Edinburgh—Colleagues—_Farrago Vitæ_—I. The Family Circle—Fleeming and his
Sons—Highland Life—The Cruise of the Steam Launch—Summer in Styria—Rustic
Manners—II. The Drama—Private Theatricals—III. Sanitary Associations—The
Phonograph—IV. Fleeming’s Acquaintance with a Student—His late Maturity
of Mind—Religion and Morality—His Love of Heroism—Taste in Literature—V.
His Talk—His late Popularity—Letter from M. Trélat.
THE remaining external incidents of Fleeming’s life, pleasures, honours,
fresh interests, new friends, are not such as will bear to be told at any
length or in the temporal order. And it is now time to lay narration by,
and to look at the man he was and the life he lived, more largely.
Edinburgh, which was thenceforth to be his home, is a metropolitan small
town; where college professors and the lawyers of the Parliament House
give the tone, and persons of leisure, attracted by educational
advantages, make up much of the bulk of society. Not, therefore, an
unlettered place, yet not pedantic, Edinburgh will compare favourably
with much larger cities. A hard and disputatious element has been
commented on by strangers: it would not touch Fleeming, who was himself
regarded, even in this metropolis of disputation, as a thorny table-mate.
To golf unhappily he did not take, and golf is a cardinal virtue in the
city of the winds. Nor did he become an archer of the Queen’s
Body-Guard, which is the Chiltern Hundreds of the distasted golfer. He
did not even frequent the Evening Club, where his colleague Tait (in my
day) was so punctual and so genial. So that in some ways he stood
outside of the lighter and kindlier life of his new home. I should not
like to say that he was generally popular; but there as elsewhere, those
who knew him well enough to love him, loved him well. And he, upon his
side, liked a place where a dinner party was not of necessity
unintellectual, and where men stood up to him in argument.
The presence of his old classmate, Tait, was one of his early attractions
to the chair; and now that Fleeming is gone again, Tait still remains,
ruling and really teaching his great classes. Sir Robert Christison was
an old friend of his mother’s; Sir Alexander Grant, Kelland, and Sellar,
were new acquaintances and highly valued; and these too, all but the
last, have been taken from their friends and labours. Death has been
busy in the Senatus. I will speak elsewhere of Fleeming’s demeanour to
his students; and it will be enough to add here that his relations with
his colleagues in general were pleasant to himself.
Edinburgh, then, with its society, its university work, its delightful
scenery, and its skating in the winter, was thenceforth his base of
operations. But he shot meanwhile erratic in many directions: twice to
America, as we have seen, on telegraph voyages; continually to London on
business; often to Paris; year after year to the Highlands to shoot, to
fish, to learn reels and Gaelic, to make the acquaintance and fall in
love with the character of Highlanders; and once to Styria, to hunt
chamois and dance with peasant maidens. All the while, he was pursuing
the course of his electrical studies, making fresh inventions, taking up
the phonograph, filled with theories of graphic representation; reading,
writing, publishing, founding sanitary associations, interested in
technical education, investigating the laws of metre, drawing, acting,
directing private theatricals, going a long way to see an actor—a long
way to see a picture; in the very bubble of the tideway of contemporary
interests. And all the while he was busied about his father and mother,
his wife, and in particular his sons; anxiously watching, anxiously
guiding these, and plunging with his whole fund of youthfulness into
their sports and interests. And all the while he was himself
maturing—not in character or body, for these remained young—but in the
stocked mind, in the tolerant knowledge of life and man, in pious
acceptance of the universe. Here is a farrago for a chapter: here is a
world of interests and activities, human, artistic, social, scientific,
at each of which he sprang with impetuous pleasure, on each of which he
squandered energy, the arrow drawn to the head, the whole intensity of
his spirit bent, for the moment, on the momentary purpose. It was this
that lent such unusual interest to his society, so that no friend of his
can forget that figure of Fleeming coming charged with some new
discovery: it is this that makes his character so difficult to represent.
Our fathers, upon some difficult theme, would invoke the Muse; I can but
appeal to the imagination of the reader. When I dwell upon some one
thing, he must bear in mind it was only one of a score; that the
unweariable brain was teeming at the very time with other thoughts; that
the good heart had left no kind duty forgotten.
I.
In Edinburgh, for a considerable time, Fleeming’s family, to three
generations, was united: Mr. and Mrs. Austin at Hailes, Captain and Mrs.
Jenkin in the suburb of Merchiston, Fleeming himself in the city. It is
not every family that could risk with safety such close interdomestic
dealings; but in this also Fleeming was particularly favoured. Even the
two extremes, Mr. Austin and the Captain, drew together. It is pleasant
to find that each of the old gentlemen set a high value on the good looks
of the other, doubtless also on his own; and a fine picture they made as
they walked the green terrace at Hailes, conversing by the hour. What
they talked of is still a mystery to those who knew them; but Mr. Austin
always declared that on these occasions he learned much. To both of
these families of elders, due service was paid of attention; to both,
Fleeming’s easy circumstances had brought joy; and the eyes of all were
on the grandchildren. In Fleeming’s scheme of duties, those of the
family stood first; a man was first of all a child, nor did he cease to
be so, but only took on added obligations, when he became in turn a
father. The care of his parents was always a first thought with him, and
their gratification his delight. And the care of his sons, as it was
always a grave subject of study with him, and an affair never neglected,
so it brought him a thousand satisfactions. ‘Hard work they are,’ as he
once wrote, ‘but what fit work!’ And again: ‘O, it’s a cold house where
a dog is the only representative of a child!’ Not that dogs were
despised; we shall drop across the name of Jack, the harum-scarum Irish
terrier ere we have done; his own dog Plato went up with him daily to his
lectures, and still (like other friends) feels the loss and looks visibly
for the reappearance of his master; and Martin, the cat, Fleeming has
himself immortalised, to the delight of Mr. Swinburne, in the columns of
the _Spectator_. Indeed there was nothing in which men take interest, in
which he took not some; and yet always most in the strong human bonds,
ancient as the race and woven of delights and duties.
He was even an anxious father; perhaps that is the part where optimism is
hardest tested. He was eager for his sons; eager for their health,
whether of mind or body; eager for their education; in that, I should
have thought, too eager. But he kept a pleasant face upon all things,
believed in play, loved it himself, shared boyishly in theirs, and knew
how to put a face of entertainment upon business and a spirit of
education into entertainment. If he was to test the progress of the
three boys, this advertisement would appear in their little manuscript
paper:—‘Notice: The Professor of Engineering in the University of
Edinburgh intends at the close of the scholastic year to hold
examinations in the following subjects: (1) For boys in the fourth class
of the Academy—Geometry and Algebra; (2) For boys at Mr. Henderson’s
school—Dictation and Recitation; (3) For boys taught exclusively by
their mothers—Arithmetic and Reading.’ Prizes were given; but what prize
would be so conciliatory as this boyish little joke? It may read thin
here; it would smack racily in the playroom. Whenever his sons ‘started
a new fad’ (as one of them writes to me) they ‘had only to tell him about
it, and he was at once interested and keen to help.’ He would discourage
them in nothing unless it was hopelessly too hard for them; only, if
there was any principle of science involved, they must understand the
principle; and whatever was attempted, that was to be done thoroughly.
If it was but play, if it was but a puppetshow they were to build, he set
them the example of being no sluggard in play. When Frewen, the second
son, embarked on the ambitious design to make an engine for a toy
steamboat, Fleeming made him begin with a proper drawing—doubtless to the
disgust of the young engineer; but once that foundation laid, helped in
the work with unflagging gusto, ‘tinkering away,’ for hours, and assisted
at the final trial ‘in the big bath’ with no less excitement than the
boy. ‘He would take any amount of trouble to help us,’ writes my
correspondent. ‘We never felt an affair was complete till we had called
him to see, and he would come at any time, in the middle of any work.’
