1851-1858
Return to England--Fleeming at Fairbairn's--Experience in a
strike--Dr. Bell and Greek architecture--The Gaskells--Fleeming at
Greenwich--The Austins--Fleeming and the Austins--His
engagement--Fleeming and Sir W. Thomson.
In 1851, the year of Aunt Anna's death, the family left Genoa and came
to Manchester, where Fleeming was entered in Fairbairn's works as an
apprentice. From the palaces and Alps, the Mole, the blue Mediterranean,
the humming lanes and the bright theatres of Genoa, he fell--and he was
sharply conscious of the fall--to the dim skies and the foul ways of
Manchester. England he found on his return "a horrid place," and there
is no doubt the family found it a dear one. The story of the Jenkin
finances is not easy to follow. The family, I am told, did not practise
frugality, only lamented that it should be needful; and Mrs. Jenkin, who
was always complaining of those "dreadful bills," was "always a good
deal dressed." But at this time of the return to England, things must
have gone further. A holiday tour of a fortnight Fleeming feared would
be beyond what he could afford, and he only projected it "to have a
castle in the air." And there were actual pinches. Fresh from a warmer
sun, he was obliged to go without a greatcoat, and learned on railway
journeys to supply the place of one with wrappings of old newspaper.
From half-past eight till six, he must "file and chip vigorously in a
moleskin suit and infernally dirty." The work was not new to him, for he
had already passed some time in a Genoese shop; and to Fleeming no work
was without interest. Whatever a man can do or know, he longed to know
and do also. "I never learned anything," he wrote, "not even standing on
my head, but I found a use for it." In the spare hours of his first
telegraph voyage, to give an instance of his greed of knowledge, he
meant "to learn the whole art of navigation, every rope in the ship, and
how to handle her on any occasion"; and once when he was shown a young
lady's holiday collection of seaweeds, he must cry out, "It showed me my
eyes had been idle." Nor was his the case of the mere literary
smatterer, content if he but learn the names of things. In him, to do
and to do well was even a dearer ambition than to know. Anything done
well, any craft, despatch, or finish, delighted and inspired him. I
remember him with a twopenny Japanese box of three drawers, so exactly
fitted that, when one was driven home, the others started from their
places; the whole spirit of Japan, he told me, was pictured in that box;
that plain piece of carpentry was as much inspired by the spirit of
perfection as the happiest drawing or the finest bronze, and he who
could not enjoy it in the one was not fully able to enjoy it in the
others. Thus, too, he found in Leonardo's engineering and anatomical
drawings a perpetual feast; and of the former he spoke even with
emotion. Nothing indeed annoyed Fleeming more than the attempt to
separate the fine arts from the arts of handicraft; any definition or
theory that failed to bring these two together, according to him, had
missed the point; and the essence of the pleasure received lay in seeing
things well done. Other qualities must be added; he was the last to deny
that; but this, of perfect craft, was at the bottom of all. And on the
other hand, a nail ill driven, a joint ill fitted, a tracing clumsily
done, anything to which a man had set his hand and not set it aptly,
moved him to shame and anger. With such a character, he would feel but
little drudgery at Fairbairn's. There would be something daily to be
done, slovenliness to be avoided, and a higher mark of skill to be
attained; he would chip and file, as he had practised scales, impatient
of his own imperfection, but resolute to learn.
And there was another spring of delight. For he was now moving daily
among those strange creations of man's brain, to some so abhorrent, to
him of an interest so inexhaustible: in which iron, water, and fire are
made to serve as slaves, now with a tread more powerful than an
elephant's, and now with a touch more precise and dainty than a
pianist's. The taste for machinery was one that I could never share with
him, and he had a certain bitter pity for my weakness. Once when I had
proved, for the hundredth time, the depth of this defect, he looked at
me askance: "And the best of the joke," said he, "is that he thinks
himself quite a poet." For to him the struggle of the engineer against
brute forces and with inert allies was nobly poetic. Habit never dulled
in him the sense of the greatness of the aims and obstacles of his
profession. Habit only sharpened his inventor's gusto in contrivance, in
triumphant artifice, in the Odyssean subtleties, by which wires are
taught to speak, and iron hands to weave, and the slender ship to brave
and to outstrip the tempest. To the ignorant the great results alone are
admirable; to the knowing, and to Fleeming in particular, rather the
infinite device and sleight of mind that made them possible.
