A Man of Conflicting Parts
The Life of Alfred Nobel. By H. Schack and R. Sohlman. (Heinemann. 21s.) TnE Nobel Institute has evidently come to the conclusion that an authoritative Life of the extraordinary inventor whose last will and testament called it into existence should be available. And certainly Alfred Nobel, the Richest Vaga- bond in Europe, as he was sometimes called during his life- time, had a life well worthy of a biographer's pen.
It is interesting to contrast this biography of a great armament manufacturer with the Life of Sir. Basil Zaharoff,
which has recently been published. ' Zaharoff seems to us the perfect type of the money-maker, pure and simple. His interest in science, in the actual technique of producing death- dealing instruments was, we should imagine, strictly limited.
Indeed, he does not seem to have even had a prejudice in favour of war in itself. If he had been in some other business',
which had made peace profitable to him, then he would certainly have been an ardent pacifist. Nobel was a very
different type. Although an exceedingly able business man with great powers of organization, he seems to have remained primarily a scientist and inventor. His millions came to him, and he no doubt appreciated them to the full ; but they came rather as a by-product of his other activities than as an end in themselves. In this, as in everything else, Nobel was a man of divided purpose. The more deadly became the weapons of destruction which he manufactured, the more he felt the necessity to become a pacifist, and the last years of his life, and, above all, of course, his will, are evidence of the genuine strength of the counter-current of pacifism within his mind.
His biographers tell us of the width of his scientific interests .- " Nobel had, to an exceptional degree, what is essential to an inventor, the gift of imagination. He had, not merely the capacity, but a positive urge, to give forth original ideas. His imagination ranged over the most varied fields ; apart from applied chemistry, he interested himself in electricity, optics, machinery, gunnery, biology and physiology, to mention only the applied sciences.
As in the case of his father, his imagination frequently became purely fantastic. Sometimes this was deliberate, as when he would break in upon a serious business discussion with an account of some bizarre invention ; but in such cases he often did so in order to throw dust in the other people's eyes, and to gain time to reflect upon a ticklish problem."
He was a man of genuine brilliance of mind, since he spoke and wrote five European languages fluently, and his know- ledge of English was good enough enough for him to write very competent English verse. How inextricably interwoven were his inconsistent interests is comically and yet touchingly shosin in the following letter which he wrote to his relative, Hjalmar Nobel, about the proposed purchase of a Swedish paper.
Hjalmar Nobel naturally supposed that Alfred Nobel wished to buy the paper in order to influence public opinion in Sweden, in favour of his own armament interests in that country, and let Alfred see this. He received the following indignant and utterly inconsistent reply :- " You seem to imagine that my object is to influence the market, but a newspaper owned by me would rather tend to arouse opposition. It is one of my peculiarities that I never consider my private interests. My policy as a newspaper owner would be to use my influence against armaments and such mediaeval survivals, but to urge that if they aro to be manufactured they should be manu- factured at home ; for if there is one branch of industry which should not be dependent in any way upon imports from abroad, it is surely the armaments industry. And as there are munition fac- tories in Sweden, it would be no less lamentable than ridiculous not to support them. I simply want to own a newspaper in order to rouse or stimulate it to really liberal views. The leaven is there ; this is easily found in a country where the general intelligence of the people is 500 per cent. in advance of its constitutional develop- ments.
It would be cruel to pick out the childish deception and hypocrisy from such a letter. But, as the will of this wifeless and childless, and probably most unhappy, man showed, the idealism and pacifism of his nature was just as genuine a part as his business acumen. This will of his, which left his fortune to be distributed as prizes for literary, pacifist and scientific work, has done perceptible good in the world. We wish that most millionaires, and armament millionaires especially, had as much self-contradiction in them as had Nobel, and would leave their money with an equal sense of_pliblic
Previous page