There was indeed one recognised playhour, immediately after the despatch
of the day’s letters; and the boys were to be seen waiting on the stairs
until the mail should be ready and the fun could begin. But at no other
time did this busy man suffer his work to interfere with that first duty
to his children; and there is a pleasant tale of the inventive Master
Frewen, engaged at the time upon a toy crane, bringing to the study where
his father sat at work a half-wound reel that formed some part of his
design, and observing, ‘Papa, you might finiss windin’ this for me; I am
so very busy to-day.’
I put together here a few brief extracts from Fleeming’s letters, none
very important in itself, but all together building up a pleasant picture
of the father with his sons.
‘_Jan._ 15_th_, 1875.—Frewen contemplates suspending soap bubbles by silk
threads for experimental purposes. I don’t think he will manage that.
Bernard’ [the youngest] ‘volunteered to blow the bubbles with
enthusiasm.’
‘_Jan._ 17_th_.—I am learning a great deal of electrostatics in
consequence of the perpetual cross-examination to which I am subjected.
I long for you on many grounds, but one is that I may not be obliged to
deliver a running lecture on abstract points of science, subject to
cross-examination by two acute students. Bernie does not cross-examine
much; but if anyone gets discomfited, he laughs a sort of little
silver-whistle giggle, which is trying to the unhappy blunderer.’
‘_May_ 9_th_.—Frewen is deep in parachutes. I beg him not to drop from
the top landing in one of his own making.’
‘_June_ 6_th_, 1876.—Frewen’s crank axle is a failure just at present—but
he bears up.’
‘_June_ 14_th_.—The boys enjoy their riding. It gets them whole funds of
adventures. One of their caps falling off is matter for delightful
reminiscences; and when a horse breaks his step, the occurrence becomes a
rear, a shy, or a plunge as they talk it over. Austin, with quiet
confidence, speaks of the greater pleasure in riding a spirited horse,
even if he does give a little trouble. It is the stolid brute that he
dislikes. (N.B. You can still see six inches between him and the saddle
when his pony trots.) I listen and sympathise and throw out no hint that
their achievements are not really great.’
‘_June_ 18_th_.—Bernard is much impressed by the fact that I can be
useful to Frewen about the steamboat’ [which the latter irrepressible
inventor was making]. ‘He says quite with awe, “He would not have got on
nearly so well if you had not helped him.”’
‘_June_ 27_th_.—I do not see what I could do without Austin. He talks so
pleasantly and is so truly good all through.’
‘_June_ 27_th_.—My chief difficulty with Austin is to get him measured
for a pair of trousers. Hitherto I have failed, but I keep a stout heart
and mean to succeed. Frewen the observer, in describing the paces of two
horses, says, “Polly takes twenty-seven steps to get round the school. I
couldn’t count Sophy, but she takes more than a hundred.”’
‘_Feb._ 18_th_, 1877.—We all feel very lonely without you. Frewen had to
come up and sit in my room for company last night and I actually kissed
him, a thing that has not occurred for years. Jack, poor fellow, bears
it as well as he can, and has taken the opportunity of having a fester on
his foot, so he is lame and has it bathed, and this occupies his thoughts
a good deal.’
‘_Feb._ 19_th_.—As to Mill, Austin has not got the list yet. I think it
will prejudice him very much against Mill—but that is not my affair.
Education of that kind! . . . I would as soon cram my boys with food and
boast of the pounds they had eaten, as cram them with literature.’
But if Fleeming was an anxious father, he did not suffer his anxiety to
prevent the boys from any manly or even dangerous pursuit. Whatever it
might occur to them to try, he would carefully show them how to do it,
explain the risks, and then either share the danger himself or, if that
were not possible, stand aside and wait the event with that unhappy
courage of the looker-on. He was a good swimmer, and taught them to
swim. He thoroughly loved all manly exercises; and during their
holidays, and principally in the Highlands, helped and encouraged them to
excel in as many as possible: to shoot, to fish, to walk, to pull an oar,
to hand, reef and steer, and to run a steam launch. In all of these, and
in all parts of Highland life, he shared delightedly. He was well on to
forty when he took once more to shooting, he was forty-three when he
killed his first salmon, but no boy could have more single-mindedly
rejoiced in these pursuits. His growing love for the Highland character,
perhaps also a sense of the difficulty of the task, led him to take up at
forty-one the study of Gaelic; in which he made some shadow of progress,
but not much: the fastnesses of that elusive speech retaining to the last
their independence. At the house of his friend Mrs. Blackburn, who plays
the part of a Highland lady as to the manner born, he learned the
delightful custom of kitchen dances, which became the rule at his own
house and brought him into yet nearer contact with his neighbours. And
thus at forty-two, he began to learn the reel; a study, to which he
brought his usual smiling earnestness; and the steps, diagrammatically
represented by his own hand, are before me as I write.
It was in 1879 that a new feature was added to the Highland life: a steam
launch, called the _Purgle_, the Styrian corruption of Walpurga, after a
friend to be hereafter mentioned. ‘The steam launch goes,’ Fleeming
wrote. ‘I wish you had been present to describe two scenes of which she
has been the occasion already: one during which the population of
Ullapool, to a baby, was harnessed to her hurrahing—and the other in
which the same population sat with its legs over a little pier, watching
Frewen and Bernie getting up steam for the first time.’ The _Purgle_ was
got with educational intent; and it served its purpose so well, and the
boys knew their business so practically, that when the summer was at an
end, Fleeming, Mrs. Jenkin, Frewen the engineer, Bernard the stoker, and
Kenneth Robertson a Highland seaman, set forth in her to make the passage
south. The first morning they got from Loch Broom into Gruinard bay,
where they lunched upon an island; but the wind blowing up in the
afternoon, with sheets of rain, it was found impossible to beat to sea;
and very much in the situation of castaways upon an unknown coast, the
party landed at the mouth of Gruinard river. A shooting lodge was spied
among the trees; there Fleeming went; and though the master, Mr. Murray,
was from home, though the two Jenkin boys were of course as black as
colliers, and all the castaways so wetted through that, as they stood in
the passage, pools formed about their feet and ran before them into the
house, yet Mrs. Murray kindly entertained them for the night. On the
morrow, however, visitors were to arrive; there would be no room and, in
so out-of-the-way a spot, most probably no food for the crew of the
_Purgle_; and on the morrow about noon, with the bay white with spindrift
and the wind so strong that one could scarcely stand against it, they got
up steam and skulked under the land as far as Sanda Bay. Here they crept
into a seaside cave, and cooked some food; but the weather now freshening
to a gale, it was plain they must moor the launch where she was, and find
their way overland to some place of shelter. Even to get their baggage
from on board was no light business; for the dingy was blown so far to
leeward every trip, that they must carry her back by hand along the
beach. But this once managed, and a cart procured in the neighbourhood,
they were able to spend the night in a pot-house on Ault Bea. Next day,
the sea was unapproachable; but the next they had a pleasant passage to
Poolewe, hugging the cliffs, the falling swell bursting close by them in
the gullies, and the black scarts that sat like ornaments on the top of
every stack and pinnacle, looking down into the _Purgle_ as she passed.