A notion was current at the time that, in such a shop as Fairbairn's, a
pupil would never be popular unless he drank with the workmen and
imitated them in speech and manner. Fleeming, who would do none of these
things, they accepted as a friend and companion; and this was the
subject of remark in Manchester, where some memory of it lingers till
to-day. He thought it one of the advantages of his profession to be
brought in a close relation with the working classes; and for the
skilled artisan he had a great esteem, liking his company, his virtues,
and his taste in some of the arts. But he knew the classes too well to
regard them, like a platform speaker, in a lump. He drew, on the other
hand, broad distinctions; and it was his profound sense of the
difference between one working man and another that led him to devote so
much time, in later days, to the furtherance of technical education. In
1852 he had occasion to see both men and masters at their worst, in the
excitement of a strike; and very foolishly (after their custom) both
would seem to have behaved. Beginning with a fair show of justice on
either side, the masters stultified their cause by obstinate impolicy,
and the men disgraced their order by acts of outrage. "On Wednesday
last," writes Fleeming, "about three thousand banded round Fairbairn's
door at 6 o'clock: men, women, and children, factory boys and girls, the
lowest of the low in a very low place. Orders came that no one was to
leave the works; but the men inside (Knobsticks, as they are called)
were precious hungry and thought they would venture. Two of my
companions and myself went out with the very first, and had the full
benefit of every possible groan and bad language." But the police
cleared a lane through the crowd, the pupils were suffered to escape
unhurt, and only the Knobsticks followed home and kicked with clogs; so
that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may say, for nothing, that fine thrill of
expectant valour with which he had sallied forth into the mob. "I never
before felt myself so decidedly somebody, instead of nobody," he wrote.
Outside as inside the works, he was "pretty merry and well-to-do,"
zealous in study, welcome to many friends, unwearied in loving-kindness
to his mother. For some time he spent three nights a week with Dr. Bell,
"working away at certain geometrical methods of getting the Greek
architectural proportions": a business after Fleeming's heart, for he
was never so pleased as when he could marry his two devotions, art and
science. This was besides, in all likelihood, the beginning of that love
and intimate appreciation of things Greek, from the least to the
greatest, from the _Agamemnon_ (perhaps his favourite tragedy) down to
the details of Grecian tailoring, which he used to express in his
familiar phrase: "The Greeks were the boys." Dr. Bell--the son of
George Joseph, the nephew of Sir Charles, and, though he made less use
of it than some, a sharer in the distinguished talents of his race--had
hit upon the singular fact that certain geometrical intersections gave
the proportions of the Doric order. Fleeming, under Dr. Bell's
direction, applied the same method to the other orders, and again found
the proportions accurately given. Numbers of diagrams were prepared; but
the discovery was never given to the world, perhaps because of the
dissensions that arose between the authors. For Dr. Bell believed that
"these intersections were in some way connected with, or symbolical of,
the antagonistic forces at work"; but his pupil and helper, with
characteristic trenchancy, brushed aside this mysticism, and interpreted
the discovery as "a geometrical method of dividing the spaces or (as
might be said) of setting out the work, purely empirical, and in no way
connected with any laws of either force or beauty." "Many a hard and
pleasant fight we had over it," wrote Jenkin, in later years; "and
impertinent as it may seem, the pupil is still unconvinced by the
arguments of the master." I do not know about the antagonistic forces in
the Doric order; in Fleeming they were plain enough; and the Bobadil of
these affairs with Dr. Bell was still, like the corrector of Italian
consuls, "a great child in everything but information." At the house of
Colonel Cleather, he might be seen with a family of children; and with
these there was no word of the Greek orders; with these Fleeming was
only an uproarious boy and an entertaining draughtsman; so that his
coming was the signal for the young people to troop into the playroom,
where sometimes the roof rang with romping, and sometimes they gathered
quietly about him as he amused them with his pencil.
