by its isolation at that moment; it seemed to symbolise the Ishmael who had his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him. There was just one little touch of relief to the almost affrighting figure, it was when be counted out sixpence to give to a beggar man who came up to him for alms. —Not Taken Seriously.— Did that little scene give a glimpse into the realities behind? I cannot tell. Never having met the man, and never judging in the case of any public man from his mere outward manifestations, I have always felt that there may have been another Rochefort as well as that terrible man who spared nobody with his poisoned shafts. I have heard people who knew of him speak of his essential good nature ; a strange contrast with his public manifestations. Perhaps the best description of this side of him Ls to be found in the admirable little sketch in the Daily Telegraph ; it shows how little ono must trust to external appearances, and it explains much that I have found so puzzling when I have discussed Rochefort with Parisians Tin's is the extract I mean : In spite of all this, the majority of Rochefort’s readers never took him au serioux 5s a political martyr. He was simply a great histrion “off the stage.’’ able to delude himself into a belief in his own sincerity. The first condition of success for him was the diurnal find ing of a prominent personage, or, in default of such a one, of a public institution, at whom or at which to shoot the barbed arrow of satire or to hurl

the boomerang of “Billingsgate.” By book or by crook the personage or institution was always found. But there was no malice in bis attacks, for he was generous, kind-hearted, and courageous to a degree. Of hie charity and benevolence one could cite a dozen instances. Of his courage it is unnecessary to speak at greater length. Towards the end of his life, after ha was 70, he was accepted as the patriarch of a whimsical and impish lampooning. Every day, without a break (there is no Sabbath for French journalists), ha wrote his leaderette, every day mada game of the Government,'accused every - statesman of bribery, theft, immorality, and murder, but did it all with delicious verve—at 82. At the end tJiere was no one man who did not love Rochefort, tha i Grand Old Man of lampoonists. He had no enemies left; no one paid any attention to what he wrote, and everyona read him and marvelled at him—amusing, biting, and witty to the last. So there was more good in him than we thought. How cautious we ought to be in our judgment of men, and especially of public men.—T. P. o’CoxNon.