The climate of Scotland had not done with them yet: for three days they
lay storm-stayed in Poolewe, and when they put to sea on the morning of
the fourth, the sailors prayed them for God’s sake not to attempt the
passage. Their setting out was indeed merely tentative; but presently
they had gone too far to return, and found themselves committed to double
Rhu Reay with a foul wind and a cross sea. From half-past eleven in the
morning until half-past five at night, they were in immediate and
unceasing danger. Upon the least mishap, the _Purgle_ must either have
been swamped by the seas or bulged upon the cliffs of that rude headland.
Fleeming and Robertson took turns baling and steering; Mrs. Jenkin, so
violent was the commotion of the boat, held on with both hands; Frewen,
by Robertson’s direction, ran the engine, slacking and pressing her to
meet the seas; and Bernard, only twelve years old, deadly sea-sick, and
continually thrown against the boiler, so that he was found next day to
be covered with burns, yet kept an even fire. It was a very thankful
party that sat down that evening to meat in the Hotel at Gairloch. And
perhaps, although the thing was new in the family, no one was much
surprised when Fleeming said grace over that meal. Thenceforward he
continued to observe the form, so that there was kept alive in his house
a grateful memory of peril and deliverance. But there was nothing of the
muff in Fleeming; he thought it a good thing to escape death, but a
becoming and a healthful thing to run the risk of it; and what is rarer,
that which he thought for himself, he thought for his family also. In
spite of the terrors of Rhu Reay, the cruise was persevered in and
brought to an end under happier conditions.
One year, instead of the Highlands, Alt Aussee, in the Steiermark, was
chosen for the holidays; and the place, the people, and the life
delighted Fleeming. He worked hard at German, which he had much
forgotten since he was a boy; and what is highly characteristic, equally
hard at the patois, in which he learned to excel. He won a prize at a
Schützen-fest; and though he hunted chamois without much success, brought
down more interesting game in the shape of the Styrian peasants, and in
particular of his gillie, Joseph. This Joseph was much of a character;
and his appreciations of Fleeming have a fine note of their own. The
bringing up of the boys he deigned to approve of: ‘_fast so gut wie ein
bauer_,’ was his trenchant criticism. The attention and courtly respect
with which Fleeming surrounded his wife, was something of a puzzle to the
philosophic gillie; he announced in the village that Mrs. Jenkin—_die
silberne Frau_, as the folk had prettily named her from some silver
ornaments—was a ‘_geborene Gräfin_’ who had married beneath her; and when
Fleeming explained what he called the English theory (though indeed it
was quite his own) of married relations, Joseph, admiring but
unconvinced, avowed it was ‘_gar schön_.’ Joseph’s cousin, Walpurga
Moser, to an orchestra of clarionet and zither, taught the family the
country dances, the Steierisch and the Ländler, and gained their hearts
during the lessons. Her sister Loys, too, who was up at the Alp with the
cattle, came down to church on Sundays, made acquaintance with the
Jenkins, and must have them up to see the sunrise from her house upon the
Loser, where they had supper and all slept in the loft among the hay.
The Mosers were not lost sight of; Walpurga still corresponds with Mrs.
Jenkin, and it was a late pleasure of Fleeming’s to choose and despatch a
wedding present for his little mountain friend. This visit was brought
to an end by a ball in the big inn parlour; the refreshments chosen, the
list of guests drawn up, by Joseph; the best music of the place in
attendance; and hosts and guests in their best clothes. The ball was
opened by Mrs. Jenkin dancing Steierisch with a lordly Bauer, in gray and
silver and with a plumed hat; and Fleeming followed with Walpurga Moser.
There ran a principle through all these holiday pleasures. In Styria as
in the Highlands, the same course was followed: Fleeming threw himself as
fully as he could into the life and occupations of the native people,
studying everywhere their dances and their language, and conforming,
always with pleasure, to their rustic etiquette. Just as the ball at Alt
Aussee was designed for the taste of Joseph, the parting feast at
Attadale was ordered in every particular to the taste of Murdoch the
Keeper. Fleeming was not one of the common, so-called gentlemen, who
take the tricks of their own coterie to be eternal principles of taste.
He was aware, on the other hand, that rustic people dwelling in their own
places, follow ancient rules with fastidious precision, and are easily
shocked and embarrassed by what (if they used the word) they would have
to call the vulgarity of visitors from town. And he, who was so cavalier
with men of his own class, was sedulous to shield the more tender
feelings of the peasant; he, who could be so trying in a drawing-room,
was even punctilious in the cottage. It was in all respects a happy
virtue. It renewed his life, during these holidays, in all particulars.
It often entertained him with the discovery of strange survivals; as
when, by the orders of Murdoch, Mrs. Jenkin must publicly taste of every
dish before it was set before her guests. And thus to throw himself into
a fresh life and a new school of manners was a grateful exercise of
Fleeming’s mimetic instinct; and to the pleasures of the open air, of
hardships supported, of dexterities improved and displayed, and of plain
and elegant society, added a spice of drama.
II.
Fleeming was all his life a lover of the play and all that belonged to
it. Dramatic literature he knew fully. He was one of the not very
numerous people who can read a play: a knack, the fruit of much knowledge
and some imagination, comparable to that of reading score. Few men
better understood the artificial principles on which a play is good or
bad; few more unaffectedly enjoyed a piece of any merit of construction.
His own play was conceived with a double design; for he had long been
filled with his theory of the true story of Griselda; used to gird at
Father Chaucer for his misconception; and was, perhaps first of all,
moved by the desire to do justice to the Marquis of Saluces, and perhaps
only in the second place, by the wish to treat a story (as he phrased it)
like a sum in arithmetic. I do not think he quite succeeded; but I must
own myself no fit judge. Fleeming and I were teacher and taught as to
the principles, disputatious rivals in the practice, of dramatic writing.
Acting had always, ever since Rachel and the Marseillaise, a particular
power on him. ‘If I do not cry at the play,’ he used to say, ‘I want to
have my money back.’ Even from a poor play with poor actors, he could
draw pleasure. ‘Giacometti’s _Elisabetta_,’ I find him writing, ‘fetched
the house vastly. Poor Queen Elizabeth! And yet it was a little good.’
And again, after a night of Salvini: ‘I do not suppose any one with
feelings could sit out _Othello_, if Iago and Desdemona were acted.’
Salvini was, in his view, the greatest actor he had seen. We were all
indeed moved and bettered by the visit of that wonderful man.—‘I declare
I feel as if I could pray!’ cried one of us, on the return from
_Hamlet_.—‘That is prayer,’ said Fleeming. W. B. Hole and I, in a fine
enthusiasm of gratitude, determined to draw up an address to Salvini, did
so, and carried it to Fleeming; and I shall never forget with what
coldness he heard and deleted the eloquence of our draft, nor with what
spirit (our vanities once properly mortified) he threw himself into the
business of collecting signatures. It was his part, on the ground of his
Italian, to see and arrange with the actor; it was mine to write in the
_Academy_ a notice of the first performance of _Macbeth_. Fleeming
opened the paper, read so far, and flung it on the floor. ‘No,’ he
cried, ‘that won’t do. You were thinking of yourself, not of Salvini!’
The criticism was shrewd as usual, but it was unfair through ignorance;
it was not of myself that I was thinking, but of the difficulties of my
trade which I had not well mastered. Another unalloyed dramatic pleasure
which Fleeming and I shared the year of the Paris Exposition, was the
_Marquis de Villemer_, that blameless play, performed by Madeleine
Brohan, Delaunay, Worms, and Broisat—an actress, in such parts at least,
to whom I have never seen full justice rendered. He had his fill of
weeping on that occasion; and when the piece was at an end, in front of a
café, in the mild, midnight air, we had our fill of talk about the art of
acting.