In another Manchester family, whose name will be familiar to my
readers--that of the Gaskells,--Fleeming was a frequent visitor. To Mrs.
Gaskell he would often bring his new ideas, a process that many of his
later friends will understand and, in their own cases, remember. With
the girls he had "constant fierce wrangles," forcing them to reason out
their thoughts and to explain their prepossessions; and I hear from Miss
Gaskell that they used to wonder how he could throw all the ardour of
his character into the smallest matters, and to admire his unselfish
devotion to his parents. Of one of these wrangles I have found a record
most characteristic of the man. Fleeming had been laying down his
doctrine that the end justifies the means, and that it is quite right
"to boast of your six men-servants to a burglar, or to steal a knife to
prevent a murder"; and the Miss Gaskells, with girlish loyalty to what
is current, had rejected the heresy with indignation. From such
passages-at-arms many retire mortified and ruffled; but Fleeming had no
sooner left the house than he fell into delighted admiration of the
spirit of his adversaries. From that it was but a step to ask himself
"what truth was sticking in their heads"; for even the falsest form of
words (in Fleeming's life-long opinion) reposed upon some truth, just as
he could "not even allow that people admire ugly things, they admire
what is pretty in the ugly thing." And before he sat down to write his
letter, he thought he had hit upon the explanation. "I fancy the true
idea," he wrote, "is that you must never do yourself or any one else a
moral injury--make any man a thief or a liar--for any end"; quite a
different thing, as he would have loved to point out, from never
stealing or lying. But this perfervid disputant was not always out of
key with his audience. One whom he met in the same house announced that
she would never again be happy. "What does that signify?" cried
Fleeming. "We are not here to be happy, but to be good." And the words
(as his hearer writes to me) became to her a sort of motto during life.
From Fairbairn's and Manchester, Fleeming passed to a railway survey in
Switzerland, and thence again to Mr. Penn's at Greenwich, where he was
engaged as draughtsman. There, in 1856, we find him in "a terribly busy
state, finishing up engines for innumerable gunboats and steam frigates
for the ensuing campaign." From half-past eight in the morning till nine
or ten at night, he worked in a crowded office among uncongenial
comrades, "saluted by chaff, generally low, personal, and not witty,"
pelted with oranges and apples, regaled with dirty stories, and seeking
to suit himself with his surroundings or (as he writes it) trying to be
as little like himself as possible. His lodgings were hard by, "across a
dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied houses";
he had Carlyle and the poets, engineering and mathematics, to study by
himself in such spare time as remained to him; and there were several
ladies, young and not so young, with whom he liked to correspond. But
not all of these could compensate for the absence of that mother, who
had made herself so large a figure in his life, for sorry surroundings,
unsuitable society, and work that leaned to the mechanical. "Sunday,"
says he, "I generally visit some friends in town, and seem to swim in
clearer water, but the dirty green seems all the dirtier when I get
back. Luckily I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this
life." It is a question in my mind, if he could have long continued to
stand it without loss. "We are not here to be happy, but to be good,"
quoth the young philosopher; but no man had a keener appetite for
happiness than Fleeming Jenkin. There is a time of life besides, when,
apart from circumstances, few men are agreeable to their neighbours, and
still fewer to themselves; and it was at this stage that Fleeming had
arrived, later than common, and even worse provided. The letter from
which I have quoted is the last of his correspondence with Frank Scott,
and his last confidential letter to one of his own sex. "If you consider
it rightly," he wrote long after, "you will find the want of
correspondence no such strange want in men's friendships. There is,
believe me, something noble in the metal which does not rust, though not
burnished by daily use." It is well said; but the last letter to Frank
Scott is scarcely of a noble metal. It is plain the writer has outgrown
his old self, yet not made acquaintance with the new. This letter from a
busy youth of three-and-twenty, breathes of seventeen: the sickening
alternations of conceit and shame, the expense of hope _in vacuo_, the
lack of friends, the longing after love; the whole world of egoism under
which youth stands groaning, a voluntary Atlas.
