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 practice
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 practiced 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 hand 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 into 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 anyone 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 gun-boats 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 è 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 that 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 help-mate; 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; our 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 Enquiry 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.
Barron, a rallying place in those days of intellectual society. Edward
Barron, 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, Anne, 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 per
sons 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: Anne 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 & 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 enquiry 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 till 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. 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.