But what gave the stage so strong a hold on Fleeming was an inheritance
from Norwich, from Edward Barron, and from Enfield of the _Speaker_. The
theatre was one of Edward Barron’s elegant hobbies; he read plays, as
became Enfield’s son-in-law, with a good discretion; he wrote plays for
his family, in which Eliza Barron used to shine in the chief parts; and
later in life, after the Norwich home was broken up, his little
granddaughter would sit behind him in a great armchair, and be
introduced, with his stately elocution, to the world of dramatic
literature. From this, in a direct line, we can deduce the charades at
Claygate; and after money came, in the Edinburgh days, that private
theatre which took up so much of Fleeming’s energy and thought. The
company—Mr. and Mrs. R. O. Carter of Colwall, W. B. Hole, Captain Charles
Douglas, Mr. Kunz, Mr. Burnett, Professor Lewis Campbell, Mr. Charles
Baxter, and many more—made a charming society for themselves and gave
pleasure to their audience. Mr. Carter in Sir Toby Belch it would be
hard to beat. Mr. Hole in broad farce, or as the herald in the
_Trachiniæ_, showed true stage talent. As for Mrs. Jenkin, it was for
her the rest of us existed and were forgiven; her powers were an endless
spring of pride and pleasure to her husband; he spent hours hearing and
schooling her in private; and when it came to the performance, though
there was perhaps no one in the audience more critical, none was more
moved than Fleeming. The rest of us did not aspire so high. There were
always five performances and weeks of busy rehearsal; and whether we came
to sit and stifle as the prompter, to be the dumb (or rather the
inarticulate) recipients of Carter’s dog whip in the _Taming of the
Shrew_, or having earned our spurs, to lose one more illusion in a
leading part, we were always sure at least of a long and an exciting
holiday in mirthful company.
In this laborious annual diversion, Fleeming’s part was large. I never
thought him an actor, but he was something of a mimic, which stood him in
stead. Thus he had seen Got in Poirier; and his own Poirier, when he
came to play it, breathed meritoriously of the model. The last part I
saw him play was Triplet, and at first I thought it promised well. But
alas! the boys went for a holiday, missed a train, and were not heard of
at home till late at night. Poor Fleeming, the man who never hesitated
to give his sons a chisel or a gun, or to send them abroad in a canoe or
on a horse, toiled all day at his rehearsal, growing hourly paler,
Triplet growing hourly less meritorious. And though the return of the
children, none the worse for their little adventure, brought the colour
back into his face, it could not restore him to his part. I remember
finding him seated on the stairs in some rare moment of quiet during the
subsequent performances. ‘Hullo, Jenkin,’ said I, ‘you look down in the
mouth.’—‘My dear boy,’ said he, ‘haven’t you heard me? I have not one
decent intonation from beginning to end.’
But indeed he never supposed himself an actor; took a part, when he took
any, merely for convenience, as one takes a hand at whist; and found his
true service and pleasure in the more congenial business of the manager.
Augier, Racine, Shakespeare, Aristophanes in Hookham Frere’s translation,
Sophocles and Æschylus in Lewis Campbell’s, such were some of the authors
whom he introduced to his public. In putting these upon the stage, he
found a thousand exercises for his ingenuity and taste, a thousand
problems arising which he delighted to study, a thousand opportunities to
make these infinitesimal improvements which are so much in art and for
the artist. Our first Greek play had been costumed by the professional
costumer, with unforgetable results of comicality and indecorum: the
second, the _Trachiniæ_, of Sophocles, he took in hand himself, and a
delightful task he made of it. His study was then in antiquarian books,
where he found confusion, and on statues and bas-reliefs, where he at
last found clearness; after an hour or so at the British Museum, he was
able to master ‘the chitôn, sleeves and all’; and before the time was
ripe, he had a theory of Greek tailoring at his fingers’ ends, and had
all the costumes made under his eye as a Greek tailor would have made
them. ‘The Greeks made the best plays and the best statues, and were the
best architects: of course, they were the best tailors, too,’ said he;
and was never weary, when he could find a tolerant listener, of dwelling
on the simplicity, the economy, the elegance both of means and effect,
which made their system so delightful.
But there is another side to the stage-manager’s employment. The
discipline of acting is detestable; the failures and triumphs of that
business appeal too directly to the vanity; and even in the course of a
careful amateur performance such as ours, much of the smaller side of man
will be displayed. Fleeming, among conflicting vanities and levities,
played his part to my admiration. He had his own view; he might be
wrong; but the performances (he would remind us) were after all his, and
he must decide. He was, in this as in all other things, an iron
taskmaster, sparing not himself nor others. If you were going to do it
at all, he would see that it was done as well as you were able. I have
known him to keep two culprits (and one of these his wife) repeating the
same action and the same two or three words for a whole weary afternoon.
And yet he gained and retained warm feelings from far the most of those
who fell under his domination, and particularly (it is pleasant to
remember) from the girls. After the slipshod training and the incomplete
accomplishments of a girls’ school, there was something at first
annoying, at last exciting and bracing, in this high standard of
accomplishment and perseverance.
III.
It did not matter why he entered upon any study or employment, whether
for amusement like the Greek tailoring or the Highland reels, whether
from a desire to serve the public as with his sanitary work, or in the
view of benefiting poorer men as with his labours for technical
education, he ‘pitched into it’ (as he would have said himself) with the
same headlong zest. I give in the Appendix a letter from Colonel
Fergusson, which tells fully the nature of the sanitary work and of
Fleeming’s part and success in it. It will be enough to say here that it
was a scheme of protection against the blundering of builders and the
dishonesty of plumbers. Started with an eye rather to the houses of the
rich, Fleeming hoped his Sanitary Associations would soon extend their
sphere of usefulness and improve the dwellings of the poor. In this hope
he was disappointed; but in all other ways the scheme exceedingly
prospered, associations sprang up and continue to spring up in many
quarters, and wherever tried they have been found of use.
Here, then, was a serious employment; it has proved highly useful to
mankind; and it was begun besides, in a mood of bitterness, under the
shock of what Fleeming would so sensitively feel—the death of a whole
family of children. Yet it was gone upon like a holiday jaunt. I read
in Colonel Fergusson’s letter that his schoolmates bantered him when he
began to broach his scheme; so did I at first, and he took the banter as
he always did with enjoyment, until he suddenly posed me with the
question: ‘And now do you see any other jokes to make? Well, then,’ said
he, ‘that’s all right. I wanted you to have your fun out first; now we
can be serious.’ And then with a glowing heat of pleasure, he laid his
plans before me, revelling in the details, revelling in hope. It was as
he wrote about the joy of electrical experiment. ‘What shall I compare
them to? A new song?—a Greek play?’ Delight attended the exercise of
all his powers; delight painted the future. Of these ideal visions, some
(as I have said) failed of their fruition. And the illusion was
characteristic. Fleeming believed we had only to make a virtue cheap and
easy, and then all would practise it; that for an end unquestionably
good, men would not grudge a little trouble and a little money, though
they might stumble at laborious pains and generous sacrifices. He could
not believe in any resolute badness. ‘I cannot quite say,’ he wrote in
his young manhood, ‘that I think there is no sin or misery. This I can
say: I do not remember one single malicious act done to myself. In fact
it is rather awkward when I have to say the Lord’s Prayer. I have
nobody’s trespasses to forgive.’ And to the point, I remember one of our
discussions. I said it was a dangerous error not to admit there were bad
people; he, that it was only a confession of blindness on our part, and
that we probably called others bad only so far as we were wrapped in
ourselves and lacking in the transmigratory forces of imagination. I
undertook to describe to him three persons irredeemably bad and whom he
should admit to be so. In the first case, he denied my evidence: ‘You
cannot judge a man upon such testimony,’ said he. For the second, he
owned it made him sick to hear the tale; but then there was no spark of
malice, it was mere weakness I had described, and he had never denied nor
thought to set a limit to man’s weakness. At my third gentleman, he
struck his colours. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘I’m afraid that is a bad man.’ And
then looking at me shrewdly: ‘I wonder if it isn’t a very unfortunate
thing for you to have met him.’ I showed him radiantly how it was the
world we must know, the world as it was, not a world expurgated and
prettified with optimistic rainbows. ‘Yes, yes,’ said he; ‘but this
badness is such an easy, lazy explanation. Won’t you be tempted to use
it, instead of trying to understand people?’