With Fleeming this disease was never seemingly severe. The very day
before this (to me) distasteful letter, he had written to Miss Bell of
Manchester in a sweeter strain; I do not quote the one, I quote the
other; fair things are the best. "I keep my own little lodgings," he
writes, "but come up every night to see mamma" (who was then on a visit
to London) "if not kept too late at the works; and have singing-lessons
once more, and sing 'Donne l'amore e scaltro pargoletto'; and think and
talk about you; and listen to mamma's projects _de_ Stowting. Everything
turns to gold at her touch--she's a fairy, and no mistake. We go on
talking till I have a picture in my head, and can hardly believe at the
end the original is Stowting. Even you don't know half how good mamma
is; in other things too, which I must not mention. She teaches me how it
is not necessary to be very rich to do much good. I begin to understand
that mamma would find useful occupation and create beauty at the bottom
of a volcano. She has little weaknesses, but is a real, generous-hearted
woman, which I suppose is the finest thing in the world." Though neither
mother nor son could be called beautiful, they make a pretty picture;
the ugly, generous, ardent woman weaving rainbow illusions; the ugly,
clear-sighted, loving son sitting at her side in one of his rare hours
of pleasure, half-beguiled, half-amused, wholly admiring, as he listens.
But as he goes home, and the fancy pictures fade, and Stowting is once
more burthened with debt, and the noisy companions and the long hours of
drudgery once more approach, no wonder if the dirty green seems all the
dirtier, or if Atlas must resume his load.
But in healthy natures this time of moral teething passes quickly of
itself, and is easily alleviated by fresh interests; and already, in the
letter to Frank Scott, there are two words of hope: his friends in
London, his love for his profession. The last might have saved him; for
he was ere long to pass into a new sphere, where all his faculties were
to be tried and exercised, and his life to be filled with interest and
effort. But it was not left to engineering; another and more influential
aim was to be set before him. He must, in any case, have fallen in love;
in any case, his love would have ruled his life; and the question of
choice was, for the descendant of two such families, a thing of
paramount importance. Innocent of the world, fiery, generous, devoted as
he was, the son of the wild Jacksons and the facile Jenkins might have
been led far astray. By one of those partialities that fill men at once
with gratitude and wonder his choosing was directed well. Or are we to
say that, by a man's choice in marriage, as by a crucial merit, he
deserves his fortune? One thing at least reason may discern: that a man
but partly chooses, he also partly forms, his helpmate; and he must in
part deserve her, or the treasure is but won for a moment to be lost.
Fleeming chanced, if you will (and indeed all these opportunities are as
"random as blind-man's-buff"), upon a wife who was worthy of him; but he
had the wit to know it, the courage to wait and labour for his prize,
and the tenderness and chivalry that are required to keep such prizes
precious. Upon this point he has himself written well, as usual with
fervent optimism, but as usual (in his own phrase) with a truth sticking
in his head.
"Love," he wrote, "is not an intuition of the person most suitable to
us, most required by us; of the person with whom life flowers and bears
fruit. If this were so, the chances of our meeting that person would be
small indeed; intuition would often fail; the blindness of love would
then be fatal as it is proverbial. No, love works differently, and in
its blindness lies its strength. Man and woman, each strongly desires
to be loved, each opens to the other that heart of ideal aspirations
which they have often hid till then; each, thus knowing the ideal of the
other, tries to fulfil that ideal; each partially succeeds. The greater
the love, the greater the success; the nobler the idea of each, the more
durable, the more beautiful the effect. Meanwhile the blindness of each
to the other's defects enables the transformation to proceed
[unobserved], so that when the veil is withdrawn (if it ever is, and
this I do not know) neither knows that any change has occurred in the
person whom they loved. Do not fear, therefore. I do not tell you that
your friend will not change, but as I am sure that her choice cannot be
that of a man with a base ideal, so I am sure the change will be a safe
and a good one. Do not fear that anything you love will vanish--he must
love it too."
