Lord Rutherford
Rutherford. By A. S. Eve. (Cambridge University Press. ars.) THE official biography of Rutherford does all that one could reasonably ask of it. It is written unportentously, with admiration, affection and knowledge ; where possible, Pro- fessor Eve modestly suppresses his own personality, and lets his subject speak for himself. Half the biography consists of Rutherford's letters, the long letters which he got into the habit of writing when he came to Cambridge as a young man, and left his fiancée and mother behind in New Zealand. To anyone who knew Rutherford even slightly, these letters are fascinating ; , and the book will give real pleasure to a great many people in the scientific world.
But to anyone who did not know Rutherford? There I have a certain doubt. To gain anything like a full impact from this biography, perhaps one needs to start with a vivid sense of the man himself. There is a danger that, to other readers and to posterity, the whole life may seem just the success story of a great scientist ; while, to anyone who met him only for an hour, so extravagantly strong was his personal impression that the letters stile home as though this were a supreme novel, and the major character had sprung out slightly larger than life.
The entire task of communicating the Rutherford legend is to suggest a little of that inescapable personal impression. No one will suggest more than a little of it ; for personal impressions only live a few years longer than the flesh. They only become immortal if by sheer chance they happen to touch a creative artist ; but Rutherford, who dominated every- one in the world of physics, probably did not make certain of a Plato or a Boswell among his audience. And yet, in an admirable lecture to the Royal Institution, Tizard came very near re-creating the Rutherford of the later, supreme, success- ful years. If this lecture, or a more elaborate version of it, could be printed in front of Professor Eve's biography, more people might come to feel how Rutherford held his unique position among the other gifted men of the heroic age of physics.
There were two reasons. He was, first and foremost, one of the greatest of scientists. In his own lifetime, everyone competent to judge came to consider him the greatest ex- perimental scientist since Faraday ; since he died, the judge- ment has sharpened into thinking him the greatest of all time. But he was something in addition. He was the closest approach to a great " character " that modern science has produced.
This does not mean that his was a specially subtle or complex character in the internal sense: that would not be true. He was a great character in quite another sense, just as
Dr. Johnson was, or some of the big externalised characters in fiction, Falstaff or Don Quixote. He was a man of broad, living nature ; not good nature or bad nature, but simply nature ; nature so spontaneous that everyone took him for granted, lock, stock and barrel. Everyone took for granted the one occasion when he was unfair and intolerant just as naturally as the ninety-nine when he was magnanimous ; everyone took for granted his immense, exuberant, quite immodest delight in being a great man. No one has ever enjoyed being a great man more. There were times when he seemed to identify himself with Jehovah and the Cavendish with the Chosen People, to be chastised with wrath but ulti- mately upheld against lesser breeds. His tremendous voice was once heard roaring from behind a screen in a Cambridge tailor's shop—" Every day I grow in girth—and in men- tality." And, when the positive electron was first being detected, he rose to his feet in open meeting and proclaimed : "There is no room for this particle in the atom as designed by me."
There were hundreds of such incidents, and everyone accepted them as completely as his big physical presence and rolling voice. They were all part of the character.
And it is precisely the overpowering impression of that character which, if you had experienced it before you read Professor Eve's biography, gives the letters their extraordinary fascination. For there you do not find Jehovah; you find instead a young man unusually diffident, sensitive about his Colonial birth, over-resentful of affronts, thinking about the necessity of " influence " with the naive worldliness of the unsophisticated. Gradually you can see him becoming confi- dent of his own powers. And there comes a moment of excitement different from anything that other biographies can give you : when, as you read the letters of his middle thirties, you realise that he has become certain that he is the most
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