In the year 1878, he took a passionate fancy for the phonograph: it was a
toy after his heart, a toy that touched the skirts of life, art, and
science, a toy prolific of problems and theories. Something fell to be
done for a University Cricket Ground Bazaar. ‘And the thought struck
him,’ Mr. Ewing writes to me, ‘to exhibit Edison’s phonograph, then the
very newest scientific marvel. The instrument itself was not to be
purchased—I think no specimen had then crossed the Atlantic—but a copy of
the _Times_ with an account of it was at hand, and by the help of this we
made a phonograph which to our great joy talked, and talked, too, with
the purest American accent. It was so good that a second instrument was
got ready forthwith. Both were shown at the Bazaar: one by Mrs. Jenkin
to people willing to pay half a crown for a private view and the
privilege of hearing their own voices, while Jenkin, perfervid as usual,
gave half-hourly lectures on the other in an adjoining room—I, as his
lieutenant, taking turns. The thing was in its way a little triumph. A
few of the visitors were deaf, and hugged the belief that they were the
victims of a new kind of fancy-fair swindle. Of the others, many who
came to scoff remained to take raffle tickets; and one of the phonographs
was finally disposed of in this way, falling, by a happy freak of the
ballot-box, into the hands of Sir William Thomson.’ The other remained
in Fleeming’s hands, and was a source of infinite occupation. Once it
was sent to London, ‘to bring back on the tinfoil the tones of a lady
distinguished for clear vocalisations; at another time Sir Robert
Christison was brought in to contribute his powerful bass’; and there
scarcely came a visitor about the house, but he was made the subject of
experiment. The visitors, I am afraid, took their parts lightly: Mr.
Hole and I, with unscientific laughter, commemorating various shades of
Scotch accent, or proposing to ‘teach the poor dumb animal to swear.’
But Fleeming and Mr. Ewing, when we butterflies were gone, were
laboriously ardent. Many thoughts that occupied the later years of my
friend were caught from the small utterance of that toy. Thence came his
inquiries into the roots of articulate language and the foundations of
literary art; his papers on vowel sounds, his papers in the _Saturday
Review_ upon the laws of verse, and many a strange approximation, many a
just note, thrown out in talk and now forgotten. I pass over dozens of
his interests, and dwell on this trifling matter of the phonograph,
because it seems to me that it depicts the man. So, for Fleeming, one
thing joined into another, the greater with the less. He cared not where
it was he scratched the surface of the ultimate mystery—in the child’s
toy, in the great tragedy, in the laws of the tempest, or in the
properties of energy or mass—certain that whatever he touched, it was a
part of life—and however he touched it, there would flow for his happy
constitution interest and delight. ‘All fables have their morals,’ says
Thoreau, ‘but the innocent enjoy the story.’ There is a truth
represented for the imagination in these lines of a noble poem, where we
are told, that in our highest hours of visionary clearness, we can but
‘see the children sport upon the shore
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.’
To this clearness Fleeming had attained; and although he heard the voice
of the eternal seas and weighed its message, he was yet able, until the
end of his life, to sport upon these shores of death and mystery with the
gaiety and innocence of children.
IV.
It was as a student that I first knew Fleeming, as one of that modest
number of young men who sat under his ministrations in a soul-chilling
class-room at the top of the University buildings. His presence was
against him as a professor: no one, least of all students, would have
been moved to respect him at first sight: rather short in stature,
markedly plain, boyishly young in manner, cocking his head like a terrier
with every mark of the most engaging vivacity and readiness to be
pleased, full of words, full of paradox, a stranger could scarcely fail
to look at him twice, a man thrown with him in a train could scarcely
fail to be engaged by him in talk, but a student would never regard him
as academical. Yet he had that fibre in him that order always existed in
his class-room. I do not remember that he ever addressed me in language;
at the least sign of unrest, his eye would fall on me and I was quelled.
Such a feat is comparatively easy in a small class; but I have misbehaved
in smaller classes and under eyes more Olympian than Fleeming Jenkin’s.
He was simply a man from whose reproof one shrank; in manner the least
buckrammed of mankind, he had, in serious moments, an extreme dignity of
goodness. So it was that he obtained a power over the most insubordinate
of students, but a power of which I was myself unconscious. I was
inclined to regard any professor as a joke, and Fleeming as a
particularly good joke, perhaps the broadest in the vast pleasantry of my
curriculum. I was not able to follow his lectures; I somehow dared not
misconduct myself, as was my customary solace; and I refrained from
attending. This brought me at the end of the session into a relation
with my contemned professor that completely opened my eyes. During the
year, bad student as I was, he had shown a certain leaning to my society;
I had been to his house, he had asked me to take a humble part in his
theatricals; I was a master in the art of extracting a certificate even
at the cannon’s mouth; and I was under no apprehension. But when I
approached Fleeming, I found myself in another world; he would have
naught of me. ‘It is quite useless for _you_ to come to me, Mr.
Stevenson. There may be doubtful cases, there is no doubt about yours.
You have simply _not_ attended my class.’ The document was necessary to
me for family considerations; and presently I stooped to such pleadings
and rose to such adjurations, as made my ears burn to remember. He was
quite unmoved; he had no pity for me.—‘You are no fool,’ said he, ‘and
you chose your course.’ I showed him that he had misconceived his duty,
that certificates were things of form, attendance a matter of taste. Two
things, he replied, had been required for graduation, a certain
competency proved in the final trials and a certain period of genuine
training proved by certificate; if he did as I desired, not less than if
he gave me hints for an examination, he was aiding me to steal a degree.
‘You see, Mr. Stevenson, these are the laws and I am here to apply them,’
said he. I could not say but that this view was tenable, though it was
new to me; I changed my attack: it was only for my father’s eye that I
required his signature, it need never go to the Senatus, I had already
certificates enough to justify my year’s attendance. ‘Bring them to me;
I cannot take your word for that,’ said he. ‘Then I will consider.’ The
next day I came charged with my certificates, a humble assortment. And
when he had satisfied himself, ‘Remember,’ said he, ‘that I can promise
nothing, but I will try to find a form of words.’ He did find one, and I
am still ashamed when I think of his shame in giving me that paper. He
made no reproach in speech, but his manner was the more eloquent; it told
me plainly what a dirty business we were on; and I went from his
presence, with my certificate indeed in my possession, but with no
answerable sense of triumph. That was the bitter beginning of my love
for Fleeming; I never thought lightly of him afterwards.