Among other introductions in London, Fleeming had presented a letter
from Mrs. Gaskell to the Alfred Austins. This was a family certain to
interest a thoughtful young man. Alfred, the youngest and least known of
the Austins, had been a beautiful golden-haired child, petted and kept
out of the way of both sport and study by a partial mother. Bred an
attorney, he had (like both his brothers) changed his way of life, and
was called to the Bar when past thirty. A Commission of Inquiry into the
state of the poor in Dorsetshire gave him an opportunity of proving his
true talents; and he was appointed a Poor Law Inspector, first at
Worcester, next at Manchester, where he had to deal with the potato
famine and the Irish immigration of the 'forties, and finally in London,
where he again distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera. He
was then advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her Majesty's Office
of Works and Public Buildings; a position which he filled with perfect
competence, but with an extreme of modesty; and on his retirement, in
1868, he was made a Companion of the Bath. While apprentice to a Norwich
attorney, Alfred Austin was a frequent visitor in the house of Mr.
Barren, a rallying-place in those days of intellectual society. Edward
Barren, the son of a rich saddler or leather merchant in the Borough,
was a man typical of the time. When he was a child, he had once been
patted on the head in his father's shop by no less a man than Samuel
Johnson, as the Doctor went round the Borough canvassing for Mr. Thrale;
and the child was true to this early consecration. "A life of lettered
ease spent in provincial retirement," it is thus that the biographer of
that remarkable man, William Taylor, announces his subject; and the
phrase is equally descriptive of the life of Edward Barron. The pair
were close friends: "W. T. and a pipe render everything agreeable,"
writes Barron in his diary in 1828; and in 1833, after Barron had moved
to London, and Taylor had tasted the first public failure of his powers,
the latter wrote: "To my ever dearest Mr. Barron say, if you please,
that I miss him more than I regret him--that I acquiesce in his
retirement from Norwich, because I could ill brook his observation of my
increasing debility of mind." This chosen companion of William Taylor
must himself have been no ordinary man; and he was the friend besides of
Borrow, whom I find him helping in his Latin. But he had no desire for
popular distinction, lived privately, married a daughter of Dr. Enfield
of Enfield's "Speaker," and devoted his time to the education of his
family, in a deliberate and scholarly fashion, and with certain traits
of stoicism, that would surprise a modern. From these children we must
single out his youngest daughter, Eliza, who learned under his care to
be a sound Latin, an elegant Grecian, and to suppress emotion without
outward sign after the manner of the Godwin school. This was the more
notable, as the girl really derived from the Enfields, whose high-flown
romantic temper I wish I could find space to illustrate. She was but
seven years old when Alfred Austin remarked and fell in love with her;
and the union thus early prepared was singularly full. Where the husband
and wife differed, and they did so on momentous subjects, they differed
with perfect temper and content; and in the conduct of life, and in
depth and durability of love, they were at one. Each full of high
spirits, each practised something of the same repression: no sharp word
was uttered in their house. The same point of honour ruled them: a guest
was sacred and stood within the pale from criticism. It was a house,
besides, of unusual intellectual tension. Mrs. Austin remembered, in the
early days of the marriage, the three brothers, John, Charles, and
Alfred, marching to and fro, each with his hands behind his back, and
"reasoning high" till morning; and how, like Dr. Johnson, they would
cheer their speculations with as many as fifteen cups of tea. And
though, before the date of Fleeming's visit, the brothers were
separated, Charles long ago retired from the world at Brandeston, and
John already near his end in the "rambling old house" at Weybridge,
Alfred Austin and his wife were still a centre of much intellectual
society, and still, as indeed they remained until the last, youthfully
alert in mind. There was but one child of the marriage, Annie, and she
was herself something new for the eyes of the young visitor; brought up
as she had been, like her mother before her, to the standard of a man's
acquirements. Only one art had she been denied, she must not learn the
violin--the thought was too monstrous even for the Austins; and indeed
it would seem as if that tide of reform which we may date from the days
of Mary Wollstonecraft had in some degree even receded; for though Miss
Austin was suffered to learn Greek, the accomplishment was kept secret
like a piece of guilt. But whether this stealth was caused by a backward
movement in public thought since the time of Edward Barron, or by the
change from enlightened Norwich to barbarian London, I have no means of
judging.
When Fleeming presented his letter he fell in love at first sight with
Mrs. Austin and the life and atmosphere of the house. There was in the
society of the Austins, outward, stoical conformers to the world,
something gravely suggestive of essential eccentricity, something
unpretentiously breathing of intellectual effort, that could not fail to
hit the fancy of this hot-brained boy. The unbroken enamel of courtesy,
the self-restraint, the dignified kindness of these married folk, had
besides a particular attraction for their visitor. He could not but
compare what he saw with what he knew of his mother and himself.
Whatever virtues Fleeming possessed, he could never count on being
civil; whatever brave, true-hearted qualities he was able to admire in
Mrs. Jenkin, mildness of demeanour was not one of them. And here he
found persons who were the equals of his mother and himself in intellect
and width of interest, and the equals of his father in mild urbanity of
disposition. Show Fleeming an active virtue, and he always loved it. He
went away from that house struck through with admiration, and vowing to
himself that his own married life should be upon that pattern, his wife
(whoever she might be) like Eliza Barron, himself such another husband
as Alfred Austin. What is more strange, he not only brought away, but
left behind him, golden opinions. He must have been--he was, I am
told--a trying lad; but there shone out of him such a light of innocent
candour, enthusiasm, intelligence, and appreciation, that to persons
already some way forward in years, and thus able to enjoy indulgently
the perennial comedy of youth, the sight of him was delightful. By a
pleasant coincidence, there was one person in the house whom he did not
appreciate, and who did not appreciate him: Annie Austin, his future
wife. His boyish vanity ruffled her; his appearance, never impressive,
was then, by reason of obtrusive boyishness, still less so; she found
occasion to put him in the wrong by correcting a false quantity; and
when Mr. Austin, after doing his visitor the almost unheard-of honour of
accompanying him to the door, announced "That was what young men were
like in my time"--she could only reply, looking on her handsome father,
"I thought they had been better-looking."
This first visit to the Austins took place in 1855; and it seems it was
some time before Fleeming began to know his mind; and yet longer ere he
ventured to show it. The corrected quantity, to those who knew him well,
will seem to have played its part; he was the man always to reflect over
a correction and to admire the castigator. And fall in love he did; not
hurriedly, but step by step, not blindly, but with critical
discrimination; not in the fashion of Romeo, but, before he was done,
with all Romeo's ardour and more than Romeo's faith. The high favour to
which he presently rose in the esteem of Alfred Austin and his wife
might well give him ambitious notions; but the poverty of the present
and the obscurity of the future were there to give him pause; and when
his aspirations began to settle round Miss Austin, he tasted, perhaps
for the only time in his life, the pangs of diffidence. There was indeed
opening before him a wide door of hope. He had changed into the service
of Messrs. Liddell and Gordon; these gentlemen had begun to dabble in
the new field of marine telegraphy; and Fleeming was already face to
face with his life's work. That impotent sense of his own value, as of a
ship aground, which makes one of the agonies of youth, began to fall
from him. New problems which he was endowed to solve, vistas of new
inquiry which he was fitted to explore, opened before him continually.
His gifts had found their avenue and goal. And with this pleasure of
effective exercise, there must have sprung up at once the hope of what
is called by the world success. But from these low beginnings, it was a
far look upward to Miss Austin: the favour of the loved one seems always
more than problematical to any lover; the consent of parents must be
always more than doubtful to a young man with a small salary, and no
capital except capacity and hope. But Fleeming was not the lad to lose
any good thing for the lack of trial; and at length, in the autumn of
1857, this boyish-sized, boyish-mannered and superlatively ill-dressed
young engineer entered the house of the Austins, with such sinkings as
we may fancy, and asked leave to pay his addresses to the daughter. Mrs.