Once, and once only, after our friendship was truly founded, did we come
to a considerable difference. It was, by the rules of poor humanity, my
fault and his. I had been led to dabble in society journalism; and this
coming to his ears, he felt it like a disgrace upon himself. So far he
was exactly in the right; but he was scarce happily inspired when he
broached the subject at his own table and before guests who were
strangers to me. It was the sort of error he was always ready to repent,
but always certain to repeat; and on this occasion he spoke so freely
that I soon made an excuse and left the house with the firm purpose of
returning no more. About a month later, I met him at dinner at a common
friend’s. ‘Now,’ said he, on the stairs, ‘I engage you—like a lady to
dance—for the end of the evening. You have no right to quarrel with me
and not give me a chance.’ I have often said and thought that Fleeming
had no tact; he belied the opinion then. I remember perfectly how, so
soon as we could get together, he began his attack: ‘You may have grounds
of quarrel with me; you have none against Mrs. Jenkin; and before I say
another word, I want you to promise you will come to _her_ house as
usual.’ An interview thus begun could have but one ending: if the
quarrel were the fault of both, the merit of the reconciliation was
entirely Fleeming’s.
When our intimacy first began, coldly enough, accidentally enough on his
part, he had still something of the Puritan, something of the inhuman
narrowness of the good youth. It fell from him slowly, year by year, as
he continued to ripen, and grow milder, and understand more generously
the mingled characters of men. In the early days he once read me a
bitter lecture; and I remember leaving his house in a fine spring
afternoon, with the physical darkness of despair upon my eyesight. Long
after he made me a formal retractation of the sermon and a formal apology
for the pain he had inflicted; adding drolly, but truly, ‘You see, at
that time I was so much younger than you!’ And yet even in those days
there was much to learn from him; and above all his fine spirit of piety,
bravely and trustfully accepting life, and his singular delight in the
heroic.
His piety was, indeed, a thing of chief importance. His views (as they
are called) upon religious matters varied much; and he could never be
induced to think them more or less than views. ‘All dogma is to me mere
form,’ he wrote; ‘dogmas are mere blind struggles to express the
inexpressible. I cannot conceive that any single proposition whatever in
religion is true in the scientific sense; and yet all the while I think
the religious view of the world is the most true view. Try to separate
from the mass of their statements that which is common to Socrates,
Isaiah, David, St. Bernard, the Jansenists, Luther, Mahomet, Bunyan—yes,
and George Eliot: of course you do not believe that this something could
be written down in a set of propositions like Euclid, neither will you
deny that there is something common and this something very valuable. . . .
I shall be sorry if the boys ever give a moment’s thought to the
question of what community they belong to—I hope they will belong to the
great community.’ I should observe that as time went on his conformity
to the church in which he was born grew more complete, and his views drew
nearer the conventional. ‘The longer I live, my dear Louis,’ he wrote
but a few months before his death, ‘the more convinced I become of a
direct care by God—which is reasonably impossible—but there it is.’ And
in his last year he took the communion.
But at the time when I fell under his influence, he stood more aloof; and
this made him the more impressive to a youthful atheist. He had a keen
sense of language and its imperial influence on men; language contained
all the great and sound metaphysics, he was wont to say; and a word once
made and generally understood, he thought a real victory of man and
reason. But he never dreamed it could be accurate, knowing that words
stand symbol for the indefinable. I came to him once with a problem
which had puzzled me out of measure: what is a cause? why out of so many
innumerable millions of conditions, all necessary, should one be singled
out and ticketed ‘the cause’? ‘You do not understand,’ said he. ‘A
cause is the answer to a question: it designates that condition which I
happen to know and you happen not to know.’ It was thus, with partial
exception of the mathematical, that he thought of all means of reasoning:
they were in his eyes but means of communication, so to be understood, so
to be judged, and only so far to be credited. The mathematical he made,
I say, exception of: number and measure he believed in to the extent of
their significance, but that significance, he was never weary of
reminding you, was slender to the verge of nonentity. Science was true,
because it told us almost nothing. With a few abstractions it could
deal, and deal correctly; conveying honestly faint truths. Apply its
means to any concrete fact of life, and this high dialect of the wise
became a childish jargon.
Thus the atheistic youth was met at every turn by a scepticism more
complete than his own, so that the very weapons of the fight were changed
in his grasp to swords of paper. Certainly the church is not right, he
would argue, but certainly not the anti-church either. Men are not such
fools as to be wholly in the wrong, nor yet are they so placed as to be
ever wholly in the right. Somewhere, in mid air between the disputants,
like hovering Victory in some design of a Greek battle, the truth hangs
undiscerned. And in the meanwhile what matter these uncertainties?
Right is very obvious; a great consent of the best of mankind, a loud
voice within us (whether of God, or whether by inheritance, and in that
case still from God), guide and command us in the path of duty. He saw
life very simple; he did not love refinements; he was a friend to much
conformity in unessentials. For (he would argue) it is in this life as
it stands about us, that we are given our problem; the manners of the day
are the colours of our palette; they condition, they constrain us; and a
man must be very sure he is in the right, must (in a favourite phrase of
his) be ‘either very wise or very vain,’ to break with any general
consent in ethics. I remember taking his advice upon some point of
conduct. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘how do you suppose Christ would have advised
you?’ and when I had answered that he would not have counselled me
anything unkind or cowardly, ‘No,’ he said, with one of his shrewd
strokes at the weakness of his hearer, ‘nor anything amusing.’ Later in
life, he made less certain in the field of ethics. ‘The old story of the
knowledge of good and evil is a very true one,’ I find him writing; only
(he goes on) ‘the effect of the original dose is much worn out, leaving
Adam’s descendants with the knowledge that there is such a thing—but
uncertain where.’ His growing sense of this ambiguity made him less
swift to condemn, but no less stimulating in counsel. ‘You grant
yourself certain freedoms. Very well,’ he would say, ‘I want to see you
pay for them some other way. You positively cannot do this: then there
positively must be something else that you can do, and I want to see you
find that out and do it.’ Fleeming would never suffer you to think that
you were living, if there were not, somewhere in your life, some touch of
heroism, to do or to endure.
This was his rarest quality. Far on in middle age, when men begin to lie
down with the bestial goddesses, Comfort and Respectability, the strings
of his nature still sounded as high a note as a young man’s. He loved
the harsh voice of duty like a call to battle. He loved courage,
enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly virtue; everything that
lifts us above the table where we eat or the bed we sleep upon. This
with no touch of the motive-monger or the ascetic. He loved his virtues
to be practical, his heroes to be great eaters of beef; he loved the
jovial Heracles, loved the astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and
Wesleys. A fine buoyant sense of life and of man’s unequal character ran
through all his thoughts. He could not tolerate the spirit of the
pick-thank; being what we are, he wished us to see others with a generous
eye of admiration, not with the smallness of the seeker after faults. If
there shone anywhere a virtue, no matter how incongruously set, it was
upon the virtue we must fix our eyes. I remember having found much
entertainment in Voltaire’s _Saül_, and telling him what seemed to me the
drollest touches. He heard me out, as usual when displeased, and then
opened fire on me with red-hot shot. To belittle a noble story was easy;
it was not literature, it was not art, it was not morality; there was no
sustenance in such a form of jesting, there was (in his favourite phrase)
‘no nitrogenous food’ in such literature. And then he proceeded to show
what a fine fellow David was; and what a hard knot he was in about
Bathsheba, so that (the initial wrong committed) honour might well
hesitate in the choice of conduct; and what owls those people were who
marvelled because an Eastern tyrant had killed Uriah, instead of
marvelling that he had not killed the prophet also. ‘Now if Voltaire had
helped me to feel that,’ said he, ‘I could have seen some fun in it.’ He
loved the comedy which shows a hero human, and yet leaves him a hero, and
the laughter which does not lessen love.