Austin already loved him like a son, she was but too glad to give him
her consent; Mr. Austin reserved the right to inquire into his
character; from neither was there a word about his prospects, by neither
was his income mentioned. "Are these people," he wrote, struck with
wonder at this dignified disinterestedness, "are these people the same
as other people?" It was not till he was armed with this permission that
Miss Austin even suspected the nature of his hopes: so strong, in this
unmannerly boy, was the principle of true courtesy; so powerful, in this
impetuous nature, the springs of self-repression. And yet a boy he was;
a boy in heart and mind; and it was with a boy's chivalry and frankness
that he won his wife. His conduct was a model of honour, hardly of tact;
to conceal love from the loved one, to court her parents, to be silent
and discreet till these are won, and then without preparation to
approach the lady--these are not arts that I would recommend for
imitation. They lead to final refusal. Nothing saved Fleeming from that
fate, but one circumstance that cannot be counted upon--the hearty
favour of the mother, and one gift that is inimitable and that never
failed him throughout life, the gift of a nature essentially noble and
outspoken. A happy and high-minded anger flashed through his despair: it
won for him his wife.
Nearly two years passed before it was possible to marry: two years of
activity--now in London; now at Birkenhead, fitting out ships, inventing
new machinery for new purposes, and dipping into electrical experiment;
now in the _Elba_ on his first telegraph cruise between Sardinia and
Algiers: a busy and delightful period of bounding ardour, incessant
toil, growing hope and fresh interests, with behind and through all the
image of his beloved. A few extracts from his correspondence with his
betrothed will give the note of these truly joyous years. "My profession
gives me all the excitement and interest I ever hope for, but the sorry
jade is obviously jealous of you."--"'Poor Fleeming,' in spite of wet,
cold, and wind, clambering over moist, tarry slips, wandering among
pools of slush in waste places inhabited by wandering locomotives, grows
visibly stronger, has dismissed his office cough and cured his
toothache."--"The whole of the paying out and lifting machinery must be
designed and ordered in two or three days, and I am half crazy with
work. I like it though: it's like a good ball, the excitement carries
you through."--"I was running to and from the ships and warehouse
through fierce gusts of rain and wind till near eleven, and you cannot
think what a pleasure it was to be blown about and think of you in your
pretty dress."--"I am at the works till ten and sometimes eleven. But I
have a nice office to sit in, with a fire to myself, and bright brass
scientific instruments all round me, and books to read, and experiments
to make, and enjoy myself amazingly. I find the study of electricity so
entertaining that I am apt to neglect my other work." And for a last
taste: "Yesterday I had some charming electrical experiments. What shall
I compare them to--a new song? a Greek play?"
It was at this time besides that he made the acquaintance of Professor,
now Sir William, Thomson.[23] To describe the part played by these two
in each other's lives would lie out of my way. They worked together on
the Committee on Electrical Standards; they served together at the
laying down or the repair of many deep-sea cables; and Sir William was
regarded by Fleeming, not only with the "worship" (the word is his own)
due to great scientific gifts, but with an ardour of personal friendship
not frequently excelled. To their association, Fleeming brought the
valuable element of a practical understanding; but he never thought or
spoke of himself where Sir William was in question; and I recall quite
in his last days a singular instance of this modest loyalty to one whom
he admired and loved. He drew up a paper, in a quite personal interest,
of his own services; yet even here he must step out of his way, he must
add, where it had no claim to be added, his opinion that, in their joint
work, the contributions of Sir William had been always greatly the most
valuable. Again, I shall not readily forget with what emotion he once
told me an incident of their associated travels. On one of the mountain
ledges of Madeira, Fleeming's pony bolted between Sir William and the
precipice above; by strange good fortune, and thanks to the steadiness
of Sir William's horse, no harm was done; but for the moment Fleeming
saw his friend hurled into the sea, and almost by his own act: it was a
memory that haunted him.
FOOTNOTE:
[23] Afterwards Lord Kelvin.--ED.