It was this taste for what is fine in human-kind, that ruled his choice
in books. These should all strike a high note, whether brave or tender,
and smack of the open air. The noble and simple presentation of things
noble and simple, that was the ‘nitrogenous food’ of which he spoke so
much, which he sought so eagerly, enjoyed so royally. He wrote to an
author, the first part of whose story he had seen with sympathy, hoping
that it might continue in the same vein. ‘That this may be so,’ he
wrote, ‘I long with the longing of David for the water of Bethlehem. But
no man need die for the water a poet can give, and all can drink it to
the end of time, and their thirst be quenched and the pool never dry—and
the thirst and the water are both blessed.’ It was in the Greeks
particularly that he found this blessed water; he loved ‘a fresh air’
which he found ‘about the Greek things even in translations’; he loved
their freedom from the mawkish and the rancid. The tale of David in the
Bible, the _Odyssey_, Sophocles, Æschylus, Shakespeare, Scott; old Dumas
in his chivalrous note; Dickens rather than Thackeray, and the _Tale of
Two Cities_ out of Dickens: such were some of his preferences. To
Ariosto and Boccaccio he was always faithful; _Burnt Njal_ was a late
favourite; and he found at least a passing entertainment in the _Arcadia_
and the _Grand Cyrus_. George Eliot he outgrew, finding her latterly
only sawdust in the mouth; but her influence, while it lasted, was great,
and must have gone some way to form his mind. He was easily set on edge,
however, by didactic writing; and held that books should teach no other
lesson but what ‘real life would teach, were it as vividly presented.’
Again, it was the thing made that took him, the drama in the book; to the
book itself, to any merit of the making, he was long strangely blind. He
would prefer the _Agamemnon_ in the prose of Mr. Buckley, ay, to Keats.
But he was his mother’s son, learning to the last. He told me one day
that literature was not a trade; that it was no craft; that the professed
author was merely an amateur with a door-plate. ‘Very well,’ said I,
‘the first time you get a proof, I will demonstrate that it is as much a
trade as bricklaying, and that you do not know it.’ By the very next
post, a proof came. I opened it with fear; for he was indeed, as the
reader will see by these volumes, a formidable amateur; always wrote
brightly, because he always thought trenchantly; and sometimes wrote
brilliantly, as the worst of whistlers may sometimes stumble on a perfect
intonation. But it was all for the best in the interests of his
education; and I was able, over that proof, to give him a quarter of an
hour such as Fleeming loved both to give and to receive. His subsequent
training passed out of my hands into those of our common friend, W. E.
Henley. ‘Henley and I,’ he wrote, ‘have fairly good times wigging one
another for not doing better. I wig him because he won’t try to write a
real play, and he wigs me because I can’t try to write English.’ When I
next saw him, he was full of his new acquisitions. ‘And yet I have lost
something too,’ he said regretfully. ‘Up to now Scott seemed to me quite
perfect, he was all I wanted. Since I have been learning this confounded
thing, I took up one of the novels, and a great deal of it is both
careless and clumsy.’
V.
He spoke four languages with freedom, not even English with any marked
propriety. What he uttered was not so much well said, as excellently
acted: so we may hear every day the inexpressive language of a
poorly-written drama assume character and colour in the hands of a good
player. No man had more of the _vis comica_ in private life; he played
no character on the stage, as he could play himself among his friends.
It was one of his special charms; now when the voice is silent and the
face still, it makes it impossible to do justice to his power in
conversation. He was a delightful companion to such as can bear bracing
weather; not to the very vain; not to the owlishly wise, who cannot have
their dogmas canvassed; not to the painfully refined, whose sentiments
become articles of faith. The spirit in which he could write that he was
‘much revived by having an opportunity of abusing Whistler to a knot of
his special admirers,’ is a spirit apt to be misconstrued. He was not a
dogmatist, even about Whistler. ‘The house is full of pretty things,’ he
wrote, when on a visit; ‘but Mrs. —’s taste in pretty things has one very
bad fault: it is not my taste.’ And that was the true attitude of his
mind; but these eternal differences it was his joy to thresh out and
wrangle over by the hour. It was no wonder if he loved the Greeks; he
was in many ways a Greek himself; he should have been a sophist and met
Socrates; he would have loved Socrates, and done battle with him
staunchly and manfully owned his defeat; and the dialogue, arranged by
Plato, would have shown even in Plato’s gallery. He seemed in talk
aggressive, petulant, full of a singular energy; as vain you would have
said as a peacock, until you trod on his toes, and then you saw that he
was at least clear of all the sicklier elements of vanity. Soundly rang
his laugh at any jest against himself. He wished to be taken, as he took
others, for what was good in him without dissimulation of the evil, for
what was wise in him without concealment of the childish. He hated a
draped virtue, and despised a wit on its own defence. And he drew (if I
may so express myself) a human and humorous portrait of himself with all
his defects and qualities, as he thus enjoyed in talk the robust sports
of the intelligence; giving and taking manfully, always without pretence,
always with paradox, always with exuberant pleasure; speaking wisely of
what he knew, foolishly of what he knew not; a teacher, a learner, but
still combative; picking holes in what was said even to the length of
captiousness, yet aware of all that was said rightly; jubilant in
victory, delighted by defeat: a Greek sophist, a British schoolboy.
Among the legends of what was once a very pleasant spot, the old Savile
Club, not then divorced from Savile Row, there are many memories of
Fleeming. He was not popular at first, being known simply as ‘the man
who dines here and goes up to Scotland’; but he grew at last, I think,
the most generally liked of all the members. To those who truly knew and
loved him, who had tasted the real sweetness of his nature, Fleeming’s
porcupine ways had always been a matter of keen regret. They introduced
him to their own friends with fear; sometimes recalled the step with
mortification. It was not possible to look on with patience while a man
so lovable thwarted love at every step. But the course of time and the
ripening of his nature brought a cure. It was at the Savile that he
first remarked a change; it soon spread beyond the walls of the club.
Presently I find him writing: ‘Will you kindly explain what has happened
to me? All my life I have talked a good deal, with the almost unfailing
result of making people sick of the sound of my tongue. It appeared to
me that I had various things to say, and I had no malevolent feelings,
but nevertheless the result was that expressed above. Well, lately some
change has happened. If I talk to a person one day, they must have me
the next. Faces light up when they see me.—“Ah, I say, come here,”—“come
and dine with me.” It’s the most preposterous thing I ever experienced.
It is curiously pleasant. You have enjoyed it all your life, and
therefore cannot conceive how bewildering a burst of it is for the first
time at forty-nine.’ And this late sunshine of popularity still further
softened him. He was a bit of a porcupine to the last, still shedding
darts; or rather he was to the end a bit of a schoolboy, and must still
throw stones, but the essential toleration that underlay his
disputatiousness, and the kindness that made of him a tender sicknurse
and a generous helper, shone more conspicuously through. A new pleasure
had come to him; and as with all sound natures, he was bettered by the
pleasure.
I can best show Fleeming in this later stage by quoting from a vivid and
interesting letter of M. Emile Trélat’s. Here, admirably expressed, is
how he appeared to a friend of another nation, whom he encountered only
late in life. M. Trélat will pardon me if I correct, even before I quote
him; but what the Frenchman supposed to flow from some particular
bitterness against France, was only Fleeming’s usual address. Had M.
Trélat been Italian, Italy would have fared as ill; and yet Italy was
Fleeming’s favourite country.
Vous savez comment j’ai connu Fleeming Jenkin! C’était en Mai 1878.
Nous étions tous deux membres du jury de l’Exposition Universelle.
On n’avait rien fait qui vaille à la première séance de notre classe,
qui avait eu lieu le matin. Tout le monde avait parlé et reparlé
pour ne rien dire. Cela durait depuis huit heures; il était midi.
Je demandai la parole pour une motion d’ordre, et je proposai que la
séance fut levée à la condition que chaque membre français,
_emportât_ à déjeuner un juré étranger. Jenkin applaudit. ‘Je vous
emmène déjeuner,’ lui criai-je. ‘Je veux bien.’ . . . Nous partîmes;
en chemin nous vous rencontrions; il vous présente et nous allons
déjeuner tous trois auprès du Trocadéro.
Et, depuis ce temps, nous avons été de vieux amis. Non seulement
nous passions nos journées au jury, où nous étions toujours ensemble,
côte-à-côte. Mais nos habitudes s’étaient faites telles que, non
contents de déjeuner en face l’un de l’autre, je le ramenais dîner
presque tous les jours chez moi. Cela dura une quinzaine: puis il
fut rappelé en Angleterre. Mais il revint, et nous fîmes encore une
bonne étape de vie intellectuelle, morale et philosophique. Je crois
qu’il me rendait déjà tout ce que j’éprouvais de sympathie et
d’estime, et que je ne fus pas pour rien dans son retour à Paris.
Chose singulière! nous nous étions attachés l’un à l’autre par les
sous-entendus bien plus que par la matière de nos conversations. À
vrai dire, nous étions presque toujours en discussion; et il nous
arrivait de nous rire au nez l’un et l’autre pendant des heures, tant
nous nous étonnions réciproquement de la diversité de nos points de
vue. Je le trouvais si Anglais, et il me trouvais si Français! Il
était si franchement révolté de certaines choses qu’il voyait chez
nous, et je comprenais si mal certaines choses qui se passaient chez
vous! Rien de plus intéressant que ces contacts qui étaient des
contrastes, et que ces rencontres d’idées qui étaient des choses;
rien de si attachant que les échappées de cœur ou d’esprit auxquelles
ces petits conflits donnaient à tout moment cours. C’est dans ces
conditions que, pendant son séjour à Paris en 1878, je conduisis un
peu partout mon nouvel ami. Nous allâmes chez Madame Edmond Adam, où
il vit passer beaucoup d’hommes politiques avec lesquels il causa.
Mais c’est chez les ministres qu’il fut intéressé. Le moment était,
d’ailleurs, curieux en France. Je me rappelle que, lorsque je le
présentai au Ministre du Commerce, il fit cette spirituelle repartie:
‘C’est la seconde fois que je viens en France sous la République. La
première fois, c’était en 1848, elle s’était coiffée de travers: je
suis bien heureux de saluer aujourd’hui votre excellence, quand elle
a mis son chapeau droit.’ Une fois je le menai voir couronner la
Rosière de Nanterre. Il y suivit les cérémonies civiles et
religieuses; il y assista au banquet donné par le Maire; il y vit
notre de Lesseps, auquel il porta un toast. Le soir, nous revînmes
tard à Paris; il faisait chaud; nous étions un peu fatigués; nous
entrâmes dans un des rares cafés encore ouverts. Il devint
silencieux.—‘N’êtes-vous pas content de votre journée?’ lui
dis-je.—‘O, si! mais je réfléchis, et je me dis que vous êtes un
peuple gai—tous ces braves gens étaient gais aujourd’hui. C’est une
vertu, la gaieté, et vous l’avez en France, cette vertu!’ Il me
disait cela mélancoliquement; et c’était la première fois que je lui
entendais faire une louange adressée à la France. . . . Mais il ne
faut pas que vous voyiez là une plainte de ma part. Je serais un
ingrat si je me plaignais; car il me disait souvent: ‘Quel bon
Français vous faites!’ Et il m’aimait à cause de cela, quoiqu’il
semblât n’aimer pas la France. C’était là un trait de son
originalité. Il est vrai qu’il s’en tirait en disant que je ne
ressemblai pas à mes compatriotes, ce à quoi il ne connaissait
rien!—Tout cela était fort curieux; car, moi-même, je l’aimais
quoiqu’il en eût à mon pays!
En 1879 il amena son fils Austin à Paris. J’attirai celui-ci. Il
déjeunait avec moi deux fois par semaine. Je lui montrai ce qu’était
l’intimité française en le tutoyant paternellement. Cela reserra
beaucoup nos liens d’intimité avec Jenkin. . . . Je fis inviter mon
ami au congrès de l’_Association française pour l’avancement des
sciences_, qui se tenait à Rheims en 1880. Il y vint. J’eus le
plaisir de lui donner la parole dans la section du génie civil et
militaire, que je présidais. Il y fit une très intéressante
communication, qui me montrait une fois de plus l’originalité de ses
vues et la sûreté de sa science. C’est à l’issue de ce congrès que
je passai lui faire visite à Rochefort, où je le trouvai installé en
famille et où je présentai pour la première fois mes hommages à son
éminente compagne. Je le vis là sous un jour nouveau et touchant
pour moi. Madame Jenkin, qu’il entourait si galamment, et ses deux
jeunes fils donnaient encore plus de relief à sa personne.
J’emportai des quelques heures que je passai à côte de lui dans ce
charmant paysage un souvenir ému.
J’étais allé en Angleterre en 1882 sans pouvoir gagner Edimbourg.
J’y retournai en 1883 avec la commission d’assainissement de la ville
de Paris, dont je faisais partie. Jenkin me rejoignit. Je le fis
entendre par mes collègues; car il était fondateur d’une société de
salubrité. Il eut un grand succès parmi nous. Mais ce voyage me
restera toujours en mémoire parce que c’est là que se fixa
défenitivement notre forte amitié. Il m’invita un jour à dîner à son
club et au moment de me faire asseoir à côté de lui, il me retint et
me dit: ‘Je voudrais vous demander de m’accorder quelque chose.
C’est mon sentiment que nos relations ne peuvent pas se bien
continuer si vous ne me donnez pas la permission de vous tutoyer.
Voulez-vous que nous nous tutoyions?’ Je lui pris les mains et je
lui dis qu’une pareille proposition venant d’un Anglais, et d’un
Anglais de sa haute distinction, c’était une victoire, dont je serais
fier toute ma vie. Et nous commencions à user de cette nouvelle
forme dans nos rapports. Vous savez avec quelle finesse il parlait
le français: comme il en connaissait tous les tours, comme il jouait
avec ses difficultés, et même avec ses petites gamineries. Je crois
qu’il a été heureux de pratiquer avec moi ce tutoiement, qui ne
s’adapte pas à l’anglais, et qui est si français. Je ne puis vous
peindre l’étendue et la variété de nos conversations de la soirée.
Mais ce que je puis vous dire, c’est que, sous la caresse du _tu_,
nos idées se sont élevées. Nous avions toujours beaucoup ri
ensemble; mais nous n’avions jamais laissé des banalités s’introduire
dans nos échanges de pensées. Ce soir-là, notre horizon intellectuel
s’est élargie, et nous y avons poussé des reconnaissances profondes
et lointaines. Après avoir vivement causé à table, nous avons
longuement causé au salon; et nous nous séparions le soir à Trafalgar
Square, après avoir longé les trottoirs, stationné aux coins des rues
et deux fois rebroussé chemin en nous reconduisant l’un l’autre. Il
était près d’une heure du matin! Mais quelle belle passe
d’argumentation, quels beaux échanges de sentiments, quelles fortes
confidences patriotiques nous avions fournies! J’ai compris ce soir
là que Jenkin ne détestait pas la France, et je lui serrai fort les
mains en l’embrassant. Nous nous quittions aussi amis qu’on puisse
l’être; et notre affection s’était par lui étendue et comprise dans
un _tu_ français.